D&D General Campaign setting in a Gas Giant World with Floating Islands

[Faolyn]

Lots of air elementals and their kin. Probably a lot of flying creatures don't have legs. Dragons may be more serpentine. Sea creatures would be adapted to air--just slap wings or a balloon on a whale or aboleth. Swarms of insects would replace krill.

Much like the oceans, there's going to be "oases" surrounding the islands (or patches of solid fog, as Kobold Avenger mentioned), and "deserts" where there's next to no life.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

One thing I thought, is if there's horses in this world there's less of a reason to domesticate them for riding. Most people are going to want to ride and train flying creatures like giant flies, griffons, wyverns, giant bats and the like.

You might get a situation where the crew of an airship is going to have fight off Dragoons (remember I said 1600s to 1800s type tech) on wyverns.

 

[Laurefindel]

One thing I thought, is if there's horses in this world there's less of a reason to domesticate them for riding. Most people are going to want to ride and train flying creatures like giant flies, griffons, wyverns, giant bats and the like.

You might get a situation where the crew of an airship is going to have fight off Dragoons (remember I said 1600s to 1800s type tech) on wyverns.

Indeed depending on how big your islands are, horses would be useless for anything but plowing and farming.

a setting like this actually changes warfare in general.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Have you heard of Coliar? It's a planet from Realmspace (the Crystal Sphere that the Forgotten Realms takes in in Spelljammer). It has basically the exact same premise as this. It's a gas-giant with floating earthmotes and creatures that live on it. There's even a sub-type of dragon specific to this world: Air Dragons.

The world is mostly inhabited by Aarakocra (that fly from island to island) and Lizardfolk, and they're pretty big rivals.

Anyway, I'd read up on it a bit to get some inspiration.

 

[Yaarel]

Right, but a gas giant has such a thick atmosphere that (if it is at earth like temperatures) than it's going to look overwhelmingly grey when you look down on it or while on it you look down or sideways. It might well look blue as you look up though.

As an analogy, suppose the planet is like a spherical egg.

The albumen eggwhite of transparent earthlike atmosphere is definitely a vivid blue, especially when viewing it from an angle.

However, as one looks directly thru the albumen toward the eggyolk core, it may well be dark and cloudy, depending on where the sun is. Also, the shift from blue toward cloudy might gradual, and even the cloudy core will be bluish.

Compare Uranus whose gas is methane and mostly invisible, but the overall planet appears blue-green because the atmosphere is blue-green. Neptune is also mostly methane plus something yet unidentifief to make the atmosphere and the planet as a whole, a vivid blue.

The color of the atmosphere is from the way the gas scatters sunlight, not from the color of the gas, per se.

 

[Yaarel]

In the clear upper atmosphere, the rocky islands might orbit rather than float. But in the hazy core, the islands would float because the sre surrounded by gravity on all sides.

The air pressure of the core is extreme and hot.

 

[Umbran]

Or, you put the planet close in to its star, just about it's Roche limit, so that it has a problem keeping its atmosphere - so the atmosphere gets smeared out in a ring orbiting the star. and there's stuff living in the ring nowhere near the planet...

Oh, hey, that's Larry Niven's book The Integral Trees!

The Integral Trees - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Eltab]

The Integral Trees, referenced above, and the sequel novel The Smoke Ring have ideas and descriptions you will find helpful.
Also the novel 2010 (sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey) pokes around just a little bit with the 'life floating in Jupiter's atmosphere ' idea.

 

[Azuresun]

So here's some things I'm pondering, what happens if someone falls off an island or a ship? Should there be a bunch of additional last chances, before falling into unknown oblivion of whatever might be at the planet's mysterious core or lower atmosphere?

In the Eberron setting. there are "feather tokens" (Common magic items that activate a Feather Fall effect when the user falls more than a short distance) and "life rings" (magic wooden rings used for when you have to abandon an airship, that you hang onto to drift down from the sky at a safe pace), both of which might be commonly available to give more time to save a falling character.

Carl Sagan once theorized about what life might look like if it existed "on" ("in"?) Jupiter. I think it involved enormous creatures that "swam" in the gas clouds.

Arthur C. Clarke did something similar, with enormous gasbag creatures (like living zeppelins) that could manipulate static electricity to shock attackers.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Have you heard of Coliar? It's a planet from Realmspace (the Crystal Sphere that the Forgotten Realms takes in in Spelljammer). It has basically the exact same premise as this. It's a gas-giant with floating earthmotes and creatures that live on it. There's even a sub-type of dragon specific to this world: Air Dragons.

The world is mostly inhabited by Aarakocra (that fly from island to island) and Lizardfolk, and they're pretty big rivals.

Anyway, I'd read up on it a bit to get some inspiration.

Elminster has a Retreat there.