The Broken Worlds

The world of Drakepunk is generally referred to as “The broken worlds” consisting primarily of two planets that came close to one another slow enough that they wound up getting tied together by gravity, their tidal forces tearing the other apart as the planets slowly drift closer together. However, it's worth mentioning how they spin and what the surrounding stellar geography is like.

The system isn't a solar system, as they don't orbit a star. Instead, the planets orbit within the accretion disk of a massive black hole in the center of a nebula. The black hole sucks in matter and fires it out in two superheated jets of gas, which provide heat and light. Since space is not a vacuum, especially within the accretion disk, heat spreads more easily and more evenly, so space is actually pleasantly warm as are the planets, in most places at least. The two planets are tidally locked to one another, and so rather than spinning on their axis they tumble over one another. This creates some areas in perpetual night, some in endless darkness, and some which experience a relatively normal day, and this applies to both planets and their debris fields.

The darkened areas are still freezing cold, but some creatures can live there, and some creatures also live on the edges of the boiling areas. Most people and creatures live in the temperate zones.

The near-impact also sped up how quickly the planets now circle the black hole. A year is three hundred days long. Seasons are defined by the other orbiting bodies, particularly the curtain of fire, a massive spire of superheated elementally charged gasses that cause the temperature shifts as the worlds fly past it and leave it behind each year.

Related:

-Kohatu

-Munus

-Astehu