MOSH: Environmental Scenario Design Framework

Via NASA

Planet generation is a topic I keep coming back to, trying to develop the perfect formula. This post has been percolating for well over a year at this point, long enough that I had actually forgotten the contents of my prior attempts (see here, here, here and here)

I have been fiddling around with this idea for a very long while now (I think this is a year+ draft?), and in doing so I have come to a revelation of sorts.

The revelation is this: In terms of making a functional component of a tabletop game, most planet generation tables are mostly useless.

They're certainly fun if you want to indulge your inner sci-fi writer for a while, and they are a useful tool in establishing the flavor and character of a location, but as a functional component of game prep? Not very useful.

(Stars Without Number's tag tables are of course very good - because they're about providing you with points of interaction.)

We can reduce all those tables of atmosphere and temperature and mass down to a binary: if you take off your helmet, either the planet kills you instantly or it doesn't.

If the planet is the sort that kills you instantly, your adventuring is either going to be inside a habitat or out in a suit. (For our purposes, gas giants and deep space are also included here.) If the planet is not the kind that kills you instantly, that's Basically Just Earth. This gives us three functional location-based adventure types:

• Habitat - An enclosed environment, ranging from the equivalent of a single building to that of a small country. There are nice thick walls and layers of safeguards between you and enough radiation to fry your progeny to the seventh generation.
• Out in a Suit - Outside of the habitat, you are both vulnerable to the elements and at significantly increased risk of finding yourself out of range of help or support.
• Basically Just Earth - You already know what this one is like, you live here. Basically Just Earth is not beholden to the clean kills you / does not kill you dichotomy. It can certainly still kill you, but not as fast as the others (usually).

I'm leading this all to the point that if we're going to be generating planets for Mothership, we should be generating them with a focus on one of these three adventure location roles.

Habitat

95% of the human population lives here, in the Iterative City and similar settlements. Monkeys in tin cans, in dome cities, in walled-off fragments of Earth.

Scale

1. Facility
2. Town
3. City
4. Metropole
5. Country

Type (Orbital)

1. Bernal Sphere - Rotating sphere.
2. O'Neill Cylinder - Rotating cylinder.
3. Stanford Torus - Rotating ring.
4. Beehive - Asteroid or iceteroid that has been burrowed into.
5. Tin Can - Little more than a pressurized can with thrusters and solar panels attached.
6. Gravity Balloon - A comparatively thin shell filled with enough atmosphere to keep it from collapsing in on itself.
7. Dyson Tree - An enormous, genetically modified plant fed on icy bodies and sustaining an enclosed atmosphere.
8. Freefall - Any type of large habitat with no spin-gravity components.
9. Decommissioned Ship - A spaceship that is no longer serviceable for interplanetary or interstellar travel, but can still serve as living space.
10. Modular - A collection of connected habitats, often of different types. Roll d3 for # of additional modules.
    

Type (Planetside)

1. Dome - The classic. Can't go wrong with a good dome.
2. Burrow - Underground is sometimes the safest place to be.
3. Lava Tube - Saves on digging costs.
4. Aerostat - Suspended in a dense atmosphere.
5. Hydrostat - Suspended on or underneath liquid.
6. Worldhouse - A crater or canyon is domed over, sealed, and terraformed in-miniature; kin to an enormous greenhouse.

Habitats will always be accompanied by some manner of support infrastructure (power generation, resource extraction and reclamation, food production, etc), though self-sufficiency is not a given and many habitats could be easily crippled or killed outright if cut off from the necessary imports,

The biggest hazard in a habitat is the enclosed environment.

• Your options for escaping or avoiding the threat are limited.
• You will be in close quarters with other people (if other people are present).
• You are more likely to be in a surveilled environment.
• Instant or near-instant death lurks on the other side of the wall.

Out in a Suit

Going out in a suit means that your number one priority is getting back to somewhere you can take the suit off. No one wants to go out in a suit, but sometimes circumstances will force your hand.

Why Are You Out In A Suit?

1) You need to travel between habitats.
2) External equipment needs repair or maintenance.
3) You are trying to reach a location.
4) You are trying to find a person.
5) You are investigating an event.

Environmental Hazards

The Rimspace Planet Generator from the Hull Breach folks has us covered here, and I'll be copying their tables mostly wholesale. I've added a fourth table for radiation and magnetic field just to even the horrible space dangers out, and I've added mechanical bits where the original tables implied them.

Temperature

1. Frigid - Extreme thermal protection required
2. Cold - Thermal protection required
3. Temperate - You don't need any special protection from the temperature
4. Hot - Thermal protection required
5. Burning - Extreme thermal protection required

Gravity

1. Minimal - 0-G training required
2. Low - Move with caution
3. Standard - You don't need any special adaptation to the gravity
4. High - Habituation required
5. Crushing - Strength training or exoskeleton required

Atmosphere

1. Negligible - Pressure suit required
2. Thin - Hazard suit recommended
   
3. Moderate - You don't need any special protection against pressure
4. Thick - Extreme winds and precipitation; Hazard suit recommended
   
5. Dense - Pressure suit required

Thin / Moderate / Thick could all technically be breathable, but that's for Basically Just Earth.

Rads & Mags

1. Extreme radiation - Surface exploration lethal
2. High radiation - Hazard suit required
3. Tolerable - You don't need any special protection
4. High magnetism - High electromagnetic interference
5. Extreme magnetism - Wireless devices useless

The biggest hazards while Out in a Suit is running out of resources

• Air supply will be limited
• Suit integrity is critical to your safety.
• Communication is more likely to be unreliable.
• You are more likely to be far away from help.

Basically Just Earth

You will neither freeze nor fry instantly here, and neither the gravity nor the atmosphere will crush you flat. It might not look like Earth, but the fact that you can stand there and say "It doesn't look much like Earth" is a miracle. This doesn't mean that the environment is safe, only that it will not immediately kill you. It is functionally Basically Just Earth, which means you might still need specialized survival equipment, genetic modification, or something else of that nature.

Basically Just Earth has the widest array of hazards to choose from, to the point where you can choose what you like from the lists above and elsewhere. But the biggest ones will be:

• Availability of open space means its easier to find yourself isolated.
• Earthlike worlds can support more factions (and faction conflicts)
• Spaceship escapes are a lot less practical
• We all know you want to put weird aliens here, go right on ahead.

 

Final Thoughts

So there you have it. Not particularly complex, but I think it's a good framework to bolt additional complexity on top of. MoSh works best when it is scenario-focused, so sketching the boundaries that will shape a scenario is the obvious first step.

Hopefully clearing this article (which had been sitting at like, 90% done for that year+) will get the others flowing along to completion. Damn my perfectionism - when it flares up, it flares up bad.