Okay to start off Apparently there are people living on Oerth's moon?
Luna is a silver moon, similar in appearance to Earth's moon, that completes its cycle of phases, from new to full, approximately once a month. It has an atmosphere and surface life but no native sapients.
Celene is an aquamarine moon with no atmosphere. From Oerth, it looks slightly smaller than Luna. It completes its cycle of phases once per season. It's said to have had an atmosphere millions of years ago, but shed it after being bombarded by asteroids. Its natives are long-extinct, but some ruins of their civilization remain.
Beneath the surface of Celene, underdark creatures like drow, illithids, and kuo-toa have settlements.
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Never did Spelljammer, what exactly does a Crystal sphere contain?
Generally speaking, a sun, planets, and moons, with stars embedded on the interior surface of the sphere itself. In Greyspace, the "stars" are gigantic gemstones that glow with positive energy. Greyspace is geocentric, with Oerth in the middle and the sun, moons, and planets all orbiting it. Note that Curley Greenleaf in Gygax's novel Saga of Old City contradicted this, claiming that Oerth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around.
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Is there anywhere else in the area that has intelligent populations that I should be aware of?
Most of the planets in Greyspace, as well as some of the asteroids, have at least some intelligent life. The gas giant Edill is populated by dragons. The gas giant Gnibile is populated by sentient undead (so, not "life as we know it"). The water world Conatha is populated by merfolk and sahuagin. Ginsel has a human civilization with mercantile city-states. Borka is a shattered world inhabited by orcs and goblinoids. Greela is home to elves. The Spectre has no native inhabitants, but there are colonies of humans, dwarves, elves, gnomes, and illithids.
Last edited by rasgon on Mon Oct 07, 2019 7:13 am; edited 1 time in total
Is Greyspace just detailed in the Spelljammer setting, or is it somewhere else?
The sphere is detailed most completely in SJR6 Greyspace, and more briefly in the Spelljammer: Adventures in Space boxed set.
The moons and their phases are mentioned in the World of Greyhawk boxed set, From the Ashes, Greyhawk: The Adventure Begins, Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, etc.
Luna is also described as an adventure locale in Return of the Eight.
Note that Curley Greenleaf in Gygax's novel Saga of Old City contradicted this, claiming that Oerth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around.
Curley knew what he was talking about. The whole idea of the geocentric Oerth system was taken from a throwaway line at the beginning of the 1983 boxed set that mentioned "the sun travels once around Oerth in 364 days." That same in-universe author also said "as is obvious, the Oerik continent is the major center of the world" and then went on to explain that all the other parts of Oerth were clearly unimportant and inhabited by savages anyway; it was pretty clearly meant to indicate that what he was saying, including the line about geocentrism, was to show the provincial and chauvinistic attitude of that narrowly-educated historian, and not to be taken as an absolute scientific fact of Oerth's star system. They just decided to take it as literal truth when they inserted Greyhawk into Spelljammer.
One cool aside in relation to this, in 201 CY the planet Borka was destroyed in the big space war between the Elves and Goblins (forgetting the name of it) and its destruction was observed by astrologers on Oerth. So when the LGG and other sources speak of the Five Wandering Stars, its possible that there were Six Wandering Stars before 201 CY, assuming Borka was observable and what the astrologers saw wasn't just a big explosion where they didn't know anything existed.
I was researching through El Raja Key and noticed a story about how a player realized a portal would that his character to Saturn and the player didn't want to risk going there. This was the OD&D era which of course is the same era as Gary's player's characters going to Mars/Barsoom. So, at least in the OD&D-pre-published era, I think the system was a heliocentric system. I still think that Oerth was going to be hollow and Venus would be habitable just because of the influence of Burroughs on Gygax. With that in mind, I'd argue that one of these two moons around Oerth may be hollow (a la Burroughs as well).
Oerth's solar system in Frank Mentzer's Aquaria campaign is wildly different from other versions. In his campaign, Oerth orbits the star Tau Ceti in Earth's far future. In Mentzer's campaign, the Tau Ceti system has two planets in the habitable zone; the third planet was named Poseidon by human colonists, while Oerth is the fourth planet from the sun.
I knew about Tau Ceti but I didn't know about Poseidon. I'm kinda fascinated right now by the OD&D era setting. So there's the Sun, Poseidon, Oerth, at least one moon, Barsoom, and somewhere I'm trying to find Kuntz' reference to Saturn and see what the other planets he was using. There's no search in my El Raja Key so I'm going to copy the HTML files and rename them to .txt so I can search inside them...
I knew about Tau Ceti but I didn't know about Poseidon. I'm kinda fascinated right now by the OD&D era setting. So there's the Sun, Poseidon, Oerth, at least one moon, Barsoom, and somewhere I'm trying to find Kuntz' reference to Saturn and see what the other planets he was using. There's no search in my El Raja Key so I'm going to copy the HTML files and rename them to .txt so I can search inside them...
Well, keep in mind that the Aquaria campaign isn't exclusively OD&D Era; Menzter has been running it online since the 1990s. He makes no claims that the solar system in his campaign is the same as it was in Gygax's campaign. I'm pretty sure there's no Barsoom in Aquaria's sky.
You should be able to search an HTML page with control+F.
Then he took out the extensive array of gems that all but filled the box and arrayed them on a blanket.
"Here," Curley Greenleaf said, placing down a huge sphere of uncut yellow corundum, "is the great globe of our sun. This emerald orb is Oerth, I think; that opal represents Luna, and the star-sapphire of smaller size stands for the blue disk of Celene," he continued, placing each piece in its correct relative position.
"These various stones are the spheres which accompany our world in its circuit of the sun... These round diamonds are stars, and the little black opals are the various moons and other celestial bodies whirling and spinning their pathways through the system," he concluded, not bothering to specifically place each of the smaller pieces.
...the two young adventurers watched their husky associate carefully examine and separate the many-colored array into two smaller piles—diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and so forth, even a large jacinth that Curley explained must represent the planet of Rao, greatest of the celestial spheres in the family to which Oerth belonged.
...the two young adventurers watched their husky associate carefully examine and separate the many-colored array into two smaller piles—diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and so forth, even a large jacinth that Curley explained must represent the planet of Rao, greatest of the celestial spheres in the family to which Oerth belonged.
-Rao would probably be analogous to Jupiter (father of the gods) in this thinking (Father of the gods); the senior god for the biggest planet.
I can't believe I missed this conversation!! How on Oerth did that happen?!
rasgon wrote:
There's an extremely pretty fan-created map of Greyspace in this thread on the Piazza, which was about Greyspace alone.
For sake of reference …
The artist, Argentmantle, actually did another version of Greyspace first, in this other thread. That one also has a close up image of just Oerth, sun, and moons.
The first version included all of the original constellations by Andy Miller from Oerth Journal #22's "Constellations of Greyhawk" article.
Unfortunately, when it was pointed out that he should credit the original author, he decided to make up his own constellations, instead. A massive loss to Greyhawk fans everywhere, in my opinion, because Argentmantle's artwork is amazing.
Here's the original version that matches all of the other fan-create sources for Greyhawk:
(Click the images to see a larger version)
Also, just to add to the conversation - Here's a astrograph of the orbits in the planetary system, including the moons :
(keep in mind, the orbits aren't actually perfectly circular)
Note that Curley Greenleaf in Gygax's novel Saga of Old City contradicted this, claiming that Oerth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around.
Curley knew what he was talking about. The whole idea of the geocentric Oerth system was taken from a throwaway line at the beginning of the 1983 boxed set that mentioned "the sun travels once around Oerth in 364 days." That same in-universe author also said "as is obvious, the Oerik continent is the major center of the world" and then went on to explain that all the other parts of Oerth were clearly unimportant and inhabited by savages anyway; it was pretty clearly meant to indicate that what he was saying, including the line about geocentrism, was to show the provincial and chauvinistic attitude of that narrowly-educated historian, and not to be taken as an absolute scientific fact of Oerth's star system. They just decided to take it as literal truth when they inserted Greyhawk into Spelljammer.
Yeah, I think the decision to make Greyspace a geocentric system created more problems than the novelty of it was worth. It really complicates how the moon phases play out, for one.
Yeah, I think the decision to make Greyspace a geocentric system created more problems than the novelty of it was worth. It really complicates how the moon phases play out, for one.
Out of curiosity, Rob, did you see the article I wrote for OJ31recently which talked about the possibility of a non-concentric or non-circular, slightly oivoid orbit for the sun that could possibly explain the moon phases?
"On The Path of Liga and Phases of Luna"
From the 'Lesser Lexicon of Astrography'
By Dean Limyrl of the Grey College Observatory
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