| Tom Kalbfus |
What if Cloud Giants had spaceships? What effect would this have? What sort of World would cloud giants live on? I think I know. Wouldn't Cloud Giants live on a small Gas giant scaled to their proportions? A Cloud Giant typically stands from about 5 to 6 yards tall. Let me extend random Height and Weight Tables from the Core Rule book.
Race Base Height Base Weight
Cloud Giant, male 4 yards, 30 inches 3240 lb.
Cloud Giant, female 4 yards, 15 inches 2295 lb.
Race Modifier Height multiplier Weight multiplier
Cloud Giant, male 2d10 x3 x135 lb.
Cloud Giant, female 2d10 x3 x135 lb.
The World a Cloud Giant would live on would be a water world, but they don't live in the water, but on the clouds above the world ocean surface. Their world proportioned to their size is 24,000 miles in diameter, about 3 times the size of Earth.
| Torbyne |
I thought about it and was going to write up a much different post but half way through it i realized Cloud Giant space ships have been done before... They were just called Zentradi back then.
As for their worlds, with super magic and super tech, they would probably live where ever they wanted and their habitats would look regal. floating citadels above perpetual storms as wide as a continent themselves comes to mind.
| Tom Kalbfus |
I am doing a dungeon, which is a spaceship that was built by them. To make it more interesting, and more of a dungeon and not a space ship that is actively crewed by cloud giants. The world they lived on ,used to be home to billions of cloud giants. Cloud giants used to travel all over the galaxy and lorded it all over everyone else, and then at some point the Gods had has enough. A war broke out between the Gods and the Titans, and these cloud giants backed the wrong side! When the gods won their war against the Titans, they got revenge upon their supporters the Giants, the attack on their civilization was swift and sudden, the good and the evil gods banded together to fight off their mortal enemies the Titans, then the evils gods turned on the giants, in their haste to meet out vengeance, they overlooked some cloud giants in sold sleep, they are still in suspended animation on board this ship, in the meantime, they ship has become occupied by other creatures, orcs, hobgoblins and the like. the rooms are spacious, the starship is huge, and it is undamaged though very old. This is the inhabited section of the starship, each of the small squares is 5 feet wide. Corridors are 15 feet wide and the ceiling is 30 feet high! There is a wide variety of monsters I could stock this dungeon with. The ship is huge, in order to take control of the ship, the PCs would first have to defeat all the other factions on board the ship, then they would have to decipher the cloud giant language, and then they would have to climb up on the consoles and control panels to control the ship once they learn how to do so, and perhaps they can revive some of the cloud giants from cold sleep to perhaps help them out some. Some of the cloud giants in cold sleep are children, so apparently whole families of cloud giants were aboard.
Here is an image of a cloud giant. I like this image, it is not clear who is the good guy in this confrontation.
| McBugman |
Reminds me a bit of the movie Prometheus. It sounds like a fun space archaeology module, or likely super module by the size of it!
To help you with the visual of your planet, 3 times the diameter isn't really 3 times Earth. The planet would have 9 times the surface area and roughly 28 times the volume of Earth. Substantially larger, though for comparison within our system it is almost exactly half the volume of Neptune and Uranus. In thinking about composition, I became curious and found this article pretty quickly. A gaseous or liquid planet this size should have no problem. Now onto dreams of cloud cities... man I wish NASA's HAVOC program was further underway!
| Tom Kalbfus |
The planet has one third the density of the Earth, so at the wave tops of this planet, the gravity is about the same. The starship in question is found orbiting this planet, the civilization of cloud giants on it was destroyed Cloud giants roam around in small clans these days, what is left of them of course. The cloud giant planet still has lots of life on it or in it. The only place once can walk on its surface are at its polar ice caps. The atmosphere is breathable and Earthlike. There are merfolk living in this endless planetary ocean, there are also some tritons that reside here. There is plant life that manages to flourish despite a lack of an ocean floor. The floor consists of ice, under he crushing ocean depths, the water solidifies into ice, and further down is a small rocky core. The planet also has a substantial ring system, the starship is buried under all those ring particles, that is why it has remained hidden for so long.
| Torbyne |
Just imagining a PC who enlarges or uses whatever passes for Giant Form in Starfinder just so they can get at those sweet, sweet, giant weapons to clear out the ship with... Too bad they wont give us giant mecha rules in core, it would be a lot more fun to board this ship in a mech of your own so you cold eventually meet the giants face to face.
| Tom Kalbfus |
Cloud giants are 18 feet tall, so a yard is a foot for them. Have you seen the product or a beta test version of it? I go the floor plans for the ship. The entire ship is probably 3 times as long as what you see in this map, The middle section are the cargo holds, the rear portion are the engines, it is a capital ship, it can't land, it could descend within an atmosphere, but it has no landing gear. The circular rooms, shown, one of them could be where the Well of Many Worlds is located. The PCs could gain access to the ship through that. The ship is within the rings of the planet, as such it might make a good pirate base for various humanoids and monsters, while others monsters can come through the well. The Well if Cloud Giant sized, so I'll say it is 8 yards in diameter and it bolted to the ceiling of one of the circular rooms. Daylight and fresh air come through that, on the other side is a world with a sinkhole that leads to the well. rain comes through and various monsters, including a dragon perhaps, have made it their lair.
| Torbyne |
The term Capital Ship usually refers to a military vessel, something that would be expected to have a lot of offensive power and a lot of staying power in a fight... even if the PCs go through a whole campaign to claim it you might want to think about how to scale it in power. Given how old it is, maybe time has really done a number on the ship? Constand exposure to radiation has weakened the armor plates, the reactors onboard are almost out of fuel and the stuff the giants used hasnt been manufactured in over 10,000 years so good luck finding anything energy dense enough to refuel with. Most of the weapons are kinetic and there are only a few hundred munitions left onboard so use them sparingly, 'cause once again the knowledge on how to make new ones died off before humans learned to write. That kind of thing.
You could also do a whole campaign around getting the resources needed to refit the ship to human scale and retrofitting new FTL/shields/energy weapons.
I actually did something similar once with a campaign where the party board and captured a giant scale trireme. They refitted it as a dedicated sailing ship and outfitted the sponsons with lots and lots of ballista... ended up with one of the largest and most unique looking vessels in the known world. Of course Pathfinder is exactly built for things like that and they were able to steam roll most naval engagements by choosing where to sail and what to fight.
| Tom Kalbfus |
The ship in question is a transport, it was designed to carry passengers and cargo, it may have some armament to defend itself against pirates, but it is not one specifically designed for military engagements, if it were, there would be barracks style crew quarters, the best analog would be that of a cruise ship, though this particular one is more about transportation that luxury and vacationing, more like an Early 20th century steamer before the advent of large scale transcontinental air passenger service.
There were three types of passage, High Passage, Middle Passage, and Low Berths. The cloud giants that are still around are the ones frozen in their low berth chambers, these were the cloud giants with the least ability to afford an interstellar passage ticket. If they are revived, they won't know what happened, nor how much time has passed. The low berths might actually use freezing or maybe a magical suspended animation spell. These would be average cloud giants for the most part, including families, the crew of this starship has been long gone, but they can read the Cloud Giant language, perhaps peruse the manuals onboard on how to fly this thing, though they aren't skilled in doing that. As regarding their attitude toward the PCs, obviously they aren't at the place they wanted to be, they would first want to find their family members and then find out what went wrong.
| Tom Kalbfus |
I was thinking of having a tree grow in the middle of that circular room, it grows through the Well, and its branches reach high enough that one can reach the edge of the sinkhole by climbing it. That way I can stock this dungeon with traditional Dungeon monsters, and have a whole dungeon ecology, and then some more intelligent creatures can arrive later.
| Torbyne |
Its so weird to think of Cloud Giants having a whole class of poor in their society... But anything works in your setting man, have at it. You are kind of setting them up as more of "just like regular humans but bigger" was their technology much greater than what we are expecting as the Starfinder baseline? You mention how they went to war with the gods so i would kind of expect them to have been massively more advanced than the rest of the setting.
... the engineer in me wants to know, if you hull breach the ship would it continuously pull atmosphere from the active wells onboard and eventually kill a planet?
| Matthew Shelton |
In one sci-fantasy homebrew setting of mine, giants have their own star empire and are a huge threat to everyone else because they consume so many resources per individual. Their starships are enormous and meant to allow for 'creature comforts'. They are tolerated by other races because they are a strong check against the empire of the dragons, who would rather just steal everything not nailed down and cart it back to their clan's den-world.
| Tom Kalbfus |
Its so weird to think of Cloud Giants having a whole class of poor in their society... But anything works in your setting man, have at it. You are kind of setting them up as more of "just like regular humans but bigger" was their technology much greater than what we are expecting as the Starfinder baseline? You mention how they went to war with the gods so i would kind of expect them to have been massively more advanced than the rest of the setting.
... the engineer in me wants to know, if you hull breach the ship would it continuously pull atmosphere from the active wells onboard and eventually kill a planet?
Its more like they worshipped the Titans, while the humans and others worshipped the Gods, much as in Greek Mythology, the Titans (Greater Titans) are older than the Gods, they were in fact their parents and the Gods were their children, and they rebelled. The Giants backed the wrong side in this struggle and their civilization perished, its not that all of them were evil or anything, they just backed the wrong side and paid the price for it!
| Torbyne |
But was giant society more of an upscaled version of civilization as we'd know it or was it closer to the "classic" giant society of everyone having a superiority complex and being some kind of pseudo nobility?
The idea of Cloud Giants being so poor as to have to use cold sleep over living it up in luxury makes me think of Cloud Giant janitors in their cities and Cloud Giant mid level administrators who endlessly push paper while dreaming of that eventual pension coming online... I suppose it could be more of their civilization was collapsing after the defeat of the titans and the eventually had to resort to near enslavement of their own kind to maintain the lifestyles of the ruling elite or some such, its just a jarring change from what i am used to for them. Its kind of neat. But still, being refugees from a pre-historic divine conflict, what kind of technology and artifacts did they have access too i wonder...
| Tom Kalbfus |
Well in any society, the upper classes can't exist without a lot more of the lower class doing the work for them. Rich people need poor people to work for them, in fact a lot of them got rich through their ability to organize those poor minions to do all their labor, so they wouldn't have to. If you have any society where their is only an upper class, then they will have to rely on robots to do their grunt work for them. From the description of cloud giants in the Bestiary.
Organization: Solitary, gang(2-5), family(2-5 plus 35% noncombatants plus 1 sorcerer or cleric oracle of 4th - 7th level and 2-5 griffons), or tribe (6-20 plus 1 sorcerer or cleric oracle of 7th-12th level and 2-5 griffons
From this description, we can infer that spell casters are a relatively high percentage of the population. These cloud giants live in clans or tribes numbering as much as 20 plus 1 sorcerer. One can infer that spell casters make up 5% of the population, in addition to the spell like abilities cloud giants normally have A clannish or tribal society of cloud giants cannot achieve the scale of economy required to build this starship I've talked about, so in the past to build this, cloud giants needed to be much more numerous, I'd say having a population in the billions like we have today with humans. Since this is a cloud giant society, there are not a lot of other races on their planet to compare themselves too. They live on clouds, they have magic to allow clouds to support their various structures, so they live on an Ocean Planet in building magically supported on clouds above the endless ocean girdling their planet.
They share their planet with aquatic races such as mermaids and aquatic elves as well as some not so nice humanoids, but they rarely interact with them, as they live in the clouds and prefer the higher altitudes over the ocean surfaces. When their civilization came crashing down, a lot of those structures plummeted into the ocean surrounding their planet, many cloud giants escaped in spaceships and basically dispersed themselves throughout the Galaxy, and some even reverted to a medieval existence on some fantasy planets, relying on magic and some lesser beings to do their grunt work for them. In this particular case, a group of cloud giants decided to hide within their planet's rings from those evil gods that wanted to destroy them. Some of the more goodly aligned gods helped hide them from their more evil brethren. The gods were brought together, both good and evil in their struggle against the Titans, with that war over now, those gods went their separate ways and followed their own agenda. Some of the good gods helped hide some of the Titans and giants against the wrath of the evil gods. Since the good gods did not want to start a war immediately with the evil gods, they did this in secret.
I like cloud giants, because they are the race of giants that are the most like humans, they are proportioned the same as humans, only three times the scale, and equal numbers of them are good and evil. Their society used to resemble human societies in the past, they built enormous spaceships, and they make great dungeons, as a lot of creatures would have trouble fitting through the 5-foot wide corridors that predominate in human ships, but the controls would be familiar enough to humans that they could learn to operate them. the furniture is three times their size. Fortunately a lot of the doors in Cloud Giant starships are of the "Star Trek" variety, they have sensors that detect objects in front of them and the doors automatically open. Or they can be left open if the doors are not functioning properly. Air locks work a little differently. There is a magical enchantment on the ship's hull that holds in atmosphere in case the hull is breached or the airlocks are somehow left with both doors open to space. I'm assuming there is some kind of spell, that I labeled "Airwall" which holds in atmosphere, but not physical objects like people. These function like the force fields over hangar openings in Star Wars. Air comes in through the well of many worlds. I'll assume there are two of them onboard this ship. One of them leads to the PCs home world, and another leads to some other world, where the more bestial monsters came through, dragons and the like that don't have spaceships of their own. One of these was created by Cloud Giant sorcerers and thus is 8 yards in diameter, it is bolted on the ceiling of one of the circular rooms and a tree from that world along with undergrowth and topsoil on the chamber floor provides an easy way down from the rim of the well, which is 30 feet above the floor. Various monsters have made their way down from that well, it rains through that well and sometimes snows, various knights and adventurers from that PL2 world beyond seek their fortunes in this dungeon, but they don't know how to operate any of the equipment. Intelligent spacefaring creatures have made inroads into this dungeon, mostly of piratical nature. The cloud giant equipment and controls are hard to use, they are still figuring it out. The ship is embedded within the planet's rings, and the pirates are fine with that for now, as they want to keep their operation secret until they can gain full control of the ship.