What's your sign?

[steeldragons]

HAPPY LUNAR/CHINESE NEW YEAR my fellow ENWorlders!

Here's hoping the year of the Rabbit can start to mellow out 2011's rather...well, less than favorable beginning.

ANYwho, this got me to thinking...as I am want to do. haha.

For all of the time and energy I have spent on developing pantheons of deities, divine and infernal forces, creation mythologies, hero legends, etc. etc. etc. for various campaign worlds...I've never actually made a "Zodiac."

...and i kinda think, for as very little as it might get used, seems like a bit of "flavor" I want to come up with for my setting.

So...What's in your campaign setting's stars?

Has anyone ever used one in their campaign? How did it go? How did you create it...or who did you borrow from?

As I recall, the Dragonlance campaign setting of Krynn had constellations which, IIRC, were images of the various symbols of the gods themselves. But other than that, I don't think I've heard of any specific mythological constellation construct (i.e. "a Zodiac").

So got me to wondering/curious what (if anything) people have done with it.

Oh, and good morning. Now, more coffee. Excuse me...
--Steel Dragons

 

[Dice4Hire]

This is a good idea, though I have never done anything with it.

 

[steeldragons]

This is a good idea, though I have never done anything with it.

Thanks Dice.

I'm thinking that there are a few really simple possibilities:
1) Just use western/greco zodiac as is.
2) Use the Chinese zodiac as is...though then I'd fear ending up with a campaign that runs suspicuously like a season of Jackie Chan Adventures. lol. Much as I loved that cartoon, but still...
3) Using either of the "real world" zodiacs and then just replacing the existing constellations with different figures/animals/symbols.

This offers the possibility of using real/actual star charts/astrology as elements in-game with no other work than looking at your conversion list (i.e., Cancer=Thisfantasysign, Gemini=Thatfantasysign.)

Since I already have a few gods who are associated with various colored "stars" (i.e. planets.) and gods assigned to each of the 2 moons of my world, I think I have to go with totally coming up with something from scratch for my world...

My initial thoughts/instincts are...that since the viewing of the stars was probably developed by the very first "wise/learned peoples"...in my world, the accepted Orean astrology/zodiac would have been created by the Druids...perhaps based off of an Elf origin...or the Druidic Zodiac and the Elvin Zodiac could be unrelated (as the eastern and western zodiacs of the real world).

Anyway, a fun creative thought experiment...

All thoughts/concepts/comments welcome...and still very interested to hear if you've done anything like this already.
--SD

 

[Jhaelen]

So...What's in your campaign setting's stars?

In my campaign it's what's between the stars that is important

I've adopted the approach described in 'Elder Evils' to use 'signs' to pace the campaign. The first sign was that the stars started to move to form new constellations. These changes were accompanied by magic becoming more unpredictable and people having extremely vivid nightmares that might manifest as creatures or actually crossing physically over to the dream plane. The penultimate stage was introduced by a massive large-scale meteorite shower and the dreamplane becoming coterminous. The final sign was the moon growing larger and picking up speed until it permanently occluded the sun.

So, yeah, not really anything about zodiacs, sorry.

 

[The Shaman]

My sign is Neon.

I developed an astrological system for my 3.0 game; there were nine houses for the nine alignments and the nine major deities, and depending on which houses the world's two moons were in, there could be certain effects - undead could be harder or easier to turn, magic could take on wild effects, those of a particular alignment could get a bonus or penalty, and so on and so forth.

What was fun about it is that adventurers could find an astrologer to find out if a particular day would be 'good' for them or not.

I'm not sure if I have my notes for it still or not - I purged most of my D&D stuff years ago, including nearly all of my 3.x books and notes, but I'll see if I can dig it up.

 

[jonesy]

I was making a star map, but real life intruded and I don't have much of it finished. Here are the poles:

Fool's Kingdom: a constellation of five pole stars of the south. They have an odd off-center circular pattern where the position of the true south pole star switches almost bi-monthly. Whichever is the current pole is said to determine fate for the southern world, and gets called the King of Fate (unless it's The Wicked who gets called the Queen of Fate, or the blue who is special).
The five stars of the Fool's Kingdom are:
- The faintly red Noom, and he is the Thieves' Star.
- The dark and almost invisible M, who brings unpredictable weather.
- The white bright (and always visible) The Wicked Princess, who shines as bright as the full moon during her reign (so it's basically similar to about two weeks of full moon).
- The faint blue star which has no name, and whose season is the season of the common people, and also a common time historically for rebellions, uprisings and assassinations.
- The bright blue Colll who is said to be a mortal who became a god. No-one agrees what his season stands for.

So you could say "Noom is the King of Fate. Take care of your belongings, fair travellers from the North." or "This is the season of the common people, My Lord. If you hurt me or my family the fates will surely punish you."

The Cieran Twins are together the north pole star. Go is yellow, and Yiu is white. Not a binary, since Go is actually quite a long way from the other, just really bright. They are part of the constellation Vengeance of Rail. Rail can usually be used as a guide to get where you want to go, but sometimes stars belonging to it become occluded, and on rare occasions the entire constellation will seem to vanish from the sky, as if something black and massive had moved to block it.

 

[Scott DeWar]

seeing as this is the year of my chinese sign, I would vote on you useing that, but I am biased.

 

[jonesy]

Cool stuff! Not sure about the astrophysics of having multiple pole stars, but hey, there's magic!

I was trying to tie it into a backstory of the south. Something along the lines of there having been a man called Fool, who travelled south and either colonized it, or conquered it. He had a party consisting of Noom, M, The Wicked, and Colll. The star of the common people would have been the only pole star back then. Forty years later the kingdom is destroyed, and the four stars representing his friends appear in the sky, doing a circle dance with the ancient commoners star. Centuries after that the people only remember Colll as having been a former mortal. And no-one knows what happened to Fool, or why exactly his kingdom fell. Several different histories exist, none a match. Where the kingdom used to be is now several somewhat peaceful republics.

Edit: when I say 'centuries after that' I'm not really sure how long that should be. 700 years? Total work in progress.

 

[Diamond Cross]

My girlfriend saw the title to this thread (which is misleading) and she quipped "slippery when wet" and gave me a big kiss.

 

[Barastrondo]

Crap, I think I've brainstormed *two* fantasy zodiacs, one for the Scarred Lands and one for my homebrew. Shamefully, I wound up liking the Scarred Lands one just a touch more, because it had a bit more post-apocalyptic teeth to it, whereas the other was more realistically "softer" in places.

The Scarred Lands one was tied to the calendar, and each of the signs had their basis in an incident from the Titanswar. The homebrew is 15 signs for a 360-day year (so, tidy), three for each of the elements (the classic four + aether, for arcana). The homebrew gets a little more complicated because it's the basis for the elven pantheon, mind: so what humans call the Raven elves call the Lamp, and tie it to the god of knowledge and scholarship...

...it's kind of a mess. Sufficiently complicated that I haven't tied anything rulesy to it: it's something interested players can delve into with some depth, but I'd never ask anyone to keep it straight unless they wanted to play a Zodiac Quests campaign like Final Fantasy Tactics or something.