This is a small piece of art, with just under thirty full colour illustrations of distant, exotic planet scenes.
I think I found in in a comic book shop (Page 45, in Nottingham). You can get it over on bookshop.org though. It’s definitely worth having a physical copy. The paper and print are wonderful. The texture is lovely. The colour bold as heck.
There’s story told with each image, though I’d hesitate to say narrative. Which means we can use these fairly abstract things as inspiration. Maybe even use the questions each page evokes as a world building tool for our own exotic planes.
- What part of life are the players seeing this place in? It’s dying days? It’s very early stages of forming?
- How would life survive here? Your players may need to use waterbreathing spells or oxygen tanks, but what about the things that are already here?
- Which biomes are present here? Not just things next to each other, but beneath and above. All life on Earth is around the crust, barely stretching down a fraction of the planet, but that doesn’t need to be the case everywhere.
- Without predators, in what way does early life flourish? On Earth we’re around four billion years into evolution. Go back a few billion years, and you won’t find perfectly honed creatures, suited exactly for survial niche. There’d be thousands of species who don’t realise they’re doomed because they’re bad at living.
- Could life be planet sized? I watched this documentary about Pluto’s oceans once, and since then I’ve had idle daydreams about six or seven the football pitch sized whales that just float around, basking in the tiny rays of sun that reach them.
- How long does this place have left? That moon definitely looks like its on a collision course, given enough time.
- What’s the vibe? Peaceful? Dead? Filled with sneaky life?
Then remember, when you’ve decided a few things about your world, throw in some conflict. Drama makes the game.