Author: Chamomile Has A Blog

I’m more nervous about this Kickstarter than I should be. Magignosis is a spin-off project of Petals and Thorns containing a suite of new classes I wrote in order to make PF/3.5 NPC stat blocks less infuriating to build, focusing more on having a suite of awesome powers rather than on having tons of fiddly customization options at every new level. It’s good for a certain type of player and also for any GM who’s short on time and needs to make a villain who’s got X levels in Y class and doesn’t care about whether he’s got the Precise Shot feat because this guy is going to be dead in two weeks anyway. I don’t know if people really want this kind of thing and if they do I don’t know if they want it badly enough to pay money for it, but I’m going to find out. Ultimately this thing is just not that important compared to the Petals and Thorns sequel I’m working on, but from the moment I launched the campaign, my subconscious became convinced that its success or failure would be an omen for the future and now won’t leave me alone. Worst case scenario, I at least got a quick and easy Friday article out of the deal, which certainly helps with getting back onto a regular blogging schedule.

Speaking of which, being that this Kickstarter is ultimately unimportant, and that the blog has been derailed badly enough by all the data entry work on the last one, I’m not planning on halting content for this one like I did for the last, so blog updates will continue as normal (except perhaps with more shilling) for the duration of this Kickstarter. Maybe also for the next, more important Kickstarter due to start up sometime in late February or early March, depending on how confident I feel about managing a Kickstarter at the same time as posting blog content.

I think this 2-3 week (depending how you count it) blackout is probably the longest period of inactivity this blog has had since launching in February 2017. Second year anniversary coming up, so I guess nearly letting it die is how we’re celebrating. It’s gotten so bad that I didn’t even notice that other blog I used to contribute to made a new post about struggling from underneath the burden of his loving wife, adorable children, prestigious university degree, and stable employment to get back to what really matters: Blogging. A post which went up like two weeks ago. Even though it’s one of like five blogs in my WordPress feed. It was still on my front page when I finally logged in, that’s how uncluttered that feed is, I just hadn’t logged in since forever.

The reason I’ve been so far behind is mainly because I really wanted to get the Pathfinder version of Petals and Thorns out to my backers before New Year’s, and once that didn’t happen, as soon as possible afterwards. Illness, freelancers of dubious quality, and a misestimation of my own ability to do lots of work in the dead of winter contributed to falling behind schedule, but now the Pathfinder version is out and I have no firm deadline for the Fantasy Grounds release. I’d like to keep to my January/February release window if possible, of course, but unlike the other versions, backers were warned up front that the release date was tenuous, so I don’t feel the need to obsessively prioritize that release should it fall behind schedule.

I don’t have any deadlines breathing down my neck anymore, so I’m going to try and get the Kartoss Gambit wrapped up. I’m also going to think about whether I want to continue LitRPG reviews right away when I do, though. I definitely don’t want to leave Kartoss hanging midway through, but I’m kind of getting to the point where I think I’ve said just about everything I have to say on the current state of the genre and it’s probably best to start looking at other things. Probably readthroughs of other books, but possibly TV shows or something instead. I’d like an excuse to get back into video editing, and while I probably don’t have time for it, a show where I hack together clips of an episode of [show] with reaction commentary is something I’d like to try doing sometime.

Also, at some point in the last couple of weeks WordPress decided that their creator-facing interface needed a hideous shade of dull pink instead of blues and oranges. It’s a lot less generic but it also looks awful. I don’t think it affects your actual experience at all, I just wanted to kvetch about it.

On a happier note, some numbers that I planned on posting about early in January before early in January became dedicated entirely to getting Kickstarter rewards out: 2018 saw this blog getting over 12,000 views from over 6,000 visitors, which is over double the numbers from 2017. That’s still not even close to Big Deal numbers, but at least they’re moving in the right direction, and fairly rapidly at that.

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” →