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View Full Version : DM Help Need help coming up with breif descriptions for planets in a homebrew sci-fi setting!



Ken Murikumo
2018-03-19, 06:59 PM
So a few for example:

The planet is a frozen wasteland but the population is housed in giant dome-like structures that pepper the planet.

Every square inch of this hive like planet is occupied by cramped city structure to compensate for extreme population conditions.

The natives on the planet have fused technology, magic, and nature to create massive and beautiful city-like superstructures out of the planet flora.

Multiple medium sized cities dot the planet, each with a multitude of average business markets; most notable is a company that produces custom "playmate" synthetics.

Some details for the setting:
-We're using pathfinder for the game, so all pathfinder/3.5 races are being used.
-self-aware Synthetic beings are a thing and considered second class citizens (as are non evil intelligent undead)
-Magitech is a normal thing (a fusion of magic and technology)
-2 major government entities: Empiric Coalition (political fat cats run a council style gov't) & the Order of Zenemus (super zealous jerks who declare war on basically everyone who doesn't like them).
-Independent governments are usually not aligned with either of the 2 mentioned and can range from monarchy to democracy
-Hyperspace jumps are the main method of long distance travel.
-Any kind of intelligent "alien" creature is effectively an Elf (it's a blanket term for any race that's not of the usual roster and also a racially pointed word to remark on how there are an insane amount of elf variations)



Anything is on the table, classic sci-fi, cyberpunk, future fantasy. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a planet, it could be a huge space station floating around an uninhabitable planet or something. Thanks, folks!

bc56
2018-03-19, 09:42 PM
Think about

Is its orbit unusual?
How many other planets are in the system?
Does it have rings? Moons?
What type of planet is it?
How's the weather?
What race lives there?
What's the culture like?
Etc.
Once you have a big enough list, mix and match to get random planets.

Berenger
2018-03-23, 07:12 AM
https://donjon.bin.sh/

- Science Fiction
-- SciFi World Generator
-- Star System Generator
-- SWd6 System Generator
-- Traveller System Generator

Ken Murikumo
2018-03-30, 11:29 AM
Snip

Thats not a bad idea, but i feel that after generating a few dozen they could get pretty same-ish and inorganic


Snip

Those generators are pretty good, thanks!

Concrete
2018-03-30, 03:49 PM
Small towers dot the nation sized farms which cover the pangean supercontinent which makes up this planets only landmass. No movement is visible on the surface except swaying grain and massive combine constructs, but deep scrying indicates massive cities just beneath h the surface.

jayem
2018-03-30, 04:23 PM
Thats not a bad idea, but i feel that after generating a few dozen they could get pretty same-ish and inorganic
Those generators are pretty good, thanks!
Use it as a seed to fill out the gaps (and filter out contradicting ones).
Warlike and elliptical, maybe they go to fight the inner planets during the summer, then hybernate.

goto124
2018-03-31, 11:45 AM
Thats not a bad idea, but i feel that after generating a few dozen they could get pretty same-ish and inorganic

I mean, if you're generating a few dozen planets, I wouldn't be surprised that certain planets start to feel 'same-ish'.

If you need so many planets, wouldn't a generator be required? Besides, surely not all planets are of the same importance - if your players are visiting every single one of these planets, most of the "few dozen" would be touch-and-go. If you planned stuff for a planet that the players decide not to explore too much of, you could reuse the same stuff for a planet the players do go deeper into.

Beneath
2018-04-03, 09:57 PM
Depending on how many you want to do, a generating procedure could help, or you could come up with a list. There are plenty of blogs that have done d100 [creative element] tables, like motivations and stuff.

One thing you might try is coming up with a list of which species are dominant civilizations in your space, and then come up with a listing of what kinds of planets each one might dominate on. So when you generate a drow world, you have a few parameters for like, what kinds of worlds Drow tend to be the dominant culture on and how that differs from the Gnomeworld and the home planet of the Ghoran, and then you can pick from there and explore down a tree of options, and there you go.

Other things that might be a factor:
Is the world's population/industrial base growing, stable, or declining? A growing world will have people running up against the natural limits of the planet, a declining world will have infrastructure not being maintained and need to import things it used to make, and a steady-state world will have issues with stagnation, with its systems running up against their own internal limits, and with the fact that trying to grow means, by necessity, choking someone else out.

Every question here I'm trying to make lead into a problem, by design. When I say "problem", think "a developing situation into which adventurers can make money by inserting themselves". In general, for every question you answer to work your way down a planet design tree, try to create at least one problem, and to avoid planets feeling samey, even if you answer the same questions the same way for them, create different problems.

Is the population small or large? A small population will need to import most of its advanced technology because the infrastructure to produce it won't be there; a large population gets into the problems of cities and stuff. Who does it trade with? What does it trade?

What's the planet's geopolitical setup? One global government? Two competing superpowers, with or without a host of minor powers (a la cold war era earth)? A single global empire? A host of petty states? No centralized government at all? How is this government structured? A federal republic is different from a direct democracy is different from a feudal monarchy is different from an absolute monarchy is different from a bureaucratic dictatorship or a polity that runs as a company town. Whichever combination you pick, write a problem or two.

Then you can get into astropolitics: Are any of the polities (countries, governments, empires, alliances) on the planet arms of an interplanetary empire? An interstellar one? Are multiple polities here arms of different interstellar polities? How does this affect the geopolitical dynamics? How does this planet relate to its larger body; how does it benefit the larger body and how does the larger body benefit it (or was it inducted at the point of a gun)? How much control does it have over the larger body and how much control does the larger body exercise over it?

Aside from the dominant species, who else lives there? Are they co-equal? separate countries? foreign conquerors? second-class citizens? outright enslaved?

These questions are vague and don't directly suggest problems, because the kinds of problems had by, say, the dominant member of a polity that has holdings in 12 systems are going to be different for the headquarters territory of an interstellar corporation, the populous industrial center of a semi-utopian interstellar direct democracy, and the seat of an interstellar feudal empire; similarly, a declining post-industrial world barely sustained by an interstellar direct democracy (which the majority of other members of would like to depopulate but don't want to handle the humanitarian crisis of simply withdrawing support) is going to look different and have different problems than a company town being downsized

Then you can get into questions of biome (with this many planets, you'll probably fall back on the single-biome-planet trope) and similar aesthetic stuff like what color the foliage is. You have stuff in your OP about a bunch of different aesthetics, so when you're coming up with stuff about a given planet, like, a city planet is going to look different if it looks like, say, Blade Runner than if it looks like Coruscant.

Probably also come up with what the most magically-significant site on the planet is and what it does, and maybe a few more if all of them attract interplanetary/interstellar visitors. Depending on how mythic you want to go, some of these places might be, like, the actual literal homes of specific deities (rather than living on the outer planes, Heironeous or whoever lives on such-and-such moon and you could physically land your spaceship there if He lets you)

If you have everything from 3.5 and Pathfinder in, I'd suggest picking one splatbook here per planet and putting its stuff in to put a place for everything in the setting while giving each one its place to shine. So you might have Occult Adventures world, Tome of Battle-world, Expanded Psionics Handbook world, maybe Epic and Mythic worlds, three separate worlds for the Tome of Magic (Truenamer World, Binder World, Shadowcaster World), Incarnum world, Complete Arcane World (home of the Warlocks), Heroes of Horror World (unless you split this into Halloween World (Dread Necromancer) and Eldritch World with the Archivist). If a class from another splat looks like it'd go well with a world, you can rearrange (maybe Eldritch World has Archivists and Binders and CArc's Alienists and Warlocks, and Arcane World has Beguilers, Duskblades, and Dread Necromancers). So then you have some classes who can come from anywhere (most of the core classes), and then a bunch of other classes which are strongly suggestive of a character's homeworld. "Another dome city planet" is gonna be more different if one has Truenamers and the other has Incarnum than if one is ice domes and the other is underwater domes.

For more questions to look at, there's a series of posts about a randomly generated astrogation map based on the original Traveller rules. The most interesting analysis is in the third post (http://jrients.blogspot.com/2017/11/more-on-ring.html), but the second provides context and some questions to ask (http://jrients.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-ring-revised.html) to make worlds less samey on that level.

The trick to not making things samey is one, to open vastly more space with your generation procedure than you're gonna use, and two, to use it as a jumping-off point for your creativity. Cranking the generator (especially a random one) is a start. Interpreting your results is an art.

DavidSh
2018-04-04, 02:02 PM
If you want to crib from classic science fiction, you could select a random issue of Galaxy magazine (https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine&tab=collection), and walk through, looking for a story with a well-described planet.

I wouldn't necessarily do that for every planet, but for enough to keep things interesting. For a coherent interstellar society, you might want to adapt the neighboring systems, if one is particularly influential.

Lvl 2 Expert
2018-04-04, 03:08 PM
The most popular building material on this planet is meat.

Bugs! Bugs everywhere!

It's a whole planet of renaissance fair. Well, except the space port, and the club town.

Someone really should have seen coming how engineering highly intelligent minotaurs would turn out.

There are close to a trillion people living on this planet, most of them small flying creatures, packed into huge cities made up of wooden towers creaking in the wind. A few slums use cardboard instead.

This planet is the private residence of the seventh richest family in the universe, not counting two secretive crime cabals that quite probably outrank it as well. The two moons of this planet house most of the factories, workers and financebots that made them this rich.

This used to be such a nice place until it was overrun by feral kobolds.

That's no moon, it's a holographic memorial.

This is one of three planets known with reverse gravity, and the strongest one at that. Up to a hundred kilometers from the average surface level gravity pulls up rather than down. Which would be fine if the breathable layer of the atmosphere did not reach up to just 10 km from the surface. People here like solid foundations.

A band of archer-bandits who fought a tyrant one system over a few decades ago were rewarded with their very own forest world when their perseverance finally payed off. This is that forest world.

Kadzar
2018-04-08, 06:01 PM
The sector creation rules from Stars Without Number (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/230009/Stars-Without-Number-Revised-Edition-Free-Version?src=newest)could help here. Someone even made a generator (https://sectorswithoutnumber.com/) that makes a whole star map based on it, and each system has several planets and points of interest, and the whole thing is editable (keep in mind you'll need to double-click to inspect a system from the map itself, as just single-clicking will let you move a system.)

Shackled Slayer
2018-04-30, 09:33 PM
Step 1: start with the farthest possible view, what orbit in it's solar system does the planet occupy? How far away is it from the sun, what color is it, and what satelites (moons) orbit it? Is it a rock or gas giant?

Step 2: anything special about the planet, like unique land formations, anything you can see from space, artificial satelites, dense or turbulent atmosphere.

Basically move down from orbit about what's important about the planet. Remember though, single climate planets can be boring. Multiple climates may be more work but reward you with more use from the planet.