Planetary Terrain: Mountain

Mustafar

Mountain environments are often poor in resources for life, simply because fluids drain away downhill and erosion scours away the soil. At very high altitudes, even air is scarce! Mountains often support lots of “micro-ecologies” specialized for a particular altitude-GURPS Space, page 142

The era of fiction that inspired Star Wars mostly discussed mountains in terms of the conquest of nature: the attempts by many explorers to summit Mount Everest, for example.  These represent tales of man's conquest of nature.  But Star Wars also draws heavily from the mysticism of the East, especially from traditions that make their home in the Himalayas.  Mountains brim with mythology, representing the place where one can come closest to God, or the ultimate location one seeks in his quest.  Villainous mountain hide-aways, especially volcanic ones, also feature in the sorts of stories Star Wars draws inspiration from, which certainly inspired the final battle of the prequels on Mustafar (depicted above).

Planetary Terrain: Jungle

Yavin 4 

Jungle settings are lush, dominated by huge autotrophs (trees, on Earth). They support lots of life, but often that life has evolved an array of defenses. Jungles offer many specialized niches for life to exploit.-GURPS Space, page 142

Star Wars draws much of its inspiration from the pulp and swashbuckling era of fiction, and the earlty 20th century was crazy about jungles.  You can still see its legacy today in the ridiculous number of legacy gorilla characters in DC comics, many of which hail from this Tarzan-dominated era.  These stories featured a very cinematic take on the jungle, full of damsels trapped in quicksand, muscular jungle-men wrestling with tigers or anacondas, and primitive, spear-wielding tribesmen just waiting for a heroic explorer to either worship as a god or to devour in their pot.

Obviously, these stories had little bearing on reality, but the fascination with the jungle came from real events. Explorers did dive into the depths of African, Asian or American rain-forests to uncover to ruins of lost civilizations, sometimes even rewriting the history books as they did so, or contacting previously uncontacted people, entirely new cultures to explore, or discovered entirely new species (sometimes even fabled "cryptoid" species that had been dismissed as legend, like the saola), as well as coming to understand the importance these rare, dangerous and beautiful places have for the entire planet.  These stories represent the same sort of fervor and fascination many people have for sci-fi to this day: the chance to discover something new.  As such, the cinematic idea of jungles and science fiction suite one another very well.

Planetary Terrain: Island/Beach

Ahch-To

Island/Beach environments are an interface between land and sea, and as such are especially suited for amphibious beings... Islands in particular can support isolated micro-ecologies where species evolve in unusual ways.-GURPS Space, Page 142

Star Wars borrows heavily from the pulp and swashbuckling stories of yesteryear, often adding sci-fi window dressing in the process.  In those older stories, islands represent an undiscovered, savage paradise.  Sometimes the stories feature "man against the world" survival stories, with castaways trying to survive, but often in such stories survival comes relatively easily (as opposed to survival stories from the arctic) and focus on interesting innovations and exploration of the islands.  Islands also feature strange cultures, dangerous cannibals, beautiful maidens and any number of exotic things to discover before packing up on your ship and sailing off.

Star Wars doesn't feature many true island planets (Ahch-To is probably the first to be featured in the actual films), likely because in the sort of story that featured islands, those islands were replaced with planets.  That is, in a story about  man who traveled to a beautiful paradise where he fell in love, then to a rugged desert island where he survived, to a volcanic island where he rescued his love, the space opera version would feature a beautiful paradise planet, then a desert planet and then a volcanic planet.  Instead, it might be better to think of "island planets" as oceanic planets, likely the homeworld of an aquatic or amphibious species, or islands are just one part of a larger planet that features other biomes.

When focusing on islands themselves, it's useful to think about what other biome might be on the island: a jungle island is very different from an arctic island.  In fact, it's so useful to think about islands this way that I won't.  This post will focus exclusively on islands qua islands, which means I'll focus exclusively on things unique to islands and on that specific water/land interface, as well as a general discussion of water in general.  Thus, while one might expect a discussion of islands as jungles, or islands as mountainous, I'll reserve those elements for their specific biomes.  So, for example, if you want to create a planet full of little arctic islands, I encourage you to open up my discussion of arctic terrain as well islands.

More importantly, this means that when I discuss islands, I am necessarily discussing small islands.  This is not to say that the British Isles or Greenland are unworthy of discussion, but there's no functional difference between being in a British forest and a German forest.  What we're worried about here is exclusively the interface between land and sea.

Planetary Terrain: Desert

Tatooine

Desert environments are any place where the necessary solvents or nutrients for life are scarce. There’s often plenty of energy, just no stuff to use. Deserts also tend to extremes of temperature. Life tends to be scarce, clustered around oases.  -GURPS Space 142

Star Wars is space opera, and like most space opera, it steals from other stories and set them in space.  The pulp stories borrowed by Star Wars featuring a desert come most often from an era fascinated by "Cowboys and Indians", "Arabian Nights" or the exploits of Egyptian Archaeologists.  Thus, stories set in a desert environment might feature hard survival of man against nature, but often features sudden, whooping raiders, bandits, ancient civilizations, exotic religions and strange ruins.  "Dune" also left an indelible mark on Star Wars, and so we might also see stories of how deserts make men hard, and how hard men conquer soft men, to themselves become the soft men of the oasis, as depicted in the poem "Ozymandias."

Planetary Terrain: Arctic

Hoth

Arctic environments are any place where the temperature hovers around  the low end possible for that type of life. For Earth life, it’s places where it’s often below freezing.
-GURPS Space, page 142

Star Wars is space opera, and space opera tends to steal the stories of its day.  The stories Star Wars most likes to steal come from the early pulp era, when fascination with arctic expeditions to the world's poles ran high.  Space opera stories set in arctic environments tend to borrow on themes of loneliness, isolation and man-against-nature survival found in the works of Jack London or in the harrowing accounts of the Shakelton expedition or other arctic survival tales.  Thus, the arctic is a world of struggle, tribulation and isolation, where people worry your tauntaun will freeze solid before you reach the first marker, or where you wander for days in empty wastes only to find a single outpost.

Planetary Environments: an Introduction

You know Star Wars happens in space not because it literally happens in space (I've only seen characters don space-suits and take a space walk in a few cases in the extended universe), but because it takes place on strange, alien worlds like Tatooine or Dagobah.  Star Wars has planets.  Psi-Wars, obviously, needs equally dramatic and interesting planets to remind players that the action is taking place in a crazy sci-fi galaxy.

Planets for a space opera setting like Star Wars require a specific approach, however.  We could dig out GURPS Space and use their planetary creation system, but that would give us detail we don't need (the orbital order of planets don't matter, nor do barren worlds that the PCs will never visit).  I'm not saying you can't use it, I'm saying our needs are different. In Star Wars, planets serve primarily as backdrops and, perhaps, challenges.  They largely fit the various terrain types offered by GURPS: Dagobah is a swamp world, Hoth is an arctic world, and Tatooine is a desert world.  All of them have breathable atmospheres and shirt-sleeve temperatures, even the volcanic planet of Mustafar.  In fact, the planets track so well with GURPS terrains and are so far removed from the GURPS Space mechanics that I would argue that we should replace the latter with the former.

It was raining that morning on (Planet) Mongo-Jerry Pournelle

Now, a lot of sci-fi fans hate the idea of a single-biome planet, and I see their point.  Setting aside the realism of a single-biome in a setting with force blades and hyperdrives, single biome planets tend to "shrink worlds down."  All of Dagobah is a single swamp, all of Hoth is a single glacier, and so on.  However, in practice, Star Wars tends to enjoy rather thoroughly detailed worlds: Tattooine has Mos Eisely, the vast wastes in which the Sarlacc can be found, the badlands where Tusken Raiders roam.  Naboo has the rich, verdant plains owned by the Naboo, and the swamps/jungles that the Jedi first crash-landed in, and the underwater civlization of the Gungans.  Star Wars actually has rather rich world-building because it tends to revisit the same worlds again and again, and sets so much of its action planetside (as opposed to Star Trek, which tends to keep most of its drama on their starships, to keep set-costs down).

Thus, in this series, I'm not going to discuss planets-as-biomes, but offer some ideas and rules for how terrains you might place on a planet.  After all, Iteration 5 is about generic setting building, about offering us the tools we need to quickly put together a new setting, and that includes conjuring planets from nothing.  If you wish to create a completely arctic world, feel free.  If you want to spend days working out an entire planet in excruciating detail, you're free to do that too.  I would suggest that you don't map worlds in full detail, because I honestly think most stories won't stay in one place long enough for it to matter.  I think it's enough to have 1-5 biomes, with 1-5 interesting landmarks/set pieces each, in the same way that you can get far with a culture by giving them a handful of interesting distancing mechanism.

A plan for my Patrons, redux

One of my more valued readers criticized my recent post, and I think he had a top-notch point.  Why is my plan for my Patrons patron-only?  Wouldn't it make sense to tell everyone what the plan is, going forward?  That way you could judge for yourself whether I am worth your patronage?  What will you be getting for your money?

Originally, my intent with that post was to point out to my Patrons, the ones I already had, what my intent for the future was, because some people have given money already and that money's coming out of their wallets on February 1st, and I wanted them to know that they were getting something for their money. That said, I think he has a great point, let's do that.  Let's talk about what my plan is for my blog, for patron and non-patron alike, moving forward.