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Grenzland-Zine/issue05/landscapes
2025-07-24 23:19:27 +02:00

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.H1
46.656 Psychedelic Landscapes
.PP
Back in 2021 when I was preparing for a
.I "Traveller5"
campaign I binge watched
.I "Star Trek",
the original series and read
.I "Dune"
and a couple of other novels by
.I "Poul Anderson" ,
.I "Jack Vance" ,
and parts of the
.I
Darkover Series
.R
by
.I "Marion Zimmer Bradley" .
As to the visuals that go along with these stories, just do an image search for “science fiction landscapes” or
“psychedelic landscape” ... see what I mean?
I just adore those retro-futuristic, quite possibly substance induced visions of the
future, conceived in our own 1960ies to 1980ies.
This is Science Fantasy to me!
To inject these awesome visuals into our gaming I came up with the following
d66 table. My idea was to roll on this table when ever the characters would
land on a new world. I'm not sure if I used it even once while we played, but I still like it, and I feel it's a perfect fit for this issue.
.PP
Interestingly back then AI generated art hadn't caught on yet. Midjourney was
only released in 2022. But looking at the options we have today, rolling up a
couple of descriptions might make for interesting prompts. Personally I'd much rather
just imagine how this would lool like, or work out a shared imagination together with
our gaming group. That's the best!
.ad l
.TS
cblblblb
c lxlxlx.
d66 The land … The sky … Over the horizon …
11 T{
coagulated caramel
T} T{
greyish purple
T} T{
a spherical station
T}
12 T{
spined blood colored hills
T} T{
color of thick dark blood
T} T{
a majestic dragonlike flyer
T}
13 T{
blockish hills like colorful toffees
T} T{
a deeper blue
T} T{
the hazy view of a ringed planet
T}
14 T{
green rolling hills
T} T{
foggy anthrazite dust
T} T{
a distant tubular structure
T}
15 T{
lush tropical forrest
T} T{
a freakish green
T} T{
myriads of tiny insects
T}
16 T{
endless patterns of industrial structures
T} T{
a gradient of cobalt blue to sparkling cyan
T} T{
a moon that appears too close
T}
21 T{
endless waves of industrial waste
T} T{
the color of sulfur
T} T{
shuttles trafficking
T}
22 T{
flat with occasional polyhedral shapes
T} T{
monotonous light blue
T} T{
a disk shaped station
T}
23 T{
like the rendering in an 8 bit computer game
T} T{
sepia colored with feathery pink clouds
T} T{
some batlike flyers
T}
24 T{
a rough desert
T} T{
like colored inks bleeding into each other
T} T{
foreboding dark clouds
T}
25 T{
swampy with occasional cone shaped hills
T} T{
almost white
T} T{
the cube like silhuette of the high port
T}
26 T{
a sea of turquois doted with myriads of steep hilled islands
T} T{
a crisp blue with floating ice crystals
T} T{
egg shaped pods traveling silently along invisible lanes
T}
31 T{
an endless storm beaten ocean
T} T{
a cold blue mist
T} T{
a distant air ship
T}
32 T{
a sprawling metropolis
T} T{
hazy red
T} T{
large birdlike creatures, homing in on their nests for sun down
T}
33 T{
wavey hills of reflecting metal
T} T{
eternally black, an endless starfield
T} T{
streaks of toxic industrial smoke
T}
34 T{
oddly peaceful rural idyll
T} T{
overcast with dense clouds
T} T{
a massive globular structure
T}
35 T{
a maze of deep gorges and canjons
T} T{
purple with yellow clouds
T} T{
a perfect rainbow
T}
36 T{
hills like burned sienna and a meandering river of quicksilver
T} T{
a wierd multicolored haze
T} T{
a strip of green light
T}
41 T{
a lattice of multilayered longitudinal structures
T} T{
a perfect gradient of blues
T} T{
two disks of setting suns
T}
42 T{
a decaying primordial forrest
T} T{
soaked with moisture
T} T{
the waning crescent of a close moon
T}
43 T{
vast yellow steppe smelling of creosote
T} T{
a turmoil of reddish clouds and gases
T} T{
silhuettes of floating islands in the far distance
T}
44 T{
iridescent vastness of transparent foilage
T} T{
filled with floating seeds
T} T{
the bright shining of the galactic core
T}
45 T{
an endless plain of fine white sand
T} T{
purple and black
T} T{
a veil of rain in the distance
T}
46 T{
hills of purple grass dotted with hulking grazers
T} T{
a canopy of stars
T} T{
colorful reflections
T}
51 T{
rust colored steep mountains
T} T{
a foggy purple to dark blue gradient
T} T{
feathery floating particles that reflect a distant light
T}
52 T{
towering pillars piercing through the mist
T} T{
scatterd grey clouds and beams of sun light
T} T{
a hazy premonition of what might be tomorrow
T}
53 T{
dusty rubble and harsh craters
T} T{
a perfect gradient from dark blue to almost white
T} T{
some fog far in the distance
T}
54 T{
dunes of colorful sands like ground marble
T} T{
a dull grey
T} T{
multicolored clouds bathed in sunlight
T}
55 T{
a sea of white dunes
T} T{
a gradient of light blue to almost black
T} T{
the plume of a space ship, rocketing into the sky
T}
56 T{
seemingly organic bulging formations
T} T{
a dazzling bright yellow
T} T{
looming cubic masses of floating habitats
T}
61 T{
semi-liquid multicolored plains
T} T{
swirls of multicolored gases
T} T{
chromium reflections of a ship passing by at low altitude
T}
62 T{
vast terrasses of grey slate
T} T{
a low haze of blue
T} T{
the notion of deep space
T}
63 T{
floating islands of rock on a sea of lava
T} T{
a dull, monotonous light blue
T} T{
some pink reptilian flyers
T}
64 T{
a large coastal delta, with mangroves and occasional villages
T} T{
a gradient from orange to red
T} T{
the hazy silhuette of a close by artificial world
T}
65 T{
a semi-liquid oily surface
T} T{
a gradient from sulfuric yellow to cobalt blue
T} T{
towering stalagmites of the arcology
T}
66 T{
monumental ice capped mountains
T} T{
criss-crossed with red stripes
T} T{
the shining swirl of the galaxy
T}
.TE
.PP
Just in case you dont 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.
.PP
Have fun spacing out!
.Au lkh