Planetary Conditions

Hey All, I am currently working on an article that details the types of conditions or items one might find on a planet. It is mainly useful for when you create a planet, or for if GMs and FMs want to spice up a planet for their plot (adding more danger to it perhaps) it also helps to add more depth and flesh out the planets as well.

I am still adding conditions to it but if people have ideas to add then please post em here.

You'll find the WIP article here: Planetary Special Conditions

One important thing, is avoid cliche planets. A planet should have more than one climate. If you really must make a desert world, water world or ice world. Then you need to think why is the planet that way. What happened, is the sun dying and so the planet is in a perpetual ice age. Or the opposite, the sun has swollen up and so the planet is being slowly cooked.

Yea, I can probably add another header to perhaps explain some of that so that a player doesn't need to create a description on their own (unless they WANT to)

http://www.onewest.net/~dollan/ARCpclindex.html

This is where I get all the info for all the various hellholes that chelti like to inhabit. Why continually make Gaian or strictly terrestrial planets when you can live in a place called an "Acidic Hothouse"?

Oooooooooh wowzers. Where was this when I was working on the Broltese Star System?

This would be really cool with more fleshing out/making it more prominent/linked within the faction guide. Hell, maybe this would be a good start to a "creating (good) planets" guide.

Stars get brighter when they're dying, not dimmer, so it's not likely to find a world that froze due to its star dying out. (If it was far enough away to survive the process, it was probably frozen to begin with.) Most ice worlds are simply far from their star in the first place, though not so far that their atmosphere freezes on, that's a different category. Water worlds usually just had a lot of water from the start. It's a common problem for superterran planets, due to their high MMWR. Superterran planets are unlikely to be dry, unless their oceans were boiling off in the past.

'Desert worlds' are a special case. The way the term is used is often confusing. A world isn't a desert just because it's dry, a true desert world still has an atmosphere and life despite being arid, otherwise it's just an ordinary barren planet. They're likely to be small and have thin atmospheres, since that makes it easier to lose water to space, without encountering a runaway greenhouse effect.

The above description doesn't apply to 'ice planets'... they're often literally made of ice, with rocky cores instead of iron ones. Ice planet with life on them will probably be rare, just like proper 'desert planets' are. Habitable planets are rare, in general. Ammonia planets are a fun type of 'ice planet', but complicated. Essentially, they need a stable red dwarf star and very specific conditions, but they might be able to generate life made of living high explosives. I'll have to work on that later.

I took the article and merged it into the Guide to Planets, which needs serious work/cleanup, by the way.

@Navian: You could edit your post above into the guide?

Yup, I'll work on that today.