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Old 08-02-2011, 09:45 PM   #2
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 1 planetology and geography

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Originally Posted by Brett View Post
Spoiler warning: if you are going to play in my campaign Red-Blooded Earth-Men, reading this thread will materially diminish your enjoyment thereof.

If you go ahead anyway, please do not convey spoilers to the other players. If you do, your character will be skinned alive, and I will not give you any cheesecake.


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In September I am going to start running a new campaign inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series (especially Master Mind of Mars), S.M. Stirling's In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, Jack Vance's Tschai (Planet of Adventure) series, and the movie Stargate. The premise is that four Australian soldiers are mysteriously transported from the battlefields in France in December 1917 to the habitable, indeed inhabited, surface of Mars.

I think my main suspender of disbelief is going to be the fact that in 1917 respectable scientists confidently reported that Mars was habitable. Apart from that enabling assumption and the mysterious transportation I want to put as little strain as possible on my players' SoD. (Don't flog a willing horse, and all that.) So I want to smear, to shade fin de siecle astronomy into what my players know of science*, maintaining the "This is what they believed then" while avoiding cognitive-dissonance-inducing clangers. That means re-imagining Barsoom completely, starting with its planetology and geography.

I toyed for a while with using one of the lovely modern relief maps of Mars, and simply adding water to a level that would cover about a third of the surface. On further consideration I decided that that would be a false step, because in the first place that would draw the mind towards modern ideas of Mars, and in the second place many features of the Martian surface are not compatible with a breatheably thick atmosphere: many million-year-old craters, for instance, would have eroded away in a few millennia if the atmosphere were breatheable.
True. On the other hand, Mars is closer to the asteroid belt and they knew that perfectly well in 1917. So it would be plausible that even a habitable Mars would have more, and more recognizable, craters than Earth, since impacts would come more often. That would be completely in keeping with 1917 knowledge.

So I wouldn't hesitate to throw a few weathered craters from big past impacts in where it seems reasonable, just don't overdo it.

(Also, if iron and other heavy metals are scarce on Mars (not an unreasonable possibility as seen in 1917), such craters might be sources of meteoric metal, and thus considered valuable property/strategic resources.)

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So I think I'm going to start with either Lowell's or Schiaparelli's map of Mars and add detail.

My grandmother's 1890 Handbook and Atlas of Astronomy tells me Mars' size correctly, that it's density is 7/9 that of Earth, and that its surface gravity is 0.38 gee. I think I have to stick with those figures. It tells me that Mars is a planet" not nearly so mountainous as Earth", with all its continents lying are a rather low level. And it assures me that there "undoubtedly take place there all the phenomena of rain, hail, and snow". Observing oceans and rather small ice-caps, it concludes that the coldness due to Mars' great distance from the Sun is moderated by the heat-retaining power of the atmosphere, so that the polar regions are drier than on Earth.
Here is where you might split the difference between 1917 and 2011. Mars should be drier than Earth (to provide an excuse for canals), but it would also be reasonable if the atmosphere is charged with greenhouse gases to partly explain why it isn't as cold as it really is. The greenhouse gas content in the air might be artificial, a remnant of the Old Martians planetary engineering from their glory days.

(The greenhouse gas might be some complicated synethetic molecule, and maybe is has subtle biological effects on Terran life, too.)

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On the other hand, I think my players will strain to believe in a Mars that is not colder than Earth: perhaps the icecaps are small because there is little water?
That fits the setting (Barsoomish), but there needs to be enough water to justify a canal system, too.

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Also, I wonder whether it would reassure them to acknowledge the fact that Mars really has enormous differences of relief, and the tallest mountains (Olympus Mons and the Tharsis volcanoes) in the solar system.
I probably would. I might make most of the continents and dry seabeds relatively level with each other, this would make the canal builder work more plausible, too. But it might be nice to have a few supermountains, maybe holy to the locals, or cursed, or both...and having Hellas and Argyre still be there as old impact sites makes sense in light of the nearness of the asteroids.

(Also, if you're going with 1917 settings and thinking, remember tha the asteroids might well be the remnants of an exploded habitable world...)

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What geographical Easter eggs might add an air of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing tale?
I think I might keep the Valles Marineris, and put oases of lush greenery in its depths, places were the former lush biosphere of Old Mars endures, hidden cities full of villains and monsters and victims, and as a testament to the former power of the Old Martians, imagine a bridge over the Valles Marineris...if it's still usable, it might be strategically vital, too, in an age of more primitive technology and skills, a way to bypass the long trip around the canyon...
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