Interesting Geographies - Worlds that are not planets

[Eldan]

So, most campaign worlds I've seen still tend to go for planets or sufficiently planet-like environments (like infinite flat expanses) for their worlds. This serves nicely for most worlds, but I'm looking for more out-there, creative ideas.

What else have you seen? What's your ideas?

Flying islands tend to be a staple of unusual worlds, to a degree that I'm bored by them even more than by normal planets. Everyone does it.

I was thinking of starting a world with a vertical organization. Either something like an infinitely tall mountain, spire, tree, etc. with settlements and countries on the outside or the inverse, an infinitely deep pit or shaft with settlements on the walls.

Other ideas?

[CavemanDan]

I like the idea of an infinite pit that's not actually going through anything (mainly for the mind-blowing purposes).

A couple of ideas:

A world that is a sphere but it's hollow and everything is on the inside of the surface (on a clear day you can see the continents on the other side).

A literal interpretation of the viking Yggdrasil and have a world that is a giant tree.

On the corpse of a dead god (humanoid or otherwise) so people who live on the feet can declare war against the arms.

That's all I've got for now.

[Eldan]

Isn't Hollow Earth already a D&D setting, one of the older ones that's not used as much anymore?

Anway, it's a nice idea. As is the tree, works with my vertical idea, and you can have some interesting and varied biomes. Dwarves that bore through the stem and thereby endanger the tree. Leaf-hopping elves. Races that grow from or farm giant patches of mold on the bark. Tons of flying species, of course.
Or for a quest hook: looking up, you can see something falling towards you. Judging by the fact that is growing larger but seems still far away, it must be miles across, hundreds perhaps...
The first expedition to circumnavigate the stem! Perhaps, as Columbus tried, some race is trying to go around the long way so they don't have to cross some hostile nation to get to a valuable trade good. Of course, no one knows what's on the dark side of the stem...

[Storm_Of_Snow]

A world that is a sphere but it's hollow and everything is on the inside of the surface (on a clear day you can see the continents on the other side).

If there's a star in the middle (and it's about 92 million miles in radius), you've got a Dyson sphere, while the cylindrical version with the star outside is an O'Neil habitat.

You could have a Ringworld as well.

How about a planet sized living creature with a silicon-based biology? Dangerous creatures would be the creature's immune system.

[Everyl]

A few unusual world ideas (with sources, if I can remember where I first saw them):

A gas torus (Integral Trees, by Larry Niven): A huge ring of atmosphere around a star with no land at all. Animals have means of flight, plants generally orbit, and large ones become habitats for animals that like a place to "land."

A solid torus. Kind of like a ringworld, but habitable on all surfaces, and probably requires even more magical handwavium to make work. Makes for very interesting navigation.

The interior of an enormous interstellar colony ship (Other threads on this forum). With sufficiently large "decks" carrying large populations of living specimens, the residents could, in theory, forget they're on a ship at all after enough generations.

A World Tree (Various myths and video games). Sometimes the tree is just a connector between "worlds" held in the branches or roots, sometimes the world is literally a tree, with people living on or in the enormous trunk and branches.

Speaking of vertical "worlds," IIRC Dark Sun has a region called the Jagged Cliffs. It's a long line of sharp, vertical mountains tall enough that an entire culture of (IIRC) halflings developed on it whose members rarely, if ever, set foot on horizontal ground in their lives.

[Knaight]

There are always space stations. This can even work in a fantasy game, if set up right - a sufficiently large station that gets claimed by nature*, where tech is mostly lost can work in a mostly lower tech setting. The ancient artifacts will have a particular feel to them, and there's probably still some oddly sophisticated technology showing up (maybe space craft, used in such a way that only the least sophisticated functions can be used), but it could work.

*Inasmuch as the plants brought aboard in the first place are nature.

[Jendekit]

There was one setting I ran a game in where the landmasses were orbiting a world-core in ten layers that I called Terra Plates. The first plate had a japanese inspired elven nation, a Vlad Tepes inspired nation, an arabian inspired nation ruled by half-orcs, boar riding halflings that behaved like the mongol hordes, I could go on and on. By the fifth plate down, sunlight was about as strong as a heavily overcast day, and by the seventh there was no sunlight except on the rare occasions that the plates aligned.

[Grey Watcher]

A solid torus. Kind of like a ringworld, but habitable on all surfaces, and probably requires even more magical handwavium to make work. Makes for very interesting navigation.

Actually, most of the early Final Fantasy games work out to this. (Yes, they're intended to be globes, but the simplifications used when circumnavigating means it'd have to be a torus if it were truly three dimensional.)

The interior of an enormous interstellar colony ship (Other threads on this forum). With sufficiently large "decks" carrying large populations of living specimens, the residents could, in theory, forget they're on a ship at all after enough generations.

For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky?

There are always space stations. This can even work in a fantasy game, if set up right - a sufficiently large station that gets claimed by nature*, where tech is mostly lost can work in a mostly lower tech setting. The ancient artifacts will have a particular feel to them, and there's probably still some oddly sophisticated technology showing up (maybe space craft, used in such a way that only the least sophisticated functions can be used), but it could work.

*Inasmuch as the plants brought aboard in the first place are nature.

Sounds like some of the early Might and Magic games (ie 1 through 5, since from 6 onward, they take place on planets).

[ThisIsZen]

Well, for a setting that sort of starts off earthlike but rapidly becomes completely dissimilar, points to Blame!. An enormous city-structure so big that one of its storage rooms is larger across than the distance from Earth to Jupiter, and which is constantly expanding outward, eternally. But the machines and the net that runs the whole thing are ancient and there's no one alive with the correct genetic sequence to actually connect to the net, so the machine runs on in perpetuity but to the remaining living occupants it's little more than a silent, distant force of nature that might remake their homes on a whim to serve some arcane designs.

I'm also rather fond of a setting idea that got spitballed up somewhere or other. An enormously wide, infinite shaft in which a seeming-infinite amount of debris is falling in perpetuity. Everything's always at terminal velocity but there are enormous chunks of rock and earth big enough to support even entire cities, and people move up and down vertically by essentially 'skating' the edges of the tunnel or parachuting. Unless you have the equipment to skate properly, though, contact with the edge of the tunnel would be a quick way to earn a messy, messy death.

[SiuiS]

My very favorite idea so far was an utter inversion, playing on primitive ideas of the heavens.


The players were all dead heroes or great villains, really momentous players of the world. They awoke to a strange land that was a seemingly infinite value world, full of mountains with no flat land in sight and teeming with two wild, focused and fanatical armies clashing against each other without rhyme or reason, constantly.

Each mountaintop was a settlement of some advanced variety, and each cluster of mountains on a mini range had similar cultures and internecine politics. They were all jerks but everyone had to play ball with them because.... On a fault even time scale (I think I picked a fortnight) the entire valley floor (up to the top of most mountains, actually!) flooded with this dark, mysterious rush of water and fog, only the glittering jeweled tops of the city states poking above the black frothing ocean. It all burned away again after a fortnight in some cataclysmic cycle that blasted it away to great gouts of fog, all being sucked I to a a tangle blue green vortex high in the sky where the noonday sun would be.


The players were in the heavens, traveling the distances amongst the stars (mountaintop city states) and the ocean of night flooded the planes until the sunship burnt them away in a constant cycle.


Another version is the "you are on the moon" one, which works best as someplace political prisoners are banished to. The catch? The earth is flat, and the moon does not or it the earth so much as the earth disk flips like a great coin... Underneath, in the dark of the planet where only crags and rocks and vines grow, where torrents of water pour off the side, there be monsters. As the earth disk turns it spews the latest generation of dragons and worse from the black bowls of hell onto the lunar world.

[Eldan]

Another version is the "you are on the moon" one, which works best as someplace political prisoners are banished to. The catch? The earth is flat, and the moon does not or it the earth so much as the earth disk flips like a great coin... Underneath, in the dark of the planet where only crags and rocks and vines grow, where torrents of water pour off the side, there be monsters. As the earth disk turns it spews the latest generation of dragons and worse from the black bowls of hell onto the lunar world.

Actually playing on the underside of a disk world could be interesting, too. For some cataclysmic reason, the surface is uninhabitable, so the races migrated to live in cities hanging between giant stalactites, vast veins of gems and minerals and the roots of the world tree. There is still day and night, because the sun and moon go under the disk, but the sun's light is dim, because it is already struggling with the world serpent every night, which tries to eat it.

[The Hanged Man]

One cool place I've set a game was on the body of an imprisoned Elder Deity with a roughly humanoid body shape. Chains vast enough to host cities were strung off of him via hooks sunk into his flesh, so that he couldn't stir in any direction without them tearing him. The far ends of the chains were anchored through stable dimensional portals to the Four-Hundred Worthy Worlds, although only a dozen or so of those were still inhabited and in peaceful contact with each other. Because of these portals, his prison dimension was used as a major travel hub and diplomatic neutral ground. There were a few well-defended settlements on his actual body, but mostly people kept to the Chain Cities due to the presence of titanic parasites. While necessities could be imported from the Anchor Worlds, an industry had built up around raiding the god's flesh for exotic materials, and this provided the chief occupation of "Adventurer" type PCs. Once through the portals, Gravity was oriented roughly towards the god, so the Chain Cities tended to have vertical construction, unless there were two or more chains near each other to build a framework between.

[VoxRationis]

One I've thought of is a world shape based on one of the d orbitals: two spheres, one on either side of a torus.

[brian 333]

Many shapes and sizes come to mind: the inside of a turtle's shell, for example, with the carapace being the sky and the plastron the ground.

Michael Moorcock, inventor of the Law vs. Chaos axis of the D&D Alignment System, proposed a shapeless world in the midst of Chaos which could be expanded by great heroes of Law going off the edge of the world and driving back Chaos, but of course, Chaos constantly nibbles at the edges.

A small star with a gas envelope around it which, at a certain distance from the star is about 15 pounds per square inch in pressure, could conceivably have slowly orbiting bodies of various sizes scattered about, some in eccentric orbits, others in stable virtually circular ones, for a variety of worlds which can be accessed by flying creatures. Flying to the moon is a real possibility in this scenario, but you may wish to consider the effects of gravity on larger and smaller bodies than the one the creature comes from.

Discs, tiered discs, and other geometric shapes are always a possibility. A tetrahedron or octahedron would make mapping relatively simple, but those points would have weird gravitational effects, being, basically, very tall mountains. Perhaps the gravity of such a body creates a spherical gas envelope and the points of a tetrahedral world extend out of the world's atmosphere. In a Spelljammer type world these would quickly become spaceports.

A rather unique shape would be a cylinder that reaches infinitely down or up, (as opposed to a hole.) A sun, (or suns,) orbits this body at a close radius so that it makes day-long days, while its moons orbit at farther distances, (and are thus larger.) If gravity on this world is vertical then the creatures live in a series of layers or balconies, while if the gravity is oriented to the axis of the cylinder they live on a 'flat' ground with close horizons to east and west with longer views north and south. Those who live directly under the path of the sun are in tropical zones, while those who live in regions to the north and south live in more temperate or even arctic zones. These arctic zones may separate one sun's region from another, making the crossing of them very rare for the world's inhabitants. Of course, straight depends on your point of view, so over vast distances the 'cylinder' may bend without the bend being noticeable by the inhabitants. (Earth's oceans look flat, for example.) What the inhabitants see as a perfectly straight cylinder may in fact be one very long strand of spaghetti twirling away in a plate of marinara... err, the cosmos.

[jqavins]

Rocheworld.

Rocheworld itself is a double planet in which the two elements are close enough that they share an atmosphere. Each element is also deformed into an egg shape by the gravity of the other.

One lobe is virtually all ocean and the other is completely dry. The nice thing about it is that the author, Robert L. Forward, is a physicist first and SF author second, so the orbital mechanics actually work.

[EisenKreutzer]

A setting I designed some years ago was a flat disc-shaped world with the world of the living on one side and the afterlife and the realms of the gods on the underside. You could actially dig your way to the afterlife if you were persistent enough.

The sun and the moon were magical artifacts crafted by the gods to provide light for their followers.

[Avaris]

A conveyor-belt setting, where new land is formed at one end and consumed at the other. Depending on how fast the trransition is, there may be no permanent settlements, or it may be that nothing can survive more than a few generations.

A world which was once normal, but has been warped by overuse of portal magic such that where you think you're walking to is not where you end up. If you walk straight ahead you will end up in one place, but if you start walking from just a few feet to the right you end up miles away.

[EisenKreutzer]

How about a world with no fixed borders. The centre is solid and unchanging, and the farther you move from the centre the less coherent reality becomes.

This world is like a flat plane, but it has no edges or borders. It is an island of stability in a void of ever-changing and mutating magical potential. In the centre it looks like any other continent, with an ocean birdering it to the east and land stretching out to the west, north and south. But as you travel away from the central mass in any direction, reality starts to fall apart. The further you travel, the more mercurial it becomes. At first, the only thing you notice is that the wildlife becomes a bit stranger, a bit more colorful. Purple cat-like beasts the size of horses graze on red grass. Trees come to life and wander around, their huge roots serving as feet.
Magic becomes more potent here.
You go further, and the laws of nature start coming apart. Fire burns cold as ice, thrown rocks never land, sometimes even turning into birds or insects in mid-air.
Further on, and reality itself loses it's cohesion. The same day repeats the next day. The ground turns to glass, and on the other side are the bones and organs of a living creature. Trees turn to dust, blow on the wind and reassemble into strange beasts. Dreams spring to life, the past becomes the present, time slows, jumps and stops, and the unchecked forces of pure magical potential warps and twists every aspect of reality.

If you somehow manage to go even further, abstract concepts take physical form, and the entire world becomes a surreal nightmare.
There is no going further than this, as the concepts of movement and travel themselves lose all meaning. At this point, you and all of reality around you dissolve into pure potential. There is no coming back from this.

[...]

-A world made of a cluster of overgrown space junk that somehow developed an atmosphere

[Milo v3]

I had a setting where each "planet" was a colossal+(19) sized elementals that while slow moving, are still mobile. Another setting had each planes as a bubble that floated through space and collided with other planes temporarily (for maybe 40-150 years) physically making curved land that linked the two, and then the planes tainted each other before they disconnect and continue through space.

[Avaris]

A world of rooms and doors. No-one knows who built them, or what is outside them, but the entire reality is contained within enclosed rooms, some normal sized, others miles across. Some have windows looking out on a wide variety of landscapes, with no continuity from room to room of what is seen through them. Powerful magic prevents excessive damage to the structure of the rooms, but those persistant enough to breach it only find disaster and the destruction of their room. Food is grown in rooms with sufficient light, and many rooms have water supplied to them from an unknown source.

[Eldan]

A conveyor-belt setting, where new land is formed at one end and consumed at the other. Depending on how fast the trransition is, there may be no permanent settlements, or it may be that nothing can survive more than a few generations.

I rather like this one. I'd probably have it slow-moving. Maybe sub-belts of more or less constant climates, so that different cultures can form. Nomadic herders, moving ever eastward. Slash-and-burn agriculture in newly growing forests.

Actually, this world woudl have an almost infinite amount of resources. And there would be almost no reason not to despoil as much as one likes. After all, if we poison a river with quicksilver and burn a forest down, so what? It will be gone in five years anyway and we'll get a new, pristine one.

[Admiral Squish]

I keep having an idea for a sub-setting region that I really wanna write up a some point.

I call it 'The Flame Sea'. The basic idea is some deep-underdark mining race breaches into some sort of deep underground cavern. It turns out it's an area the size of Australia, a massive cavern formed by a dome of heat-resistant rock that floats on the planet's mantle. Floating islands made of rock-bergs drift in the molten stone below, some large enough to hold massive cities of lava-sailing peoples. Mining races bore into the sides of their home in search of the minerals they eat. Tribes of barbaric races crawl on the sides and ceiling and glide on the ever-present updrafts. There are 'aquatic' races that swim in the magma itself, and a plethora of monsters, both native to this plane and refugees from the plane of fire that found a home close to their own.

I haven't worked out the specifics, but I really think the area has some potential to develop.

[EisenKreutzer]

A world that has no Prime Material plane. At the intersections between the Inner elemental planes lies an enormous city. The inhabitants of this interplanar metropolis are elemental creatures, plane-touched mortals and various outsiders native to the Inner and Transitive planes. The city has four cardinal directions: Firewards, Earthwards, Waterwise and Airway. Travel too far in any direction, and you move from the centre to one of the elemental planes. Each elemental plane has a sub-urb of the main city.

[D2R]

Once I was considering a world akin to an infinite sponge, with cavities varying from barely travel-able passages to those large enough to build a city inside, inhabited by various races / factions, who originate from places outside of this world and are trying to rebuilt their home environments. I wanted different physics, too - it was supposed to have zero gravity conditions, but any objects other than the walls of the "sponge" (or maybe only *certain* materials) would have their own gravity fields to make things like more or less "normal" (non-zero-gravity) cities where you can actually walk - not swim in the air, flying fortresses and ships (NOT actually shaped like sailing ships, more like Spelljammer phlogiston spaceships, with open decks etc.) possible. It would've had pretty high level of available technologies, up to late XIX or even early XX century - high explosives, rapid-firing artillery, magazine rifles, machine guns and all - but with all tech originating from different places beyond this world and available only to certain groups or factions.

It was inspired by this art from an old magazine -

Spoiler

Show

- and, to some extent, the Spelljammer setting, with its strange-working gravitation and some other features.

It didn't go anywhere for a variety of reasons. Maybe the biggest problem was that everything looked just too "artificial" - too many assumptions were required to make it work properly without magic of any kind. And it was not supposed to be a magical world - just some superhuman abilities which are not necessarily supernatural.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Just remembered one - Eldar Craftworlds from 40k. Massive spacecraft with domes containing practically anything, linked by pathways and travel tubes that range in size from single person width alleys to multi-lane boulevards, and portals that allow access to a hyperspace network, theoretically allowing someone to end up anywhere in the universe, but actually restricted by damage and loss of exit portals.

[jqavins]

Once I was considering a world akin to an infinite sponge, with cavities varying from barely travel-able passages to those large enough to build a city inside...

Why not even smaller? Nooks that are only good as storage cabinets, mouse holes, porous walls, etc. The whole thing could be a fractle surface.

[...]

-I know you said "no floating islands," but I don't think this was your intention. A bunch of rocks floating down a lava river. Honestly, this probably wouldn't be inhabited, but it would still make a nice adventure planet/plane.

-I would describe it in more detail, but I think people would get the idea from this: Infinite Rainbow Road with dirt base and vegetation.

-A colony of insect-like creatures that house an extremely large civilization in one of their chambers. When the inhabitants reach a certain age, they are killed and eaten by the creatures. The inhabitants are aware of this and have no objections to the status quo. The souls of the deceased are not destroyed, but do also not leave the plane. It is suspected that they are used by the insects, but no one knows what for.

[brian 333]

-A colony of insect-like creatures that house an extremely large civilization in one of their chambers. When the inhabitants reach a certain age, they are killed and eaten by the creatures. The inhabitants are aware of this and have no objections to the status quo. The souls of the deceased are not destroyed, but do also not leave the plane. It is suspected that they are used by the insects, but no one knows what for.

I see Logan's Run here!

[Vereshti]

Besides a Dyson Sphere, there's also the concept of Dyson trees: a special plant is seeded on a comet and grows a canopy covering the surface, using sunlight and the comet's water to produce oxygen that can provide a breatheable atmosphere within carved-out spaces in the comet or the massive trunks and main branches. You could have massive forest fleets arrayed in orbit around a star and travelling through space. It's a greener version of the inhabited asteroid idea - literally!

Edit: Here's a speculative idea for the plant: the Yggdrasil Bush.