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USS Sorceror
2015-06-05, 11:00 PM
So I've been contemplating running a game whose setting is of the "sword and planet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_and_planet)" variety. The beginning premise is our adventurers start off with lower power, breaking into a fortress of some enemy (hobgoblins, orcs, invading humans, other, what have you). When they reach the center of the fortress, they discover what the enemy was really trying to hold/control/study: an ancient magical gate, broken. Should the PCs be inclined to fix it or try to use it to their advantage, they discover that it connects to different planets, opening hundreds of potential adventures.

My question is populating all of these planets. What are they like, what kind of adventure do they hold? I'd like to theoretically be able to roll a percentile die and ship them off to a different planet with each roll. My ideas so far are kind of cliched in my opinion, so I'm turning to the Playground to give more suggestions. So far I have:

1. Planet in civil war: The party becomes inadvertently involved in a conflict between two or more sides in a civil war. Could be run straight good rebels vs. evil overlord, could add some moral gray areas depending on what the party is like. Sides could also be looking for additional gates to enlist the aid of more allies/have easier avenues for conquering other realms when this planet's war is over.
2. Lizard Tatooine: A desert planet where half the adventure is surviving. Populated by reptilian humanoids of an as of yet undetermined level of technological achievement (though I like the idea of them being roughly equivalent to what the party has). Denizens may attack the monstrous mammalian creatures on site, attempt to capture and study them, etc.
3. Dead or dying world: Orbiting a distant star that is well on its way to dying, this planet used to be inhabited by some form of life. Constructs still go about their purpose (which may be bad news for the party as one of those jobs was definitely security). The original inhabitants left some interesting magical items behind, but some of them linger on in unliving forms.

What other suggestions do you have?

Karl Aegis
2015-06-05, 11:14 PM
So you want Dark Heresy minus guns? Just play Dark Heresy minus guns.

awa
2015-06-05, 11:27 PM
that is both condescending and deeply unhelpful trying to turn dark heresy into a sword and planet system would be far more work then coming up with planet ideas for d&d

some ideas
1) utopia with a dark secret
2) civilization of martially frail individuals being surrounded by oncoming barbarian hordes (possible from a third world)
3) decadent society which has used magic to create a post scarcity environment but possible due to the corrupting nature of the magic or the long march of ages the society has become petty and cruel particularly to outsiders

USS Sorceror
2015-06-05, 11:31 PM
So you want Dark Heresy minus guns? Just play Dark Heresy minus guns.

I find "why not play [setting] in [game system]" to be an unhelpful answer, as many of my players (and myself) may not have time/energy/resources to learn all the rules of [game system] or all the details of [setting] before a session begins. What I want is some generic space fantasy planet ideas which could be easily translatable into any system (and thus I could run it in any of the systems my players and I already know) and not rely on any one setting or specific set of rules to make it possible.

I have a setting, I have several potential systems to use, what I'd like are additional ideas. If you are suggesting I look through some of the setting details for Dark Heresy for inspiration, then thank you, but otherwise I'd like something different.

USS Sorceror
2015-06-05, 11:33 PM
that is both condescending and deeply unhelpful trying to turn dark heresy into a sword and planet system would be far more work then coming up with planet ideas for d&d

some classic ones are
1) utopia with a dark secret
2) civilization being surrounded by oncoming barbarian hordes

Thanks, added to my list!

Karl Aegis
2015-06-06, 12:43 AM
Pick a world: roll 2d6 reroll a result of 7, draw a card between ace and ten of your favorite suit, roll 1d10, whatever. If you want to skew the results towards a particular world, give them more possible successes, like Feudal World gets picked on 4 and 7 on a 2d6 roll instead of just 4.

Agri-World: Everyone who doesn't administrate the world is a farmer. There should be some food here.

Feral World: I would say they were primitive, but that would be an insult to the primitive people. Expect the land to be untamed and people barely able to use tools. What they can use they use effectively.

Feudal World: A rich dude rules over rich dudes who have their own rich dudes to rule over. These rich dudes have one final tier of rich dudes to rule over before the rich dudes start ruling over poor dudes. Everything the poor dudes use are actually borrowed from the rich dude who rules over them.

Forge World: You're in an industrial center. Most of the world's surface is covered by factories and the world manufactures enough weapons and goods to destroy the world. There may be a shortage of food. The world may end in a fiery explosion or cloud of acid at any point.

Frontier World: People here are from a more advanced culture, but they don't have access to most of their technology. There is probably one power center with all the skilled laborers on the planet where you can get everything, but everywhere else is untamed.

Highborn: Everyone here is rich and classy. Expect to be political here.

Hive World: You're in a population center. Cities extend deep underground and high into the sky. Expect massive cities separated by vast wilderness as only a few areas on the world are worth populating. Trade between cities is done efficiently and effectively.

Shrine World: You're at a holy site. Expect religious dudes and dudes who pretend to be religious dudes.

Void: You're in space, congratulations.

Death World: Everything here is trying to kill you. Even the weather. Especially the weather. Good luck.


Pick your threat:
(1-16)Aliens (Includes Demihumans)
(17-20)Mutants (Includes witches)
(21-32)Heretics (Includes separatists)

You can change the distributions of your threats if you want to. If you want to include a fourth category drawing from a deck of playing cards is perfectly viable. Spades for Alien, Clubs for Mutants, Hearts for Heretics and Diamond for your wild cards. Drawing a 2 is a puny threat, drawing an Ace is a massive threat.

Example: I roll a 4 on 2d6 and draw an Ace of Spades. You're in a massive industrial center being overrun by dinosaurs that reproduce about as fast as you can kill them. You could nuke the entire planet and get rid of the dinosaurs, but you're also losing the entire population of the world in the process. There doesn't seem to be any other way of stopping the dinosaurs short of finding out how they reproduce (maybe a queen or something needs to be taken out).

There is your system. Good luck using it.

Airon
2015-06-06, 05:08 AM
For ideas, you may want to look into the solar system from the Pathfinder setting, Golarion. There is a 68-page sourcebook (called Distant Worlds) detailing a handful of very diverse and adventure-worthy planets.

There is a planet with no life on the surface but full of tunnels and underground caves with sentient, civilized bug-beings.
There is a tidally locked planet, with one emisphere constantly scorched by the sun and one in constant freezing darkness, with only the equatorial line inhabitable.
There is the planet that, after a natural disaster, lacks an atmosphere capable of sustaining life and is inhabited solely by undead.
There is a planet with an incredibly long and strecthed orbit, so that it passes centuries frozen far away from the sun and centuries scalding hot close to the sun.

and so on...

Maglubiyet
2015-06-06, 05:28 AM
I made a Random Crystal Sphere Generator for Spelljammer (http://peterstribe.com/crystal_sphere_generator2.html) that might be helpful.

(Hmm, maybe I'll also put the link in my signature along with other things I've written.)

Anonymouswizard
2015-06-06, 06:41 AM
So you want Dark Heresy minus guns? Just play Dark Heresy minus guns.

Dark Heresy is dark space opera, whereas the OP wants something closer to planetary romance.

On topic, an idea:
'Dead' world, roll 1d6 to determine what killed it.
1: heat, without suitable clothes or heat regulation players take 'fire' damage.
2: cold, 50% chance of ice, 50% chance of barren, without suitable clothes or heat regulation players take cold damage.
3: virus, players may be infected if they do not take precautions. May or may not have affected all life.
4: war, chance of killbots, golems, or similar still being around.
5: Apocalypse, the world was broken by the gods, weird things happen.
6: roll twice and combine, or make something up.

But what lives there? Roll 1d6.
1: giant insects!
2: anything, as long as it's strong.
3: plant creatures.
4: wraiths and spectres, or zombies.
5: forgotten super soldiers.
6: nothing.

To determine the state of civilisation, roll 1d6.
1: gone.
2: highly advanced utopia/dystopia, about to collapse.
3: feudal villages, with no communication between them.
4: scavengers, surviving buy fixing and jury rigging supertech (magic items).
5: terraformers for another planet! Roll to see if they are hostile.
6: wandering tribes.

But what complicates this adventure? Roll 1d6.
1: they are captured as slaves! (By intelligent bug people if required)
2: their way out is broken and they must get resources to repair it.
3: a NPC the party likes is somewhere on the planet, they must find them.
4: their way out works, but there is no power. If it uses ambient magic, any spell fails on a d20 roll of 1.
5: the world is in pieces! Find a way to get from a to b.
6: this is their home world (or is it? 90% chance of it simply being strangely similar)

Mastikator
2015-06-06, 07:01 AM
Frozen world inhabited by silicone based life. The mean temperature ranges from -200c to -160c, the ocean, clouds and rain is made out of methane and trace amounts of ethanol, the atmosphere contains nitrogen and oxygen, except for at the poles were even the nitrogen and oxygen deposits into snow and there is no atmosphere at the poles at all.
The "plants" look like organic crystals shimmering in red and green crystal shards, the animals look like they're made from stone and crystals. The intelligent inhabitants make sure that carbon based life can survive by creating heat rooms and heat suits so that visitors don't freeze to death. The inhabitants are friendly, intelligent and civilized and live in cities, they have a humanoid shape but their skin is is covered in diamond-like scales. If their temperature reaches -140c or higher they shatter into pieces and die.
Rather than a star the planet orbits a pulsar, looking up in the purple sky you'll see a strong (but very tiny) light flickering rapidly. The sky is purple and the terrain ranges from blue to indigo, the ocean is blue.

EccentricCircle
2015-06-06, 07:24 AM
Some of the old Spelljammer books detail a range of planets, including the solar systems of the main D&D settings of the time. You could also check out some of the stuff that they did on the various Stargate series. I know that that was military sci fi rather than planetary romance in the John Carter of Mars school, but if you are going to be using portals to get from one planet to another then it's certainly worth looking to it as a source.

Rather than detailing 100 or so planet outlines I'd suggest having a few different tables so that you can roll different environments, societies, etc.

That way you only have to write a few seed ideas, and then let them combine in thousands of ways.

I'd probably go for the following tables each with ten to twenty ideas on it.

Planet type (Rocky, desert, earth like, icy, jungle etc)
Society type (will likely be several per planet)
Technology level
Location of Stargate
Recent Events (wars, disasters, revolutions, first contacts etc)
Planetary "Hat"
Dominant species (roll a few times)
Alien Skies (Moons, rings, other planets etc)

Then consider things like whether the people on the planet had access to the stargate before hand, or whether they are being introduced to the idea of other worlds when the PCs show up.
Putting the gate in different strange places and situations can go a long way to making a world feel different.

I hope that the game goes well, it sounds like a great idea for a campaign.

awa
2015-06-06, 08:09 AM
world with some kind of traditional system radically switched
The classic would be a matriarchy of some kind but unless your default setting is a lot more sexists then a typical d&d setting it would not make a particularly interesting contrast.

for example some hypothetical choices
evil industrialist elves oppressing people from the tops of their war trains,
cowardly treacherous dwarven nomads with no knowledge of stone or metal working,
treants killing all non tree life, every thing from people to flowers and insects and then trying to solve their environmental collapse with more conquest.

Zombie apocalypse becuase come on you need one of those.

Calen
2015-06-06, 07:23 PM
Have you considered watching Stargate or Star Trek (The Original Series in particular)?

That would give you several ideas to work with.

Working off the gate idea:

A culture that uses gates to steal resources from other worlds.
A culture that worships the gates and would believe that the party is either Gods or Demons

golentan
2015-06-06, 08:13 PM
How alien do you want your worlds?

I'm seconding looking at Distant Worlds, and Spelljammer as source materials, to be sure. I'm just wondering if it would be helpful to look at Traveller for inspiration: I've had really good luck with some of the Alien Life Form tables (for non-sapient natives and to give the local life their own quirky trends) and the world generator tables (the expanded one) for abstract physical details (how heavy is the gravity, is the air pleasant, what's the temperature)...

USS Sorceror
2015-06-06, 10:07 PM
I'm wanting most of these planets to be humanoid enough, with the alien aspects coming from cultural conflicts ("who let all these men wandering around with weapons?") or environmental ("what do you mean you don't lay eggs? How can a dominant species not lay eggs?")

Also everyone making Stargate comparisons is pretty on the nose with where I took inspiration, but I'm not as familiar with the series so I'll look it up.

M Placeholder
2015-06-07, 08:55 AM
A planet that has been given over to cultivation of crops. A civilization that has solved the hunger issues - by taking over another planet, and then making it their personal bread and fruit basket.

That concept was used for an episode of Stargate SG1, and also for the Red Dwarf tie in book Space Corps Survival Manual. In it, the author details that he once crashed on a planet that was given over entirely to the cultivation of Sweetcorn, but since there was no butter, he had to eat bumble bees and headlice to stay alive.

Malimar
2015-06-07, 12:50 PM
Three worlds I've used in my Spelljammer game:

Texas (pronounced "tayzas") -- Space station built on an asteroid that formed around the spleen of a long-dead god. The primary economic activity of this asteroid centers around adventurers delving deep into the asteroid to chip off a fragment of god spleen for themselves.

Dryspace -- Desert. Lots of desert. Two human civilizations, at war for reasons they don't remember. One civilization wants the party to delve into an ancient ruin to recover an ancient superweapon; the other civilization wants the party to delve into the ancient ruin to destroy the ancient superweapon. More details here (http://luduscarcerum.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-world-of-dryspace.html).

The Dracosphere -- Dragons. All dragons, all the time. No non-reptilian lifeforms. Just dragons. Also kobolds.

Inevitability
2015-06-08, 11:40 AM
How about a world consisting of high peaks and deep valleys, with the valleys filled with negative energy and the peaks the only points of light in the darkness? Some mountain-cities might have become isolated to the point they are either xenophobic savages or mutated monsters, while other cities are all fanatical zealots who lead suicide missions against the undead that inhabit the depths.

Alternatively, a living planet, with rivers of blood and mountains of flesh, should unnerve the players at the very least.


Finally, a general rule of thumb should be; with your players having hundreds of locations to go, have each one be a compelling destination. They should have a reason to go where they go, even if the reason is 'monster X has item Y we need to do Z'.

Segev
2015-06-08, 03:29 PM
One thing to keep in mind - and I don't ahve any solid ideas to help with it at this point, sorry - is that if you want to send them to different planets, they should be more different than if you sent them to just different continents in the same world. A lot of "space" settings wind up with planets of hats that are no more differentiated than if they were an ocean-sailing game going to port cities in disparate parts of the world. Planets are HUGE, and DIVERSE if they have indiginous populations. Think of Earth; a second planet would have just as many different and strange cultures and races and biomes.

This is not in the slightest to pooh-pooh your idea, but you want to think about how it is distinct from just being a single-world-spanning network of gateways.

Maybe come up with just 1-3 other planets and give them distinctly alien traits - whether alien skies, biomes which are impossible on the other worlds, etc. - and then developing each of them with a large number of civilizations and setting elements, all connected by gates?

Using just two, imagine Earth has gates connecting China, Central America, Central Africa, Scandanavia, and the Holy Roman Empire during the late 1200s, and that an alien world (just one other) held the Vulcan, Klingon, Jidoon, and deep-dwelling Dwarf civilizations under a two-moon sky with much thicker air and heavier gravity. The vulcans, klingons, jidoon, and dwarves are stronger than the chinese, aztecs, zulus, vikings, and germans, but have a harder time breathing in Earth's thinner atmosphere and find the skinnier and weaker human races can outlast them by a long shot on their own, thicker-oxygenated world.