What might the spells and alchemy look like, that let you shift into, out of, and through the plane?
There have been a few neat ideas in literature that could be borrowed for flavor or mechanical entertainment.
Hyperspace and some materials in it (gemstones, minerals, metals) have colors that don't exist naturally in the material world or almost anywhere else.
These substances of impossible colors and their intensity help govern how reliably or swiftly ships travel through this realm. A reddish-green impulse crystal of average purity may provide less impulse power than an orangey-blue one, and a golden-purple impulse crystal is more powerful than either.
Windows have to be shut or blacked out in hyperspace, or special headgear worn if exposed to the outside, because anyone who looks into the void begins to develop a variety of mental illnesses and paranoia until they go completely insane and become homicidal maniacs, incurable schizophrenics, or simply become comatose vegetables.
Hyperspace is full of weird stuff that has impossible angles in it (you can't stare directly at the thing because your vision involuntarily slides past it).
In hyperspace, on a ship in motion, visible EM radiation only travels at angles 90 degrees or more away from the direction of travel. This means that anything forward of you is visible, up to a 90 degree offset, but anything aft of you is hidden in nonmagical complete darkness. This would affect lowlight vision but not darkvision, blindsight, echolocation, or magical light sources. (There was a short story I read a long time ago in which the hero had to rescue people out of singularity type incidents. Light was visible but only at angles approaching the center of the singularity field.)
A hyperdrive works by creating an artificial light source in front of the ship, some yards ahead of the bow. It shines on the impulse crystals imbedded in the hull which causes the ship to pull itself forward in the direction of the light source. The 'projecting lens' can be steered in any direction, changing the bearing of the ship with it. For extra speed, many ships are fitted with sails, wings, etc containing additional impulse crystal surfaces.
Well, now that you mention "impossible" colors, I am inclined to think of the Colour Out Of Space. Maybe this monster is slightly wrongly named and should really be called the Colour Out Of Hyperspace.
It's already been said that Hyperspace is natively empty. There's nothing at all there...
But other planes have been leaking into it, leaving traces of weirdness.
You may run into slivers of elemental planes, or the heavens and hells.
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I created the Event Horizon to reach the stars, but she's gone much, much farther than that. She tore a hole in our universe, a gateway to another dimension. A dimension of pure chaos. Pure... evil. When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back... she was alive! Look at her, Miller. Isn't she beautiful?
There have been various takes...
In Babylon 5 Hyperspace was a formless void that you couldn't navigate in without locking into beacons from realspace.
In Warhammer 40k Hyperspace was the dwelling of Chaos itself, and only the constant psionic influence of the Living Dead Emperor made it navigable. (So essentially Event Horizon is what happens when you try hyperspace in a universe without said Emperor)
In Traveller Jumpspace was a Black Void and the Jump field is the ship's protection against the unreality of jumpspace. In lesser exposure it would induce permanent brain damage.
^In Babylon 5, ease of navigation in hyperspace seemed to depend upon who you were -- most people seemed to need the beacons, but Shadows and probably Vorlons and other First Ones seemed to be fine without them. (And Shadows could engage in combat in hyperspace without risk to themselves.)
All a moot point when the Infinite Improbability Drive is developed.
The phlogistion.
What might the spells and alchemy look like, that let you shift into, out of, and through the plane? <snippage>
I think FTL travel should work differently for different races/species.
Since we humans have already theorized how a warp engine would work, we could have that. But a different race could use jumpships (instantly disappear from one location to end up in another). And another set could use massive stargates that allow ships traveling at slower than light speeds to travel to distant worlds instantly (there was an old RTS called dark reign or something that used this). Another option is the Honorverse's gravity wave technology or using worm holes (a common FTL in many sci fi settings). In the Dragonspace setting (D&D 3.0 rules) many ships traveled via the astral plane for FTL. In Alternity (TSR's last "new" rpg) they used a hybrid jump engine that took exactly 5 days to get anywhere within the engine's jump range.If you look at Babylon 5, their hyperspace was reds and blacks. Probably because hyperspace only allowed low end spectrum colors to be seen outside a ship. Other settings have the stars looking like white lines streaking by. Some would say the ship would be moving faster than light could be seen, so it would be black. Or in GW's W40k warpspace, it is total chaos that would drive a man insane. Especially when the chaos forms faces that look back at you.
FTL is granted by a god, so it's already magical. It requires technology rather than magic to use, but it is technology operating on properties given by a magical entity.
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like regular space but you gave it a lot of sugar before bed time.
but for real I would say a lot like the astral plane and only because its in a pathfinder-esk reality.
Well, I'd personally like if different types of (non-magical) types of FTL was used. The most common to Golarion's solar system can be the hyperspace one, but I'd think it would be weird if every single being in the entire universe used the exact same method of FTL travel.
I mean, that's already canon anyway. The Divinity ship in Iron Gods used artificially created wormholes, allowing it to instantaneously travel from point A to point B.
There's multiple ways to create propulsion in real life. The details may vary but based on the same general principles of 'make energy and turn it into motion'. They're by no means equal in effectiveness either. Fossil fuel combustion, hydrogen combustion, ion drives, light sails, the EM drive, and so on. Allow for sci-fi and fantasy concepts and you can have gravity drives, space warp, time warp, wormholes, stargates, collapsars, hyperspace travel, swap drives, starcasters, dream travel, etc.
These don't have to be equally effective. In real life, propeller technology on airplanes has limitations which the jet engine has easily overcome. In a similar vein, FTL trumps sub-light, teleportation is infinitely faster than FTL, and having to load up in a ship to travel through vacuum or another dimension is more difficult than being able to walk through a stargate with your luggage in tow.
Some races, governments, and corporations will be more advanced than others. If someone has developed stargate tech we can assume they have already mastered space warp drive or access to hyperspace. Higher technologies build on lower ones.
The game could get away with having more than way to go faster than light and have it make sense; they are just stepping stones to faster and more effective personal travel. Ultimately, the point of space travel is to get your character and/or some stuff from one place to another location very far away, and you are always trying to improve on what you can already do, not make it harder. The more convenient the travel, the more advanced it is. Unless you want to draw the line at some level of convenience, someone in-world will always trying to figure out how to do it better, faster, more efficiently, etc.
I would like hyperspace to be an actual place where you can visit, have adventures, possibly become lost, discover new monsters and races and also allows spaceships to have WW2 style dogfights.
I would like for hyperspace to have a type of aether that resists the motion of spaceships much like air resistance, which means that spaceships need cool looking, sleek aerodynamic designs if they wish to travel quickly.
What I don't want is for it merely to be an explanation for how ships manage to cross large distances in normal space or be some boring void.
I'm happier with multiple magical approaches, rather than different races having different physics defying technological methods.
Do we know anything about what the starship in Numeria used? I didn't get Iron Gods.
We know what was used, but not that much of a clue as to how it worked. But I gather the impression that it was pretty much an interstellar teleport jump type of drive. And the reason it crashed was that it was not used properly given the desperate situation the city-ship was in. So when it emerged, the ship was already breaking apart.
well I thought my sugar rush joke was funny :P
We already know that hyperspace is an 'empty' plane that is slowly getting polluted by bits and pieces of other planes. You can have random encounters in hyperspace, by running into terrain and/or creatures from other planes. As we've been told so far (it may change), there's nothing hyperspace-native to encounter.
Potentially, you could have some kind of point-to-point teleportation/jump drive that only works with infrastructure set up on both ends, so that you need another slower form of travel (preferably still FTL) to set it up (and to fix it if it fries and your maintenance people on the remote end can't do it themselves).
Edit: Also, magic is just insufficiently analyzed technology.
unarcane,s is good. I'm kind of imagining It to be very magic made into technology. consider that the culture that is using the science today is the same culture that used (uses) magic. Its not unreasonable to suppose that their technology is going to have components that might remind one of magic.
So teleportation is probably likely and it wouldn't surprise me if the teleportation system used the astral plane as a means of conveyance must like magic does. The same of FTL travel to I would imagine but possibly in a different way.
The available methods of FTL travel do shape the kinds of adventures there could be.
If everyone merely teleported where they wanted to go, nothing interesting would happen or exist in deep space except for navigational failures, sabotage, and super-secret space stations.
If there were stargates that permanent wormholes, smaller (and less expensive) ships could travel across known space going to different places. Put together a bunch of stargates and you can build a network of trade lanes (such as in Freelancer). Wherever these trade routes cross or join up, now you can have space stations, supply depots, and wretched hives of scum and villainy out in deep space between star systems. Of course there might be gate fees, having to buy trade lane access subscriptions, travelers getting ambushed by raiders who hacked the trade lane network, etc.
Beyond that, getting your own actual hyperdrive would be a huge deal, because now you can go anywhere you want, and this opens up more potential locations for shipwrecks, abandoned outposts, outlaw hideouts, visiting rogue planets, and generally getting into trouble out there in the dark between civilized areas.
Teleportation is and should be tricky since you have to know where you're going, and that takes more than buying a tourist map. It should require some heavy-duty divination and investigation.
From what I understand, it was a slower-than-light generation ship.I'm happier with multiple magical approaches, rather than different races having different physics defying technological methods.
Do we know anything about what the starship in Numeria used? I didn't get Iron Gods.
That used warp gates for FTL. An already damaged Destiny came though one that wasn't quite on the 5by5 and was torn apart as a result.
The answer to the OP's question is that it all depends on what flavor element you want hypertravel to be put into the game.
1. If you want it to be a horror element, Event Horizon and Warhammer 40K give you the guidelines.
2. If you mainly want it just as a statement of getting from point A to point B, with some intermediate stops at one or more point C's, the model you use is Traveller.
It was shown to people by the god, but is not necessarily a god-maintained-magicland itself.
It is maintained by the Dead and Not-Dead Emperor.. through the daily sacrifice of thousands of pyschics. :)
Windows have to be shut or blacked out in hyperspace, or special headgear worn if exposed to the outside, because anyone who looks into the void begins to develop a variety of mental illnesses and paranoia until they go completely insane and become homicidal maniacs, incurable schizophrenics, or simply become comatose vegetables.
Or maybe they go mad because they see the THINGS that dwell in it. Event Horizon had some pretty big windows in it.
{. . .}
Windows have to be shut or blacked out in hyperspace, or special headgear worn if exposed to the outside, because anyone who looks into the void begins to develop a variety of mental illnesses and paranoia until they go completely insane and become homicidal maniacs, incurable schizophrenics, or simply become comatose vegetables.
{. . .}
Suddenly my brain scrambled this into:
Windows has to be shut down or hibernated in hyperspace, or special netgear used if exposed to the outside, because any computer that looks into the void begins to develop a variety of mental illnesses and paranoia until it goes completely insane and becomes a HAL-9000-class maniac, incurably botnetted, or simply goes into a Blue Screen of Death.
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You've been spending too much time looking out into the void on the other side of the Windows ;)
{. . .}
Windows have to be shut or blacked out in hyperspace, or special headgear worn if exposed to the outside, because anyone who looks into the void begins to develop a variety of mental illnesses and paranoia until they go completely insane and become homicidal maniacs, incurable schizophrenics, or simply become comatose vegetables.
{. . .}Suddenly my brain scrambled this into:
Windows has to be shut down or hibernated in hyperspace, or special netgear used if exposed to the outside, because any computer that looks into the void begins to develop a variety of mental illnesses and paranoia until it goes completely insane and becomes a HAL-9000-class maniac, incurably botnetted, or simply goes into a Blue Screen of Death.
In C.J. Cherryh's Alliance/Union books, (most) humans need to be drugged to make it though Jump space sane. Computers need to reboot afterwards.
Not all races share these limitations, which is a hell of an advantage in terms of being able to react faster when you reach your destination.
The Minbari advantage was accuracy... they could plot a realspace entry to within 300 feet.
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And yet they still couldn't conceive of how powering up your weapons and targeting the other guy would *not* be seen as an act of friendly greeting.
This 'tradition' was invented by Valen to make sure the Earth-Minbari War happened. In fact he needed to make it inevitable that first contact would not only go badly, but that events would play out as they were always meant to. All the way up to the events surrounding Sinclair's capture at the Battle of the Line, his being interrogated by the Grey Council, then triggering the Triluminary, their unilateral surrender, and his eventual involvement with the Minbari until he would go back in time and become Valen (again). It is a causal loop.
Dukat didn't seem surprised at what happened, which suggests he expected it would happen the way it did, that Delenn would do everything she did, etc. He knew he would die, because the Vorlons told him, and because Valen told _them_ how it would turn out for the Humans and Minbari.