Alternate Venuses

Three tables to roll an alternate Venus (or Venus-like) world for your old-school campaigns.

 General Planetary Conditions
1. Dense (crushing) Atmosphere, unbreathable, surface temperatures high enough to melt lead.
2. Dense (crushing) Atmosphere unsurvivable by humans at low altitudes, high altitude contained habitats survivable but oxygen supplement needed to breathe outside habitats.
3. Dense Atmosphere unsurvivable by humans at low altitudes, high altitude jungle environment habitable.
3. CO2 rich atmosphere hot but endurable, filter mask required to breath outside habitats for human.
4. Thick but breathable atmosphere with surface ravaged by toxic clouds that periodically rain insidious acid rain.
5. Oxygen rich atmosphere requires filter masks to breath, frequent vast fires create they cloud deck that blocks out sunlight keeping surface survivable (aside from the frequent fires).
6. Otherwise breathable atmosphere tainted by gases bubbling from the vast seas of rotting biological matter. The seas are a riot of grotesque life-forms in an aggressive Darwinian contest.
7. A Seeming tropical paradise save for the toxic atmosphere which would kill humans in minutes.
8. A steaming world spanning Tropical jungle filled with dinosaurian life.
9. A riot of fungus-like growths dominate the lowlands in such profusion the spores are dangerous to human life. In the uplands isolated communities struggle to keep the infestation at bay.
10. An ocean world wracked by and ever storm filled sky conceals a vibrant and diverse aquatic ecology in the depths of the oceans.
11. A steaming ocean world  where the only surface is vast island-mats of vegetations. Great beasts of immense size swim in the seas mostly ignoring the relatively pathetic surface life that clings to the island-mats.
12. A world choked in the gases of a once great technological civilization. Little pockets of life exist isolated in precarious local ecologies but on the main the seas, land, and air are filthy with wastes from the fallen civilization.


Native Intelligent Species (roll 1d3, if more than one choose one to be dominant)
1. Blind Spiked Crustaceans
2. Levitating Cephalapods
3. Sentient Bivalves
4. Tripodal Fungoids
5. Chthonian Horrors
6. Communal Vegetable Intelligence
7. Gargantuan Insects
8. Large Singing Snails
9. Savage Reptilians
10. Sophisticated Myriapods
11. Machines from an elder civilization
12. Forgotten Atlantean Colonists/Amazons




Native Technology (roll 1d12 for dominant culture, 1d8 for others)
1. Non-technological society
2. Primitive/Stone Age; tools shaped directly from raw goods in the environment
3. Pharaonic; Chariot-like vehicles and pyramids
4. Bronze Age; catapults and small ships
5. Medieval; castle, swords, and handwritten books
6. Steam Age; an age of industry and science overtaking older way of life
7. Diesel Age; roughly analogous to the middle of the 20th century
8. Crystal Age; harmonic vibrational weapons and healing crystals
9. Space Age; Orbital weapons, Superalloy
10.Bio-Tech; Cultured materials and bio alteration
11.Psychotronic; Astral Detonators, Psychoactive beat
12.Cosmic; appears to be magi-tech to primitives


Some of the general conditions seem like they would prohibit much in the way of local species being around. Those that do seem out of place could be in isolated habitats (dungeons, domes, towers, redoubts, spaceships), micro-environments, just a notion to describe long lost ruins, or the undead remnants of a previous civilization.

Sample:
Dense Atmosphere unsurvivable by humans at low altitudes, high altitude jungle environment habitable. Crustaceans and Insectoids with medieval technology battle it out over control of the lowlands while the remnants of an Atlantean colony struggle to survive in isolated mountain citadels with their slowly failing crystalline technology (they are ignorant of the fate of Atlantis on Earth).

SciFi world generator system notes.

Last Fall I posted a quickie and general world generation system and noted I had an older one I used for traveller that I was updating to the 21st century. Some of it is here in this post, it's a big old mess of charts and a few notes, it's incomplete but I felt like sharing and wondered if anyone else out there would ever be interested in seeing more?

World Class

RR	Ring
AS	Asteroidean	Under 0.0001 Earth Masses,Small Minor Planet
SD	Sub-Dwarf	Under 0.001 Earth Masses, Large Minor Planet
DD	Dwarf	Between 0.01 and 0.001 Earth Masses
MM	Mercurian	Under 0.1 Earth Masses but over 0.01 Earth Masses
ST	SubTerran	0.1 to 0.5 Earth Masses
TT	Terran	0.5 to 2.0 Earth Masses
XT	SuperTerran	2-10 Earth Masses
CH	Chthonian	2.5-25 Earth Masses
HN	Helian/Neptunian	10-50 Earth Masses
JJ	Jovian	50-200 Earth Masses
XJ	SuperJovian	Over 200 Earth Masses, up to 80 times the mass of Jupiter
BDW	Brown Dwarf	A cool dim near-star

Hot Zone World Table (roll 2d6, 1d6 times)

2	SD - Sub-Dwarf
3	DD - Dwarf
4	MM - Mercurian
5	ST - SubTerran
6	XJ – Super Jovian
7	JJ – Jovian
8-9	TT - Terran
10	XT - SuperTerran
11	CH - Chthonian
12	HN - Helian/Neptunian

Warm Zone World Table (roll 4d6, 1d6-1 times)

4-7	AS - Asteroidean
8-9	SD - Sub-Dwarf
10-11	DD - Dwarf
12-13	MM - Mercurian
14-15	TT - Terran
16-17	JJ –Jovian
18	XJ – Super Jovian
19-20	ST - Terran
21	XT - SuperTerran
22	CH - Chthonian
23	HN - Helian/Neptunian
24	BDW - Brown Dwarf

Cold Zobe World Table (roll 2d6, 2d6-2 times)

3	AS - Asteroidean
4	SD - Sub-Dwarf
5	DD - Dwarf
6	MM - Mercurian
7	TT - Terran
8-10	JJ –Jovian
11-12	HN - Helian/Neptunian
13-14	XJ – Super Jovian
15	ST - SubTerran
16	XT - SuperTerran
17	CH - Chthonian
18	BDW - Brown Dwarf

Determine World Size within a Class

2d6-2, if result is 0 roll 1 d6 on 1-3 go Down A World Class, 4-6 use size 1; on 10 roll 1d6 on1-3 use size 9, 4-6 go up a world class

(Many more charts/tables after the break. I had to trim a bunch just from the selection I'm posting here. )