An almost obligatory feature of
Floating Continents,
Floating Castles, and
Flat Worlds, (especially if the setting is
Crystal Spires and Togas) is waterfalls off the side of the structure.
Awesome, but Impractical in the case of smaller floating islands since you'd expect the water to run out fairly quickly since they don't have a very large area of land from which to collect rainfall. It's especially strange in the case of
Flat Worlds since it doesn't seem that there would be anything to bring the water back.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Film
Literature
- The world of The Chronicles of Narnia has this feature described in some detail in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Continually sailing to the east doesn't bring you around to the west again, but to The End of the World. If you go over the edge, you end up in Aslan's Country - one of the few ways to get there without dying first.
- Terry Pratchett's Discworld has the ocean falling off all sides of the Disc, but "arrangements are made" (it's probably quantum). There are even people who take advantage of this and have put a net around the edge (the "circumfence") to catch floating items for salvage.
- His earlier work Strata had a different disc-world made by Ancient Astronauts terraformers, which (IIRC) had a hidden system to pull the water back up.
MMORPGs
- Aion has some of these in the aptly named Abyss.
- Outland in World of Warcraft has both small floating islands with waterfalls on them, as well as a few places where water falls off the edge of the world.
- Wizard101 has a lot of these because of the Shattered World setting.
Video Games
- Chrono Trigger's Kingdom of Zeal, of course. Oddly enough, walking around on the surface of 12,000 B.C. you can't find any torrential downpours falling out of nowhere... so probably the wizards living on the floating continent have something worked out.
- This appears in Golden Sun, which has a Flat World.
- The Myst novel The Book of Atrus featured something like this in a small, gravity-defying Age that Catherine made. Supposedly the water falling off into the abyss turned to vapor almost instantly and rose to the top of the world, where it condensed and rained back down again, perpetuating the cycle. Atrus was having fun working out the physics behind it, Catherine just thought it was cool.
- The Beach Bowl Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy has this. On multiple levels.
- One puzzle in Banjo-Tooie involves removing the plug from a pool of water in Cloudcuckooland.
- These are all over the place in Skies Of Arcadia, where The Sky Is An Ocean but most every Floating Continent has a river or two.
- The vaguely Sonic-like and so-cute-you'll-vomit SNES platformer Rainbow Bell Adventure
had plenty of floating islands with waterfalls in the background.
- May appear on floating islands in Minecraft and can be intentionally created by the player using a water or lava "source block".
Western Animation
