Prepping a planet for a session requires embracing some tropes and being generous with your hooks.
I grew up on location-based prep. “Here’s a dungeon or a hexmap. It tells you where and what everything is.” In contrast, you can’t prep a planet at that level of detail, unless maybe it’s one of the planetoids visited by The Little Prince!
Fortunately, the tropes common to space opera simplify what players expect:
- Planetary Nation – The planet has one government, unless there’s a civil war. Heck, it might be all city (like Trantor or Coruscant).
- Single-Biome Planet – You know, it’s a Desert Planet (like Dune or Tatooine), a Swamp Planet (Dagobah), an Ice Planet (Hoth), etc.
- Planet of Hats – Everyone is a warrior, a cowboy, a gangster, …
Players expect a planet intended for a session or two to be basic compared to a planet that might be used for an entire campaign.
You do typically want to add a twist:
- A gangster planet, because the aliens learned about gangsters from an Earth book left behind.
- A cowboy planet, because the humans were kidnapped and transplanted from the American West by UFOs during the 1800s.
- A planet where Rome never fell and now televises gladiator fights, because technobabble and rule of cool.
I like mashups myself: “Start with a standard set piece (e.g., a Western town) but give it a twist (e.g., a Western town with Viking architecture).” (From the Planet of the Week GM Guide.)
I’ve run my Hintutubí 1 Science Mission three times now, and the last time I ran it I left out a key detail when describing the planet. Then the players did poorly on their Investigation and missed the hook: there’s a metal complex with active power down there on the planet surface!
At one point the PCs were looking for shelter, and I had them detect the complex on their scans. Yes, I made sure that they had landed near the one thing I’d prepared for that region of the planet. The session went fine, but I realized I should have leaned into the hook earlier and given them more info. That planet has three interesting hooks to investigate in what starts out as a leisurely science mission before becoming something more urgent.
For some of the planets I’ve prepped, I’ve tried to go beyond the tropes—I’ve had multiple cultures, different biomes, different hats for aliens to wear.
Lampblack & Brimstone’s The Perilous Void is great here. As I wrote in my review:
The planet creation system is incredibly detailed, yet abstracted enough to be suitable for gameplay, and makes me want to run a “planet of the week” campaign.
But the system is fractal, as well. Early Star Trek often had one-dimensional planets with one race of aliens or with one settlement. Later Star Trek improved on this (e.g., two types of Andorians, more kinds of Vulcans, etc.). The Perilous Void lets you generate a range of communities: mega-cities, space stations, outposts, and villages.
While Perilous Void has two excellent tables for generating planet names, including one based on Greek/Latin words, I typically look to other languages for thematic names. For instance, Planet of the Week takes place in a multicultural future where all the planets were renamed by the Exoplanet Speculator Fund. (Because having to track real exoplanet research and nomenclature would be too limiting to me and offer too little gain.) Bǝbǝku-ma is Sai Gumuz for “big”; Tàiyáng Rén is Mandarin Chinese (simplified) for “sun people”; Hintutubi is Tagalog for “large dragonfly”; and so on.
Prepping planets doesn’t have to take a world of effort.
Image credit: Photo by Harsh Kumar on Unsplash.
