So here’s a table you might want to use in your next science fiction or plane hopping campaign.
I came up with this while starting to prep for a science fiction campaign I’m planning to run some time soon. It’ll use the Traveller5 rules set, but that’s just a side note.
So right now I try to read as much science fiction stuff as I manage, things like Dune of course, various stories by Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, parts of the Darkover Series by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I also binge the original Star Trek series for inspiration, and I marvel at pictures of imagined futuristic and psychedelic landscapes. Do an image search for “science fiction landscapes” or “psychedelic landscape” … see what I mean?
I adore those retro-futuristic, quite possibly substance induced visions of the future, conceived in our own 1960ies to 1980ies.
| d66 | The land … | The sky … | Over the horizon … |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | coagulated caramel | greyish purple | a spherical station |
| 12 | spined blood colored hills | color of thick dark blood | a majestic dragonlike flyer |
| 13 | blockish hills like colorful toffees | a deeper blue | the hazy view of a ringed planet |
| 14 | green rolling hills | foggy anthrazite dust | a distant tubular structure |
| 15 | lush tropical forrest | a freakish green | myriads of tiny insects |
| 16 | endless patterns of industrial structures | a gradient of cobalt blue to sparkling cyan | a moon that appears too close |
| 21 | endless waves of industrial waste | the color of sulfur | shuttles trafficking |
| 22 | flat with occasional polyhedral shapes | monotonous light blue | a disk shaped station |
| 23 | like the rendering in an 8 bit computer game | sepia colored with feathery pink clouds | some batlike flyers |
| 24 | a rough desert | like colored inks bleeding into each other | foreboding dark clouds |
| 25 | swampy with occasional cone shaped hills | almost white | the cube like silhuette of the high port |
| 26 | a sea of turquois doted with myriads of steep hilled islands | a crisp blue with floating ice crystals | egg shaped pods traveling silently along invisible lanes |
| 31 | an endless storm beaten ocean | a cold blue mist | a distant air ship |
| 32 | a sprawling metropolis | hazy red | large birdlike creatures, homing in on their nests for sun down |
| 33 | wavey hills of reflecting metal | eternally black, an endless starfield | streaks of toxic industrial smoke |
| 34 | oddly peaceful rural idyll | overcast with dense clouds | a massive globular structure |
| 35 | a maze of deep gorges and canjons | purple with yellow clouds | a perfect rainbow |
| 36 | hills like burned sienna and a meandering river of quicksilver | a wierd multicolored haze | a strip of green light |
| 41 | a lattice of multilayered longitudinal structures | a perfect gradient of blues | two disks of setting suns |
| 42 | a decaying primordial forrest | soaked with moisture | the waning crescent of a close moon |
| 43 | vast yellow steppe smelling of creosote | a turmoil of reddish clouds and gases | silhuettes of floating islands in the far distance |
| 44 | iridescent vastness of transparent foilage | filled with floating seeds | the bright shining of the galactic core |
| 45 | an endless plain of fine white sand | purple and black | a veil of rain in the distance |
| 46 | hills of purple grass dotted with hulking grazers | a canopy of stars | colorful reflections |
| 51 | rust colored steep mountains | a foggy purple to dark blue gradient | feathery floating particles that reflect a distant light |
| 52 | towering pillars piercing through the mist | scatterd grey clouds and beams of sun light | a hazy premonition of what might be tomorrow |
| 53 | dusty rubble and harsh craters | a perfect gradient from dark blue to almost white | some fog far in the distance |
| 54 | dunes of colorful sands like ground marble | a dull grey | multicolored clouds bathed in sunlight |
| 55 | a sea of white dunes | a gradient of light blue to almost black | the plume of a space ship, rocketing into the sky |
| 56 | seemingly organic bulging formations | a dazzling bright yellow | looming cubic masses of floating habitats |
| 61 | semi-liquid multicolored plains | swirls of multicolored gases | chromium reflections of a ship passing by at low altitude |
| 62 | vast terrasses of grey slate | a low haze of blue | the notion of deep space |
| 63 | floating islands of rock on a sea of lava | a dull, monotonous light blue | some pink reptilian flyers |
| 64 | a large coastal delta, with mangroves and occasional villages | a gradient from orange to red | the hazy silhuette of a close by artificial world |
| 65 | a semi-liquid oily surface | a gradient from sulfuric yellow to cobalt blue | towering stalagmites of the arcology |
| 66 | monumental ice capped mountains | criss-crossed with red stripes | the shining swirl of the galaxy |
Just in case you don’t know what d66 stands for: this is a random table to be used with two six sided dice. Roll once for each collumn, and just roll two regular dice and read the first one as tens (a 5 becomes 50 for example) and the second die as ones (just read as is). You could use differently colored dice, so you can tell which one denotes the tens. I simply roll which ever two dice I can grab and read the one that lands more leftish of the other as tens.
Have fun spacing out!