A World a Week: Bog, Not Desert Planet

Getting ready to start my Spacers: Big Space mini-campaign running. From my notes both typed and handwritten.

Bog, Not Desert Planet

A planet that is thirty percent land, forty percent open water, the rest covered in moss-filled and marsh-like environment. The moss is an organism that is akin to similar plants on Earth can be up to five-meters thick.

Settled by human colonists from Earth some six hundred years ago, its colony-ship het Rotterdam, is still in orbit and treated as a shrine to Old Urth. Its original colonists have formed into a dozen or so clan nations, known as Houses, that compete with each other for dominance as well as work together against those that would dominate them. While the cities of planet can be very high tech in their living standards most of the planet remains hi-tek rustic so to speak. Turfskippers, move through the marshes and alternately fuel their abodes energy with peat and cold fusion.

For two centuries now, Solar Standard Calendar, Panni leaders from their Commonwealth Worlds, have noticed Cluster J and have started to incorporate the worlds therein into their territories. Bog being the most prominent of the star groups’ worlds has not escaped their notice. The Gradom Corporation, an agent of the Panni Empire, has taken the lead towards inroads in making the planet one of theirs. This has not been met with much success.
The clans of Bog have developed their own interplanetary fleet, known as the Trot, and increased their own interstellar commerce as well. The largest city of Bog, Jewel, even created a floating city, Loom, above itself to so their capabilities to any newcomers thinking that they might have a technological edge over the natives are rapidly apparent. Now called City-Above-City, it is the premier spot of high tech culture of the Cluster. Gradom has sponsored its own city known as the Spire, in one of the less inhabited portions of the planet. While the Panni boast of one day creating a space elevator on the planet, not much has come of that. They have bred a human/Panni hybrid species called the “Numan” which they are sure will seduce the humans into becoming subjects of the Empire for confused and muddled racist reasons.
The Kodoan species-dominated star systems known as the 19 Worlds has more recently involved themselves with Bog. Cluster J is a lot closer to their territories than any part of the Panni Commonwealth. They are not friendly towards the humans of the Julii star system, but they do not want to see the Panni make any progress there either. The largest clan of the planet, House Ingsco, has been able to tread a careful path of undermining the Panni and not driving the lesser clans towards working with them. How long can they keep this up? Well, this is where the role-playing starts.

Star: J6 Calendar
Type: Red Dwarf
Systems: 5 “dry” terrestrials planets, 3 gas giants, 4 ice giants: 12 planets (a-k) recognized in official navigation archives.

Inhabited Areas:

J6-J Caesar

A gas giant five times the Jupiter. There are three terrestrial-sized moons in close orbits around the planet.

J6-J4 Javelin

A heavily volcanic world where rain-forest jungles at the equators create an Earth-like atmosphere, but the heavy emissions from the volcanoes fill it with too much sulfur and methane to be breathable except to plants and insects. It is claimed by the Panni-directed Gradom Corporation. House Ingsco also has a military training complex on the planet and does not acknowledge Gradom’s claim to exclusively own the world.
At the Equator: About 280 to 320 Kelvin
At the Top and Bottom: Around 200 Kelvin
Places of Interests: Speartip, Gradom Mining Depot,
Space Ports: Gradmo Industries Port of Entry, Lake Speartip

J6-J5 Bog

Thirty percent land, forty percent open water, the rest covered in moss and marsh-like environment. The moss can be up to five-meters thick.
At the Equator: About 290 to 305 Kelvin
At the Top and Bottom: Around 270 Kelvin
Places of Interests: City-Above-City, Logjam, The Great Southern Marsh, The Spire
Space Ports: Logjam, The Spire

The Lukriig Trot, Bog’s space fleet.

The battleships of the planet Bog are manned by personnel from all the clans institution known as the Luchtkriigmach, or just more commonly the Lukriig. Alternately the vessels are maintained by the biggest clans and therefore commanded by members of those clans. This can cause some friction between the ships when strife occurs between the big clans back on the planet. This disunity is often countered by the other vessels stepping in to moderate potential conflicts between the antagonists. The battleships are known as Turkeys and as a fleet it is called the Trot. Listed from biggest to smaller.

The Ajax
The Cambuur
The Sparta
The Go Ahead Eagle
The Heracles
The Fortunna
The Willem

J6-J6 Orangutan
A very cold world covered in orange colds.

At the Equator: About 180 to 100 Kelvin
At the Top and Bottom: Around 90 Kelvin
Places of Interests: Kastek, the Methane Sea, Ymir
Space Ports: Kastek

Cha'alt: Fuchsia Malaise

 So into the second Cha'alt book by Darrick Dishaw,  known better by his handle Venger Satanis, which I will lump the overall works into my High Fantasy folder in my head's reality.  I could just be brainwashed from bothering to read the world's filings in any sort of depth, but I doubt that. It is not because of writing structure that I categorize the overall world setting as such. If there are two poles of world-building in gaming such as highly skilled prose and narrative [1] and then massive dumps of notes, charts, and recurring references [0], this work would be [.46] and the rating is probably not on the conscious effort of the author.

 Fuchsia Malaise starts out with bunch of charts, many are designed to further detail the atmosphere of the doomed planet Cha'alt with its pink rose colored skies and purple mountains. Others are the random for random's sake so loved by the professed OSR (the ones that are not friendly to 5e because like there's girls involved) crowd which reminds me a lot of the original Arduin Adventure pamphlets (supposedly written before girls were involved) that I read years ago. Entries such as Dehydration and Henchman reactions are straight up Runequest level of visceral land tromping detail for the D20-addicted.

And then, following all that, there is the scenarios.

It is in these scenarios where a guy like me, an escapist looking for weird fantasy to tide me over until my next foray in the Dreamlands, gets some bang for my buck. The potential GM has hundreds of rooms throughout the book that are, as written, seeds for entire scenarios. The subplots for this or that room does not have to necessarily have to be tied into each other. Malaise is also where Dishaw starts to tie his other work(s?), Alpha Blue, and maybe others which I haven't read, into this long and arduous text. A narrative form of the story starts to come out where the Satanis Federation of Planets (my name not his) are exploiting Chaalt, Pompadour planet (Not Dune, Desert Planet) and an over-arching theme gets developed. This narrative, to Dishaw's credit, gets accomplished in paragraphs not chapters. That is strong work for an Author-GM in the tabletop roleplaying field.

This second book has a lot of problems though. Mostly it is lack of tone continuity control in the project. The tone varies from page to page, making it a hard read. A decent editorial approach could've corralled the work into nice story-stems instead of just making sure the words therein were spelled correctly and formatting was most correct. On top of the approach, I, being a person that does not fault someone for being not fully throughout in their humor. I have to give a pass to a lot of political jokes, not really tied into anything overall, that can be applied to any political group yet somehow tied in Dishaw's mind to socialists. Makes me think he's never met somebody that voted for a Clinton let alone a lefty-liberal. I am joking here, he has and is just being lazy.

The work though overall is a Loch Ness on the scale of Godzilla to Smurf scale of things. An experienced GM can make a whole year of gaming sessions out of this book alone. Their players would feel like they are in a epic quest and the GM would have plenty of leads to start that next campaign.

The World of Revilo Works

 Though the influences on Brian Colin's world may be more Frank Oz than say JRR Tolkien, I'd call his work High Fantasy. I think it was Brian that I met at GenCon this year selling the books. The lure of distinct settings always gets me. The list of authors include him, Isaac Skaggs, Kerry Colin, and Wyatt Colin. The artists listed are Carey Drake and Brian Colin.

 

https://creaturecuration.com/role-playing-games/

The setting is a continent that can be worked into an existing world if the author/GM has blank spaces on their map. The reason why the PCs haven't heard of it, well once ships get there, they usually crash and the survivors have a really hard time of leaving. The lands go from cold and volcanic lands to deep deserts to cursed areas, and then the obligatory levitating island. The native species of the lands are based off of the art, sculptures I think, from Brian Colin. The traditional D&D player-kin, whatever they are these days, are known as Outlanders indicating their recent arrival on these alien environs. The natives are a mixture of furry folk, with ample bird and lizard influence, with more dinosaur-based species worked in.

Talk about a mythopoetic work, Colin (and Skapps and Colin-s), have developed a whole age of myths and talk about longer than say even Gloratha RQ books do. The species are descended from the earth-goddess figure, Creedona, along with one created by her darker sister, Ghyrma. This makes up most of the history of the world. The more recent history, and more relevant to the players a certain Murk Von Horvath has arisen as the despot in charge of fair lands around Murk's Hollow.

Overall, I find the series a pretty good read. It's a Bigfoot on the Smurf to Godzilla rating scale. It definitely filled up a weekend's reading.

Revilo by Brian Colin

High Fantasy Season Begins

As the veil begins to thicken as the Feast of All Saint's Day takes place, the night before where the ghouls, goblins, and witches brought the spooky season, well month really, to its climax with Halloween. our mood as fantasists turns towards the broader brands of fantasies. I am already reading through the worlds of Revilo (Brian Colin), Chalt, and China Mieville's Bas-Lag so I am not behind the power curve. Little ideas are coming to be for maybe a Holiday Special like the Big Foot that Stole Christmas or Yetis Versus the Great Turkey, that depends on my energy level over the following weeks as I found a job that I like working full-time again. 

The newish Dune, newness depends on region where the viewer is, has me delving into some space opera for the gaming table this winter. I am trying to dwell on topics I think Frank Herbert was really on about, which was transhumanism, with the political history of West Asia being only used as a starting basis. Ecological adaptation is equally important in the books. Thanks to reading Dishaw's Fuchsia Malaise scenarios there will be a lot more Lexx than what one would expect. A GM does have to come up with twists on things to keep the regular and nearly so surprised. 

It has to be the sexy seasons of course.