How to set up the cosmology of a D&D setting as a Dyson Swarm?

[Gavinfoxx]

So I have a... strange idea. I'd like to lean into the 'sci fi bits' and 'magitek' tropes of D&D a bit more than usual. But I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing it. How would I go about setting up a D&D setting to be the various artificial structures within a Dyson Swarm? I would presume the star radiates magic, and there's some sort of crystal collectors to be solar panel analogs to power everything. But other than making each plane a different McKendree Cylinder or Banks Orbital or something, I'm not sure what to do?

How would I reference all the weird unique planar cosmologies of many of the main settings (like Greyhawk, for example), but set it up as all being a single artificial solar system? Anyone have any suggestions?

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx
How would I reference all the weird unique planar cosmologies of many of the main settings (like Greyhawk, for example), but set it up as all being a single artificial solar system?

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you want different orbiting habitats to have the properties of different planes, i.e. a habitat flooded with negative energy, another filled with shadow, etc.?

And do you want one habitat per plane analogue, or do you want millions of habitats with just a few of them exhibiting properties of specific planes?

[Gavinfoxx]

One per plane, I think. An Orbital is big enough, and the idea that the planes are infinite struck me as meaningless. Though seven, one for each hell, a ton of them for the abyss, etc. But I don't know how to make it more interesting?

[Nifft]

Eberron's orrery cosmology is a good match.

[Gavinfoxx]

Well, the setting is already described as 'vaguely like Greyhawk', but I was hoping for some suggestions for specifics?

[Mnemius]

Way back, in the days of yore, on the Sega Genesis (or it's later remake onto GBA)... there was a game, Phantasy Star 3.

You thought you were a world, but as the game played out, found out it was a set of habitats in a big framework. Your "caves" to travel to other lands were really tunnels/service corridors to the other habitats.

Could always borrow from that. Toss in D&D's/Whovian the inside is bigger than the outside...

[DrMartin]

There's a setting / adventure called Anomalous Subsurface Environment, depicting a post apocalyptic world regressed into wasteland fantasy sprinkled with odd remains of the previous high-tech era.

The gods are AI installed into satellites orbiting the planet, and they "beam down" their presence, attention and divine favors at some specific nodes where their followers gather to receive spells and such. They can do this at precise times, bases on when the gods is orbiting directly overhead - at other times, another god will be above the temple, and showing its face through the temple's monitors. Hence priests and communities serve "the gods" more than an individual deity, depending on which ones happen to be orbiting above a specific town.

Maybe there's something here you can recycle for your setting, or it can spark some idea :)

[Esprit15]

I'd make each plane an orbital ring. While they have a limited surface area, each is still long and wide enough that many sages say they might as well be infinite as nobody has actually traveled the length by foot and found an edge, nor managed to come back to the same place, and the width is still several planets wide. (If one were to have the circumference of earth's orbit, it would take around 21 and a half millennia of straight walking to travel the distance.)

Each god's divine realm is a private habitat, be it an O'niell Cylinder or a manufactured planet or a 0g space station or even their own orbital ring.

Nanomachines have become integrated into many lifeforms, granting numerous unusual abilities such as fast healing, regeneration, and various spell like abilities. These machines are powered by beamed energy from solar collectors. Clerics are those individuals that the "gods" like to beam a little extra power because they suit their cosmic chess matches against each other.

The layered planes are simply rings that have (surprise) layers to them, with only the top-most layer being exposed to the sun, and the rest being entirely "underground." These underground sections may still have their own lighting systems and skies that are miles high. While some of these locations are made to be as natural looking as possible (or at least designed to suit their inhabitants), others like Mechanus (where the primary hub of the overseeing AI lies) or the City of Dis are steampunk and cyberpunk, respectively.

Travel between the rings can be simple consciousness broadcasting, with nanomachines building a body for you wherever you land and breaking the old body down to conserve resources. This also explains the tendency for teleportation mishaps, and why spells like Anticipate Teleportation work.

The Infinite Layers of the Abyss are the hundreds of thousands of partially constructed rings and habitats out in the Kuiper Belt, many run by barely functional AI that do nothing but seek out raw materials to continue to build themselves to the specifications of inhabitants who no longer exist, or worse, do. Those with more stable AI plan wars with each other over the dwindling supply of comets and rocky bodies, and it is common for smaller "layers" to be devoured by larger ones, or to band together temporarily to devour a single larger one.

Naturally, the Astral Plane is merely space, in all its inky black and frightfully vast glory.

If you want some more ideas for structures, I highly recommend the Youtube channel Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur.

[lylsyly]

Well, if your going to have less than 416 planes there is the ultimate engineered solar system

https://planetplanet.net/2017/05/03/the-ultimate-engineered-solar-system/

[Bronk]

To me, this all sounds like a tech fluffed Spelljammer. In Spelljammer, Greyhawk, the Realms, Krynn, and a bunch of other places are already statted out as individual crystal spheres bigger than solar systems. Some, like Hindspace, are already shown as having the inner portion of the sphere as habitable space with normal gravity, rather than having planets. Starbeasts are fun too.

There's already a bunch of tech in Spelljammer, including more physics than normal and genetic engineering, so a slight refluff of the background would be pretty easy. Maybe... instead of what it is now, there was a super ancient war at the dawn of time where a terrible weapon was used that changed the vacuum state of the universe, causing zero point energy to become the phlogiston, and only the most advanced groups could create Dyson Spheres to survive, and each group made their own unique sphere. They all died out/ascended/whatever long ago, no-one knows how to make more of them or change them beyond opening gates to the outside, and the current game would be otherwise normal.

If you wanted everything to be linked spheres, portals and so on, a good reference series would be the Deathgate Cycle by Hickman and Weiss.

[Gavinfoxx]

I'd make each plane an orbital ring. While they have a limited surface area, each is still long and wide enough that many sages say they might as well be infinite as nobody has actually traveled the length by foot and found an edge, nor managed to come back to the same place, and the width is still several planets wide. (If one were to have the circumference of earth's orbit, it would take around 21 and a half millennia of straight walking to travel the distance.)

Each god's divine realm is a private habitat, be it an O'niell Cylinder or a manufactured planet or a 0g space station or even their own orbital ring.

Nanomachines have become integrated into many lifeforms, granting numerous unusual abilities such as fast healing, regeneration, and various spell like abilities. These machines are powered by beamed energy from solar collectors. Clerics are those individuals that the "gods" like to beam a little extra power because they suit their cosmic chess matches against each other.

The layered planes are simply rings that have (surprise) layers to them, with only the top-most layer being exposed to the sun, and the rest being entirely "underground." These underground sections may still have their own lighting systems and skies that are miles high. While some of these locations are made to be as natural looking as possible (or at least designed to suit their inhabitants), others like Mechanus (where the primary hub of the overseeing AI lies) or the City of Dis are steampunk and cyberpunk, respectively.

Travel between the rings can be simple consciousness broadcasting, with nanomachines building a body for you wherever you land and breaking the old body down to conserve resources. This also explains the tendency for teleportation mishaps, and why spells like Anticipate Teleportation work.

The Infinite Layers of the Abyss are the hundreds of thousands of partially constructed rings and habitats out in the Kuiper Belt, many run by barely functional AI that do nothing but seek out raw materials to continue to build themselves to the specifications of inhabitants who no longer exist, or worse, do. Those with more stable AI plan wars with each other over the dwindling supply of comets and rocky bodies, and it is common for smaller "layers" to be devoured by larger ones, or to band together temporarily to devour a single larger one.

Naturally, the Astral Plane is merely space, in all its inky black and frightfully vast glory.

If you want some more ideas for structures, I highly recommend the Youtube channel Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur.

FINALLY!

Someone who gets what I am going for! Yes, I subscribe to SFIA. Here's some bits that I was thinking. I was thinking that the Material Plane are simply a set of Bishop Rings in close proximity with one another, and if you are on the right parts of the edge with a simple telescope, you can Teleport to the safe parts of the other ones rather than needing a Greater Teleport (what I plan on using as my Plane Shift spell) to get around. Such would be the same with other planes with more than one 'planet' or 'layers'. The bigger, more important planes would typically be Banks Orbitals, but yea, I like The Abyss being a bunch of ****ty, half-finished smaller habitats full of monsters. In my idea, the Ethereal Plane --which covers everything, pretty much -- is the data/nanobot fog layer, the angelnet or demonnet, depending. Astral Projection is typically a data avatar on the ethereal plane, and ghosts and incorporeal things are these sorts of nanofog constructs. I'd have the planets and asteroids mostly deconstructed by now. I wanted it to be a little more magical than what you describe, though -- no lethal teleports and such... for most people, that is. As far as underground, I think that's probably how I can get away with every place having an Underdark. Those aren't natural caverns, they're there for maintenance and such.

For the godly divine habitat, yea, I'd have them be these stationary AI god space stations, for sure. Floating about above various different planes of heaven or hell or whatever... But I want to keep their 'dominions' as most 'theirs', I suppose. Maybe that's where they keep their avatars?

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx
Someone who gets what I am going for!

I’ve been thinking about this, but having a hard time wrapping my head around exactly what you wanted. I understand you want habitats to stand in for various planes, but I’m still not clear if you want actual nanotech or a magical equivalent to same, and if populations have access to actual spells, or technology whose effects can be approximated by standard spell descriptions.

Speaking of which, how are you going to arrange humanoid and monstrous species? Will there be a general mix on each of the habitats, or will some habitats be home to elves, others to halflings, etc.? Or will you be brewing a completely new suite of playable species?

Also, will you have options for playable races drawn primarily from SF, such as moravecs?


Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx
For the godly divine habitat, yea, I'd have them be these stationary AI god space stations, for sure.

Rather than stationary, perhaps they’re in high parabolic orbits, cranked well out of the plane of the system, which only swing through every few dozen or few hundred years. This would allow for Great Conjunctions during which they would be especially powerful, perhaps making personal visits while they’re close, then shooting around the star for another long period of celestial remoteness.

[Esprit15]

Well damn, now I kinda want to run this as a setting.

[Gavinfoxx]

I’ve been thinking about this, but having a hard time wrapping my head around exactly what you wanted. I understand you want habitats to stand in for various planes, but I’m still not clear if you want actual nanotech or a magical equivalent to same, and if populations have access to actual spells, or technology whose effects can be approximated by standard spell descriptions.

Speaking of which, how are you going to arrange humanoid and monstrous species? Will there be a general mix on each of the habitats, or will some habitats be home to elves, others to halflings, etc.? Or will you be brewing a completely new suite of playable species?

Also, will you have options for playable races drawn primarily from SF, such as moravecs?



Rather than stationary, perhaps they’re in high parabolic orbits, cranked well out of the plane of the system, which only swing through every few dozen or few hundred years. This would allow for Great Conjunctions during which they would be especially powerful, perhaps making personal visits while they’re close, then shooting around the star for another long period of celestial remoteness.


Well, what I was thinking of was, 'Let's advance a setting that worked kind of like Eberron a several centuries, and specifically make it so that the magic is ultimately powered by the sun, and have them build a dyson swarm to tap into that, because that's what you do eventually if you have enough time on your hands and industry and tech and such and don't have unlimited power for things, and then created their gods that they had been worshiping all along but hadn't really existed, and then they transcend or die out or are no longer around any more, and then you've got what seems to be a normal D&D setting, except all the locations are all in one solar system, with no remaining non-artificial planets'. So there's nanoscale golems, but they're more golems rather than robots, and the various types of elemental and undead and other-type animating spirits are distributed throughout the swarm themselves, and that's what makes up the ethereal plane; it's the nanogolem-fueled datanet. And the spells work the way they always did since it is a magical setting, it's just the setting passed a singularity some time ago. Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science, after all! As far as the species, these habitats are freaking huge and those not based on a 'theme' (like particular layers of hell or whatever) have more than one biome in them. Remember, the smallest of them is basically the size of a continent, so if it's one of the types with multiple biomes, then all of the species from pretty much everywhere they can survive! And I'd have the standard D&D player races.

[unseenmage]

Each plane's sun is actually the far end of a gate.

Those gates are each portals conveying power from a supe-sun-like creation engine of the gods or somesuch.

Each portal is a panel of a Dyson Sphere that surrounds this super magic sun.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx
*snip*

That does explain it more thoroughly than before. Advancing Eberron to system-level engineering, got it.

It's an interesting idea, and clearly it has the potential to grab peoples' interest, but I wonder how you'd run a campaign in it--or rather, what sort of campaign you could run which would take advantage of the setting's unique features.

If most of the habitats are the size of a continent at a minimum, you could run an entire campaign without leaving a single habitat, but that seems to miss out on the setting's possibilities. But as pointed out above, it's easy to move into Spelljammer territory, which may or may not be what you want.

Would you want to run a campaign in which the storyline takes the characters throughout the entire swarm? Would this be a story about the discovery of the true nature of their cosmology? If not, what other stories could you tell in this setting which couldn't be told in Greyhawk?

.

[SangoProduction]

Simplest way? Open up a new portal to the plane of fire to run a turbine each time you need to expand your energy capacity. It's an infinite plane of elemental (pure) fire, with some rare inhabitants. As a concept, elemental fire IRL doesn't make sense, as fire is a chemical reaction. But in D&D it's a form of energy in and of itself.
You'd obviously want to have a filter on the portal, like how dams have filters to prevent the sucking in of fish, but otherwise, that's literally all there is to it.
Oh, and best of all is that you can water-cool it with an infinite supply of water which then leaves the system you are powering, dramatically reducing the thermal load that would normally limit massively dense populations.
So, now your only limiter for population density is literally just how much mass you can fit in to a given area before it becomes a blackhole. Which can be countered with Reverse Gravity, and presumably a more perfected version that's better suited to a controlled gravitational equilibrium.

The only reason you'd build a dyson swarm is to to capture the energy of the sun. When you've got definitionally infinite energy, you have no reason to build a dyson swarm.

You could still potentially have reason to build space habitats, depending on the intra-planar cosmology of the prime material plane, and the presence of demiplanes, but still. I could imagine a sufficiently advanced and bored set of wizards deciding that they'll summon a collective wall of stone between the earth and the sun at the Lagrange Point. But...eh. Wizards being bored can do anything.

[Gavinfoxx]

Simplest way? Open up a new portal to the plane of fire to run a turbine each time you need to expand your energy capacity. It's an infinite plane of elemental (pure) fire, with some rare inhabitants. As a concept, elemental fire IRL doesn't make sense, as fire is a chemical reaction. But in D&D it's a form of energy in and of itself.
You'd obviously want to have a filter on the portal, like how dams have filters to prevent the sucking in of fish, but otherwise, that's literally all there is to it.
Oh, and best of all is that you can water-cool it with an infinite supply of water which then leaves the system you are powering, dramatically reducing the thermal load that would normally limit massively dense populations.
So, now your only limiter for population density is literally just how much mass you can fit in to a given area before it becomes a blackhole. Which can be countered with Reverse Gravity, and presumably a more perfected version that's better suited to a controlled gravitational equilibrium.

The only reason you'd build a dyson swarm is to to capture the energy of the sun. When you've got definitionally infinite energy, you have no reason to build a dyson swarm.

You could still potentially have reason to build space habitats, depending on the intra-planar cosmology of the prime material plane, and the presence of demiplanes, but still. I could imagine a sufficiently advanced and bored set of wizards deciding that they'll summon a collective wall of stone between the earth and the sun at the Lagrange Point. But...eh. Wizards being bored can do anything.


So here's what I'm thinking. Make it a setting feature that all of those 'infinite energy' tricks -- the 1/round wondrous items going off all the time, the ring gate tricks, using undead as a labor source on a large scalel, the walls of fire tricks, the decanters of endless water tricks, the portal to the elemental plane of fire, etc. etc. -- all of them, if you go past a certain very limited point, cause massive negative side effects in the environment (maybe null magic or wild magic zones? Perhaps it seeks out the nearest place with lots of variation in movement and levels of magical energy, and drains it, massively aging things in that area and super-charging entropy, a la arcane magic in Athas?), and because of this, if you try and bypass these limits, the Progenitors decided that the punishment is to portal in a bunch of Inevitables to kill you. So as long as you aren't trying to break thermodynamics on a runaway scale, you can do whatever though. And of course the Progenitors would send Inevitables at a threshold well before it would start to **** things up. This sort of natural law would give the Progenitors a reason to research Magical Fusion-Equivalent, and build this huge solar collector thing with a bunch of habitats--their need for huge amounts of energy and living space. Thoughts?

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Astral Projection is typically a data avatar on the ethereal plane, and ghosts and incorporeal things are these sorts of nanofog constructs.

Note that astral projection obviously takes you to the Astral, not the Ethereal, so it wouldn't work as a datanet construct. I'd suggest it be changed to more of a hard-light probe with a real-time sense link to the caster, which you can safely send through space and to other habitats to interact there.


So here's what I'm thinking. Make it a setting feature that all of those 'infinite energy' tricks -- the 1/round wondrous items going off all the time, the ring gate tricks, using undead as a labor source on a large scalel, the walls of fire tricks, the decanters of endless water tricks, the portal to the elemental plane of fire, etc. etc. -- all of them, if you go past a certain very limited point, cause massive negative side effects in the environment (maybe null magic or wild magic zones? Perhaps it seeks out the nearest place with lots of variation in movement and levels of magical energy, and drains it, massively aging things in that area and super-charging entropy, a la arcane magic in Athas?), and because of this, if you try and bypass these limits, the Progenitors decided that the punishment is to portal in a bunch of Inevitables to kill you. So as long as you aren't trying to break thermodynamics on a runaway scale, you can do whatever though. And of course the Progenitors would send Inevitables at a threshold well before it would start to **** things up. This sort of natural law would give the Progenitors a reason to research Magical Fusion-Equivalent, and build this huge solar collector thing with a bunch of habitats--their need for huge amounts of energy and living space. Thoughts?

What's your reason for adding this as a setting element? Because this setting posits multiple suns constantly pumping out thousands of gigathaums of magical energy from a distant point rather than any sort of ambient magic field that can be polluted or used up, giving the creation of undead/portals/continuous magic items/etc. bad side effects make even less sense than it would in the default setting (especially because any side effects should affect the suns themselves much more than any individual project on a habitat somewhere), and the "the future is awesome!" tone of the setting clashes pretty heavily with a "the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare trying to kill us" tone Athas and its defiling setup have.

If you really want to have an in-game reason to avoid certain tricks, I'd simply posit that those tricks aren't actually a different source of energy than the suns, because if folks only have access to space instead of the actual Astral then there are no Astral conduits to let you access other planes, and you'd need the connection provided by the constant solar beams to create and maintain such planar connections. Inevitables, then, are basically power regulation and infrastructure maintenance workers who can increase, decrease, supercharge, or entirely shut off the flow of energy to certain things or regions for safety purposes, the same way gods can regulate their clerics' power, and they use the datanet to monitor for anything that draws on the suns' power too heavily so that they can be disabled.

So trying anything funny with decanters doesn't cause wild magic and get you killed, it simply sees the decanter suddenly shut off, a sending sent to its user along the lines of "Thaumic service to Device #57A3B35 has been suspended because you have exceeded the bandwidth limitations as described by the terms of your ISP contract" (ISP standing for Infinite Solar Power, of course :smallwink:), and an inevitable sent to investigate what went wrong--nonviolently, unless the subject in question is a repeat offender.

[Gavinfoxx]

Note that astral projection obviously takes you to the Astral, not the Ethereal, so it wouldn't work as a datanet construct. I'd suggest it be changed to more of a hard-light probe with a real-time sense link to the caster, which you can safely send through space and to other habitats to interact there.



What's your reason for adding this as a setting element? Because this setting posits multiple suns constantly pumping out thousands of gigathaums of magical energy from a distant point rather than any sort of ambient magic field that can be polluted or used up, giving the creation of undead/portals/continuous magic items/etc. bad side effects make even less sense than it would in the default setting (especially because any side effects should affect the suns themselves much more than any individual project on a habitat somewhere), and the "the future is awesome!" tone of the setting clashes pretty heavily with a "the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare trying to kill us" tone Athas and its defiling setup have.

If you really want to have an in-game reason to avoid certain tricks, I'd simply posit that those tricks aren't actually a different source of energy than the suns, because if folks only have access to space instead of the actual Astral then there are no Astral conduits to let you access other planes, and you'd need the connection provided by the constant solar beams to create and maintain such planar connections. Inevitables, then, are basically power regulation and infrastructure maintenance workers who can increase, decrease, supercharge, or entirely shut off the flow of energy to certain things or regions for safety purposes, the same way gods can regulate their clerics' power, and they use the datanet to monitor for anything that draws on the suns' power too heavily so that they can be disabled.

So trying anything funny with decanters doesn't cause wild magic and get you killed, it simply sees the decanter suddenly shut off, a sending sent to its user along the lines of "Thaumic service to Device #57A3B35 has been suspended because you have exceeded the bandwidth limitations as described by the terms of your ISP contract" (ISP standing for Infinite Solar Power, of course :smallwink:), and an inevitable sent to investigate what went wrong--nonviolently, unless the subject in question is a repeat offender.


No? Where did you get the idea of multiple suns? The whole premise is only one sun, only one star system? The only reason to build a dyson swarm is if you don't have access to infinite energy. And I do guess that these items drawing from the power net does make sense, and that isn't infinite... that'd give you a reason to build such a thing, to increase the access to magical energy overall so more things can work for more people... hmmm...

[PairO'Dice Lost]

No? Where did you get the idea of multiple suns? The whole premise is only one sun, only one star system?

Ah, my bad, when you said "one per plane" in post #3 and that the Material Plane was a single set of rings in #11, I somehow misread that as one sun per D&D former-plane and different layers of the plane being different habitats, rather than one habitat per plane and everything surrounding one star, with "single artificial solar system" meaning a multi-sun system a la the Firefly 'Verse (https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/firefly/images/7/71/Verse.png).

The setup I described works the same with one sun as it does with many, though; the key point is just that you reflavor anything that would end-run the "make a Dyson swarm" premise as needing to rely on the sun like everything else (at least in part) so that the objection of "why not just open a gate to X" is addressed.


The only reason to build a dyson swarm is if you don't have access to infinite energy.

The "infinite solar power" bit was just a pun on "ISP" as in "internet service provider," not an implication that that sun's power would actually be infinite, 'cause if it were you'd have no need for inevitables to regulate it.


And I do guess that these items drawing from the power net does make sense, and that isn't infinite... that'd give you a reason to build such a thing, to increase the access to magical energy overall so more things can work for more people... hmmm...

Since magic = sunlight in this case, what if you treated different kinds of magical power (fire, good, necromantic, etc.) as different colors of light, and stipulate that the use of large amounts of a certain kind of power within a given region "tints" the datanet in that direction, with multiple sources of that same power enhancing the effect (up to a point) and multiple sources of different "hues" interfering with one another?

That gives you a more sci-fi-ish rational why habitats are organized by former plane (if a proto-Elysium habitat is powered by a Good-tinted "angelnet" then obviously anyone else wanting to use pure Good power would want to cluster in the same place, while anyone wanting to use an Evil-tinted "demonnet" would go off and make their own Abyss habitat, anyone wanting to use Fire-tinted power would make a Plane of Fire habitat, and so on) and why different planar habitats have their own magic traits (different magical flow patterns and radiation and such).

It also inherently discourages people from trying to use too many of the things you mentioned, because you can say that building a decanter of endless water plus a gate spewing out fire plus an animated skeleton workforce would be much less magic-efficient than having just one of the three and getting water/heat/labor by other means, and if you do have just the one then the resulting Enhanced Magic trait from the local magic "tinting" would make that single thing more efficient than normal (e.g. it's a tradeoff between 30%/30%/30% power in the former case and 110%/0%/0% in the latter).

[SangoProduction]

I'm not trying to be confrontational here, but what functional difference is there between a civilization with dyson-sphere levels of energy generation and infinite energy? A single hour of the regular old, non-magical sun's output is more than enough to power the history of human electricity.
The sun's no joke. It perfected fusion power long before earth was even a rocky smudge on the face of the solar system. Meanwhile we're still 20 years out from having small scale fusion generators.

[Gavinfoxx]

I'm not trying to be confrontational here, but what functional difference is there between a civilization with dyson-sphere levels of energy generation and infinite energy? A single hour of the regular old, non-magical sun's output is more than enough to power the history of human electricity.
The sun's no joke. It perfected fusion power long before earth was even a rocky smudge on the face of the solar system. Meanwhile we're still 20 years out from having small scale fusion generators.

Ultimately, I want to have it that the original Progenitors could basically do whatever they want and had, as far as anyone can fathom, infinite energy. They didn't see it that way, and had constraints, though. I don't want the current people to have full access to tap into that, after all, things break down if there aren't enough golems or whatever to take care of the whole system as a whole, but the some of the regulation procedures they had when they were using so much should still be in place. Make sense?

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx
I don't want the current people to have full access to tap into that, after all, things break down if there aren't enough golems or whatever to take care of the whole system as a whole, but the some of the regulation procedures they had when they were using so much should still be in place.

So I’m still wondering about two main questions:

1. What level of social/political organization does this system have as a whole? Is there a general awareness that each of the habitats is part of an artificially created system, or does the majority of each habitat’s population believe they’re alone in the cosmos? Is there any kind of governing body for the entire system, and/or a society which is able to move between habitats as a matter of course?

2. What kind of stories do you want to tell in this setting? In particular, what stories are you looking to tell which can’t be told in an ordinary setting?

[Gavinfoxx]

How much political organization does Greyhawk have? Does Oerth have a single planetary government? How about Abeir-Toril? What about the planes of Celestia? Mechanos? Baator? It'll be like that. And I'd say the people on the Bishop Rings that make up the Material Plane dont hage much awareness of planar stuff beyond the Material, but those on the Banks Orbitals that make up the important planes do... And I plan on running a traditional d&d game, monsters, dungeons, empires, and the big evil empire you thought was a big deal was actually quite a small fry and you start dealing with planar threats at the midlevels...

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx
How much political organization does Greyhawk have? Does Oerth have a single planetary government? How about Abeir-Toril?

Since you’ve been describing this from a top-down perspective, it’s a fair question as to whether the system is governed or regulated as a unified whole. I would think that some form of cross-ring empire would attempt to establish itself at some point, but that’s up to you.


Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx
And I'd say the people on the Bishop Rings that make up the Material Plane….

Did all the races and monsters evolve on the rings and habitats some time after the Progenitors left, or were they imported, stocked, or uplifted in some way?


Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx
And I plan on running a traditional d&d game, monsters, dungeons, empires, and the big evil empire you thought was a big deal was actually quite a small fry and you start dealing with planar threats at the midlevels...

I can see how that would be interesting, and it’ll be great to see the players’ reactions when they finally realize what kind of cosmology they’re dealing with. Although if you describe the arc of the ring rising through the sky at the beginning, that will certainly clue them in to the ringworld aspect if nothing else. Will other rings and habitats be visible in the night sky?

Also, you mentioned service levels beneath the habitable surface layers as a counterpart for the Underdark, which makes sense. But this article (https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4845ef5c4ca7c) points out that the exterior surface of a Banks’ orbital is a unique habitat of its own, with equivalent surface area to the inner terrestrial zone, but with little to no human presence.

This opens up all manner of possibilities for other creatures, either vacuum-adapted forms like moravecs or more traditional fantasy options such as undead, golems, constructs and the like. Since their night sky will have a perfectly clear view of the rest of the system, one could imagine societies developing on the outer surfaces of orbitals with a superior understanding of the system as a whole, and more likely to develop the ability to travel between the exteriors of other rings. Thus the exterior civilizations might be in regular contact, as opposed to the interior civilizations, which might be less advanced and more insular.

[SangoProduction]

Oh. It's mapping the planes on to a ring world. That is much more understandable. Especially if the different planes are "exaggerations" fueled by myths about the other sectors. And that the elemental plane of fire is when someone decided to teleport into the sun.
It's not an infinite plane of water. It's just the aquaculture sector....that spans the width of multiple earths and is unknowable kilometers deep. Baator was a prison colony where the sickest and most depraved were sent...rather than getting mental help by the magical overlords. But still. I wonder how awful their wildlife must be if our regular old Australia has....that.

All in all, making no functional differences. But is cool to postulate about.

[Gavinfoxx]

Oh. It's mapping the planes on to a ring world. That is much more understandable. Especially if the different planes are "exaggerations" fueled by myths about the other sectors. And that the elemental plane of fire is when someone decided to teleport into the sun.
It's not an infinite plane of water. It's just the aquaculture sector....that spans the width of multiple earths and is unknowable kilometers deep. Baator was a prison colony where the sickest and most depraved were sent...rather than getting mental help by the magical overlords. But still. I wonder how awful their wildlife must be if our regular old Australia has....that.

All in all, making no functional differences. But is cool to postulate about.


You're close, but not quiiite there! No Niven Ringworlds here. Just a bunch of Banks Orbitals and Bishop Rings and the odd Stanford Torus and various other free-orbiting infrastructure and solar collectors and similar. And the Elemental Plane of Fire is just one of the Banks Orbitals where the controlling god(s) decided to to have a surface that is at extreme temperatures where things can and do actually burn, for the sorts of creatures that function at such high temperatures.

[Palanan]

I’d still be interested in hearing your thoughts on these questions:

1. What kind of stories do you want to tell in this setting? In particular, what stories are you looking to tell which can’t be told in an ordinary setting?

2. Did all the races and monsters evolve on the rings and habitats some time after the Progenitors left, or were they imported, stocked, or uplifted in some way?

3. Will you have options for playable races drawn primarily from SF, such as moravecs?

[Gavinfoxx]

1.) Mostly, I just like the setting. And I want to play around with the whole 'any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology' bit, allowing me to make weird magic-based technology with it's own quirks. And it also lets me play with scale and the size of things, and be ambiguous with what powerful entities are or aren't, in a fun way. And it lets the gods be more present in a scary way (Hextor is that object right there, hanging as the hub of that particular orbital that he's claimed. He can see us from where he is, you know. Don't piss him off.).

2.) Presumably, much of the races were generated when the Progenitors were around, as they made the level of magic dense enough so that these creatures could happen, and created sufficient types of Gods to actually get the creation of all of these creatures done. I would think maybe they were lonely, and wanted to uplift lots of creatures, which is why there are so many weird creatures. But that doesn't mean that all of them did, there was probably a moderate-magic type planet where normalish creatures evolved at some point.

3.) I don't know a lot of D20 stats that make sense for various sci fi creatures, and I figure the insane number of sapient creatures in D&D 3.5e should be enough, yea?