Kau System (test)

Kau (K-Type Star)

1d4 & 1d6: 1 = Terrestrial Planet w/ Ring or Moon

1d10 A(steroid Belt): 5

1d8 (Large Terrestrial Planet): 8

1d12 (Ice Giant): 12

1d20 (Gas Giant: 16

Kau 1: using rules as previously established: mini-Ice Giant; dense nitrogen oxygen; "Floating Plateau". A few things here need to be addressed. There's a type of exo-planet referred to as a "Hot Neptune". It's theorized that if a Hot Neptune forms in the outer regions of the star system, it would probably chemically resemble Neptune, containing volatiles and amorphous ices. But if formed near the star, its probably made up of more terrestrial stuff, like rock and metal. Plus, I rolled a breathable atmosphere, which might be unlikely but not impossible. 

But I'm also not sure about the way I have the tie-breaking mechanism set up. If I think about how the Moon formed, it was likely from the impact of a smaller planet smacking into the primordial Earth and basically forming very quickly resulting in the Earth-Moon system we all know and love. So replacing a Medium Terrestrial planet with an Asteroid Belt really doesn't ring true to me.

So, I'm going to treat this as though it were still a Medium Terrestrial planet at which point, keeping the rolls the same, we get an Ocean World with a standard nitrogen oxygen atmosphere with a "Floating Plateau". This sounds a little more interesting to me, so I think I may amend the ore-existing rules.

Kau 2: Asteroid Belt with 2 rocky planetoids.

Kau 3: Super Ice Giant; Nitrogen Oxygen (this just can't be right, I need to expand the possible IC Giant atmosphere lists to include hydrogen-helium); "Changeless Sea"; 9 moons

Kau 4: Super Gas Giant; hydrogen-helium; "Blistering Volcano"; 14 moons

Domia System

Domia (M Dwarf)

• Domia 1: medium volcanic terrestrial planet; thin hydrogen sulfide; Shattered Plateau.
• Domia 2: large rocky terrestrial planet; ring system; 1 moon; trace helium sodium atmosphere; cratered surface
• Domia 3: in Asteroid Belt; small volcanic terrestrial; trace helium sodium; Dimensional Rift on surface
• Domia 4: in Asterpoid Belt; small rocky terrestrial; trace helium sodium; Mud Volcano.
• Domia 5: in Asteroid Belt; small rocky terrestrial; trace  helium sodium; Antique Slime Vat.
• Domia 6: Ice Giant; dense methane hydrogen; dominated by a quasi-ocean of glowing supercritical fluid beneath the dense atmosphere; 7 moons
• Domia 7: Super Gas Giant; hydrogen helium; orbited by a Drydock Station (King's Bay) that has recently been overrun by an invasive species of acidic slime; 17 moons

Planet & Polyhedrons Test Flight

This is the first "large-scale" test for the P&P system.

By that, I mean it's fairly small.

I wanted to try making a Sector Map out of several Sub-sector maps. So I rolled up four sub-sectors (as shown here).

Then I decided to "zoom" in on a star system and roll up it's details.

I rolled an M-type star.

My orbit dice rolls were like this:

• d6 (Medium Terrestrial Planet): 2
• d4 (Small Terrestrial Planet): 3
• d8 (Large Terrestrial Planet): 3 (uh-oh!)
• d10 (Asteroid Belt): 9
• d12 (Ice Giant): 11
• d20 (Gas Giant): 19 

None of the planets are in what would generally be considered the Habitable Zone of the star, but we'll get to that in a bit.

The Small Terrestrial Planet got destroyed by the Larger Terrestrial Planet, so now that Large Terrestrial Planet has a ring system. Pretty cool.

Okay. So, going down the line, let's add some attributes.

Rolling my dice again for each planet, I find:

Medium Terrestrial Planet is Volcanic with a thin Hydrogen Sulfide atmosphere with a "Fractal Plateau". This summons tom mind a toxic mashup of Mordor and the Shattered Plains (from The Way of Kings). Very Star Wars.

Large Terrestrial Planet is a Rocky World with a Trace Atmosphere of helium and sodium. It has a "Cratered Plateau" and, as per the previous step, a Ring System.

The Asteroid Belt has Three Small Rocky planetoids.

1. Volcanic; Trace helium sodium; "Dimensional Canyon". This I kind of picture as a rift to another dimension cutting across the surface. How did it get there? Natural happenstance? Was there a sketchy science lab hidden on it? 
2. Rocky; Trace helium sodium; "Blistering Mountain". While not technically a volcanic planet, I suppose it could have a very large volcano on it? Or maybe it is more like a blister? Volcanic, yes, but more of a constant upwelling of molten mud bubbling up and hardening, gradually building up over years.
3. Rocky; Trace helium sodium; "Antique Lake". This is pretty weird. There are any number of substances that could form lakes in this environment, but the "antique" quality is pretty weird. It is an ancient, artificial lake? Why would that be there?

The Ice Giant has a super dense atmosphere of methane and hydrogen. It also has a "Phosphorescent Ocean". That's cool! I like the idea of there being some sort of phosphorescent, glowing something under the clouds of this Ice Giant. I know the "ice" on an ice giant is not conventional ice. So I'll have to do some research to think about what this might be.

Gas Giant is a Super Gas Giant with a hydrogen, helium atmosphere. I rolled "Acidic Cavern" on the unsual features table and this probably demonstrates a limit of the system. Obviously, a Gas Giant wouldn't have a cavern system. But this sort of inconsistency can just force you to come up with explanations: 

• this gas giant is just built different!
• Acidic moon in close orbit!
• Labyrinthine alien megastructure infested by acidic slimes!
• Are said acidic slimes originally from the antique vat on the rocky world in the Asteroid Belt? I'm starting to suspect so...

Sometimes prompts work best when they're non-sensical.

Slime aside, this isn't a wildly habitable-seeming star system. It would be very easy for me to say, "Well, this must be that unexplored system in the upper-right quadrant." But let's force the situation a little. Let's say I have to pick one of the populated systems.

I'm going to make my life a little easier and say it's one of the systems with a "Service Station" in it.

Where would it make most sense for the Service Station to be located? Probably just on the edge of the system. Perhaps by a certain Super Giant with a claustrophobic slime problem?

Maybe the service station itself has been over-run by the acidic slime?

I think that sounds pretty good. You've got instant stakes: a ship that needs refitting, a station crew in danger, a narrow warren of station halls and maintenance tunnels filled with acidic slime. Sounds like a dungeon to me!

One-Roll Planet Attributes

It's pretty important to me that the final PDF version of the P&P system has as little flipping back and forth as possible, so I wanted to make sure I got as much of this process on a two-page spread as I could. As such, I decided not to write a draft in a separate word processor, as I have with other parts of P&P. Instead, I developed it right in Affinity Publisher to try to make it all fit. 

I'm not going to be able to fit the d100 Extra Flavor table on these pages, but everything else got squeezed in. Rather than try to transpose it all into Blogger form, I'm just going to post a screen shot of the rules:

The d100 Extra Flavor table isn't close enough to "being there" to be worth posting about yet. In the mean time, I want to test the core system out a few times to see if it generates really boring systems over and over.

One-Roll Star System

One of my favorite RPG books to just read through is GURPS (4E) Space. I have, due to whatever sickness I suffer from, read the sections about generating star systems and planets probably a dozen or so times over the years. It's a very nifty, nitty-gritty, crunchy experience of discovering what kind of star(s) your system has, what kinds of planets would most likely orbit it (them), how large their orbits would be, where the Habitable Zone for each system is likely to be, etc. It's pretty exhaustive.

It's also pretty exhausting.

I've gone through the process, I think, four times for no reason other than my own amusement and I think I've wound up with a star system full of dusty dead planetoids that is hard to imagine wanting to explore, let alone colonize, pretty much every time.

You can force the system to give you a Garden World, but that always feel vaguely... dishonest? Like a cheat code.

Somehow, despite the high-esteem to which I hold the system, the end result always leaves me feeling let down. "I cranked through all these tables for this?"

To give you a sense of the fun you've been missing out on, here's what it looks like:

It's like this for, like, 40 pages.

It's very cool. But it's very much a slog.

So, I'm always on the lookout for faster ways of generating star systems and planets and, well, there are actually a number of options for doing this quickly on the computer. 

Donjon offers star system creation in three different flavors, in fact: Star Wars, Traveler, and Generic. The generic sci-fi one pumps out results pretty similar to what you would get from GURPS Space. And you get it instantly, rather than chugging through a bunch of tables and spinning the multiplication crank.

But for me, this has two shortcomings:

1) It's cool to know the exact radius and surface gravity of a planet. It's nice, I like it. But also who cares? It's like if every time I rolled for weather in Dolmenwood it told me: it's 78 degrees F and then told me separately what the humidity was. Just tell me if it's hot or mild!

2) It's actually too fast. While GURPS Space may be laborious, it also takes long enough that your keep thinking about how to implement whatever ice-rock feature you've just rolled up will fit into your story or game. So when a Star System generator spits out the bare stats of a planet, my mind goes blank. There's no spark.

It is fun to know that my habitable planet's gravity is 77% that of Earth as opposed to, say, 73%. Fun, but not useful. 

I really don't want it to seem like I'm knocking these systems. I'm sure they work for other referees or world builders. They just don't hit the right notes for me personally.

There's writing advice that goes something like, "Write the stuff you want to read." I'm going to try to take this advice, as amended: "Write the tables you want to roll on."

One-Roll Star System Generator

I lied. Technically, there are two rolls:

First, to determine the type of star your planets orbit.

Because the point of this process is rapid development, I’ve limited the following table to the least-exciting Main Sequence Stars (dwarfs), presumed to be in the middle of their lifespan, because this makes them the most-likely candidates for evolutionary success. They're more stable and long-lived than other stellar options.

If you want a more “realish” distribution of star results, use d100. 

If, on the other hand, you don’t want to roll Red Dwarfs over and over, use 1d10.

Main Sequence Star

1d100	1d10	Type
1-76	1-5	M-Type
77-88	6-7	K-Type
89-96	8	G-Type
97-99	9	F-Type
000	10	A-Type

M-Type Stars (Red Dwarf)

.3	.6	1	1.5	2	2.5	3.5	4.5	5.5	7	8.5	10	12	14	16	18.5	21	23.5	26.5	29.5
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20

K-Type Stars (Orange Dwarf)

.3	.6	1	1.5	2	2.5	3.5	4.5	5.5	7	8.5	10	12	14	16	18.5	21	23.5	26.5	29.5
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20

G-Type Stars (Yellow Stars)

.3	.6	1	1.5	2	2.5	3.5	4.5	5.5	7	8.5	10	12	14	16	18.5	21	23.5	26.5	29.5
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20

F-Type Stars (Yellow/White)

.3	.6	1	1.5	2	2.5	3.5	4.5	5.5	7	8.5	10	12	14	16	18.5	21	23.5	26.5	29.5
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20

A-Type Stars (blue/white)

.3	.6	1	1.5	2	2.5	3.5	4.5	5.5	7	8.5	10	12	14	16	18.5	21	23.5	26.5	29.5
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20

Determine Planetary Orbits

The second roll is the big one. Here we determine what planets go where.

Each die represents a planet (don't use the 10s die):

d4: this die represents your Small Terrestrial Planets (ST). e.g., Mercury, Mars, the Moon, etc.

d6: represents Medium Terrestrial Planets (MT). e.g., Venus, Earth

d8: represents Large Terrestrial Planets (LT). e.g., super-Earths or mini-Neptunes

d10: represents asteroid belts (AB)

d12: represents Ice Giants (IG) e.g., Neptune, Uranus

d20: represents Gas Giants (GG) e.g., Saturn, Jupiter 

Steps:

1. Drop your dice

2. Interpret Results: each die result represents the planet’s distance to its parent star

3. Adjudicate Ties:

1. If a Small and Medium terrestrial planet are on the same orbit, replace them with an asteroid belt

2. If an asteroid belt coexists with any planet, the planet “wins” and gains a ring system

3. In all other circumstance, the larger planet “wins” and is upgraded to a larger class of planet: e.g. Large Terrestrial Plant → Ice Giant → Gas Giant → Super-Jupiter

4. Determine Number of Moons: subtract 2 from each die roll

Example 1

• G-Type Star

• d4: 4

• d6: 4

• d8: 4

• d10: 6

• d12: 8

• d20: 20

d8 would normally be a Large Terrestrial planet, but since over the course of its development, it ate up d4 and d6, it’s an Ice Giant instead. But it’s also too close to its parent star (coming before the asteroid belt), so its atmosphere has been stripped away and resulted in a massive Ocean Planet (OP).

d10 is an interrupted Asteroid Belt (AB).

d12 is an Ice Giant (IG)

d20 is a distant Gas Giant (GG)

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
			OP		AB		IG												GG

Moons:

• d8: 4 - 2 = 2

• d10: asteroid belts don’t have moons, but they may have moon-sized planetesimals. 6 - 2 = 4.

• d12: 8 - 2 = 6.

• d20: 20 - 2 = 18

We’ll determine moon types and orbits later.

Example 2:

• M-Type (Red Dwarf)

• D4: 1

• D6: 4

• D8: 5

• D10: 1

• D12: 5

• D20: 13

d4 & d10: I’m doubtful that a Small Terrestrial planet could hold onto a ring this close to a star, but Red Dwarfs are pretty small, so let’s say it managed to maintain a ring of dust and small debris.

d6: A Medium Terrestrial planet which would have been in the CHZ of a star like the Sun, but here is frozen, out in the cold.

d8 & d12: The Ice Giant eats the Large Terrestrial planet.

d20: 13 is normal Gas Giant (GG)

.3	.6	1	1.5	2	2.5	3.5	4.5	5.5	7	8.5	10	12	14	16	18.5	21	23.5	26.5	29.5
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
ST			MT	OP								GG

Moons:

d6: 4 - 2 = 2

d12: 5 - 2 = 3

d20: 13 - 2 = 11

Example 3:

• K-Type Star

• D4: 2

• D6: 6

• D8: 7

• D10: 5

• D12: 1

• D20: 3

This is a chaotic one! It’s sort of a weird, dense, inside-out star system.

D4: Small Terrestrial Planet, right in the middle of the CHZ.

D6: Medium Terrestrial Planet, quite frozen.

D8: Large Terrestrial Planet, also frozen.

D10: Asteroid Belt

D12: Is an Ice Giant--but orbiting its star at less than 1 AU! That makes it an Ultra-Hot Neptune. These weird planets which are not well-understood by science. But see Glossary.

D20: to make things crazier, this star also has a close-orbiting Gas Giant. Most likely, the GG and UHN migrated inward from their original, unstable orbits. They probably threw other orbits out of whack, which is maybe why the terrestrial planets are on the outside of the system rather than on the inside. The exterior planets might even be migrating out of the system depending on how jarring the transitions of the UHN and GG were.

What a weird doomsday scenario for anyone that might have evolved on the MT planet.

.3	.6	1	1.5	2	2.5	3.5	4.5	5.5	7	8.5	10	12	14	16	18.5	21	23.5	26.5	29.5
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
UHN	ST	GG		AB	MT	LT

Moons:

UHN: 0

ST: 0

GG: 1

AB: 4 planetesimals

MT: 6 - 2 = 4, but if it originated from further in the system it probably really only has 1 or 2.

LT: 7 - 2 = 5

Where to Next?

So, obviously this is a little clunky as it stands. I'm hoping to clean it up and make a nice, readable PDF in the coming weeks.

I don't really think there's a reason to have fractional AU distances on the system tables past Orbit 10. Does really matter much if a planet is 23.5 AU rather than 24 AU from it's star? I mean, I'm sure on an astrophysical/planetary scale it matters, but does it matter to you?

The process for setting up moon orbits is pretty much identical to this, with a planet instead of a star, but I think it needs more thought before I post it.

Anyway, let me know what you think!