My fantasy world Treyidal is a planet inhabited by two races, humans and merfolk. They live on a very seismically active world, with such things as micro-magic based earth quakes.
For the moment we'll put all that aside, and just look at one aspect of the world.
If viewed from space, Treyidal has the peculiar feature of looking like tidal pools almost, being composed more of inland seas than large oceans. A number of these seas need to be more shallow than oceans on Earth, to facilitate a comfortable habitat for the merfolk.
So what negative effects would result from these shallower smaller seas?
Possible ways to circumvent problems I see:
- Have more groundwater
- Don't have true oceans still, but divide the bodies of water more with small segments of land
- and the regrettable option, handwave it away with some magic, though hopefully in a good, logical fashion
I think that lack of broader ocean currents would be very tough on all of this world, lacking the ability to spread things like warmer water to farther north climates. Also, erosion would've probably made the oceans larger over time anyway, wouldn't it have?
All this aside, here is a very, very rough map of what I've thought about so far with my world. You can see that the prominent body of water in the center, the Aliya sea, is not necessarily required to be a true inland sea, though I do want a good amount of these. Basically, I don't want a world where continents appear to float on the ocean, but more like the water is penned in by the continents.