Quick polity and biome procedures for approaching strange worlds

From the previous post on randomly generating a system I was left with the puzzle of what to do with truly enormous planets with mind boggling surface areas. What can you pack into a water world the size of Saturn, for instance? For reference, Earth is the archetypal Class E, but we have 30% of our surface above water so only 60M square miles. That is to say the next class down, D, has half the land area of our Earth, assuming there are no surface water bodies at all. For reference, the planetary classes and their areas if a sphere or a single-sided discworld.

Class	Diameter (mi)	Sphere surface area (mi.sq)	Discworld top side area (mi.sq)
A	350	384845	96211
B	800	2010619	502655
C	1500	7068583	1767146
D	3200	32169909	8042477
E	8000	201061930	50265482
F	16000	804247719	201061930
G	32000	3216990877	804247719
H	80000	20106192983	5026548246
I	160000	80424771932	20106192983
J	350000	384845100065	96211275016

To try and visualise this - here is a cumulative area chart, assuming an Earth-like share of ocean coverage (70%) - red is Class E - Earth - down in the corner. Once you move up a planetary size class, you start getting some very large spaces to work with indeed.

The question that arose elsewhere was 'does this mean a planet is a mono-culture?' I see argument in some places saying that if you are running Spelljammer or any other inter-planetary game then there is no point creating highly detailed worlds because you want getting from point to point to be part of the fun of the setting. The detail and interest on a given world should not be so much that people decide to stay groundside and abandon the Spelljamming part of it all. Taking that on board, I think there is a question of versimillitude - I can see the typical table I run giving me a very hard stare if I said 'there is no geographic variation on this world' and 'a single polity rules everything' for a place the size of Earth.

d12 hazards of the old castle

I got to visit an old castle, that has been in use ~500+ years but inhabited by the current family for ~ 200. Their primary business is running a farm, land-holding as was the the case for such buidlings for much of the past. I was interested to see that what was all over the walls of this place was less swords, shields and momentos of conquest but religious iconography and things to do with farming. There was a fantastic set of a dozen cowbells in the ground floor hall, awards for finest cows and other markers of success in the primary occupation of the dwellers.

d12 hazards encountered trying to sneak through a great house

Shiny TTRPG links #68

Links, another sample from the torrent. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

d4 Caltrops shares Table Talk: My Process for Random Tables - given they crank out so much stuff so regularly this is an interesting read for any creative types

Everythings the Meta-Magician creates Magic the Gathering RPG Oracle

The Bottomless Sarcophagus waxes eloquent in "I Love The Blacklance Paragon"

Tales of the Lunar Lands talks about bringing to the table the medieval tradition of Pas d'armes

Weaver.skepti.ch has an interesting piece in Dogs of Yesteryear

Traverse Fantasy writes "Wizards HATE Her! How to Play D&D for Free, Part 1: Structures & Routines"

Grumpy Wizard on how Writing and Storytelling are Not the Same Thing.

Review - AD&D DMG (1995)

I retrieved my old DMG, this was the book I learned from back in the day and going through it I note it spends a lot more time trying to teach me how to play than newer editions. Maybe things really were easier back in the day.

This was the AD&D DMG from 1995 - a refresh after 6 year as it says in the introduction.

I have no memory of where I read or heard the point - perhaps on the Adventuring Party? Or the OSR discord? - but it was said that this was the last of the DMGs that actually tried to teach you the game. The shadow of the same argument crops up in Alexandrians 'cargo cults' point - that there are lots of folk in the hobby that have seen adventure shaped things but the teaching of how's and why's fell away somewhere. Looking through this book with its full-on focus at teaching people how to run a game, I begin to see the point. I can also see here how all the arguments about 'playing D&D wrong' arise. For those who read and absorbed this book, the word was very clear - here is how to play, this is the style of game, we all have a common reference now.

Actual test: crystal sphere generating with classic Spelljammer

tl;dr: solar system building with the original Spelljammer rules, testing to see how much adventure can be rolled up

From Chapter 5: Celestial Mechanics in the Concordance of Arcane Space we have rules for DM-Created Universes which gives a checklist:
1. Type of System
2. Primary Body
3. Number of main planets
4. Orbit distance from primary
5. Size, type and shape of planetary bodes
6. Presence of any civilizations with spelljamming capabilities
7. Distance to the crystal sphere

Photo of own well worn copy of Spelljammer (2e)

So together with the in-house testing team we diced up a crystal sphere and its contents, to see how much adventure we could squeeze from an hours work.

Shiny TTRPG links #67

Things I have found as I tramp about the internet. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet writes Worldbuilding without canon - part of a discussion I find so strange because I cannot understand who would insist that a world *you* would build must adhere to some outside canon. It is your world, your blank canvas, you are beholden to noone when you create it - the only canon is what is created at the table, afterwards.

Dungeonfruit - they of the awesome tagline "Harvesting neat ideas" returns with Making Good Rumors (And Later, Dungeons)

Quotes for hirelings and porters on alexschroeder.ch.

The Cosmic Orrery writes Swords, Sails, & Sorcery with 3 x d10 strange folk, places and treasures

Generators for your elf games - "With this much stuff you can improvise a whole campaign on the spot" on Perchance.org

Review: Fateforge Encylopedia

tl:dr; a new take on familiar races, a rich history and lots of interesting sites to explore and civilizations to encounter, delivered with 'naturalists sketchbook' art that makes it feel real.

I backed the Studio Agate Encyclopedia kickstarter - having backed just the pdf during the Creatures campaign, I used the opportunity to get a hard-copy of Creatures and the Encylopedia... and some other stuff. Creatures I reviewed before and liked its new angle on classic fantasy and the 'sketches of real fantastic places' art style.

The treasure trove that turned up.

This time around we take a look at the Encyclopedia - the world book which describes four civilizations found in the world through history, locations and items. First impression is that this is very good looking - as before lots of art and a great deal of graphic design work to make the text look like an in-world scrapbook. The art throughout is really nice, there is a distinctive house style that I like quite a lot - very naturalists notebook with pencil sketches, cutaway diagrams, and maps mixed with classic fantasy art spreads. It looks great and conveys a lot of the sense of the world.

We get lots of lore - this is a world delivered in character which is an interesting choice. Most books give us perhaps an chapter opener or some snippets of in-world character text but the proportion is much higher here - say approx 1/4 of every 2-page spread is an in-world note or quote. These vary from text from books to tales told by campfire.

In the loops and repetition you see a realistic construct of things that have importance, compared to the things that are practically lost to time, only known as legends. This gives nice flexibility to tune the world as you need since all these facts were just heard as tales.