Creating worlds

 I have about a month until my first Game session set in space. We've briefly ventured into space before, but this will be different. The players will have characters that live in space. This creates a problem for the GM: he needs to make sure they understand the world they come from. One of the main reasons for setting the original Game on 20th-century Earth was so that I didn't need to explain to players how the universe "worked". Everybody knows how fast a car goes, where New York is, and so on. I didn't have to invent the basic world and I didn't have to explain it.

But now we're in space, and the player-characters will be visiting different planets, and they should know what those planets are like in advance as they're in the middle of an established empire where they all grew up, not exploring strange new worlds. So I have a month to create enough planets to make the universe feel real and lived in.

Here's the first one: Plunderers Planet.

There is no apostrophe in the name. This isn't me being illiterate, it's deliberate. Why? I don't know, that's just what it's called.

I've invented a lot of new terminology in this article that I'm not going to bother explaining because I don't need to. Oh ok, I will:

A Boluscanomical Unit is obviously analogous to the human term Astronomical Unit. How big is it? It's not important to the Game. I could work it out if I needed to, using Kepler's laws and so on, but I don't need to.

A Cycle is a Boluscan year. It's slightly longer than an Earth year I think, but the exact length isn't important. If I ever need to work it out, then obviously I will also need to work out the length of a Boluscanomical Unit, but I can't be bothered.

The parsec is the only Earth-centric unit I'm using. I could make up a Boluscan equivalent, but I like the idea that through random chance a parsec from Bolusca is the same as a parsec from Earth (which I can make work if I choose suitable figures for the BU and Cycle).

I have a scale for planet types ranging from "B" (exactly like Bolusca, which basically means exactly like Earth) to "B-" (slightly inhospitable) and so on. Plunderers Planet is a B-. This makes more sense to me than saying "Class M", which might be a more familiar term but doesn't really mean anything.

I think that's everything. But none of that is important for the players, they only need to read the Plunderers Planet article so they know what the expect when they visit. If they visit. This article in no way implies that I'll set a scenario there. Of course I won't. What would be the point, nothing interesting ever happens there. Honest.