How do you treat Outer Space in your fantasy setting?

[dead]

I was wondering how others dealt with the Outer Space in their fantasy settings. Do you assume that the Outer Space is just like our real world; ie. without oxygen and very deadly. Or, do you take a more fantastic approach and have something like the Spelljammer setting where, not only is the Outer Space breathable*, but the whole scientific idea of stars and gallaxies has been reworked. In Spelljammer you have planets floating in a Crystal Sphere and the "stars" are painted on the inside of it. Outside of the Crystal Sphere you have the Phlogiston, a strange substance that Space Travellers (Spelljammers) can sail across to access other Crystal Spheres (which contain other campaign settings). The Space Craft of Spelljammer are powered by magical Spelljammers (usually a throne of sorts) which leach a spellcaster's memorised spells to power the ships propultion and gravity-defying maneuvers.

Anyway, this is just one take on a fantasy Outer Space. How do you deal with yours?

*Spelljammer Space is not breathable, as such. All objects have an "atmosphere" around them but this atmosphere can be depleted if it is not renewed. Therefore, a stranded PC floating in space would eventually suffocate. So, I guess, Spelljammer Space is a vacuum like our real world Space. (I haven't read the material in a while.)

 

[Ibram]

straight up regular ol' vacume few degrees above Absolute Zero.

It is possible to travel through space IMC, infact thats how many of the races that now inhabit the setting got there: Humans, Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves were brought by a now extinct race known as the Golden Ones. Goblins, who are distantly related to Orcs came on their own as refugies tens of thousands of years before my campaigns. Trolls were brought by the Dragons millions of years before any other race.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

Space, in my campaign world, is like space in our real world. In fact, the world of my campaign (DeForai) is but a backwater, lost colony of a great interstellar empire that imploded through civil war and external invasion. DeForai is really just a mutation of D-4-I which was the Imperial Designation of this backward but interesting (due to the phenomenon of Magic, which is really just a strange blend of science and psionics with more than a touch of the supernatural ala the "Dark Sun" trilogy by C.S. Friedman) planet.

It helps, in my mind, to explain the various sentient races and monsters that populate D&D if I think of them as alien space travelers who are stranded on DeForai.

Actually, the last major campaign ended when the players finally figured out that the Floating Cities of the Dead Gods were really abandoned space stations, that the Rain of Satan's Wrath was really orbital bombardment, and that the Guardian of the Paths of the Dead was not a Iron Golem, but instead a crashed, starcruiser whose computer was still defending itself from "boarders", etc., etc.

It was very easy to mutate the Sci-Fi past of the planet into Fantasy trappings.

 

[Deadguy]

For the new Talyr campaign, if you go high enough you end up in the Heavens, which is the canopy of the Tree of Heaven. There are planets and stars dotted across the canopy. And if planets hanging from a tree shouldn't be able to orbit, well I respect mythology which never had any problem with somewhere existing as two or more realities simultaneously. A fantasy world should never be compelled to be a reflection of what science has allowed us to deduce as the nature of the real world.

 

[Sejs]

Never had it come up before, and probably never will.

 

[Wombat]

Crystalline spheres, retrograde motion, and all the rest of the medieval astronomical paraphenalia

Best way to go!

After reading Garfinkle's Celestial Matters, I have never looked back!

 

[the Jester]

My world is on the inside surface of a humungous air bubble in an infinite ocean. So there is no outer space, alas.

In my old campaign world, I was going to use a sci-fi-ish ruleset for space, but then Spelljammer came out and I decided to use it instead.

 

[The Goblin King]

My world has no 'outer space'. If one was to fly high enough they would enter the realm of the gods where the Sun, Moon, and Stars live.

 

[Tonguez]

Father Sky encircles Mother earth and all things seen are their children. Beyond the heavenly embrace is only empty darkness - the realm of formless spirits and unknown dreams wherein the Chosen may enter the presence of the One.

 

[Dogbrain]

"Outer Space" differs depending upon the locale. I decided that all the various cosmologies of my world are true--even when they contradict each other. The greatest possible disaster would be some group getting powerful enough to "discover" the "underlying truth". To do so, they would have to reconcile a lot of stuff, and this could be mystically devastating.

Yes, I do like Stafford's work.