First of all, the weather on the shores of the local water features are going to be heavy on the precipitation. You can get noticeable microclimates in California by watering lawns with imported water. You can definately get that out of small seas.
Second: water has had some significant topological effects on the damp and dirty rockball we call home. Lack of things like glacial creep, river-driven trenches, ocean tides, water to drive all that pretty precipitation-based erosion, expanding ice to push cracks and so on are going to have a *lot* of effects on the shape of the planet. At the very least, your mountains are going to be taller, sharper, and more likley to contain odd shapes. They're all going to be igneous, too, or metamorphic off of igneous, because you won't hve the water to drive sedimentary - at least not at a large scale, and maybe not at all, depending on how arid it really is. I suspect that you wouldn't see the same kind of continental shelf, either, but I don't know enough about the topic to say for sure. It is certainly the case that hotspot volcanoes (like the one that's responsible for hawaii) would be *enormous*.
Third, you're going to want to work on your water cycle a bit. If your ocean trenches are maintaining anything like a stable level of water, then they're going to need to get back all of the water that the burning sun evaporates during the day. You probably don't need to much, but you do ned enough that it's a plausible skeleton.
Fourth, people are going to be living almost exclusively on the bits that would be our ocean floor (however that winds up). It's the major available source of water - which means it's also the place that has most of the *life*. Head too far away, and you don't have enough water or enough local food supply to sustain more than a few aboriginal types. There are going to be huge areas outside the control of civilization, and it's going to *stay* that way, because they just can't support enough people for civilization to be self-supporting. The primary nation-building resource will not be Land, but Water. Civilizations that have no contiguous water-routes (or at least, no points of water within a few days travel of one another) will not naturally have any contact at all, and setting out across the trackless desert in search of them would have been very much like Columbus's trip in our world - they are smaller, and further apart, likely a bit greater in number, and possibly may be found by looking for weather, but serious similarities remain.
Essentially, the culture will shape itself according to the availability of water. Figure out exactly how you want your water to behave, and let that inform how your people organizze themselves.
Second: water has had some significant topological effects on the damp and dirty rockball we call home. Lack of things like glacial creep, river-driven trenches, ocean tides, water to drive all that pretty precipitation-based erosion, expanding ice to push cracks and so on are going to have a *lot* of effects on the shape of the planet. At the very least, your mountains are going to be taller, sharper, and more likley to contain odd shapes. They're all going to be igneous, too, or metamorphic off of igneous, because you won't hve the water to drive sedimentary - at least not at a large scale, and maybe not at all, depending on how arid it really is. I suspect that you wouldn't see the same kind of continental shelf, either, but I don't know enough about the topic to say for sure. It is certainly the case that hotspot volcanoes (like the one that's responsible for hawaii) would be *enormous*.
Third, you're going to want to work on your water cycle a bit. If your ocean trenches are maintaining anything like a stable level of water, then they're going to need to get back all of the water that the burning sun evaporates during the day. You probably don't need to much, but you do ned enough that it's a plausible skeleton.
Fourth, people are going to be living almost exclusively on the bits that would be our ocean floor (however that winds up). It's the major available source of water - which means it's also the place that has most of the *life*. Head too far away, and you don't have enough water or enough local food supply to sustain more than a few aboriginal types. There are going to be huge areas outside the control of civilization, and it's going to *stay* that way, because they just can't support enough people for civilization to be self-supporting. The primary nation-building resource will not be Land, but Water. Civilizations that have no contiguous water-routes (or at least, no points of water within a few days travel of one another) will not naturally have any contact at all, and setting out across the trackless desert in search of them would have been very much like Columbus's trip in our world - they are smaller, and further apart, likely a bit greater in number, and possibly may be found by looking for weather, but serious similarities remain.
Essentially, the culture will shape itself according to the availability of water. Figure out exactly how you want your water to behave, and let that inform how your people organizze themselves.