Moons around the Storm God

What moves the wind, brings the rain, boils the clouds into the sky and freezes them into snow? 

Not the Storm God. He is rather the one who takes what the weather gods have wrought and imbues it with his malice, his pride, his might, and his indignation. His task is to bring low, to strip away, to break down, and to shatter, splinter, smash. He waits in a brooding simmer, and at moments when his umbrage at the sheer gall of the living grows too great, he summons the power of his rage to remind them that their lot is to suffer.

He sits as a tempestuous mass of wondrous colour deep in the great ocean of rainbow dream-scape that is drawn into the sky of all possible worlds. But he does not sit there alone. Around him he has flung his children - ninety-five of them he has sired - as a man casts a great fistful of salt into the air around him. Each a world in its own right, hanging imprisoned and transfixed before the vastness of his bulk and the greatness of his outraged splendour; they are the closest to the power of his anger, and bear it at its most frequent and savage. 

But the peoples who inhabit them, near as they are to him, also know a secret - that when a storm abates, in its wake is revealed a world transformed in its freshness and clarity, such indeed that it never fails to be shown as it really is, with all that is shrouding, or misleading, or veiling, or deceitful, swept aside and gone forever. It is in such moments, these peoples know, that opportunity takes its moment to presence in creation - and the Storm God is unwittingly displayed to be the agent not only of sorrow, but also of hope.

(A Moons of Jupiter planetcrawl to put the new Spelljammer in WotC's pipe and make them smoke it. 'Nuff said?)

Random Moon of Jupiter Generator and Three Random Moons

It's more interesting to come up with details for each of the Moons of Jupiter. But I couldn't resist creating a d20 table to spur the imagination. Here it is.

Let's create some moons.

Moon 1: Terrain - living growth. This moon is a forest of toadstools, mushrooms, and other fungi. It has one main antagonist type: an evil intelligence. A roll of 3 indicates beholders. Excellent: a fungus forest in which lurks a beholder hive mother and her many drones. They enslave anybody unfortunate enough to land, and are busy constructing a magical portal by which they can invade other worlds.

Moon 2: Terrain - Icy. A glacial ball hovering in the void. Main antagonist types are fomorians and a lammasu. There is a special condition of 'unstable'. Clearly, the lammasu was placed on this moon to protect an ancient artefact, temple, shrine, monument or captive. The fomorians dwell in caverns in the ice, perhaps plotting its conquest - or a way to get off this icy sphere and to somewhere where they can satisfy their cruel lusts.

Moon 3: Terrain - Icy. Another glacier world. Main antagonist type is salamanders. Curioser and curioser. The salamanders are clearly exiles from the elemental plane of fire. Having committed some obscure crime, they have been sentenced to punishment by their efreeti overlords to live in suffering for 1,001 years in severe and unrelenting cold. They are desperate to escape, or - even better - return their home plane to wreak horrible vengeance on their betrayers.

I love D&D.

Moons of Jupiter Ring Map

Let's think some more about D&D Moons of Jupiter. Let's also establish none of this is based in physics or actual astronomical reality. We're dealing in broad brush strokes.

This is what I am christening a Ring Map. I've arranged the moons of Jupiter into sections of rings. (Not actually related much to their real orbits.) The way it works is as follows.

Every d6 days the innermost ring rotates one section clockwise. (The irregularity is to do with fluidity of the phlogiston, direction of Jovian Winds, etc.) Every 2d6 days, the second ring rotates one section clockwise. Every 3d6 days, the third ring rotates... And so forth. This is not difficult to keep track of - you just make the rolls at the start of the campaign for all the rings, keep a tally of days, and reroll for a given ring on the predetermined rotation date.

Ships are limited in how far they can travel. Ordinary ships can move only as far as the next moon over in any direction before needing to resupply (or running out of aether or whatever). Very expensive, fancy ships can move two. Sailing between moons takes d3 days.

So, for example, imagine the PCs are on Euporie. They want to get to Adrastea because on that rock lives a medusa who owns a magical amethyst which can cure lycanthropy or whatever. They can get there by hopping to Leda, then Europa, and then Adrastea. Each time they have to stop to resupply and each journey risks an encounter with pirates, dragons, slaad raiders, floathing aboleths, Jovian krakens, plogiston sorcerors, and so forth.

On the other hand, imagine the PCs are on Europa. They need to get to Carpo, because they've heard their enemy, the spinagon Malakofrex, is building a fortress there. They could hop from Europa to Carpo, which would take a number of 'moves'. Or they could simply wait until Europa's orbit catches up with Carpo's and make the move in one easy step - perhaps taking the time in between to research Malakofrex's weaknesses and prepare.

Needs more work: the moons which are just code numbers need Greek sounding names, and maybe some empty spaces would be good to make travel in some regions riskier. But serves as a sort of proof of concept.

Fantasy Moons of Jupiter Planetcrawl

Imagine Jupiter with its (as of 2012) 66 moons (subject which has come up before). Now imagine a Spelljammer-esque game of D&D set there. Ships sailing from frigid Europa (planet of frost giants, ice mephits and white dragons) to fiery Io (the kingdom of the Efreeti). Stopping off at tiny rocky Thebe to pick up a potion of Stone to Mud from the duergar who mine that lonely, isolated speck of stone. Plotting a raid on the Necromancer who has made the moon Praxidike his home, where he is guarded by spectres and banshees shrieking into the cold infinity of space. Afterwards feasting with the hook horrors of Callisto, communicating with your hosts through a sverfnebiln interpreter who taps out words to them in code with a complicated system of pebbles tied to his fingers. You hear a rumour from them that on the rings of Saturn lives a gold dragon, who has buried all his treasures in a huge hunk of ice. He is practically invincible, but on far away Pluto there is the shattered remnant of a gelugon's palace, said to house a trident of dragon slaying in its deepest oubliette....

Moons of Jupiter Planetcrawl

A long, long time ago (I can still remember how those blog entries used to make me smile) I wrote about the Solar System and its vastness, pondering:

In light of [the sheer size of space], and the fact that the solar system contains 8 planets, 5 dwarf planets, 335 moons and millions of asteroids, minor planets, comets, trojans, centaurs and the like, you really have to wonder why science fiction has obsessed for so long about interstellar and intergalactic empires. Isn't the solar system big enough? 

It strikes me now that the answer is fairly obvious: aliens. There aren't any in the solar system, or at least not ones we can wage war on/fuck/misunderstand, so SF authors by necessity need to look beyond it if they want Klingons.

But the fact remains: the Solar System is massive. Consider this for a second: the distance between Jupiter and Saturn is from 600 million kilometres to 2 billion kilometres. Jupiter has, at current count, 66 moons. Saturn has 62. Uranus and Neptune have another 40 between them. There have been 1,200 Transneptunian Objects recorded. There is a lot of stuff out there to get lost in. Indeed, the question I am currently considering is not so much "Why bother with what's outside the Solar System?" as "Couldn't you just set a game among the moons of Jupiter or Saturn?"

The moons of Jupiter vary hugely in size - from massive rocky Ganymede, bigger than Mercury, to tiny Cyllene, only 3km in diameter. They also vary in character: Icy Europa may have a great warm ocean beneath its surface which harbours life, while Io is a world of magma and volcanoes. Probably only 4 - the Galilean moons of Ganymede, Europa, Io and Callisto - are "settle-able" in the SF sense, but think of the potential in the 58 others. Secret bases for space pirates. Impossibly ancient and haunted alien monuments. Mines to be warred over. Space stations right and left. Orbital rigs for siphoning gas from Jupiter itself, built on construction bases bigger than cities, that circle elliptically around Callisto.

The thing about the Moons of Jupiter Planetcrawl is that the distances make sense. These moons are generally about 200,000 km apart at their closest (although of course, at the opposite ends of their ellipses, they are a heck of a lot further), which is traversable in a few hours at the speed of, say, Voyager 1. An inter-lunar craft would probably be a lot slower, because Voyager 1 is a big fat cheat and has the benefit of decades of acceleration, but still - it's the sort of travel that is do-able in the Star Trek "set a course for Ganymede and we'll be there by Friday" sense, and is imaginable without too much handwaving if you want your SF hard. And since your scope is somewhat restricted, you can actually flesh out your locations in a lot of detail - you don't end up with Traveller-esque abstraction in which each solar system has a single interesting planet about which there is a single interesting fact and a single culture. You can go deep: what's going on with Callisto? How does that affect what's going on with Io? What's with the planetary war on Europa and will the Jovian orbiters get involved?

I happen to have recently bought Diaspora. Maybe the planets are aligning.