Designing a Crystal Sphere

[MavrickWeirdo]

These are some different ideas, some of which you already mentioned.

Crystal (Diamond) world

Cloud world (check out Larry Niven's Smoke Ring)

Dessert world

Dead world

Dream (subjective reality) world

Giant (races) world

Heavy (gravity) world

Hollow world

Ice world

Jungle world

Living world

Mech (Construct) world

Shadow world

Tiny (races) world

Volcanic/Fire world

Water world

 

[Andor]

The whole 'paint everything with broad strokes' aesthetic along with the flying ships makes me think of old pulp and space opera. Flash Gordon and the Lensmen. Possibly good sources of inspiration?

A lot of the weirder world concepts can be tucked into 'the dark corners of space'. A world of dinosaurs tucked inside a hollow meteor lost in the belt somewhere. The smoke ring planet can be a planetary ring of a giant. (I was going to say Gas Giant, but it's D&D, no reason you can't have a planet the size of jupiter with a rocky surface and earth normal gravity.)

Twisted regions of space where things orbit in impossible patterns. (Man, that just reminded me of a Cordwainer Smith story "Under Old Earth" where the Douglas-Ouyang planets tried to find friendship with man, but had found the wrong man and the wrong friendship.)

Man this does sound like a fun campaign.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Mech (Construct) world

I don't know how I missed this. I was looking for something for Warforged...

Thanks!

The whole 'paint everything with broad strokes' aesthetic along with the flying ships makes me think of old pulp and space opera. Flash Gordon and the Lensmen. Possibly good sources of inspiration?

Yeah-- old pulp and space opera was where I started. Should probably make a go of moving back in that direction a little ways, since the whole "alien corruption" thing is getting all the love right now.

Need to get some John Carter of Mars in there, too-- since that's practically iconic D&D, if you overlook that it's set on Mars.

A lot of the weirder world concepts can be tucked into 'the dark corners of space'.

Yeah. I was originally thinking I was going to do a write up of all the planets, but then I started using the term "civilized space" to describe the part of the universe that gets screwed up when the gas giant pulls through on its irregular orbit.

I can get a lot of mileage out of that "civilized space" thing by putting most of the really weird stuff in "uncivilized space". Space games always need a frontier region... and the edges of that frontier region give me places to put the weirder races, too.

The weirder it is, the further it should be from the center of everything.

Twisted regions of space where things orbit in impossible patterns. (Man, that just reminded me of a Cordwainer Smith story "Under Old Earth" where the Douglas-Ouyang planets tried to find friendship with man, but had found the wrong man and the wrong friendship.)

Speaking of irregular orbits...

I'm not familiar with the story. What's the gist?

Man this does sound like a fun campaign.

Thanks. There's a good chance I'll be trying to run it on http://www.plothook.net-- and since all my notes are public anyway, I'll make sure the finished product is available for anyone who wants it. (Besides, most of the people who'd want it are helping me write it, whether they realize or not.)

I'd suggest that I might do a Story Hour of it-- but we've all seen what happens when I try that.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Mech (Construct) world

Call it Cybertron!

 

[Lazarous]

A question about this setting - are you planning on setting it all up within one crystal sphere or across multiple crystal spheres? Several of the concepts (the corrupted gas giant) seem to fit multiple spheres, but others (only five idyllic worlds) seem to fit a single sphere.

Also, an idea that you could include into the world if you wanted: have various locales be outcroppings of elemental planes. Stars are fire, asteroid belts are earth, smoke rings are air, earthsea type comets are water. This lends itself to some nifty story ideas like evil wizards trying to harness elemental fire for their nefarious purposes and thus posing a threat to all life in a sphere (they'll snuff out the star), or wanting ready access to some form of element and thus crashing a comet or asteroid into a planet.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

A question about this setting - are you planning on setting it all up within one crystal sphere or across multiple crystal spheres? Several of the concepts (the corrupted gas giant) seem to fit multiple spheres, but others (only five idyllic worlds) seem to fit a single sphere.

Within one huge crystal sphere, if the Crystal Sphere concept is used at all; I'd kinda like to leave it open for people who want to plunk it down into a regular Spelljammer game. That way, you can either use it as a self-contained setting, or you can use it as part of... well, part of what inspired it in the first place.

If it helps for visualization, think of the Sphere's primary as an enormous, invisible Void body, with the individual stars orbiting around it... Hmm. That must have significance for Void Shugenja, on some level.

Also, an idea that you could include into the world if you wanted: have various locales be outcroppings of elemental planes. Stars are fire, asteroid belts are earth, smoke rings are air, earthsea type comets are water.

Hmm. I like the way that parallels with the classifcation system for worlds. Wasn't planning on including the Elemental planes at all, but I could do something similar with "manifestation of the pure Earth", "manifestation of the pure Fire", like classic alchemy.

This lends itself to some nifty story ideas like evil wizards trying to harness elemental fire for their nefarious purposes and thus posing a threat to all life in a sphere (they'll snuff out the star), or wanting ready access to some form of element and thus crashing a comet or asteroid into a planet.

Indeed...

 

[Andor]

If it helps for visualization, think of the Sphere's primary as an enormous, invisible Void body, with the individual stars orbiting around it... Hmm. That must have significance for Void Shugenja, on some level.

The center of all mass is nothingness. Significant? Nah.... There is so very much some Zen buttkicking goodness in that thought. You need to center some of the funkier monk Prcs from Rokugan around than. The Empty fist style of the monks of the void....

I'm not familiar with the story. What's the gist?

The gist... Oi...

Tell ya what, I'll quote you the start, which provides some direction.

[QUOTE="Under Old Earth" by Cordwainer Smith]There were the Douglas-Ouyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around in the same orbit unlike any other planets known. There were the gentlemen-suicides back on Earth who gambled their lives - even more horribly, gambled sometimes for things worse than their lives - against different kinds of geophysics which real men had never experienced. There were girls who fell in love with such men, however stark and dreadful their personal fates might be. There was the Instrumentality with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.

This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it.

Music runs though this story. The soft sweet music of Earth Goverment and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fuges and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries - opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins.[/quote]

 

[Lazarous]

Within one huge crystal sphere, if the Crystal Sphere concept is used at all; I'd kinda like to leave it open for people who want to plunk it down into a regular Spelljammer game. That way, you can either use it as a self-contained setting, or you can use it as part of... well, part of what inspired it in the first place.

If it helps for visualization, think of the Sphere's primary as an enormous, invisible Void body, with the individual stars orbiting around it... Hmm. That must have significance for Void Shugenja, on some level.

If you feel really ambitious, set up some celestial congruences - the corrupted gas giant star is at perhelion relative to one of the idyllic worlds every 1000 years, making a grand tour of the five idylls before coming back to the first again. The artificial city-planet that was created by mages only comes into real space when the planets are aligned just so, etc.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

If you feel really ambitious, set up some celestial congruences - the corrupted gas giant star is at perhelion relative to one of the idyllic worlds every 1000 years, making a grand tour of the five idylls before coming back to the first again.

I'd been thinking that it's normally distant for lengths of time-- possibly millenia-- and is then close to the idylls for a span of decades before trailing away again.

I could spread those decades into a century or two by spreading the idylls out, so that it passes close to one system, and then another, and another, and another. Of course, it also passes close to non-idyllic worlds, and they feel its effects, but they're largely under the Aberrations' radar. Maybe the Elan Traitors are hiding there.

I've managed to nail down a few more details:

Classes/Races/PHB Stuff:

• The list of "standard" races includes all of the races in the PHB, plus Orc and Hobgoblin. I'm thinking that, to qualify as a standard race, a race must have a significant native population on three out of the five idylls.
• Non-standard races are definitely allowed-- at least in my games-- but I'm going to place them sparingly, with a mind to where they fit in on other planets. The most common non-standard races are going to be Elan, Lizardfolk, Thri-Kreen, Nezumi, and Kobolds, followed by standard races and reptilians with draconic templates.
• Githyanki and Githzerai will probably become major during the first campaign, but are unavailable beforehand.
• Classes are pretty open-- the only class I normally allow that doesn't fit this setting is the Favored Soul, because of the remote and possibly non-existent gods. I'm making a good deal of changes to the Cleric and Druid classes, but it shouldn't be difficult to use the standard versions if you prefer.
• Tainted classes, including Alienist and Warlock, will be available for PC usage. You can be tainted and still heroic. Taint isn't really evil, so much as it is alien and incomprehensible-- though the creatures responsible for spreading the taint are definitely Evil.
• Guns will be fairly rare and primarily wielded by Gnomes and Giff-- making most of them the wrong size for the majority of PCs.
• I don't have any regional feats designed yet, but I'm going to start doing that as soon as I start breaking the races down by planet. There will be special regional feats for Darkworlders and people from the City.

Before I get into regions, I just want to note that I suck at naming things and haven't named anything yet.

Civilized Space:

• The five idylls-- also called Empire Worlds-- are really the heart of the setting, and I'm probably going to start the first campaign with groundling PCs on and from one of them.
• The Empires have small navies; they're Empires in name only, and don't even control the other planets orbiting their stars.
• The majority of defined planets will be in the star systems around the idylls.
• The Empire Worlds are in an ever-shifting game of brinksmanship and espionage with one another. This generates a lot of work for adventurers.
• The City planet is probably the first destination for anyone leaving one of the five Empire Worlds. This means it most likely has a central location, which makes sense for the people who built it. It can't be in the dead-center of the universe, because of the Void-- but it could orbit the Void at about half the distance that each idyll's Sun does.
• The City has no star of its own; it relies on ambient heat and magical lights maintained by the city's magewrights. The City was designed to make this as efficient as possible with the assistance of perfectly shaped and placed mirrors.
• There is no night-time in the City. It's kept slightly brighter than twilight at all times; natives close their windows to sleep, and Darkworlders wear goggles. People who need more light either make it or buy it.

The Pseudonatural World and the Dark World:

• The horrible gas-giant bathes its moon in a pale, sickly light; it isn't bright enough to see by or to trigger Drow light-blindness. Darkworld Humans have the Night-Adapted template from Galactic Races.
• Only Aberrations and Outsiders can survive in the Pseudonatural World, because they're immune to Taint. Only Illithids are known to be able to leave it-- and no Elan, Loyal or Traitor, has ever gone there and come back.
• Other than being an object of fear, the pseudonatural world doesn't actually do anything. All of the action takes place in the Dark World.
• There are no Good-aligned societies on the Dark world. The Gnomes and some of the Humans are Neutral. Good beings either escape or die-- and far more Evil beings escape than Good ones.
• The races of the Dark World-- Human, Orc, Drow, Duergar and Svirfneblin-- are embroiled in a five-way genocidal war, though they occasionally form alliances. The Humans and Svirfneblin are generally considered to be allied, but the occasional "unsanctioned" raid occurs.
• Occasionally, especially when the gas giant is nearing civilized space, the humanoid races declare a truce, both to focus on piracy and to gang-up on the Illithids, who become much more active during these times.
• The gas giant's orbit takes it from within a couple days' journey from each of the idylls to a couple years' journey away in its unusual, slow orbit.
• The gas giant passes near civilized space for a couple of years out of every two or three centuries, as noted above. It's on its way in now, and will make its closest approach in about three or four years. It's about seven weeks away by ship.
• This orbit means that the gas giant is moving fast as hell-- faster than any other celestial body. That means that it goes a very long way out when it leaves.
• I know these times are very quick on an astronomical scale; it's intentional, to make sure that short-lived Humans don't forget about the horrors before they come back. At my original numbers, not even Elves would be worrying about the aliens' return.

Frontier Space:

• I have next-to-nothing on this, except the idea that there are stranger races to be found in Frontier Space-- despite that most planets are already inhabited by the Standard Races.
• Generally, when dealing with non-humanoids, creatures from the Monster Manual are from civilized space; the later the monster book, the further away from civilized space you find them.
• I am thinking that the bug races are from Frontier Space; native Thri-Kreen were driven to civilized space by the Xixchil, and Dromites are actually a modified servitor race of the Xixchil. Despite being Aberrations, Xixchil are opposed to the pseudonaturals-- because of their inherently irreligious and logical mindset-- and might prove to be a powerful ally against them.
• I was originally going to put Giff on the African idyll, but I think they might be better in Frontier Space. Because of their inability to use magic, they rely on other races for spelljamming, and they are losing a nasty guerilla war against the savage halflings of their homeworld. They're on their way to becoming the wandering mercenaries of Spelljammer.

Cosmology and Magic:

• Incarnum is a major part of how magic works-- it's a component of divine and arcane magic, especially summoning. Most summoning spells are actually conjurations which create "Outsiders" out of incarnum. I may invent some soulmelds which reflect this.
• Intelligent conjured creatures reflect the theological beliefs of their conjurers, raising many questions; like most cosmological questions, I have no intention of answering them.
• Psionics is going to be integral to the setting, though I'm going to try to work out details for removing or ignoring it. Psionics is distinct from every form of magic, and this setting will likely use modifications of the Psionics Are Different variant.
• Spelljammers tap into the Astral Plane to generate speed-- possibly by ignoring Materal physical/magical laws.
• Arcane magic is more Astral than Ethereal, and arcane casters may have an edge in spelljamming. Divine magic draws heavily from the Ethereal, which is a plane of spirits and dreams.
• I may or may not keep the Shadow plane, but I intend to allow classes that draw heavily on Shadow
• Spells that access the Far Realm are rare and high-level. They're mostly limited to tainted casters, and may even be exclusive to them.
• Aside from Spelljamming, I have no idea what sort of setting-specific magic I should include.

Pseudonatural Taint:

• This concept is getting far more of my attention than it should-- I don't intend it to dominate the campaign to nearly the extent that it's seeming to.
• As per Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana, Taint acts as a penalty to Constitution and Wisdom. I am thinking of replacing this with Wisdom and all interaction skills.
• Taint is not evil. Evil Outsiders have no protection against it, though Outsiders rarely manifest long enough for Taint to become an issue. (They lose any Taint they have when the spell duration ends; rogue Outsiders acquire Taint normally.)
• Taint is acquired more slowly than in Unearthed Arcana.
• Characters can recover from Taint on their own, at the same rate as ability damage, but characters who have been Tainted acquire a Minimum Taint score.
• The cosmetic effects of Taint are as disturbing as the OA/UA effects, and almost as unpleasant, but are less disease-like and more mutation-like.
• Humanoids who acquire enough Taint become Monstrous Humanoids. Animals become Magical Beasts. Tainted PrCs are all transformational and change the character's creature type to Aberration at 10th level.
• Undead and Aberrations are wholly immune to the penalties caused by Taint, but Aberrations automatically qualify for feats and classes with a Taint prerequisite.
• Warlocks and Tainted PrCs gain a quality called Taint Resistance, which negates the penalties of a certain amount of taint and gives a bonus to saving throws to resist acquiring more Taint. The apotheosis ability of Tainted PrCs makes characters immune to Taint.

I need to start detailing worlds, especially the idylls, and start hammering out regional feats. I also need to start naming things. I'm also going to look over some of my Spelljammer material, as well as the stuff archived on Beyond the Moons, and start working on the details of spelljamming.

 

[Lazarous]

Lots of info there, some thoughts:

edit:meh, tags giving me all sorts of issues so back to ascii bullet points .

Civilized space:

-The artificial city sounds like a great place to set up as a mini-dyson sphere or ringworld. You can also go with labyrinthine maze that defies casual description, but there is a great deal to be said for simplicity of visualization.

Pseudonatural world:

-Perhaps make it so that the star which the gas giant revolves is corrupted/different from the other stars in the crystal sphere.
-Alternatively, have the gas giant actually be a dwarf star which provides sustenance to the dark world (functionally the only difference between this and your description would be that the pseudonatural world would be visible as a star in the night sky of other worlds). Your description makes me think that the pseudonatural world is just freefloating without a starsystem, dunno if that's what you intend.

Frontier Space:

There are seemingly two ways of envisioning frontier space - that of star systems out at the edges of the crystal sphere which are at such distances as to make travel dangerous/intolerably expensive, or frontiers around the periphery of each inhabited system.

The former would fit settings where you want the frontier races to be more mysterious/unknown. Either as implacable, alien enemies or nearly incomprehensible, but powerful, allies. The latter is better suited to more mundane villian of the week scenarios.

I'd recommend the former, with the star systems being strange in some way for each frontier race you wish to add. For example, the formian star system could appear to be a dim red dwarf out at the periphery of space, but as you approach you see that it is actually a series of linked habitats that dissipate heat the formians create externally - shining a dull red in the process. A bit more mundanely, a frontier star system could have weird laws of physics as compared to the rest of the crystal sphere, where gravity is weaker than normal, space is actually breathable, stars rotate around planets, that sort of thing.

Cosmology and magic:

It seems you set up the system so that there are four planes - prime, astral, ethereal, and far realm. Spelljamming would be a setting specific magic for this sort of system, but also tapping the various planes for power (spelljamming becomes a subset of that). If astral can be tapped for increased travel speed in spelljamming, you might see more mundane uses such as carriage enchantments that make them swifter, teleportation magic that is actually astral manipulation, etc. You'd have some spells which have different interactions with the gameworld than the phb would suggest (i.e. teleportation) and possibly require some reexamining/rewriting of rules as well as more specific and limited magic (carriage speed boost).