Alicornutopia

First one's safe, second two are - not safe, but not guaranteed binding, either? For an oath to be definitely binding it needs to be spoken by a lucid speaker of the language who understands their audience to be interpreting their words as an oath; for an oath to be definitely not binding it needs to be explicitly a quotation; everything in between will vary based on the expectations/knowledge/understanding of the speaker and minutia of word choice and so on.

The orf threads have ripped my heart out of my chest and torn it into pieces. I'm not sure whether to yell at you, thank you, or congratulate you.

:D

Maglor continues his habit of killing people and adopting their kids.

What? That’s the first time he’s done that!

In particular, this instance has not done it before, and I am not aware of any instance doing it at an earlier point in the timeline.

not earlier, later. with elrond and elros, at sirion.

You can’t just take a Bronze Age planet, change their constellations, and then neither teach them summoning nor focus really hard on communicating specifically with them! That is a good way to get most of the people to literally starve to death.

Were recent events inspired by the discussion of “what could daeva do if the Sun disappeared”? For the long term it seems better to remove the old suns and replace them with demons than to teleport the planets, but that was probably needed for the short term.

Why exactly would most of the population starve to death? Navigation by sea would be a problem, if the planet even had seas or a seafaring population, but I don't think most Bronze Age societies, even most fishing ones, had boats that got that far from shore. I think it takes a demon like a continuous month to make a sun, and that's too long to not have a sun.

That’s why I said teleportation was good in the short term.

You don’t know when to plant crops without a somewhat precise calendar, and the constellations are the most precise calendar available. Obviously a civilization could figure this out a second time, but it would be a number of bad years before that and I think the population would be too large to be supported by the poor harvests. I think you also get an advantage for harvesting at the right time, but I’m not as sure about that because you can judge if a crop is ripe by looking at the crop itself.

DanielH wrote:That’s why I said teleportation was good in the short term.

You don’t know when to plant crops without a somewhat precise calendar, and the constellations are the most precise calendar available. Obviously a civilization could figure this out a second time, but it would be a number of bad years before that and I think the population would be too large to be supported by the poor harvests. I think you also get an advantage for harvesting at the right time, but I’m not as sure about that because you can judge if a crop is ripe by looking at the crop itself.

On Earth, at least, the following things seem at least as precise to me as constellations:
-phases of the moon
-dates when various plants start to flower/bud/leaf/fruit at a given latitude
-when domesticated animals of various sorts go into heat
-days since last frost at a given latitude
-days since beginning/end of monsoon season, where appropriate
-timing from the solstice/equinox (which you can measure based on direction of shadows at noon/sunrise/sunset, c.f. Stonehenge)

I think of constellations much more as navigation aids than timing devices.

Obviously the first method relies on having a moon, which might not be generic for habitable planets, but I'd imagine the others work on any planet which contains enough plants/animals for agriculture to matter and enough of an axial tilt for seasons to be a thing (and if they aren't it shouldn't matter when you plant crops). Changes outside the solar system shouldn't affect them.