The World Ship

When I originally created the world map I crash landed an alien ship on the north pole. I was just thinking, it's like the big ID4 mother ship crashed on the planet. Then I looked up its dimensions and started playing with maps... Its big, about four times a Death Star big.

What follows are some of my scratch notes and half formed ideas for this location. It started as prep in case my players went there, but now I'm wondering what a full campaign would look like using it as the setting. Beware what follows is more sword and planet and is massively inspired by Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu.

Dimensions of the world ship

First lets look at is length and width (converting all to miles and hexes), it's 370 miles long and 298 miles wide. That's about fifteen 24 mile hexes or four of my 96 mile hexes, given I gave it 1-3 96 mile hexes on the original map I need to shrink mine a little. I'm happy to go about 240 miles long and wide.

The first problem I'm going to have is the height though, at 233 miles I have a big problem... Some reference points, mount Everest is 5.5 miles high. The upper atmosphere is 20-30 miles up (edge of stratosphere). So, first, lets shave those pylons off, taking it down to around 70 miles, still too much. Lets dig it in a little, it crashed so will have dug in a decent distance. So the crust is 30 miles deep for continental crust.

So, lets make it 54 miles in height without the pylons, nine 6 mile hexes (The pylons would be lying somewhere along its crash path. Its dug in 18 miles down, but the lowest deck was shaved off in the crash making it only 12 miles deep. This ship would have had a third dorsal pylon, but it and the top deck were shaved off in the war against the gods. So above ground it goes up 24 miles, to the upper stratosphere.

Settling in at 240 long, 240 wide and 54 miles high this impact should have destroyed this planet's surface on impact. Only sorcery explains why all life was not destroyed. If there were clouds, this more than pierces them, its four times bigger that Everest, mountains formed at its base are dwarfed by it. Not that you could view them from the ground outside as the area outside the broken hull is bathed in radiation.

Mapping the world ship

So maps, first, I'm thinking it's like a manta ray, so going with that shape. In the campaign 24 miles hexes it would look like this (larger hexes are 96 miles):

All the grey hexes are ship, the outer crust is broken and burned and exposed to radiation, but the inner sections are still habitable. Zooming into 6 mile hexes my template map was too small, but I got all the inner zones (larger hexes are 24 miles).

For the 6 mile hexes I put in some marking points of interest. Now that I have mapped it out it makes me think... you could run a whole campaign in this thing! There is enough room and height here for several empires and factions to exist. If I limited each "deck" to a mile I have about 42 maps, maybe 7 by six mile decks would be easier. Decks above and below this would be cross sectionally smaller the more they move from the ground level deck shown here.

Ideas and factions on the world ship

But what is it, this ship that is? It is a harvester, but not a planet harvester, a god harvester. It travels between worlds to eat gods, siphoning up their divine energy. Inside its core it would digest gods (is there one still there half eaten? Is it even a god from this world? What if it was released?). The visitors would do this to harvest the energy they need to power their technology. After all what do you think those energy crystals are made of that you fire your plasma pistol with...

It would have reality shields, anti-magic zones to protect the ship from godly powers and sorcery. This is why a physical assault would have been staged. These machines would be in various states of operation making magic onboard spotty.

It would have gardens, zoos and water reserves as big as oceans. There would be creatures harvested from across the galaxy for experiments (many new and exotic monsters). Maybe it would also have bugmen stowaways who learned a long time ago how to avoid visitor observation.

Their would be factions onboard, a core visitor faction would still control the central core and power systems. They can't repair or recharge the ship but would be sitting on the biggest power crystal cache on the planet.

Human survivors of "creator" military units that stormed the vessel would be present in the ship, most likely the hangers. Human and Visitor Hybrid scavengers would inhabit many of the outer hull segments, salvaging and building technology for sale.

If their are Endjinn onboard they would also be remnants from the god war. The question is are Iron Giants or Steel Artificers still alive or present here? To the rest of the Endjinn communities on this planet these molds no longer exist, but the last remnants were a part of the forces that attacked with the gods and the creators. (My players found an Iron Giant in stasis and it joined the group as a henchman, but they think Rex is the last of his kind, what if he isn't?)

Elves and dwarves no longer exist on this world, both are said to have departed. But elves were involved in the attack, if there were survivors they could be here.

Their may be other visitor factions, slave casts and lesser casts. I wonder why they wouldn't group up with the others?

What next

This one is a slow cook, I think like any campaign map I need to add places of interest. Map out factions and monsters etc. But it certainly did spark my imagination.