Planet names of Settings

[Orius]

It's in Ultima 3 that the overtly sci-fi elements disappeared.

If I'm not mistaken, wasn't the final boss in Ultima III a computer?

 

[Orius]

Thanks for this. I had no idea about any of this stuff. It does sort of put things in context.That seems strange to me for some reason. These guys are creative fellows; it just seems odd, given the prevalence of worldviews in the past that didn't think in these terms. It just seems to me that if you're writing about a world full of gods and magic that planetary systems would hardly be the first thing you would think of. But maybe it's just further evidence that I'm weird.Again and again, no less; after all, it's turtles all the way down.

Maybe because it's easier to use a "normal" planet as a baseline. I have a campaign that is a flat world with a sun and a moon, and I can't figure out for the life of me how to explain how day and night works, how the climate bands work, how the seasons work, and so on, besides "The gods will it so." And there's additional wonkiness involved in the flat world. For example, if the world is flat, is it always the same time everywhere on the surface of the world at once? Granted, the will of the gods works fine enough in a fantasy campaign, and most players won't notice these major details in a typical campaign anyway.

 

[Gez]

If I'm not mistaken, wasn't the final boss in Ultima III a computer?

Yes. Forgot about him. And you could prevent his return in Ultima 7, if you had the Forge of Virtue add-on.

 

[Faraer]

Ya, but what's the planet of the Warhammer RPG called???

The Warhammer world doesn't have a planetary name.

What I particularly don't like are simple perversions of the word Earth to make it "fantastical sounding" like Yrth or Oerth. Those are just silly, IMO.

Oerth and Ærth are part of a series of parallel Earths with different metaphysics and levels of magic (see "Why Gargoyles Don't Have Wings..." in Polyhedron #21). Oerth is apparently not pronounced the same as Earth, though I'd assumed it was.

The planet of which Faerûn is a continent was only named "Abeir-Toril" for the 1987 Forgotten Realms Campaign Set; "Toril" is from Jeff Grubb's world.

As an exercise in science-fictional worldbuilding, planets make sense, but as a setting for stories that set-up has no particular privilege, since worlds for stories have to speak to the imagination and what people care about. I don't know how Gez distinguishes sword & sorcery from "pulp fantasy" (all sorts of fantasy were published in the pulps, the non-contemporary stuff being mostly sword & sorcery), but part of Gary Gygax's reason for making the World of Greyhawk a planet may well have been his love of Burroughsian planetary romance.

 

[Gez]

Well, by pulp fantasy I meant more things like Pellucidar and other E.R. Burroughsism. While by sword & sorcery I mean things grittier, with less sci-fi or quasi-sci-fi elements in them like Leiber or Howard.

 

[fusangite]

It was an ancient greek who calculated the size of the round earth. So while not an example of newtonian/einsteinian, it is an example of a pythagorean/aristotelean physcial world view at the same time as cosmology including nymphs, fauns, and shapeshifting gods.

The earth was round. It was not a planet; the sun and moon were planets in many round earth systems but the earth never was. The idea of a heliocentric system in which Earth was just another planet and, therefore, the other planets might be worlds is either a marginalized or non-existent view until the re-emergence of the hermetic texts in the 15th century.

Earth=sphere and earth=planet are very different realizations and in most such systems planet did not equal sphere. Most earth=sphere systems emphatically denied the earth=planet position. Ptolmaic astronomy was premised on the idea that the earth was round but was not a planet. Thus, one mainstream pagan explanations of planets was that they were divinities. In most geocentric systems, planets, the moon and sun were all in the same class or similar classes and totally distinct from earth which constituted the stationary centre of the universe.

I'm not objecting to the sphere thing. I credit that in a game with teleportation, non-spherical worlds can be inconvenient; I am just suggesting that there are a lot of ways for worlds to be easy to GM without having to be planets.

Since when does Newtonian/Einsteinian physics preclude magic? Or are you not saying that?

I guess we could get into some kind of weird debate about the definition of "magic" but I think you know what I mean here. And even thought I don't mind your logical extension of my statement, provided you apply it only to Einsteinian physics not to Newtonian physics, no, that was not what I was saying. What I was saying was that in D&D, there are four elements; the existence of the four terrestrial elements is an immediate indication that we are not using post-Newtonian physics (or arguably even post-Paracelsian physics).

 

[Voadam]

Well for most of the spelljammer stuff it added planetary bodies as planets, I think in most CS's they don't define them to that level. But since in Spelljammer you could fly your ship to the planets it made sense to define them as new worlds you could explore. That said I think in Greyspace the sphere is terrocentric with Oerth at the center and all the planets, the moon, and the sun revolving around it.

And we have plenty of real world mythology in D&D supplements so for instance the egyptian mythology settings do have Ra journeying across the sky during the day and norse ones have the seven worlds where the sky is Ymir's skull and the sun is a horse pursued by a wolf, etc. So if you are looking for different astrophysics in D&D settings it is not too hard to find. And then there are the planes as well, where the land is usually infinite layers without planets.

 

[Gez]

The idea of a heliocentric system in which Earth was just another planet and, therefore, the other planets might be worlds is either a marginalized or non-existent view until the re-emergence of the hermetic texts in the 15th century.

True, etymologically, planet means "wandering star" and in a geocentric view of the universe, the Earth is not wandering, everything else is.

The existence of other worlds akin to Earth was a heresy and one of the reason Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.

 

[fusangite]

The existence of other worlds akin to Earth was a heresy and one of the reason Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.

Exactly my point. This view arose from the re-emergence of the hermetic texts in the 15th century -- the same texts that inspired Copernicus to produce his model. Only when you switch to a heliocentric model do you begin to conceive of the wandering stars as peers of earth.

And we have plenty of real world mythology in D&D supplements so for instance the egyptian mythology settings do have Ra journeying across the sky during the day and norse ones have the seven worlds where the sky is Ymir's skull and the sun is a horse pursued by a wolf, etc. So if you are looking for different astrophysics in D&D settings it is not too hard to find. And then there are the planes as well, where the land is usually infinite layers without planets.

Glad to see we're on the same page. This is why I found it so weird that published settings would all make the game worlds a planet; as you illustrate, there are so many accessible alternatives.

 

[Voadam]

Exactly my point. This view arose from the re-emergence of the hermetic texts in the 15th century -- the same texts that inspired Copernicus to produce his model. Only when you switch to a heliocentric model do you begin to conceive of the wandering stars as peers of earth.

The stars in spelljammer are often different things, in some crystal spheres they are holes/clear panes in the crystal sphere that light from the phlogiston comes through, in others they are portals to the plane of radiance or fire, and of course in dragonlance they are actually the gods themselves (except the ones of magic which are the moons).