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I was prepping to run some space battle hijinx on roll20 when I thought - do we have a stock background image for The Drift for spaceship combat? I know there's a number of images that feature The Drift floating around online, but all of them are images of stuff, and not suitable to just throw up on roll20 underneath a Hex grid. The Drift is described as a swirling kaleidoscope of shifting colours, and in the representations I could find, it tends to be in the pinky-purpley spectrum.
I know there's a number of published space battles that take place in the Drift (like in Dead Suns, Cries from the Drift, Beacon Code Dilemma, and so on) but when I went back to check, the maps for all of the ones I could think of just used the "Basic Starfield" image, if at all, for Drift combat.
What do you use for images of The Drift for spaceship battles taking place there? I think I'm gonna throw this up and see how it goes.
There's the default starship map which I think it a pretty good representation. Wispy pink and green nebulas floating about.
I like to imagine it like "hyperspace" from Babylon 5 (nebulous, vastly empty, with no real navigational fixed points). Here's a video clip to show what it looks like with a ship eventually exiting "hyperspace."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emu6DRNn5sU
I tend to envision the Drift as filled with a sort of ambient rainbow glow. Rainbow, because the non-Euclidian geometry of the plane acts to diffract light from any source; its like shining light through a prism of variable density. Combine that with the creation of the plane being both recent and "energetic", and you have a cosmic background glow that is all over the spectrum. Expert navigators can use the properties of this diffracted glow to navigate better, since how tightly or narrowly the light is diffracted correlates to the local spatial geometry.
This same spatial weirdness also means that trying to look too far out into the Drift is uncomfortable. Depth perception just doesn't work when parallax is unpredictable. The net result is an illusion of "flatness" past a certain local distance, like one is in the center of a hollow sphere a few dozen kilometers in radius. Experienced spacers generally don't spend a lot of time staring out of windows in the Drift, because it feels rather claustrophobic.
That's a good interpretation. I tend to go: empty, except for a few nearby splashes of color. It looks like space, but without all the stars. Disturbingly empty.
I feel like "The Drift" would be an excellent future map for Paizo to release.
I feel like "The Drift" would be an excellent future map for Paizo to release.
The backside of their basic starfield map already is the drift...
Edit: nevermind, apparently it's a nebula