Planets 2: Time and weather in the Disk

Not every planet has a night: very small planets have not enough mass to block much sunlight. However, as they grow big in scale, the dusk zone also grows. This is truer in orbits closer to the sun, where desertic climates are common. At the temperate middle orbits it's easy to have bright nights due to the clouds acting as lush reflecting screens. But even if the confortable darkness of night is a luxury for some, it becomes the norm far from the sun: behind all the cloud layers piled up, the planets are gradually subsumed in penumbra.

The very concept of a day is certainly diffuse in the Disk as whole. Every planet has its own rotation cycles, and there is not an unified unit of time. A traveler in planet A can build a house from the foundations to the roof during a single night. Then go to planet B and have seven dusks and dawns pass over him during a nap. But most people don't travel too much, and adapt their lives to their local idiosincrasy as part of their planet culture; just as all civilizations adapt to summer and winter. But how much exactly does a winter last?

Translation cycles are equally diverse across the known world. And while using years as an unit can work when talking with a fellow planeteer or organizing local stuff, the proper way to deal with strangers or speaking of the past is in terms of generations: "In times of my father, my grandfather, or my grand-grandfather". However, seasons do exist, and every planet gets their summer, fall, winter and spring. They just have a different impact and time on each. I cannot imagine how hard (an long) can winter be on one of the outernmost planets, and how does their people endure, if there is actually somebody there.

Sometimes, a sage tries with more effort than success to research notes, contrast planetary records and make sense of the world history, and eventually surrenders; cursing the disinterested nature of men; because it's very hard to find records of the past of any kind in the planets beyond personal or familiar diaries. "Maybe people would act different if we all lived in a planet with the same years and days for everyone" he says. "We could measure our ages in years; or know which planet holds the oldest city" But only sages care about that kind of impossible things: nobody else cares about when something happened or what is their exact age. A kid becomes a youth at some point, and then an adult, then an old man. Those ages are most times obvious to oneself and to others, and they don't need more. While for the sages the world is old and carries the weight of the past, for those with fire in their bellies the world is as fresh as the everchanging sand in a beach, waiting for them to build their castles on; and its easy to hear the breath of the gods behind you, just as if they had created the world not long ago, and are still taking a rest.

Weather, on the other hand, is much more important. 

The Disk itself looks like a disk, because the known orbits all spin in the same plane. Just like planets, clouds and winds have their own cycles around the father sun. And just as birds migrate from planet to planet, alongside floating flower seeds, stray projectiles or the harmless paper hearts that young girls like to send into the sky so they find their future lovers, also winds and storms are put to dance by thermal and centrifugal forces and attracted eventually by a planet's pull. However, weather's dance is as vital to farmers and navigators as planet's dance is to the sages. A weather yearly almanac, be it copied from another guildsmen or inherited through many generations is an invaluable treasure to have for men and woman of many trades. When there is no other choice, settlers and pioneers write them by their own hand, many times in the improvised symbols and crude drawings proper of illiterate men.

Planets 1: Floating around

 

"Why doesn't everybody fly around from planet to planet all the time? It's so easy, right?" 

Thats what most kids ask when they learn about the open space of the Disk. 

 "Yes, it is, kids." Parents say. "But have something in mind: once you set your feet off the land, our gravity will pull you less and less, and at a certain point, you'll be drafted by further gravities of distant planets, so you'll probably get to go somewhere. But the orbits are capricious, our whole universe an unfathomable clock of a myriad spheres. If you lose track of your home planet, you might never be able to find it again. I wish you would stay with us forever, and there is no shame on it. Many others do. But someday you'll be a man and might like to prove your worth far beyond those clouds..."

Nobody knows for certain how many planets there are on the solar system. It is known that the biggest one (and the most populated for sure) is probably Hytral: its enormous circumference spanning almost 250 km along its equator. The planet codices at the observatory in Emben register the names of five hundred spheres of different sizes, though the actual number is for sure much larger: its impossible to count all the smaller nameless rocks which can barely hold a handful of baobabs. The added problem of them all having different rotation cycles makes travel and observation very difficult during long spans, making most of that information incomplete and outdated,

Travelling from planet to planet is not difficult for a healthy and fit person. Although at surface level all the planets have similar gravity pull, its easy to break free of it by propelling yourself high enough: this distance is usually proportional to the size of the planet. In a very small one, an energic jump can do the trick, or you may help yourself by using a jumping pole or climbing up a tree (As a kid growing up in a small planet, I did it all the time with my friends instead of going into school). Bigger planets normally have towers dedicated to the purpose of helping departers reach the heights for low gravity. Of course, the landing is also rougher on those, and having a parachuting device is advised to those travelling into one. 

Its always wise to check your local sage for the upcoming planetary conjuntions, as you can lift off and wade through clean sky and clouds for more time than you intended, or find another place instead. In case of doubt, following a flock of birds will always lead you somewhere. On the other hand, following a flock of cloud whales will surely lead you to deep cloud formations with little or no land, in which is terribly easy to become disorientated and lost.

Most people has no real reason to travel to other planets. Some do it in their youths, as an adventure, or maybe searching for a different place in which to settle. Constant travel is much rarer, and people who does it is often treated with as much curiosity than suspicion. Though interplanar invasion and wars are very strange in the disk, probably for logistical reasons, criminals and scoundrels are not. But who doesn't like the visit of a journeyman of any strange foreign trade, looking for knowledge and sharing his own? Who isn't enthralled by the visit of a singer, bringing information that is part her own lies and part the ones that were told to her? Who hasn't followed a foreign monk into the local dojo, searching for an honorable duel in which to test his skills?

 

We open in Winter

image: Ilya Shichkin

Because its been half a year without posting. Didn't play rpgs at all in this time. On the other hand, I have been playing a LOT of Magic: The Gathering, specifically PREMODERN. That game is like a hard drug. But despite of it, and maybe inspired by it, I have a couple of gaming related ideas I want to put into text ASAP.

1. Shifting aim of descriptions. During a walk, I noticed that everytime I narrate places and situations to the players, I speak to their senses: I tell you what you see, hear or smell, so you have information and put the whole scene in your mind, so you react accordingly. I think that is the most natural for a prosaic GM to do, but I have fed this "vice" by sticking to what I read that other GMS do. Fantasy books, or any books, however, rarely do this: they speak to the readers or the characters mind, straight away.

An example from the top of my head could be like: 

GM A: "you notice a rush of air moving towards you"
PLAYER: "which corridor does it seem to come from?"
GM A: "north one. It also carries smell of manure and hay"
PLAYER: "is the current strong?"
GM A: "enough to make your hair move a little"

This is how I do it normally, and while its good to make players take informed decisions ("does wind interfere with my prepared spells?") and actually takes very little time, i'm a bit tired of having this kind of conversations. They come up a lot into a game and they feel like describing an elephant to a blind man everytime: that small time they take its enormous when compared to the split second it takes for the character to absorb that information.. And bigger yet when compared to the relevance of such information: probably none and is there only to give the place a sense of identity. Knowing this, I could just go like:

GM B: "You arrive at a bifurcation of two corridors, and while the two are very similar, the gust of wind coming from the left one carries a smell of labored fields that reminds you of the spring nights at your village before it was destroyed, fighter. It fills you with a strong feeling of nostalgia"
PLAYER: "NOOOOOO you cant tell me what I feel likeeeeeee"
GM B: "I dont care, this is a much natural and evocative way to narrate and will do it whenever I want"

However it is probably the best of it all to use both narrative approaches at once depending on what you want the players to feel and prepare for. This is why GMing is an art and not a science.

2. Emulating nature VS emulating plot. Following the same trail of thoughts, I realized that OSR procedures, generators and random tables normally emulate a nature: You can picture and ecosystem and nature of a place by observing the results of those tables: How likely is a goblin to appear in this forest in contrast with a boar? how much treasure does the average bandit have in his stash, and how much does he steal in this road every year? Those, of course, can be improvised or generated with absurd numbers sometimes, but yet, once they appear at the table, they tell you something about the place. The other thing procedures do is to create the passing of time: if you spend time at a certain place, monsters appear. Weather changes. HP restores. As I don't like to keep strict time records nor a calendar of any sort, an idea I want to try is to have certain time related events, both of a natural nature (the passing of the seasons) or of a plot nature (a war striking, an NPC dying, an alliance forged between factions, some relevant person or thing from the current adventure being captured, etc) be ingrained on some kind of random event table; possibly one that activates during downtime.

3. Worldbuilding is better robust than wide.  I am very confortable with my latest houserules. Achieving a ruleset that scratched all my autisms and that played nicely for other people was like an obsession for me for years. Now I want to focus on some next shit I already talked about: A magic system that, instead of different classes (druid, wizard, cleric, etc) has spells of five natures, or "colors" that a magic user can choose from: one at first, then two and maybe three. The main thing that draws me to it is that it is a simple way to picture magic in-game, that can be learn and exploited by players while giving me things to work to paint the world as a GM.

If one plants the core foundations of how a world works (in difference or addition to our real work) is very easy for players to act around it, think around it and feel more like home on it. Campaigns are sometimes based in media: everybody knows more or less what their character can be in the Middle Earth, or what kind of background, common information or customs they might have. But sometimes campaigns are based on the GMs imagination and the idea of a mythic age we more or less agree upon. But some hard guidelines are always needed, specially when I run a "sandbox" style game. I have realized over time that is very important to tell the players a handful of "constants" that will be true in the game world, no matter where they go, and that are related to things they will see and do in game. One can be, for example: "the world is full of dungeons which have gold inside" or "The wilderness is filled with monsters". Other can be "The world is full of bandits of different dangerousness, and all cities in the world have agreed to pay a reward for any criminal that is important enough".

I think that I can do well by doing "The world has five "pure" types of magicians, and they tend to live and behave in five different ways. Their wizard schools have helped to shape this earth: you will find all of them across the globe, and If you are a wizard, might learn from them or be duelled by them"

4. Descriptions of combat at high levels: Something I read about in this blog. The author inquires on the best way to narrate combat descriptions at higher levels, when the nature of the monsters makes attacks physically obtuse (hitting a giant or a dragon on a vital spot, for example). Normally I would rule that monsters expose themselves during combat, while making their "attack routines". But I liked this comment on the entry and want to pin it here to give it a thought.

Dwiz wrote: This is a good example of where it becomes important to revisit the core mechanic's logic: the players can do anything that seems reasonably feasible in the fiction. Therefore, the burden is on the players to describe to you a plausible means of performing those attacks. If they can't, then they don't get to make the attack roll to begin with. You're right: trying to get a meaningful stab at the giant from the ground seems silly. So the players are going to have to come up with a more appropriately OSR "combat as war" tactic like luring the giant into a trap.

Have a nice year everyone. Take a little moment today to enjoy the winter mood!