Difference between revisions of "World Creation"

Revision as of 11:40, 25 January 2020

Main > [[Rules|Rules]] > World Creation

Place the Stars

The standard sector map is a grid of hexagons 8 wide by 10 high, with hex templates easily acquired from the net.

Number of Stars: Roll 1d10 and add 20 to determine the total number of stars in the sector, or simply choose a number that suits.

Placement of Stars: For the first twenty or so stars, roll 1d8 and 1d10 together to determine the column and row in which to place the star. If the hex is already occupied, place it adjacent in the direction of the nearest edge.

Once you’ve placed the randomly-positioned stars, add the remainder to connect any stellar clumps or groupings.

Generate Worlds

To determine the Atmosphere type, roll 2d6 and consult the table below.

2d6	Atmosphere	2d6	Atmosphere
2	Corrosive	6-9	Breathable Mix
3	Inert Gas	10	Thick Atmosphere
4	Airless	11	Invasive, Toxic Atmosphere
5	Thin Atmosphere	12	Corrosive and Invasive Atmosphere

Temperature can be determined by rolling 2d6 and consulting the appropriate column for the atmosphere type of the world.

2d6	Breathable	Thick	Thin	Airless	Corrosive/Invasive
2	Cold-Temp	Cold-Temp	Cold-Temp	Frozen	Example
3	Cold-Temp	Cold	Cold	Frozen	Cold-Temp
4	Cold	Cold	Cold	Cold-Temp	Cold
5	Cold	Temperate	Cold	Cold	Cold
6	Temperate	Temperate	Cold	Cold	Cold
7	Temperate	Temperate	Temperate	Temperate	Temperate
8	Temperate	Warm	Temperate	Temperate	Warm
9	Warm	Warm	Temperate	Warm	Warm
10	Warm	Warm	Warm	Warm	Warm
11	Temp-Warm	Warm	Warm	Temp-Warm	Temp-Warm
12	Temp-Warm	Burning	Warm	Temp-Warm	Burning

Biosphere is determined by rolling 2d6 and consulting the appropriate column for the atmosphere type of the world.

2d6	Breathable	Thick	Thin	Airless	Corrosive/Invasive
2	Remnant	Remnant	Remnant	Remnant	Remnant
3	None	None	None	None	None
4	Microbial	Microbial	None	None	None
5	Microbial	Microbial	Microbial	None	None
6	Miscible	Microbial	Microbial	None	Microbial
7	Miscible	Miscible	Miscible	None	Microbial
8	Miscible	Immiscible	Immiscible	None	Immiscible
9	Immiscible	Immiscible	Immiscible	None	Immiscible
10	Hybrid	Immiscible	Hybrid	Engineered	Immiscible
11	Hybrid	Hybrid	Hybrid	Engineered	Immiscible
12	Engineered	Engineered	Engineered	Immiscible	Engineered

Population is determined by rolling 2d6 and consulting the appropriate column for the atmosphere type of the world.

Temperature: -1 if Warm or Cold, -2 if Variable, -3 if Frozen or Burning

2d6	Breathable	Thick	Thin	Airless	Corrosive/Invasive
1-	Outpost	Uninhabited	Uninhabited	Uninhabited	Uninhabited
2	Failed Colony	Failed Colony	Failed Colony	Failed Colony	Failed Colony
3	Outpost	Outpost	Outpost	Uninhabited	Uninhabited
4	10 Thousand	Outpost	Outpost	Uninhabited	Uninhabited
5	100 Thousand	10 Thousand	10 Thousand	Outpost	Uninhabited
6	Million	10 Thousand	10 Thousand	Outpost	Outpost
7	10 Million	100 Thousand	10 Thousand	10 Thousand	Outpost
8	10 Million	100 Thousand	100 Thousand	10 Thousand	10 Thousand
9	100 Million	100 Thousand	100 Thousand	10 Thousand	10 Thousand
10	100 Million	Million	Million	100 Thousand	100 Thousand
11	Billion	10 Million	10 Million	Million	Million
12	Alien	Alien	Alien	Alien	Alien
13+	Billion	100 Million	100 Million	10 Million	10 Million

Roll 2d6 and consult the table below based on the type of population on the world.

2d6	Remnant	Outpost	10 Thousand	100 Thousand	Millins	Billions
1-	TL0	TL2	TL0	TL0	TL1	TL2
2	TL0	TL3	TL0	TL0	TL2	TL3
3	TL0	TL3+	TL1	TL1	TL3	TL3+
4	TL0	TL4-	TL2	TL2	TL3+	TL4-
5	TL0	TL4-	TL3	TL3	TL4-	TL4-
6	TL0	TL4-	TL3+	TL3+	TL4-	TL4
7	TL0	TL4-	TL4-	TL4-	TL4	TL4
8	TL0	TL4-	TL4-	TL4-	TL4	TL4
9	TL1	TL4-	TL4-	TL4	TL4	TL4+
10	TL1	TL4	TL4	TL4	TL4+	TL4+
11	TL1	TL4	TL4	TL4+	TL4+	TL4+
12	TL2	TL4+	TL4+	TL5	TL5	TL5
13+	TL3	TL5	TL5	TL4+	TL4+	TL5

Atmosphere

Airless worlds are common as asteroids, rocky or icy planetoids, or barren worlds that have had their atmospheres burnt off by weapons or cosmic caprice. While there may be a very thin atmosphere, like Mars, whatever atmosphere exists is usually too thin to support anything other than microbial life.

Breathable mix atmospheres can support human life without additional equipment or gengineered modification. Any world that has a human population in the millions or more almost certainly has a breathable mix atmosphere.

While the air is breathable, almost every world has its own subtle cocktail of inert gases, atmospheric contaminants, and other odoriferous ingredients. For spacers accustomed to the filtered air supply of a starship, the “new world stink” of a fresh planetfall can be maddening, as few linger long enough to get used to the smell of the local air. Attempting to explain the source of this discomfort to the locals rarely results in positive results. Some spaceport bars make a point of their air filtration and composition mixers.

Corrosive atmospheres are dangerously hostile to conventional vacc suits and other protective gear. They steadily strip away at a suit’s vent ports, wiring connections, and other weak spots until they eventually break through and flood the suit with a toxic cocktail that usually kills a victim in seconds.

Native vacc suits are usually covered with an ablative layer or spray that can be regularly renewed, and their buildings often rely on a steadily-extruded slurry of neutralizing materials that can be constantly renewed by pores in the building surface itself. This often gives the building a drippy, half-melted look that may be more than cosmetic in the case of those structures that have failing slurry pumps. Advanced tech level 5 equipment may be able to overcome the effects, but even pretech is often taxed by the relentless rigors of this world. Vehicles and shuttles are kept in pressurized garages when not in use, and starships never land for long.

Inert gas atmospheres aren’t hostile or poisonous, but they’re unbreathable by humans. If the planet’s climate is otherwise tolerable, the natives might be able to live and work outdoors without anything more than an air tank and face mask. Some degree of technical sophistication is going to be necessary for humanity to survive, and large supplies of oxygen are going to have to be extracted from some local source. “Air mines” might exist to replace the oxygen lost during human use, or local power plants might need to be kept running full blast in order to crack water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

Invasive toxic atmospheres are composed of a substantial proportion of molecules small enough to infiltrate past the seals of most vacc suits. This infiltration doesn’t harm the suit, but the molecules have to be steadily flushed by the system’s purification sensors before they build up to a debilitating level. This causes a much faster bleed of air as breathable oxygen is jettisoned along with the infiltrating molecules. Most invasive atmospheres cut oxygen supply durations by half, at best.

Invasive atmospheres make oxygen an even more important resource than it is on inert gas worlds. Outdoor work is avoided whenever possible, as any failure of a suit’s toxin sensors or flush system can lead to death before the wearer even realizes something is wrong. Steady exposure to low levels of the toxins can also result in unfortunate effects even with a fully-functional suit. Hallucinations, chronic sickness, or worse can follow.

Thick atmospheres can usually be breathed with the aid of a filter mask, though the mix of contaminants renders it slowly or quickly toxic to humans who attempt to breathe it straight. Separate air supplies are not necessary to supplement the blend, but any society that means to survive on such a world must have sufficient technological expertise to manufacture and maintain large numbers of filter masks.

Thick atmospheres are often at least semi-opaque, and some worlds have thick atmospheres that are completely impenetrable to ordinary light. Deep banks of permanent fog might shroud the planet, or natives might have to go about with sophisticated ultraviolet or infrared viewing equipment if they don’t wish to be blind. Some banks of gases might be impenetrable to even these viewing tools, leaving a party vulnerable to moments of complete blindness while out on the surface of the world.

Thin atmospheres can usually be breathed with the use of a filter/compressor mask. Separate air supplies may be necessary to supplement the blend, but any society that means to survive on such a world must have sufficient technological expertise to maintain large numbers of filter/compressor masks and be able to manufacture and store compressed gas (TL2). Thin atmospheres may be more breathable in rift valleys or other deep depressions in the planet’s surface, if they exist. Temperatures tend to vary wildly on worlds with thin atmospheres, plunging to very low temperatures at night.

Temperature

Burning worlds are too hot for a human to survive without equipment similar to a vacc suit in effectiveness. Rivulets of molten lead or copper might bleed from open veins on the hillsides, and many of the same perils that face an explorer on a frozen world have hotter equivalents on a burning one. Ash drifts, pools of molten metal, and superheated liquid vents can bring quick death to an unwary explorer, and the miners who inhabit such worlds must be forever vigilant against the perils of their burning home.

Cold worlds are uncomfortable, but a human can survive on them in nothing more than heavy clothing. The worst of the cold worlds are similar in condition to Earth’s Antarctic regions, barren wastes of ice and wind. The more clement ones have brief warmer seasons or equatorial bands that get enough solar radiation to support substantial agriculture.

On cold worlds, agricultural land is at a premium. The population is unlikely to be willing to limit its numbers to what hydroponic farms can provide, and they may lack the technology for wide-scale artificial production methods. Savage wars may have broken out over control of fertile growing regions, and populations have perhaps been driven away from the arable land into the cold zones and a lingering death.

Some worlds retain installations from before the Silence deep within the frozen wastes, ancient bases and laboratories that were planted in an age when good launch sites and orbital windows meant more than trifles of temperature. These lost sites might be remembered in legend and story, and some native leaders might still be in possession of the automatic defense bypass codes handed down by their ancestors.

Frozen worlds are those with so weak a stellar primary or so great a distance that the average temperature is close to absolute zero. Any atmosphere that once existed has long since frozen into drifts of solidified oxygen or lakes of liquid helium. Exposure to these drifts is very dangerous. Vacc suits maintain a tolerable temperature easily because the stellar void is very empty, and there is little conduction of heat between the suit and empty space. Dunking a suit into a lake of thermally-conductive superchilled liquid can force the heating elements into sudden and drastic overload, draining a power cell in minutes or even seconds.

Temperate worlds were the most popular colony sites, and most of the truly populous worlds of the frontier have a temperate climate. Many temperate worlds have temperature ranges not unlike that of Earth, though most are canted a little further toward cold or heat depending on their angle and proximity to the local star.

Temperate worlds are the most likely to teem with native life as well, and to have alien ruins or remains located somewhere on their surface. Most frontier worlds never accumulated enough population to put a serious strain on a temperate world’s arable land, but this same capaciousness often allows for more complicated social divisions to develop. Natives of other worlds are often forced to cooperate or die, while those of a clement temperate world have the luxury of deep and lasting divisions.

Variable temperature worlds tend to show a greater distribution of climates than other worlds, either ranging from cold to temperate levels or temperate to hot levels. This may be a climate that changes world-wide when a long, slow orbit brings the planet into proximity with a stellar primary, or it might be a world that has substantially different climatic zones spread across its surface. The north pole of one world might be a sun-blasted desert that moderates to a cool, wet equator, or an icy world might be warmed here and there by complex channels of geothermally-heated subsurface rivers. Variable temperature worlds tend to have savage weather. The mixing of hot and cold air can send ferocious cyclones and raging hurricanes across the surface of the world, some large enough to consume most of a hemisphere.

Warm worlds come in two main flavors, depending on the prevalence of water. “Desert worlds” are hot enough or arid enough to be deprived of most surface water. Any life on such a planet has to be capable of extracting water from living prey, air currents or moisture supplies deep underground. Humans can survive on warm worlds without more than appropriate clothing, but desert-world humans must learn sophisticated techniques of water prospecting and well-drilling in order to maintain their agricultural systems. Warfare often revolves around these water systems.

The other common variety of warm world is one blessed with an abundance of surface water. These worlds tend to be covered with plant and animal life, teeming with thick jungles and vast mats of sargasso on seas that boil with piscids and other alien life analogs. These worlds can be quite prosperous for humans if the native life is edible, but inhabitants are often forced to deal with large predators and a vigorously ingenious native ecology of disease.

Biosphere

Population

Tech Level

World Tags

World Tags: Politics

Error: operator for the virtual field 'WorldTags.TagType' must be 'HOLDS', 'HOLDS NOT', 'HOLDS LIKE' or 'HOLDS NOT LIKE'.

World Tags: Trade

Error: operator for the virtual field 'WorldTags.TagType' must be 'HOLDS', 'HOLDS NOT', 'HOLDS LIKE' or 'HOLDS NOT LIKE'.

World Tags: Type

Error: operator for the virtual field 'WorldTags.TagType' must be 'HOLDS', 'HOLDS NOT', 'HOLDS LIKE' or 'HOLDS NOT LIKE'.

World Tags: No Population

Error: operator for the virtual field 'WorldTags.TagType' must be 'HOLDS', 'HOLDS NOT', 'HOLDS LIKE' or 'HOLDS NOT LIKE'.

@@ Line 194: / Line 194: @@
 {{Grid|type=end}}
-=== [[Sector Rules/World Tags|World Tags]] ===
+== Temperature ==
+{{Grid|type=begin|cols=2}}
+'''Burning''' worlds are too hot for a human to survive without equipment similar to a vacc suit in effectiveness. Rivulets of molten lead or copper might bleed from open veins on the hillsides, and many of the same perils that face an explorer on a frozen world have hotter equivalents on a burning one. Ash drifts, pools of molten metal, and superheated liquid vents can bring quick death to an unwary explorer, and the miners who inhabit such worlds must be forever vigilant against the perils of their burning home.
+{{Grid|type=div|cols=2}}
+'''Cold''' worlds are uncomfortable, but a human can survive on them in nothing more than heavy clothing. The worst of the cold worlds are similar in condition to Earth’s Antarctic regions, barren wastes of ice and wind. The more clement ones have brief warmer seasons or equatorial bands that get enough solar radiation to support substantial agriculture.
+On cold worlds, agricultural land is at a premium. The population is unlikely to be willing to limit its numbers to what hydroponic farms can provide, and they may lack the technology for wide-scale artificial production methods. Savage wars may have broken out over control of fertile growing regions, and populations have perhaps been driven away from the arable land into the cold zones and a lingering death.
+Some worlds retain installations from before the Silence deep within the frozen wastes, ancient bases and laboratories that were planted in an age when good launch sites and orbital windows meant more than trifles of temperature. These lost sites might be remembered in legend and story, and some native leaders might still be in possession of the automatic defense bypass codes handed down by their ancestors.
+{{Grid|type=div|cols=2}}
+'''Frozen''' worlds are those with so weak a stellar primary or so great a distance that the average temperature is close to absolute zero. Any atmosphere that once existed has long since frozen into drifts of solidified oxygen or lakes of liquid helium. Exposure to these drifts is very dangerous. Vacc suits maintain a tolerable temperature easily because the stellar void is very empty, and there is little conduction of heat between the suit and empty space. Dunking a suit into a lake of thermally-conductive superchilled liquid can force the heating elements into sudden and drastic overload, draining a power cell in minutes or even seconds.
+{{Grid|type=div|cols=2}}
+'''Temperate''' worlds were the most popular colony sites, and most of the truly populous worlds of the frontier have a temperate climate. Many temperate worlds have temperature ranges not unlike that of Earth, though most are canted a little further toward cold or heat depending on their angle and proximity to the local star.
+Temperate worlds are the most likely to teem with native life as well, and to have alien ruins or remains located somewhere on their surface. Most frontier worlds never accumulated enough population to put a serious strain on a temperate world’s arable land, but this same capaciousness often allows for more complicated social divisions to develop. Natives of other worlds are often forced to cooperate or die, while those of a clement temperate world have the luxury of deep and lasting divisions.
+{{Grid|type=div|cols=2}}
+'''Variable temperature''' worlds tend to show a greater distribution of climates than other worlds, either ranging from cold to temperate levels or temperate to hot levels. This may be a climate that changes world-wide when a long, slow orbit brings the planet into proximity with a stellar primary, or it might be a world that has substantially different climatic zones spread across its surface. The north pole of one world might be a sun-blasted desert that moderates to a cool, wet equator, or an icy world might be warmed here and there by complex channels of geothermally-heated subsurface rivers. Variable temperature worlds tend to have savage weather. The mixing of hot and cold air can send ferocious cyclones and raging hurricanes across the surface of the world, some large enough to consume most of a hemisphere.
+{{Grid|type=div|cols=2}}
+'''Warm''' worlds come in two main flavors, depending on the prevalence of water. “Desert worlds” are hot enough or arid enough to be deprived of most surface water. Any life on such a planet has to be capable of extracting water from living prey, air currents or moisture supplies deep underground. Humans can survive on warm worlds without more than appropriate clothing, but desert-world humans must learn sophisticated techniques of water prospecting and well-drilling in order to maintain their agricultural systems. Warfare often revolves around these water systems.
+The other common variety of warm world is one blessed with an abundance of surface water. These worlds tend to be covered with plant and animal life, teeming with thick jungles and vast mats of sargasso on seas that boil with piscids and other alien life analogs. These worlds can be quite prosperous for humans if the native life is edible, but inhabitants are often forced to deal with large predators and a vigorously ingenious native ecology of disease.
+{{Grid|type=end}}
+== Biosphere ==
+== Population ==
+== Tech Level ==
+== [[Sector Rules/World Tags|World Tags]] ==
 {{#cargo_query:
 tables=WorldTags

Difference between revisions of "World Creation"

From Gulf of Fallen Stars

Revision as of 11:40, 25 January 2020

Contents

Place the Stars

Generate Worlds

Tags

Atmosphere

Temperature

Biosphere

Population

Tech Level

World Tags

World Tags: Politics

World Tags: Trade

World Tags: Type

World Tags: No Population