Megastructures, an article in Strange Horizons, is all about fantastically large objects in science fiction — “any single artifact that challenges human preconceptions of size,” from Dyson spheres to space elevators and Halo’s ring.
The best of these are awe-inpsiring — excellent fuel for worldbuilding and campaign design, as well as being just plain cool. (I freely admit to being biased: I’m a huge sci-fi buff.)
This article offers a good overview of around a dozen of the best-known sci-fi megastructures, suitable for use as locations for set-piece encounters or backdrops for entire campaigns. (Via Metafilter.)
Funny, I was just reading up on Dyson spheres the other day on Wikipedia. 🙂 Definitely a cool concept, and just the sort of thing to get the creative juices floating.
Thanks for the article, looks like a good read and a quick perusal shows at least a few things I’ve never heard of before.
Great ideas! The campaign world I am currently creating exists inside a Megastructure similar to a Dyson sphere.
The world itself resides in a planet-sized shell(with the as-yet unoriginal name ‘Sphere’), with continents and islands ‘floating’ and revolving independently inside in layers, and a core made up mostly of the refuse discarded over thousands of years from the other layers (it’ll be great fun bombing those living on lower layers with huge chunks of rock!). The Sphere itself illuminates the continents, so there is no natural darkness and no one knows about stars or other worlds, creating a self-contained cosmology. I haven’t decided what the Sphere is yet, but with working ideas ranging from a transport ship of some ancient race or an astronomical power source created by aliens. (or something even more fantastical if I can come up with it!)
(Shameless plug: As many others, I’ll be incorporating the Evil Overlord idea as well, with perhaps one of the groups possessing ancient technology and knowing some of the secrets of the world.)
Weis and Hickman do a good job of developing good fantasy mega-structures in their Death Gate Cycle.
I do enjoy mega-structures, though I haven’t worked them into my games. Probably because the sheer scope of the structures usually assumes a very powerful race to create them…
First real game I ran was a fantasy set in a dyson sphere, easiest way I could thick of to set up a night and day cycle in a inside out world was to make the sun a flat disk and spin it fast enought that every part of the world got 12 hours of sun and 12 hours of a cold dimly lit moon which could cycle the excess heat back into the sun.
By setting the disk at a slight angle it gave shorter days in the norther part of the sphere and longer in the southern, and since a dyson sphere set into a spin to provide gravity would have little or no gravity at the poles, the sun tilt ment that the north pole was a inacesable artic wasteland and the south pole was equally inacesable due to the heat.
One problem I never addressed would be a correcting mechanism for the constant build up of frozen water in the north.
Alan: Well, a physical sphere would be unstable, but Dyson’s original concept was not a sphere but a “cloud” of power collecting satellites that effectively enclosed the star… Not as cool but maybe more practical. 😉
Thorin: I’ve been working on something similar, but a fantasy version. I just declared the setting to be an intersection of the Elemental planes (sort of an inverted Prime Material plane I guess): with Water as the shell, Fire as the center, Air inbetween, and Earth as “floating” masses that every one lives/wars on. Now I just have to felsh out the Flying-Steampunk-Shadowrun culture…
Spleen:
Awsome idea… here’s a thought about your northern exposure problem: Since it’s nearly in zero-g at the axis (with some pull towards the ‘sun’) just rule that giant icebergs regularly break off, then drift/migrate towards the sun, but then disintegrate/evaporate and fall as rain. Imagine, with good eyes, or a telescope you could predict when the monsoon was coming from weeks out… “Oh crap! That’s the largest rain-berg I’ve ever seen. Prepare for the floods, we only have a month to get ready!”
It would also provide a reason not live in certain “wet areas”… making them more exotic.
Ooh, the Death Gate Cycle — I’d forgotten about those books! I quite liked the first three, but the fourth one was bad enough that I never finished the series. Definitely a good example of fantasy megastructures.
tlorin: Your Sphere campaign looks neat — I hope you do give the EO thing a shot with it!
Thanks. I’ve taken to heart the ‘Lead with the cool stuff’ philosophy you talked about in one of the first posts I read here as I’ve been designing it. It’s been enjoyable to build a world more around ‘fun factor’ being first and foremost and less around ‘balance’, which has always been one of my hangups.
Larry Niven wrote a great essay about megastructures called “Bigger Than Worlds.” It’s in his book _A Hole in Space._