Spelljammer Real life space facts to gamify in spell jammer

[Shades of Eternity]

This thread is here to look at the wonders of our own space and see how we can use it within the spelljammer genre .

I will start.

Are there any gas giants in
spelljammer? How would you do one and keep it gameable as a concept?

 

[see]

The 2e Spelljammer approach was to call such worlds "air bodies", have them generally be of breathable air with no increase in air pressure no matter where you were in them, and often have chunks of land and water floating in them.

 

[Shades of Eternity]

Here's another

 

[Baldurs_Underdark]

The problem with space is that most of it is extremely empty and lethal.

But since you can put a pocket of air around everything you can pick any celestial body.

• Asteroid with an orbiting moonlet (e.g. Didymos & Dimorphos)
• Huge canyons or craters, for a more vertical play
• A really distant dwarf planet (e.g. Sedna) for a place that is in 100% darkness all the time. (Make sure to ignore the cold though - i.e. what I said about space being lethal).

 

[Tonguez]

Turbulence I like to use Gravity wells and magnetospheres as a source of turbulence (rough seas) and wild weather in space. A Ship approaching the Magnetosphere of a Jupiter sized planet will be beset with lightning and rough seas they need to manouvere out of or get sucked in.
Solar flares can also be used as weather disturbances

ORCs (Odd Radio Circle) are huge circular objects (50 thousand times the diameter of the Milky Way) that are invisible to the naked eye but glow bright at Radiowavelengths.

A ‘Polyphoenix,’ in 2021 astronomers discovered an enormous entity, (more than one million light years across) made of aging plasma that has taken on the shape of a jellyfish that was emmiting radiowaves of immense complexity and mystery. The jellyfish phenomena is beleived to be 2 billion years old and was dubbed a pheonix because it is beleived that it is the remnant of an ancient black hole that went dormant (died) but which has been revived by a more recent release of electrons from an exploding galaxy - it has risen from the dead in fiery majesty!

Oumuamua is an asteroid-like object that appears to have come from outside the solar system and which exhibits non-gravitational acceleration (ie it sped up under its own compulsion), probably by outgassing as solid material melted due to the suns warmth, however no such gas was observed.
I created a race of space Coral ‘Cnidarians’ that look like asteroids but are psychic explorers who feed off space plasma. The Cnidarians send exploration drones down to planets which hatch out as Flumphs.