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There was some talk recently in the TG Chat thread of starting a thread to discuss tabletop campaign settings. Since no one else did it, I have taken it upon myself to start just such a thread! I am not really good at major effort posts, so please feel free to discuss your favorite tabletop campaign settings from any system or time period, or talk about some of the interesting stuff from your homebrew setting! [-- This space reserved for if the thread takes off and I come back to fancy this post up a bit --]
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Nov 15, 2020 08:11
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I'll bite. Salt Bay - once a mining town, now a coastal tourist village. Sit your cliffside resort with a glass of wine and watch container ships fight their way across the whirling bay to Coal City down the coast. Quiet, scenic and expensive. That ain’t you. You drifted into town with the wrong crowd. The kind that hangs around the Love Shack behind the dive shop at one in the morning, sweating gin and eying the staircase in the back. The one that leads into the undercity. You’ve heard stories about what’s down there. Buried gardens of killer kudzu, infested with urban druids. Old rotting houses full of giant spiders. Gutters of meat that squirms like it’s still alive. Moving sculptures that really stretch the definition of “art”. It all looks like dollar signs when you’re an occult criminal with empty pockets and a gun in your hand.  I whipped this up for a convention game of Esoteric Enterprises. Like all EE cities, the surface city begins as a thin layer of skin draped over the undercity, but gets more personality as you play. The book has an implied setting that comes together from the elements that fall out of the random generators and into the dungeon map, which the DM has to make sense of and animate for the players. So the result will be partly the meta-setting from the book (which is sort of like World of Darkness or Unknown Armies), and partly your own creation. Salt Bay was a soft sequel to Cow Town, which was a followup to Coal City. A single city is the perfect size - it's much easier to bring a neighborhood to life than a country or continent. But it has a limited lifespan - it can only take so many sessions of occult gang warfare and apocalyptic cults before things reach a climax. I think three cities is all the game can handle, before you've wrung out all the content it has to offer.
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Nov 15, 2020 10:18
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Dark Sun: best D&D setting or just best official D&D setting?
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Nov 15, 2020 12:21
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gaining unknown armies style power from paradox by both loving planescape but also hating the alignment grid at the same time
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Nov 15, 2020 14:08
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Splicer posted:Dark Sun: best D&D setting or just best official D&D setting? it's the worst as the constantly oppressive environment is a needless burden now ravenloft, that's a hilarious campaign setting
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Nov 15, 2020 17:37
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Splicer posted:Dark Sun: best D&D setting or just best official D&D setting? Dark Sun is basically tied with Mystara as my favorite official campaign setting. It's also probably the setting with the single most consistent theme, which I really appreciate.
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Nov 15, 2020 18:48
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My dream is to play a Dark Sun game with a party of all thri-kreen, with people who share my obsession with this book and all its majestic weirdness: God, I love Thri-Kreen of Athas. It presents the only truly alien playable D&D race, and it's bonkers.
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Nov 15, 2020 19:48
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Splicer posted:Dark Sun: best D&D setting or just best official D&D setting? Eberron is the best, but Dark Sun is very good. Planescape and Starjammer, as well. And special shout out to Birthright! So poll: which campaign setting in everyone's opinions has the best depiction/relationship with gods? I've always liked how the gods in Eberron were portrayed, with the Sovereign Host being highly generic but that itself allows for an insidious takeover and appropriation of the pantheons of other cultures as part of assimilating them. But on the other hand, their distance and questionable existence leaves seeds of doubt in their followers. Meanwhile, the real, actual presence of the Silver Flame inspires a level of passion and evangelism the Host cannot, and the similar closeness of Vol provides an alternative to the incredibly poo poo afterlife everyone knows awaits them after a lifetime of devout worship to the Host. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 20:32
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Eberron is also my favorite for how their gods work, because I like that the setting never actually explicitly says that the gods are, well, gods. It allows a different level of interaction with faith compared to the D&D standard of "the gods are real and incontrovertible proof is everywhere". The Sovereign Host might not exist at all, the Silver Flame might just be a powerful spellcaster and a demon stuck together without being divine, etc.
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Nov 15, 2020 20:56
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Nuns with Guns posted:Eberron is the best, but Dark Sun is very good. Planescape and Starjammer, as well. And special shout out to Birthright!
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Nov 15, 2020 21:16
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Nuns with Guns posted:Eberron is the best, but Dark Sun is very good. Planescape and Starjammer, as well. And special shout out to Birthright! Eberron's one of those settings I absolutely love the philosophy and general design sensibilities of, but could never really get into, myself. I think it's that the whole dungeonpunk aesthetic just doesn't speak to me.
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Nov 15, 2020 21:24
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senrath posted:Eberron is also my favorite for how their gods work, because I like that the setting never actually explicitly says that the gods are, well, gods. It allows a different level of interaction with faith compared to the D&D standard of "the gods are real and incontrovertible proof is everywhere". The Sovereign Host might not exist at all, the Silver Flame might just be a powerful spellcaster and a demon stuck together without being divine, etc. Yeah, the big collective of gods being so distant that they don't interact with their worshippers, while the Silver Flame and Vol being effectively ascended mortals is a cool modernization of D&D tropes to me. You do lose the charm of being able to meet up with and high five/bone your patron goddess though. Splicer posted:Do I even need to answer this I'd love to hear your thoughts on deities and faith in Dark Sun, yes. Like sure, the actually D&D-style pantheon gods are gone, but that doesn't stop people from trying to build up cults around the dragon kings or druids from using their ties to nature to keep small oases alive. How's that all break down in particular? KingKalamari posted:Eberron's one of those settings I absolutely love the philosophy and general design sensibilities of, but could never really get into, myself. I think it's that the whole dungeonpunk aesthetic just doesn't speak to me. Eberron has non-dungeonpunk aspects to it, too, but then you run into the problem that political intrigue, swashbuckling adventure, and crime thrillers that so many other corners of the setting are designed around don't work stupendously well in straight D&D rules. Still, I do appreciate how they managed to justify a huge variety of dungeons and ruins all over the world to hop between, with a sufficiently fascist faction of evil clerics to be your nazi substitutes to sucker punch as you escape with ancient relics before they can seize them. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 21:26
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Eberron was tough for me cause it's very similar to the world I ran my games in at the time. It's a world that D&D sorely needed but was still a kick in the dick cause everyone wanted to play it and I'm like it's basically what we've been doing this whole time.
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Nov 15, 2020 21:30
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Nuns with Guns posted:So poll: which campaign setting in everyone's opinions has the best depiction/relationship with gods? In D&D it's obviously the FR, with a second-place shoutout to Planescape for fitting in as another facet. But since this isn't a thread just for D&D, I think Glorantha deserves a shoutout too. It's not really my cup of tea, but having actual historians/theologists building a world lead to something really interesting and different from what little I know about it.
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Nov 15, 2020 21:49
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Arivia posted:In D&D it's obviously the FR, with a second-place shoutout to Planescape for fitting in as another facet. I would personally love to hear more about Glorantha, Tékumel, all those other worlds that were these childhood/academic labors of love that were then converted to modern roleplaying. What I do know about Tékumel that's pretty interesting in that the way they explain how they avoid the player/character knowledge discrepancy by stating that your character is from out of that world, and they're stuck in the immigrant quarter until they and you learn enough/gain enough levels to win citizenship. But it was a hard sell to have anyone run it who wasn't already Professor MAR Barker. "Hey, kids! Wanna have to learn an entirely new invented language just to be able to GM?!"
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Nov 16, 2020 01:56
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Nuns with Guns posted:So poll: which campaign setting in everyone's opinions has the best depiction/relationship with gods? A (now-defunct) LARP system in the UK called Maelstrom had a huge and fascinating god metaphysic. The nature of the gods was left ambiguous: - they all had an agenda for how they wanted the world to be, but limited ability to intervene in the world - they had angelic messengers who claimed to speak with the voice of the gods (but who were free-willed, and fallible, and could Fall to become scary demons) - you could send prayers to the gods and perform supplications in their name, the results of which were ambiguous and mostly delivered via said fallible messengers - the recently-discovered New World had god's of its own who seemed to mostly, but not quite, play by the same rules - there was a whole school of magic whose deal involved loving about with the whole process, up to and including faking commandments to the angels so they looked as if they came from a god Understandably, there was enormous and widespread player speculation about what the gods' actual deal was. Ascended messengers? High-level wizards? Cosmic pyramid scheme? The organisers were impressively tight-lipped about the whole thing, which led to one of my abiding memories of the campaign. See, when the campaign ended, the organiser did a Q&A on undiscovered bits of the metaphysic, and revealed that the gods were... genuinely benevolent divine beings who only wanted the best for their followers. As the playerbase of maybe five hundred larpers digested this, a shout rang out from somewhere behind me: "You sick gently caress!"
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Nov 16, 2020 13:09
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Anyway here's an actual campaign setting that I'm running for my D&D4e group: The world, so they say, was once a place of noble kings, great gods, wild spirits, and powerful magic. Then came the Wealed One, turning allies against one another and drawing armies to her side. She was defeated in a last, desperate battle that rent the earth, breaking the royal lines, sending gods and spirits into hiding, and ripping the very land from the ground into the sky. So they say. But these days there's little time to study history, and little history that isn't spun by somebody with an agenda. These days, the Outlands are ruled by gangs: whoever has the biggest spellguns, the fastest hoversleds and the meanest magic writes the law. The gangs rule the Outlands, and fight over deposits of the thick, red, toxic, worldblood that powers magitech (and turns flora and fauna into horrific monsters) -- but the Guilds rule the gangs from their floating sky-islands. The Guilds keep the secret of how to refine worldblood into magitech, and let their favoured Outlander minions take a few scraps from their table in return for the dirty work of keeping the worldblood flowing. Then there are the spirits. When the world broke they fled into the hollow places, folds in reality -- but they are not gone. They still influence the mortal world, and they can still provide you with power -- if you are willing to pay the price, if you can understand what their price is, if you can even work out what they're trying to tell you. And between gods, spirits, gang wars, and villainous magical corporate intrigue there are numerous people willing to pay a group of four to six heavily-armed loose cannons to solve their problems for them.
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Nov 17, 2020 01:26
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Alright, I'm in the process of working on a big Mystara effortpost that is taking longer than I anticipated. In the meantime, here's a less intense post about the homebrew setting I've been using for my 5e games: The World of Helm  Helm is the homebrew setting I’ve been using for my D&D games: A science fantasy world built over top the ruins of a technologically advanced, transhuman civilization. Built heavily on the notion that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, this is a setting where barbarians delve into crashed spaceships in order to recover millennia-old laser weapons to give them an edge against the local monarch. I’ve included a lot of the old D&D mainstays, but with a science fantasy twist: Liches are beings who have uploaded their brain into a computer to achieve limited immortality, spirits and demons are hinted to actually be artificial intelligences, and it is ambiguous if spellcasters are really casting magic, or simply manipulating the latent nanotechnology that has integrated itself into the environment. The setting’s creation was heavily inspired by books like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth and Frank Herbert’s Dune; tv shows like He-Man, She-Ra andThundarr the Barbarian; and games like Horizon:Zero Dawn and the hot mess that is Numenara.  A Brief History Thousands of years in the past there existed The Ancient Humans: Legendary beings who had conquered death, could create life in their own image and who wandered between the stars in great fortresses made of steel. They came to Helm in ages past and altered the world to suit their needs. They built great cities and fortresses, gifted the inhabitants of Helm with the spark of intelligence and ruled the world as living gods. Then, roughly 2,000 years ago, the Ancient Humans vanished and left the other races of Helm without guidance or direction. The circumstances of the Humans’ departure are unclear, lost in the calamities that followed: Demons descended on Helm from above, raining fire and destruction down upon its surface. The works of the Ancient Humans were razed and the people were cast once again into darkness. Over the next 1,500 years civilization slowly rebuilt itself, eventually reaching a roughly renaissance-era level of technology and the technological marvels the Ancient Humans left behind were rediscovered. It was during this period that four great empires emerged: The Empires of the Dragonborn, The Saurians, the Serpentfolk and the Demihumans. As their reach expanded, the four empires began to vie against one another for power and territory. After centuries of stalemate, the leaders of the four empires turned their attention to powerful weapons left behind by the Ancient Humans, hoping they could crush their enemies once and for all. This would prove to be their undoing. The great weapons wrought a terrible swath of destruction across Helm: The Empire of the Dragonborn was engulfed in an endless winter, The people of the Saurians were struck by madness, The Serpentfolk’s Empire was swallowed by the jungle, and all across the land the dead began to rise and fight the living. The Great War was ended with no winner, merely the ruins of four once mighty empires and civilization again plunged into another dark age. It has now been 200 years since the Great War and civilization has slowly begun to emerge from its Dark Age. Most people live in tiny pockets of civilization surrounded by vast tracts of wilderness and ruins filled with monsters and the undead, and unclaimed human artifacts lie waiting to be recovered. It is the perfect time for an enterprising adventurer to make a name for themself!  The People of Helm I’ve tried to set Helm up to accommodate as broad a range of playable races as possible. I’ve sometimes heard people talk about the “Mos Eisley Cantina Effect” derisively, but that’s sort of exactly what I’m going for. When a band of adventurers walks into a tavern on Helm, they should be confronted with a wide assortment of strange and unique sapient beings, each with a story to tell. Humans, being the ancient precursor race that vanished long ago, aren’t an option for PCs. The major races I’ve included thus far include: Demihumans are a catch-all for all of your typical fantasy races that are almost human; things like Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, Orcs, etc. All of these creatures are part of the same species and were genetically engineered by the Ancient Humans. Their Empire was the one that suffered the least overall devastation during The War, and the territory they control is the main focus of my campaigns thus far. We should all be familiar with Dragonborn at this point, and they remain relatively unchanged in Helm. Their Empire is one of the oldest on Helm and was the most technologically advanced before The War, being the only one with the knowledge to build airships. Unfortunately the fallout from The War hit them especially hard and they’ve fallen into a state of slow decay and decadence. Lizardfolk is a catch-all for a wide array of lizard-like humanoids. In addition to your usual D&D lizardfolk there are also races that take after chameleons, frilled lizard and gila monsters; as well as distinct subraces like Tortles and Saurians (Humanoid dinosaurs). One of the weapons unleashed during The War was a strange plague that affected only the Lizardfolk and turned its victims into feral, near-mindless monsters. While the majority of the Lizardfolk remain unaffected, it’s a constant, looming threat. Serpentfolk are exactly what they sound like: Snake people of all shapes and sizes! Their empire was almost completely wiped out in The War, so most modern Serpentfolk either live as members of other societies, or as fractured cults seeking to restore their empire to glory. Automatons are sapient robots originally built by the Ancient Humans. While exceptionally long-lived, they’re not truly immortal and their central processor will eventually break down, essentially resulting in their death. They were originally created with a distinct purpose by the Humans, but what that purpose is has been warped and lost to time. It’s not uncommon to find enclaves of Automatons who have turned their original programming into a strange religion.  Felinids are Thundercats-style cat people. It includes the lion-like Leonids, who have a culture akin to the Orcs in the Elder Scrolls games; the housecat like Grimalkin, who have established a number of thriving enclaves within major cities; the tiger-like Rakhasta, who have built a mighty mountain kingdom; and the Gnolls who were displaced from their homelands during The War and have been forced into banditry to survive. Thri-Kreen have been transplanted pretty much wholesale into this setting from Dark Sun. They primarily live in the Western Wastes: A vast wasteland created during The War that lies on the edge of civilization. Mothlings are moth-like humanoids who are innately drawn to human technology and have a strange aversion to living around other members of their species. Most Mothlings make their way through the world as lone wanderers, gathering with other Mothlings only in semi-annual swap meets in which they trade stories and relics with one another over a multi-day festival before resuming their solitary lifestyle once again. Despite their aversion to travelling with members of their own kind, Mothlings seem to have no problem with joining groups of non-Mothlings, in many cases seeming to prefer it.  Tauren covers the likes of Loxodon, who mostly live in matriarchal, nomadic clans that wander the savannahs; The Minotaur whose city states held a close allegiance to the Demihuman Empire; the wild centaurs who roam the vast plains of the north; and the skittish fauns who build hidden communities in the woods. Avians are the various bird-like races, including the familiar Kenku (Who lack the weird lack of creativity from the vanilla game) as well as the raptor-like Hawklings and the owl-like Strix. Cephaloa are a race of three foot tall, intelligent octopuses who make their home along the shores of the Central Sea and the Northern Ocean. They are semi-amphibious and a common sight amongst sailors. Sprites are the various races of small, flying humanoids like fairies, pixies and imps. They don’t have much in the way of a society of their own, usually either living lives of self-reliant hedonism or as citizens of other civilizations. Anansi are a race of giant, sapient spiders native to The Underworks, the vast system of caves that run beneath Helm. They have only recently come in contact with the surface world, though they have a strong mercantile tradition in The Underworks and are eager to set up trade with the surface dwellers.
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Nov 17, 2020 21:47
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It's been cool to read about people's homebrew settings! Here's some stuff about one I made back in high school, reposted from an earlier discussion:Agent Rush posted:Doubt I could find the notes now, but I once had a setting where the world was a cube where every face had radically different technology levels and populations. One was your standard fantasy land where everyone thought the world was flat because no one had ever tried going over the edge. Another was full of modern people, who had realized that gravity would re-orient anything that went over but tried to avoid interfering with the development of the other faces. Maybe I'll talk more if I remember or find my old notebooks.
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Jan 1, 2021 02:18
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Hello, Settings Discussion Thread! I should discuss the "generic" setting which I use for the majority of my games these days that take place in a fantasy context. There are three interpretations of it, but the usage of elements from one is fluid for any other iterations. The Kingdom of Arcadia is a large place that is mostly human-centric that has its borders go from the Savage West to the Unconquerable East; to the Frozen North down to the Scorching South; and it has reigned for a thousand years under many, many kings. Originally founded by King Arcadius in the War of the True King, he banded together Warriors of Light to unite the land against the Sky Realm, otherworldly beings with ancient technology sent to subjugate the central lands from another dimension. Using the power of the Outrage Weapons, Arcadius defeated and banished the Sky Realm and Four Heavenly Kings from the land, to which it knew a thousand years of peace. Fifty years ago, King Eselred defeated the last of the Four Heavenly Kings, the DARK LORD, in a battle with new Warriors of the Light. They each sacrificed something to seal away the DARK LORD and to allow the land to know peace after the War of Light. Now, the Kingdom of Arcadia is weakened, Eselred is dying, and this sets up the backdrop for one of the games I run. Swapping out Arcadia for another central area, the megacity of Oratorio is home to deities and demigods that walk the land known as "Pretenders". Carrying the divine spark, they descended from the Celestial Heavens to enjoy the wonders and delights in the world below. Underneath Oratorio lies the Megabore, a gigantic vertical shaft that leads into various zones in a place known as the Megastrata, a 100+ level megadungeon said to have been created in an event called the Dungeon Hazard an unknowable amount of time ago. Delvers make their fortunes in the Megastrata while watched from afar by the Pretenders, taking a mixture of mundane and weird requests from the all powerful Adventurer's Guild. Swapping out the other two central locations, we also have Fronteira, the fortress city on the border between the Faldervoll Ranges, Badabaskor Islay, and the Winedark Sea. This was the major region inspired by Keep on the Borderlands where the players in an older D&D game had their stakes in the ground there. Aside from those I also did a twenty page or so document for a GURPS near-future scifi campaign involving giant robots and psychic mercenaries: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vSD7VUhk1HOJqZ_qr0xVsAzv6xKbMj-iSSsoa43v1hI/edit?usp=sharing
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Jan 22, 2021 06:19
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Since this thread is also cool for homebrew settings, I'm in the early stages of brainstorming a sci-fi/mecha setting, kinda in the Gundam vein I guess. So with that in mind, something that's been bouncing around my thoughts: The Earth has long since been blown out by climate change, and humanity has moved on to the stars, both in the form of a "chain" of space colonies in geostationary orbit around the planet, as well as the planet Mars. Here are the questions I'm dealing with: 1) For Mars, should the setting have dome cities or should it be terraformed? Venus is another interesting question, should this setting have people settled on Venus? And finally: if they have the technology to build dome cities or terraform planets ala Mars and Venus, with the context of The Chain, should they have resettled on the Earth? Hmmm, I also kinda like the idea that the big fight that defines the setting would be over disagreements about what to do with the Earth. King of Solomon fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Jan 22, 2021 |
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Jan 22, 2021 16:16
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King of Solomon posted:Since this thread is also cool for homebrew settings, I'm in the early stages of brainstorming a sci-fi/mecha setting, kinda in the Gundam vein I guess. So with that in mind, something that's been bouncing around my thoughts: I'm no ecologist, but my understanding is that having enough soil/biological substrate to grow plants/crops outside is a major issue in terraforming. So if you go with a Mars looking to expand out of domed cities you could have a conflict between those that want to strip mine Earth for resources to help the terraforming project vs those who want to work on restoring it.
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Jan 22, 2021 17:24
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Napoleon Nelson posted:I'm no ecologist, but my understanding is that having enough soil/biological substrate to grow plants/crops outside is a major issue in terraforming. So if you go with a Mars looking to expand out of domed cities you could have a conflict between those that want to strip mine Earth for resources to help the terraforming project vs those who want to work on restoring it. I kinda want the Mars that is portrayed in Aria, which is basically a water world with robots and extremely silly but chill anachronisms. If you are going the terraforming route then it will be considered a considerably large leap forward from dome cities. Generally speaking if there are habitats with controlled agriculture zones from aquaponics or other similar artificial growth techniques then this will also limit the size of the cities as well. Gundam was able to get away with the colonies but not terraforming, iirc, and the colony/earth dichotomy was very strong during it. There are lots of examples in sci-fi where "the memory of earth" is a large psychological driving force for some people in society, to the point where it can serve as an ideological flash point. If Earth represents the hegemony and demands of colonies that are self-sustaining, what do the colonies have to gain from such a tyranny? That's one of the setups for Gundam as well and creates a setting ripe for mecha action. If terraforming Mars is possible in your setting then re-terraforming Earth unless it was turned into a tomb world would absolutely be a priority of an enterprise with access to the technology. Example: Earth is a dead planet, but Mars and Venus have become garden worlds as a result of advanced terraforming supported by the space colonies around them. Earth has remained as a symbol of hope, peace, and a cautionary tale for the hubris of civilization. Now, the leading experts in terraforming have announced their biggest project yet, which is to re-terraform Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, the situation is quite different, as civilization rises from the ashes in a cobbled together with advanced war machines. Society has regressed to feudalism after mass desertification, and giant robots serve as protectors and enforcers over the last bits of arable land. What will happen when the warlords of Earth meet with the Terraformers of the Garden Worlds? etc.
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Jan 22, 2021 18:27
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Excellent thoughts, both of you. Any thoughts on Venus? I feel like that has some interesting potential for a sci-fi world based on its properties, but also I'm not sure if I should do that in addition to (or as an alternative to) settling Mars in the setting.
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Jan 22, 2021 21:41
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Floating Venusian cities are always a favorite of mine.
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Jan 22, 2021 23:10
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Aerostats are great. One other possibility explored in the Mars Trilogy is a big sunshade, to block enough sunlight that you reverse the runaway greenhouse effect and the atmosphere becomes more earth-like.
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Jan 22, 2021 23:11
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aldantefax posted:There are lots of examples in sci-fi where "the memory of earth" is a large psychological driving force for some people in society, to the point where it can serve as an ideological flash point. If Earth represents the hegemony and demands of colonies that are self-sustaining, what do the colonies have to gain from such a tyranny? That's one of the setups for Gundam as well and creates a setting ripe for mecha action. However, what happens when people's hearts go elsewhere? Either to the colony cluster or megaship of their birth, or if you want to make the analogy a little easier, to another planet entirely? Most sci-fi like this has Earth be forgotten (Niven's Known Space stories are the largest exception I can think of) but what if Earth is just becoming irrelevant, because the meta-economic flux between Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani's colony planets is starting to rise to equal, or match, whatever Earth can do?
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Jan 22, 2021 23:48
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King of Solomon posted:And finally: if they have the technology to build dome cities or terraform planets ala Mars and Venus, with the context of The Chain, should they have resettled on the Earth? Suggestion: Venus was terraformed as a kind of proof of concept for repairing Earth's runaway greenhouse effect. They could test stuff out without destroying the remains of Earth's ecosystem. It went so well that there's now an argument over whether to go ahead and fix Earth or to cannibalise the remains of Earth's biosphere to "finish" Venus & terraform Europa & fill a bunch of O'Neill cylinders. All of which could be done while also fixing Earth, but it would be a lot quicker if they just treated it as raw materials. Splicer fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jan 23, 2021 |
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Jan 23, 2021 00:00
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Splicer posted:This would be my worry. It's hard to justify terraforming Mars if you could fix Earth for the same or less trouble. Also Mars is, honestly, kind of poo poo for terraforming. It's tiny, cold, has no core, and is covered in in poisonous, lung destroying dust. mellonbread posted:Aerostats are great. One other possibility explored in the Mars Trilogy is a big sunshade, to block enough sunlight that you reverse the runaway greenhouse effect and the atmosphere becomes more earth-like. Ah yeah, I had some ideas for how to make Venus livable given the extreme temperatures, and one of the ideas I had was a sort of energy field that dissipates sunlight and UV-rays, or something that absorbs it for energy generation purposes. A giant sunshade or having this work done as a POC for repairing the Earth is also definitely something I'll have to consider.
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Jan 23, 2021 00:11
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If you have gone through all the trouble to make Venus into Earth, and Earth has become like Venus, why move back there? Just steal the Moon and claim God stole all the fossils. Or has this already happened?  e: Also, if you covered the far side of the sunshade in photovoltaics, you'd have plenty of energy to do your space industry with, without any of that ew-gross-icky radiation stuff involved in nuclear power. I wonder if they have a lot of uranium on Venus. Nessus fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Jan 23, 2021 |
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Jan 23, 2021 00:24
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Nessus posted:If you have gone through all the trouble to make Venus into Earth, and Earth has become like Venus, why move back there? Just steal the Moon and claim God stole all the fossils. Side B is all "Nah let's stick with the plan and fix up the old homestead and end up with two planets down the road." Side C is just a bunch of people hitting the table and shouting "MARS! MARS! MARS! MARS!"
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Jan 23, 2021 00:48
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Splicer posted:Well yes, that would be the argument of Side A
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Jan 23, 2021 01:28
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King of Solomon posted:Since this thread is also cool for homebrew settings, I'm in the early stages of brainstorming a sci-fi/mecha setting, kinda in the Gundam vein I guess. So with that in mind, something that's been bouncing around my thoughts: If you're concerned about terraforming negating the need to settle a world other than Earth you could go the Eclipse Phase route and have Earth being uninhabitable not just due to climate change but some other form of active hostility that means it would be a much bigger project to reclaim than terraforming Mars or Venus would be. You could also use that to build on the common mecha trope of "The mysterious and inscrutable alien enemy that can only be battled with specific technology" you see in things like Evangelion, Macross or Space Battleship Yamato. Speaking of Eclipse Phase: Another idea for Venus that piggybacks off the aerostat model that I've been playing with for an Eclipse Phase/Alien/Cowboy Bebop Casette Futurist setting is using Venusian colonization to explore a class divide between humans and robots. Basically the aerostats are the domain of the human upperclass but are kept in operation by the robot underclass because they're the only ones that can withstand the Venusian environment. I don't know if sapient AI exists in your setting, but if it does that could be a fun idea to explore. KingKalamari fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Jan 23, 2021 |
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Jan 23, 2021 01:35
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KingKalamari posted:If you're concerned about terraforming negating the need to settle a world other than Earth you could go the Eclipse Phase route and have Earth being uninhabitable not just due to climate change but some other form of active hostility that means it would be a much bigger project to reclaim than terraforming Mars or Venus would be. You could also use that to build on the common mecha trope of "The mysterious and inscrutable alien enemy that can only be battled with specific technology" you see in things like Evangelion, Macross or Space Battleship Yamato. My setting is still really early, so I haven't even thought about sapient AI yet, but it's definitely something I'm going to need to put some serious thought into.
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Jan 23, 2021 01:52
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KingKalamari posted:If you're concerned about terraforming negating the need to settle a world other than Earth you could go the Eclipse Phase route and have Earth being uninhabitable not just due to climate change but some other form of active hostility that means it would be a much bigger project to reclaim than terraforming Mars or Venus would be. You could also use that to build on the common mecha trope of "The mysterious and inscrutable alien enemy that can only be battled with specific technology" you see in things like Evangelion, Macross or Space Battleship Yamato. Meanwhile, of course, people in space are doing just fine. Earth can't do much to them even if they wanted to. An attempted nuclear attack or something could only affect the lunar area at best, and would be seen coming-- and it is far easier to drop something down than to pick something up. You could even have something tense happen here. Regime collapse on Earth. Stealth attack using a novel weapons vector against spacenoids. Can the PCs stop it, or at least de-escalate or avert The Big Dumb Drop?
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Jan 23, 2021 01:53
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Nessus posted:The rest of your idea is really cool but I think that taking a different approach in a space-colonization scenario, with regards to the centrality of Earth, would be an interesting attitude. In Gundam it is sort of aesthetically posited that there is a craving and drive to go back to Earth, specifically - and since everyone is in the solar system rather than on the other end of a slow-boat trip to another planet, it is not necessarily implausible to do. I'm thinking of Legend of the Galactic Heroes more than Gundam where Earth plays a pretty critical role in one of the major story arcs in the mid to later part of the series. It's a non-spoiler to say that Earth was beatified to people who were not born there, had no memory of there, yet ended up buying into the culture that "Mother Earth" had some kind of special significance that most everybody else had said 'you know what, Earth is just a planet and there are a billion other ones out there, we got a space war to fight'. The entire storyline with that I felt is a great source of mining when talking about interplanetary realpolitik. In terms of Venus, if terraforming is a reality, it still does not account for 100% of the various planetoids that are in the solar system - one need only look at space 4X games and their many different (for game balance purposes) planet types. Wikipedia is interesting to mine here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus Of interest here: quote:Venus's relative proximity makes transportation and communications easier than for most other locations in the Solar System. With current propulsion systems, launch windows to Venus occur every 584 days,[4] compared to the 780 days for Mars.[5] Flight time is also somewhat shorter; the Venus Express probe that arrived at Venus in April 2006 spent slightly over five months en route, compared to nearly six months for Mars Express. This is because at closest approach, Venus is 40 million km (25 million mi) from Earth (approximated by perihelion of Earth minus aphelion of Venus) compared to 55 million km (34 million mi) for Mars (approximated by perihelion of Mars minus aphelion of Earth) making Venus the closest planet to Earth. Venus acting as a comms relay and waystation before going to the extremity of the solar system could almost certainly be a feasible situation. The most common thing I've seen (I'm not a big sci-fi nut) is a colony in orbit near Venus but there are research stations (perhaps aerostats or just big-rear end research shuttles) which are studying ways of harvesting the exotic environment as a form of unlocking new energy. If interstellar communication is a thing, then Venus acting as a waystation to bounce comms from deeper in the Solar System to somewhere further out might be of interest. Semi-silly thinking here is that perhaps Venus has been marked a free trade zone because nobody is capable of actually settling on the planet, but you can totally pull up a trade freighter and establish a gigantic economic sector built in high orbit. This can also fold into the communications aspect of it where people will bring all kinds of information into Venus for processing, research, and dissemination. Why not have Venusian hologram stars blasting everybody's entertainment visors on one hand while merchant-marines swap stories about space pirates plaguing their long hauls, while stock traders are busy using it as the clearinghouse for their space economic wheelings and dealings?
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Jan 23, 2021 09:02
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aldantefax posted:Venus acting as a comms relay and waystation before going to the extremity of the solar system could almost certainly be a feasible situation. The most common thing I've seen (I'm not a big sci-fi nut) is a colony in orbit near Venus but there are research stations (perhaps aerostats or just big-rear end research shuttles) which are studying ways of harvesting the exotic environment as a form of unlocking new energy. If interstellar communication is a thing, then Venus acting as a waystation to bounce comms from deeper in the Solar System to somewhere further out might be of interest. e: Oh, it's mostly CO2. Well, we certainly don't love it here but having huge amounts of CO2 right next door would definitely be helpful for a colony infrastructure. Use some kind of suction to get it upwards, then crack it with solar electricity, and presto! Elemental carbon and oxygen. Nessus fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Jan 23, 2021 |
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Jan 23, 2021 09:22
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Keep in mind that terraforming isn't a binary "uninhabitable -> habitable" switch, it's a millenia-long gradual project. You could have a Martian surface that's somewhat terraformed, in that it's still mostly covered in toxic perchlorates and had an atmosphere thinner than the top of Mt Everest, but at least SOMETHING could survive outside. The more wealthy elites might prefer living in domed habitats or sealed lava tubes underground just to have less radiation and a more pleasant atmosphere, but you might still have Fremen-type hardened survivors setting up shop on the open surface with a minimum of survival equipment or cybernetic/genetic augmentation. This is a bit harder to imagine with Venus, as pretty much nothing organic could hope to survive on the surface unless you radically altered the planet, but the Venusian stratosphere ~50km up is, as others have pointed out, fairly habitable, nice average temp and tolerable pressures. No oxygen, and rather a lot of sulfur compounds that might gently caress up your skin, but you could go outside without a pressurized suit. Normal earth air is a lifting gas there, people could live in massive balloon habitats...though they WOULD be a bit fragile to any space villains who could just shoot them. e: In fact, if you did wanna terraform Venus, you could terraform Mars at the same time and kill two birds with one stone, if slowly. Venus has too much insulating CO2 and Mars doesn't have enough, they could be mutual allies in making their worlds more habitable, who needs Earth?
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Jan 23, 2021 18:47
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Tone of your game and setting definitely important here since I just figured you could have like a bigass set of tubes funneling gas back and forth from Venus to Mars in an insane space contraption like that poo poo was an oil pipeline, but that probably wouldn't work so well when shuffling between planets
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Jan 23, 2021 19:36
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 20:56 |
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My big issue with using an Aerostat Venus strategy in this setting is I'm a big worried it's a bit too similar to the space colonies. I do want there to be a meaningful distinction between the terrestrial humans and the people living in the space colony chain. If there's a way to make living on terrestrial Venus matter while still having some level of aerostat, that's more than reasonable, but I'm not sure what that looks like.
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Jan 23, 2021 21:07
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