Re: Shield Space 2 of many

----- Original Message -----
From: "Clint Whelly" <Clint.Whelly@?????????.ca>
Subject: [SPELLJAMMER] Shield Space 2 of many

I've finally read though another one of these.

> Shield Space
> This Crystal Sphere was sealed until recently.  There were no portals nor
> could any be made.

When I read the second sentence I insert a pause after the word portals. I think there
should be a comma there.

> The Gnomes and other creatures were trapped within.

Don't forget that portals are not the only way to breach a crystal sphere. You mentioned
some other methods yourself in your first post. Planeshifting magic is another way to get
in and out of Shieldspace. You need to address these.

> This probably changed when Humans were placed here.

Wouldn't people know the exact date (or at least the year) when the portals reappeared? It
is the sort of thing that would be news.

> This sphere is in the
> nexus of a number of phlogiston currents and thus far, 21 of these currents
> have been found directly connecting Shield to other spheres.  This might
> explain why there is such a diverse amount of life in Shield space as
> perhaps inter-sphere traffic was very high in the past.  Whatever the
> reason, this sphere is once again open for travel.

I would expect at least one of the civilised races of Shieldspace to have some sort of
legend that explains why Shieldspace was sealed off. If you have a local branch of the
IEN, then I would expect them to have an exact year for the closure.

Maybe it could be something like the same year as the First Unhuman War. Maybe a large
force of goblinoids invaded this sphere in an attempt to kill the elves and take over.
Perhaps the gods heard the cries of their worshipers, sent some sort of godly power to
destroy every goblinoid ship in the ether and sealed the sphere.

You could at the same time destroy whatever planet The Grinder used to be. Maybe the
planet was inhabited by goblinoids that were working with other goblinoids from the
outside to take over the sphere and their planet was obliterated as a punishment.

You could also perhaps tie the importation of the humans from Earth into this somehow.
Perhaps there were a small number of humans living in Shieldspace and their numbers were
diminished somehow. The gods could have realised that this race had become extinct and
responded by teleporting in a colony of them and reopening the sphere.

>  Thus far, three natural portals have been found, At he top and bottom of
> the sphere and one following the line of planets to the equator of the
> sphere.

You have two typos in this (one of which *should* have been found when you spellchecked
it). "At" should either have a full stop before it or should be in lower case if you keep
the comma. The word "he" should be "the" (don't forget that spellcheckers can't find typos
that make other words - come back to your work after 1 day and read it slowly to catch
most of these). I think the sentence as a whole would scan better if it read something
like:

"Thus far three natural portals have been found. One is at the top of the sphere and one
is at its bottom. The third is on the equator of the sphere and lines up with the
planets."

You have a problem with that *third* portal. You haven't yet introduced the fact that the
planets are all in a line, but you are referring to the planets when you mention the
portal. This made me think: "Huh? What's going on?" Have a think about this. Perhaps you
can mention that three portals are the only way in or out of Shieldspace, but not give
their location until the end of the document (when your readers already know that the
planets are all lined up). If you also move the references about the stars to the end, you
will take readers on an outward progression from the sun to the sphere wall (with its
moving stars and its three stationary portals)

>  Thus far, all attempts to create other passage ways have failed.
> The stars that show on the sphere are huge blobs of glowing something slowly
> moving along the shell wall.  All attempts to investigate further have met
> with failure.  This movement is very slow and the constellations formed by
> these glowing blobs will not change perceptibly in a human lifetime.

I think the last sentence would read better if you changed "will" to "does" as the study
of the stars would be from past experience and does gives you the same thing without tying
it to the future. By the way if it is so hard for people to get through The Grinder,
doesn't that imply that nobody will see the stars? Perhaps the starlight intermittently
gets through the gaps in the grinder and each star seems to randomly wink on and off
(normally stars are constant in space so they would look normal outside The Grinder's
orbit).

> The planetary system is somewhat normal in that there is a sun in the middle
> and planets and such orbit it.
> This system has far more debris than most systems as is evidenced by the
> grinder (see below).  In addition, three planets share the same orbit along
> the same plane.  The term orbit however is somewhat of a misnomer, as the
> planets do not orbit the sun but rather just stay in place.  There is
> another unknown force akin to gravity at work holding the planets safely in
> place and manifesting itself in other ways.

You contradict yourself here. Orbit implies that the planets circle the sun, but then you
reveal that the planets are all stationary. I think it would be better to not mention
orbiting planets (or say that it the planetary system is normal). Instead you could start
off with something like:

"Shieldspace has a fixed planetary system with most of its planets forming a straight line
that points out from the central sun. Splash, Hagor, and The Grinder are the three objects
in the system that do not conform to this straight line."

By the way are all the objects of debris part of The Grinder or are there other bits
floating around?

> Temperature: The Ether seems to transmit or control temperature within a
> Sphere.  The ambient temperature is about 150 degrees at about 10,000,000
> miles from the sun, dropping to about 75 degrees around Shield and then
> about 60 degrees at the Grinder.  Just after the Grinder, the temperature
> plummets to 0 and drops to about -100 towards the Crystal Shell wall.

I'd already mentioned that you didn't use units in a reply to your last post. Most other
spheres seem to have a fairly uniform temperature through the sphere. Your variation is an
interesting idea. You might need to touch on what sort of in-game effect this variation
has as DMs that want to use your system may wonder if -100 degrees (Fahrenheit?) is cold
enough to cause injury or death to crews arriving in the system.

150 degrees (whether Celsius or Fahrenheit) is probably hot enough to make most people
ill. Perhaps you could define a safe area in the middle of the sphere. If you want to
simplify things you could say something along the lines of:

* Everything inside the orbit of Hell is too hot and crews require protection from heat,
* Everything between Hell and The Grinder is a temperature that crews can tolerate and
* Everything outside the orbit of The Grinder is too cold and crews require protection
from the cold.

The inner hot zone would be arbitrary, but The Grinder itself provides a good excuse to
stop the suns rays and make the outer part of the sphere cold and dark.

> The
> Ether has no effect on planetary bodies and the ether itself does not seem
> to exist within a gravity well.  (There is no trace of Ether or its
> associated effects to within six times the planetary bodies' radius.)  The
> ambient temperature on planetary bodies fluctuates based on the distance
> from the sun, available light, reflection index, atmospheric composition,
> internal heat sources and whatever else I missed.

The ether doesn't exist within a gravity well, but ships have gravity. This implies that
the ether wouldn't get inside a ships gravity field (or air envelope). If you do want to
make the ether penetrate ships atmospheres then I suggest that you drop the reference and
just say that ether seems to be repelled by planets as it is not found within six times
the radius of the planets (I assume this goes for the sun as well).

Saying "and whatever else I missed" looks awful. Look up the subject, and if you think
there is nothing else that changes this stop after "internal heat sources."

> The System:
> The sun is not as hot as expected and a far lower amount of hard radiation
> is emitted by it.

I don't think people expect a sun to be any specific temperature. I suggest you instead
say something like:

"Although Shieldspace's sun is about the same size as Earth's sun it is a lot cooler..."

"Hard radiation" is not a normal feature of Spelljammer, so unless you intend to write
radiation rules I suggest you drop it. If you do want to keep it then you need to
research: cosmic rays, solar wind, alpha partials, beta particles, gamma rays and x-rays.
You will also have to look up how much radiation of any type a person can cope with (I
believe that there is more than one unit for this) and extrapolate radiation levels for
all the other races.

> Its size is about the same as ours (865,000 miles in
> diameter) and seems to be a doorway to the elemental plane of fire.
> Fire-based creatures abound on the sun but do not seem to leave or at least
> travel far from its surface.

*If* the sun is a doorway to the elemental plane of fire (as opposed to a ball of gas with
a nuclear fusion reaction in its centre) there is no logical source for radiation. I
suggest you keep the plane of fire and drop the radiation.

> This might be due to the very deep gravity
> well and the fact that the sun does have a stronger gravitational pull than
> normal by about 10 times.  As a note, this 10G gravity well extends out
> about 2.5 million miles from the sun!

Have you read up on gravity? It is possible to escape any gravity well that isn't a black
hole, provided you have enough force behind you (the scientists call it delta V). You can
even avoid getting sucked into something as strong as a black hole as long as you keep
well away from the event horizon. A strong elemental or a group of elementals with a
spelljamming ship could escape the sun's gravity. Perhaps they stay in the middle because
they *like* to be under a strong gravity field. By the way, I don't think there is any
gravity on the elemental planes. You'd better check. If I'm right these particular fire
elementals could somehow find gravity enjoyable or intoxicating and may dislike travelling
further than 2.5 million miles from the sun.

> Hell: <snip>
> Hell resembles Mercury with a liquid metal/rock surface.  Pure liquid ores
> exist on the surface but due to the large amount of hostile fire-based
> creatures that inhabit Hell, little effort has been applied to any kind of
> mining attempts.  (Moreover, it is somewhat hot.)

You have said that the fire creatures on the sun don't like to go more than 2.5 million
miles from the sun, but Hell is 10 million miles from the sun. Ether the creatures can go
further than 2.5 million miles, but don't normally do so or these are fire creatures from
a different source.

Normally, I wouldn't personally recommend comparing Spelljammer planets with ones in our
solar system as it pulls people out of fantasy and makes them think of real life. However,
as you are already linking Shield to Earth it probably isn't so much of a problem.

As for mining. Here is how you do it:

1) Find something fire creatures want,
2) Find a way to communicate what you want and,
3) Find a way to exchange stuff without either side being hurt by the temperature of the
others.

If fire creatures on Hell brought up a bowl of molten metal and threw it into space it
would eventually cool off a bit. A spellcaster could even cast some sort of cold spell on
the molten blob to speed up the process. All you would have to do then is bring the object
on board. Mind you if the entire planet is a molten blob there might not be any way for
the creatures to make a bowl or a spelljamming ship that wouldn't melt.

> Swamp: Orbit 30,000,000 miles. Size: 10,000-mile diameter. Breathable
> atmosphere
> Swamp is a large, hot jungle world full of nasty biting things.  Average
> temperature is 140 degrees.  Due to the high heat and 100% humidity along
> with the nasty dangerous life forms such as dinosaurs it is a place mostly
> avoided, as the reward vs. risk is low.

I may be wrong here, but I'm under the impression that 100% humidity means that 100% of
the atmosphere is water! If I'm right you've just said that the atmosphere is made from
steam instead of air!!! I suggest that if you really want to put a percentage you look up
a place on Earth with a rain forest and add a small number to that. Alternatively why not
just say that if it was any more humid the planet would probably be lifeless.

> Distance to Equatorial portal: 190 million miles (approximately 8 days)
> There is a small Lizard man enclave under Shield's protection as of AE 72

Don't forget that Lizardmen become more evolved when they have more humidity and heat.
These lizardmen should probably be comparable to the ones in Spelljammer rather than the
ones on typical groundling worlds.

> Shield: Orbit 40,000,000 miles. Size: 2,000-mile diameter*. Breathable
> atmosphere

You forgot the full stop after atmosphere. Your spellchecker *should* have spotted this.
You *did* spellcheck before posting this didn't you?

> Shield is a fragment of a planet and looks like an ice cream cone, see
> details below.

Why do you say "ice cream cone" instead of just saying "cone"? If Shield is a fragment of
a planet then I hope you are going to mention what happened to it and more importantly
where the missing bits went.

You could have an explosion on Shield (possibly at the same time the sphere was sealed)
that threw bits out into space. The solid parts of Shield could have been captured by
Hagor and could have turned into its moons. The water on that side of the planet could
have been thrown into space to form Splash.

You could even say that Shield was originally in orbit around Hagor and that the explosion
moved it away from its parent planet and made it into a planet in its own right.

The planets may have orbited normally *before* this disaster and may have been fixed into
position as part of the disaster. Maybe there is a god of planetary movement and he was
either killed or abandoned the sphere. Maybe every god in your system is associated with
one of the planets and the gods of Shield and whatever The Grinder used to be, had a war
that damaged one planet and destroyed the other. You could even have a magical artefact
that will restore the movement of the planets.

> Shield shares its orbit with two other worlds about 120
> degrees apart (or 1/3 of the orbit apart), Hagor and Splash. Shield's
> gravity field extends out in a uniform 3500-mile radius.

Are you saying that this gravity field is spherical (as if Shield used to be a sphere)?

By the way, I skimmed through your next post and didn't get a picture of a cone in my
head. Instead I had a picture of a former hollow world, with life on both the inside and
outside of a sphere. In my head the side of this planet one half/two thirds/three
quarters/whatever was blown away. In my head this would leave something that looks more
like a bowl than a cone.

> Splash:

>Thus far all attempts to live on Splash are eaten.

This doesn't scan right. Attempts don't get eaten: people get eaten.

> Hagor: Orbit 40,000,000 miles. Size 20,000 miles. Gas giant.
> The three moons of Hagor all have the same atmosphere as Hagor and as such
> are quite poisonous to ANY air-breathing humanoid.

You say that the three moons of Hagor have the same atmosphere as Hagor, without actually
explaining that Hagor has a poisonous atmosphere. I think that you should introduce Hagor
first and then come on to the moons.

By the way when you say "the same atmosphere" do you mean one common atmosphere that
connects them all?

> Hagor and its moons are
> inhabited by what are known as the Methane Breathers.

Anybody that wants to use your sphere without introducing the chemical element of methane
into a fantasy game, could just say that Hagor and its moons have poisonous atmospheres
and the creatures that live on them are either able to breath poisonous air with no ill
effects or just don't breath air. They could be outsiders from the plane of elemental air.

It would be nice if these moons had names.

The word "whatnot" looks bad. I suggest you get rid of it.

> The Grinder

The Grinder is the name of a smaller but identically shaped asteroid field in Greyspace.
You should address this. Maybe Shieldspace had some colonists from Greyspace and they
thought your asteroid sphere looked like The Grinder in their old sphere. By the way if
your Gnomes act like Tinker Gnomes then you probably also have colonists from Krynnspace.

> Instead, the planetoids of the Grinder are spread out into a
> hollow sphere, surrounding Shield and the inner planets with the exception
> of the stellar poles.

It might be worth while working out how large these holes are. By the way these holes also
line up with your top and bottom portals, so you have *two* lines across your sphere.

> This means that every SpellJamming vessel bound for
> Shield from the outer planets or from the boundary of the Crystal Sphere
> must pass through the Grinder or detour around the Grinder via the stellar
> poles then come back to the ecliptic.

For ships heading for the boundary, this isn't true as you have placed portals above/below
both of these holes. A ship could continue up or down in a straight line until it got to
the spheres edge.

> The Regent, once estimated the amount of mass of the Grinder and came up
> with a fascinating result

Who is The Regent? I don't remember you introducing him/her yet. The Regent sounds like a
ruler of some kind. It should really be some sort of sage or wizard doing this sort of
estimation. If you do that Planescape thing then the narrator could chip in here and
mention an estimat of the mass and what their legends say created The Grinder.

> For obvious reasons, pirates and other rogues of the space ways find the
> Grinder to be a perfect place to ply their trade.

The only planets outside The Grinder are Marble, Rock and Biggie. Only Biggie has life and
*that* is Methane Breather life. Attacking a Methane Breather ship would almost certainly
contaminate the atmosphere of any pirate ship making it hazardous to do.

While you do now have people coming in from the outside. Don't forget that your sphere was
shut off until recently. This means that your pirates have nobody to prey upon before the
humans arrived and the sphere was unlocked. I suggest that you put air breathing cultures
on the moons of Marble in order to give the pirates someone to live off of. You could even
make Rock a hollow world with air inside and put dwarven mines inside it.

> This of course raises a number of problems and benefits.  There are so many
> asteroids that virtually every race, or every nation or any special-interest
> group, can create its own port.

> This, of course, leads to collisions as
> rocks are constantly drifting into each other, shattering, or bouncing off
> in new orbits.

Apart from the fact that you've said "This of course" two times (you should try to vary
things like this), I want to point out that these two facts clash. Your many asteroid
ports would constantly be destroyed unless they had some sort of way to avoid the constant
collisions.

> Even the largest asteroid is tiny when
> compared to a world, making escape time much less of an issue (it takes only
> minutes to escape from the largest asteroids gravity well.)  Trying to
> prevent this is just about impossible, as there is just too much to cover.

Trying to prevent what? You were just discussing escape time. If "this" refers to
something like piracy then you need to separate these two subjects. Every paragraph should
refer to *one* subject. I think this entire section should be broken up into separate
points and rewritten.

> However, as these groups, whatnots and whomever's come to the Grinder, they
> mostly bring economic gain and trade from other spheres.

This implies that piracy did not exist before the arrival of the humans and the reopening
of the portals. Again "whatnots and whomever's" looks bad (and in this case the sentence
works without those words).

> Many of the larger
> groups even pay a tax to Shield for police protection.

I might be wrong but I believe the concept of "police" is a fairly modern one. Perhaps
Shield should instead have a navy. Ships flying a flag of Shield would receive protection
from its navy, but would have to pay taxes to the Shield government (or the government of
one of its ports if you have several nations with their own flags) in order to receive
permission to fly their flag. Don't forget that flags belong to individuals and not
nations. The concept of national flags is a modern thing. A country's flag *originally*
represented the king, queen, prince, baron or other official.

Thinking about flags and Shield has made me think of something related to both. As your
major world is called Shield, it might be worth looking up some stuff on heraldry (and not
that nonsense conmen use to trick Americans into buying their "family coat of arms" -
there *is* no such thing as a family coat of arms). In the proper rules of heraldry there
is one coat to one man. Anyone wanting a coat of arms had to achieve something to get one
(or be the son of someone that already had one). You could have common people serving in
the Shield navy in order to gain renown (or maybe even knighthood) so that they could ask
the king/queen's heralds to make them a coat of arms. A little knowledge of how this works
would help you to design believable coats of arms for your players.

> Thus attacking them
> is attacking Shield, no small deterrent!

I don't think pirates would care about that. In the middle of The Grinder a ship is not
very likely to be rescued by ships from Shield. Perhaps you should create convoys of ships
that travel from Shield through The Grinder with an escort of heavily armed ships. (Look
up WWII stories of U-boats attacking British convoys for an idea of how many merchants,
escorts and pirates to put into a typical combat.)

> Thus far, some of the larger
> settlements are Dwarven and Gnomish in origin.

So are the pirates dwarves and gnomes? I don't remember you saying who they were. Or are
pirates from every race (including Methane Breathers)?

> Marble: Orbit 80,000,000 miles. Size 30,000-Mile diameter.
> Marble is a gas giant about the size of Neptune. Has 4 moons.
> Distance to Equatorial portal: 120 million miles (approximately 4.6 days)

Not enough information here. Does this have a breathable or poisonous atmosphere. What are
its moons like. I suggest you also give the moons names as there are only four and names
are free.

> Rock: Orbit 90,000,000 miles. Size: 6,000-Mile diameter. No atmosphere
> Rock has no atmosphere at all! It's just a rock, like the Earth's moon.  It
> is totally dead with no plate tectonics, etc.
> Distance to Equatorial portal: 110 million miles (approximately 4.2 days)

Rock, like Marble is a wasted opportunity. With nobody wanting to go there, you cut down
on traffic. I wouldn't bother going through The Grinder if I was headed for a portal. I'd
go for the north or south portal and avoid The Grinder and its pirates. I suggest that you
put something "cool" on one or both of these worlds.

> Biggie

I don't like that name. It sounds a bit comical.

> Biggie is a
> huge gas giant twice as big as Jupiter with 14 moons.
> The ambient temperature around Biggie is about 80 degrees. This is from the
> planet itself as it radiates a lot of heat in the infrared spectrum.

Radiated heat *is* in the infrared spectrum. I suggest that you chop of the stuff after
the word "heat". If you mention infrared, you are going to have people want to create
light based spells that use infrared instead of visible light.

> Nine of the moons have the same atmosphere as Hagor.  One of the moons seems
> to be developing this same atmosphere and one seems to be developing an
> oxygen atmosphere.  The other three moons have no atmosphere.  Methane
> Breather activity is quite heavy here.

This moon (with some oxygen) is the only place outside The Grinder that a ship can go to.
You might want to alter the balance a bit.

Again, lets have some names for these moons. At the very minimum the habitable moon should
have a name.

Anyone wishing to convert your system to pure-fantasy, could refer to the moons as either
having a breathable or poisonous atmosphere. No explanation of what is in the atmosphere
is necessary if you don't want to involve science.

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Virtual Eclipse Role Playing Club
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualeclipselrp/links/d20_system_001071937434/Spelljammer_001071430476
http://virtualeclipse.aboho.com/