Month: December 2018

We’re taking a second pass on our solar system syncretism. Now that we’ve assigned planes to as many planets and moons as possible, it’s time to look at what’s left over and if we can fix it by adding any extra moons and planets. We’ve actually managed to assign most of the settings (except ones like Dragonstar, which were cut for being way too big to fit inside one solar system, and Stargate SG-1, which were cut for having nothing to do with D&D’s fantasy millieu to the point where it’s baffling they used D&D mechanics to make the tabletop RPG in the first place), and we’re also just about out of real estate, so we’ve really only got a few important considerations to make here in the second pass:

1. We weren’t able to find room for Wheel of Time, Rokugan, Pathfinder, or Forgotten Realms. Those latter two are being held in reserve because one of them would make a good Earth, but we still need to figure out which one’s gonna get it and what to do with the other.
2. We have no room at all left for new Magic: the Gathering planes. We’ve managed to get this far by sticking fairly close to analogies for the real world solar system which allows people to import their knowledge of real world science. If you know how many significantly large moons Saturn has in the real world, you automatically know how many significantly large moons Saturn has in the D&D solar system, which means you don’t have to memorize a new fact. Bonus points: If you memorize how many significantly large moons Saturn has in the D&D solar system, you have also memorized a real fact about actual science. The problem is, Magic is going to add new planes. If they don’t happen to fit onto an existing planet or moon that doesn’t already contain another Magic plane, we have nowhere in the system to put them. We can solve this by adding extra moons to Saturn, Neptune, or Uranus and thus intentionally break the consistency with the real world, and we can also keep the consistency with the real world and just hope that all of Magic’s new planes can be fit onto existing moons or planets. It’s also worth noting that Uranus and Neptune could either or both be used as ocean planets to host mostly-water settings like Theros, Ixalan, or the Council of Wyrms, freeing up some moons. The problem is, a major theme of the setting so far is that the moons of a gas (and water) giants have lots of interaction with moons of the same giant. We have to free up either all of a planet’s moons or none of them, because if only some of them are freed up, those blank moons can’t interact with the others.
3. Krynn is in Pluto’s position. It has a cool thing where being past the reach of the gods explains why the Dragonlance gods keep falling in and out of contact with the plane, but the problem is that Krynn is not especially cold, and people expect Pluto to be cold. I think we can get away with the moons of Jupiter being temperate because, despite being quite a bit further from the sun than Earth, people don’t expect Jupiter to be cold. They do expect Pluto to be cold. Dragonlance, and especially other settings in the far system like Middle-Earth and Game of Thrones, really don’t want to be directly plugged into the greater solar community, though. Partly because having those settings included represents a level of gonzo that some people otherwise interested in the solar system syncretism will want to ignore, and partly because they’ll be changed unrecognizably by prolonged contact with the solar community, so the only way to meaningfully include settings like Middle-Earth is if players get to see the change as it happens.
4. Mercury is still blank.

Continue reading “D&D Solar System Syncretism V: Second Pass” →

I had hoped to post an update on how Petals and Thorns did in its initial release on Roll20, but instead I am writing about why it has not yet been released on Roll20. Except the answer to that is “I don’t know,” so this is gonna be a short post. The adventure was finished back on Thanksgiving, and since then it’s been tons of database forms, and cropping my cover to fit a very specific format, and tax forms, and then…weird radio silence? So far as I know, everything’s good for my adventure, but a week and a half later, it’s still not in the marketplace, and I’m not getting answers to my emails as to what’s gone wrong. I don’t expect this blog post to affect the situation or anything – I’d just planned to write about how the adventure was doing and don’t know what else to write about except my confusion as to why it’s still caught in red tape.

We’ve discussed the inner planets of our syncretic solar system, and although Mercury and Earth aren’t getting filled in on our first pass, Eberron and Hyboria form the two pillars of the inner system’s trade routes alongside the Asteroid Belt, which contains innumerable city- and town-size asteroids which support dwarven citadels, giff mercenaries, neogi slavers, and all manner of other principally space-faring creatures pulled in from Spelljammer. We’ve discussed the outer gas giants, more self-contained as they’re further apart from one another and the inner system, especially the remote Uranus and Neptune, for whom regular trade to other planets is unknown, replaced instead by sporadic visitors who usually come for a specific purpose. Now we discuss the limits of the solar system, and dwarf planets that lie beyond them.

First, let’s talk about the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is a collection of asteroids and dwarf planets that starts at around Neptunian orbit at about 30 astronomical units from the sun and goes to about 50 AU. That is, the Kuiper Belt alone is nearly as far across as the entire rest of the solar system. It contains at least twenty times as much total material between its asteroids as the Asteroid Belt, although it’s hard to say for certain because we haven’t catalogued all of its objects. We do have a rough estimate of how much mass is out in the Kuiper Belt total, and it’s not nearly enough. There is not enough stuff out in the Kuiper Belt for the dwarf planets there to possibly have formed, given how far from the sun they are and thus how big their orbits are.

We’re giving this scientific mystery the obvious answer: Literal angels and demons used the vast majority of the Kuiper Belt’s asteroids as raw materials to create an unconscionably large ringworld at the limits of the solar system. Presumably, in our real solar system, this ringworld was subsequently dismantled or destroyed and its debris either ejected from the solar system completely or launched into the sun. In the D&D solar system we’re making, however, the ringworld is still there, at the limits of the system, just past Neptune’s orbit. Its circumference is 8 billion miles, which means even at just 100 miles across – a little longer than Hadrian’s Wall across the north bit of England near the Scottish border – it is nearly a trillion square miles. It has the surface area of five thousand Earths. Each individual godly plane described in every D&D and D&D spin-off product ever made could have an entire Earth surface area and the ringworld would still have room to spare.

Continue reading “D&D Solar System Syncretism IV: The Far System” →

As it stands, we have the sun encompassing the elemental chaos with Sigil located above, a trade metropolis in the center of the solar system and just high enough above the orbital plane that you can sail directly to your destinations from there, never having to sail around a planet as their orbits will always take them below your path, not into it, until you reach your destination. In place of Mercury we have a “this space for rent” sign, and in place of Venus we have a slightly more poisonous version of Eberron, which is also home to Immoren, the setting of Iron Kingdoms (and by extension, WarmaHordes) Highpoint, the setting of MechDragon, and Kaladesh, the magepunk MtG plane. It’s a world recently hit by its own moon and which is almost entirely consumed by war, except for the continent of Khorvaire, which recently emerged from war and wants nothing to do with that any longer. Thus, naturally, people stopping over tend to come to Khorvaire. We’ve skipped over Terra for now, on account of that being hyper-valuable real estate that we’ll parcel out at the end, while giving Luna over to the Feywild for the light side and the Shadowfell for the dark side. Hyboria and the Young Kingdoms got their origin stories mushed together and deposited on Mars, and that was the end of the inner solar system. Today, we’re going to push further outwards to the gas giants and water worlds of the outer solar system.

First up, we have Jupiter. At some point, we’ll have to rename this to something other than just “Jupiter” and we can’t do that by stealing an existing setting name because Jupiter has no surface and is home to no settings. For now, we’re just going to keep calling it Jupiter. What we’re really here for are the moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa. All of them are bigger than Pluto and Ganymede is bigger than Mercury. We can add additional moons if necessary because, unlike the order of planets, the number of decently large moons Jupiter has is not super common knowledge (although nerdy types do fairly regularly know about these big four, both because Galileo discovered them and because they’re relatively good candidates for colonization in the next few centuries), but in this phase we’re just going to plonk down what settings we have onto the moons available and see how many are still homeless when we reach the end of the solar system.

Jupiter has two moons that are all at interesting and two more that are super boring. Ganymede is the moon with subsurface oceans (although it’s not the moon that might have marine life on it – that’s Saturn’s moon Titan), and Io is the moon that’s a volcanic hellscape. Callisto and Europa are basically just moons. Callisto does have some ice on it as well as a stupendous number of craters, and Europa technically has an extremely thin atmosphere of oxygen, but so far as providing interesting terrain goes, they are both basically just the moon in slightly different colors. This means we are throwing the details out completely. The only thing we are retaining from real science is that Jupiter has four moons (and even that is subject to change further down the line) and they range in size from “about the size of Asia” to “twice as big as Asia,” but bear in mind that Asia is by definition purely land (and small inland bodies of water), whereas any temperate D&D setting we seek to offload onto one of these moons will be at least 60% water, so in practice these moons go from “about the size of Asia” on Ganymede’s end to “about the size of Europe” on Europa’s (I doubt “this would have about the same landmass as Europe if it happened to have the same land:water ratio as Earth” was the reason for naming the moon Europa). Still enough room to locate a single-continent setting – or more than one, if they for some reason do not have oceans.

In addition to sheer space, there’s theming. A lot of our worlds have some overlap, and I don’t want Jupiter to be “the ghost planet” whose moons are all slight variations on gothic horror (i.e. Innistrad, Ravenloft, Diablo, etc. etc.). These moons form a community but are entirely different celestial bodies, so just like the terrestrial planets, I want each one to be noticeably different from the others. Unlike Hyboria and Eberron, where we stitched together settings with similar premises (swords and sorcery with ancient precursor people and magepunk, respectively), here on Jupiter we’re situating different settings near to one another to create little planetary neighborhoods with some decent variety to them. Since the gas giants of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus all have a significant number of sizable moons (though often they’re barely able to hold a single small continent once water is accounted for), each one can serve as a mini-solar system unto itself. Birthright and Greyhawk have a fair amount of overlap, but if Golarion is neighbors with Innistrad while Oerth is neighbors with Ravnica, that does a lot to help distinguish them.

Continue reading “D&D Solar System Syncretism III: Outer Planets” →

We have our raw materials all sorted, so now we start with one end of the map (I’m going with the sun) and fill in everything that’s easy and obvious. Once the obvious stuff is filled in, we can see how much we have room for left over to try and save stuff from the chopping block.

We’re going to start with the sun. And the sun is the elemental chaos. Or maybe it’s not so chaotic anymore. What’s important is that the gods use this place as a reserve of raw materials with which to create the universe (or maybe one god – I’m actually importing this idea from another setting I made with one of my brothers, where it was just the one god who did the creation, but for the sake of syncretism I’m assuming no master creator deities and instead more of an Order of the Stick approach, where lots of different pantheons had to work together to make worlds). It is surrounded by a blindingly bright wall of pure radiant energy, not fire, and past that barrier are the standard earth, fire, air, and water planes as depicted by the 5e DMG (which is only a minor update on how they were depicted in most earlier editions).

Above the sun is the city of Sigil. It’s a torus, but the city is on the inside of the torus, so when you look up from Sigil, you see more Sigil above you. The exterior of Sigil is far too hot to sustain life, constantly bombarded by the heat and pure energy of that radiant shield encircling the elemental planes. It is, however, full of astral docks. The sun, you see, is goddamn enormous, which means that if you’re at the top of it, you are actually quite high above the orbital plane. From that perch, it is easy to see the rest of the solar system (if you have good telescopes – Sigil does) and plot a course to any orbit. Sometimes it’s easy to go from one planet straight to another because they happen to be at a similar point in their orbits, but other times the two are on opposite sides of the sun – and that means regardless of where your journey starts or ends, half the time it’s somewhere between a slight detour to right along the way to stop at Sigil.

Underneath Sigil is the spire that leads up to it. It is not infinitely tall – we’re going to make a lot of things previously called “infinite” merely “unimaginably large” – but it does reach from the center of the sun up to far above its surface where Sigil lies. In the center of that spire is a space elevator leading from Sigil down to the Outlands, which you might more properly call the Inlands, since they are the center of everything. The center of the elemental chaos, connected by teleportation gate to each of the outer planes, and directly below Sigil, the trade center of the solar system.

Next up, Mercury. As mentioned earlier, there is a bizarre paucity of volcano planets for us to use for not!Mercury. Mercury could also be used as a desert planet, but we’ve already got one of those in Mars, whose dusty red landscape is better known to the public than any other planet but Earth’s. Having a pale blue dot that’s all temperate and normal with a desert planet just beyond is the bare minimum for allowing people to import knowledge of our solar system to understand the super-setting faster (and I really don’t want to demand people learn a whole new solar system from scratch – if I can keep the number of sizable moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn the same, I’d like to, even though most people don’t have the first idea how many large-ish moons Saturn has).

Complicating matters, the one volcanic world we do have is Phyrexia, which needs to be in close proximity to its targets of invasion in Mirrodin and Dominaria, which means it needs to be a moon orbiting a gas giant so that those two planes are also moons, thus explaining why Phyrexians have targeted those two. If Phyrexia is Mercury while Mirrodin and Dominaria are orbiting Saturn, it’s super weird that Phyrexia skipped over the entire inner solar system on their way to invade not one, but two worlds. It works much better if they’re all in the same planetary neighborhood.

I’ll get to the outer planes from planescape later on, but suffice to say that I wanted them all in one place and have what I think is a pretty cool idea for them, so I don’t want to use Mercury as the Lower Planes planet with Baator and the Abyss and so on (although it’s not a completely unworkable idea – if you consider the sun’s gravity well to be the “bottom” of the solar system, Mercury is the lowest reach of the system except for the sun itself, though this is complicated somewhat with this “sun is an elemental supply depot” concept). As a side note, I also don’t want to combine Phyrexia with Baator over on Io. There’s definitely some overlap between the two, with Phyrexia even being referred to as “the Nine Hells,” but scratch the surface and Phyrexia’s got a lot of differences. They could definitely be stitched together if we didn’t have enough real estate for both of them, but again: Bizarre lack of volcano worlds leaves almost nothing to put in the Mercury slot.

I’d like to give each of the four inner planets a noticeably different climate, though – no doubling up on desert worlds, especially since Amunkhet and Dark Sun are the only desert settings to go around and neither comes close to filling up Mars by themselves. so I’m leaving Mercury blank for now. It’s a problem I’ll have to come back to and solve in the second pass. It may end up being an uninhabitable wasteland or the blasted remains of a setting I dislike. Fans of whatever setting ends up melted probably won’t approve, but if I end up going that route it’ll be using a setting I had no room for anyway, so they weren’t going to be happy to begin with.

Next, Venus. There are two routes to go with this one: Venus as tropical world on the basis that it’s closer to the sun than Earth but further than Mercury and also is colored green in the sky, and Venus as smoggy world on the basis that it’s a burning toxic hellscape in real life because the actual solar system is just no fun. We’re going with smoggy world, because giving Venus three settings is a good use of real estate, and we only have two mutually exclusive options for a tropical world: Ixalan and (sort of) Zendikar, which are separate Magic: the Gathering planes and therefore should be located on separate worlds if possible, since it’s explicitly only possible to reach one from the other with magic superpowers. Using just one (underdeveloped!) MtG world is a waste of Venus, which is nearly as big as Earth and can perfectly well host multiple different small-ish settings. Eberron, Kaladesh, the Iron Kingdoms, and DragonMech are located on Venus, which we’re calling “Eberron” as a world name. DragonMech is puny, having significant landmarks so few in number that they come across as barely the size of France, and Kaladesh is barely more than a city-state, with its major landmarks being limited to the city of Ghirapur and a handful of villages located in the prerequisite mountains, plains, swamps, forests, and islands nearby. The Iron Kingdoms can fit into a single continent, and while Eberron nominally has several continents, it doesn’t really need them to be Asia-size continents – Australia size is more than enough for many of them.

Continue reading “D&D Solar System Syncretism II: Inner Planets” →