u/ScienceForge319

Taking satisfying steps with #3dprinting I 3D printed clicky slippers with tiny feet that click on every step — using soft filaments on a budget multicolor printer. To pull it off, I had to find out how soft this thing can actually print.

I hope you like it

Ok so, for complicated reasons my metaplot involves some Aboleths pulling the moon closer to the planet. I have worked out some of the effects and have a cause I want feedback on. I’ll start with the science and then get to the fantasy later.

I am no expert in orbital mechanics, but here is what I understand the moon moving closer would cause. This assumes that Selune is a rocky sphere and not a magical projection of a goddess.

The tides would become higher and lower. I don’t know how quickly that would be noticeable but this would fuck up the Sword Coast quickly. Ports would quickly become unusable and sea traffic would grind to a halt. Low lying islands would be wiped out and seacoast flat land would be flooded.

If the moon gets close enough, it would cause tectonic chaos as the gravity increases. Hopefully the heroes don’t let it get that far but it would be cool for a bunch of volcanos to go off all at once. Shit, where ARE the volcanos in FR?

As the moon is pulled closer, its orbital period would shorten. That means the tides also get faster. This assumes that the moon does not get pulled into an elliptical orbit rather than being pulled equally. As much as I like the chaos this would cause, it complicates things too much.

An interesting side effect of moving faster and closer, is that the far side of the moon would become visible. The moon is tidally locked which means it completes one revolution every orbit. If the orbit shortens, the rotation would remain the same. Effectively I think this would look like the moon was rotating slowly to the right? Does that sound correct?

For the magical effects, I think (and this is pure speculation on my part) this would cause chaos in the church of Selune. Their connection is partially based on the regularity of her cycle and position. With both of those in flux, their powers and connection to the goddess would become unpredictable with powers surging one moment and fizzling the next.

Selune guides wanderers so I guess the in-land navigation would be affected but no idea how to make that impactful without being obnoxious. Selune also has some ties to fertility, menstruation and births but this also seems difficult to make meaningful to an RPG plot.

She also famously has dominion over lycanthropes especially the good aligned ones. Werecreatures not having control of their transformations would out a lot of secret ones and cause even the good ones to go a little berserk.

Since Selune and Shar always be beefin, I think that with Seline out of control that Shar would use this as an opportunity to cut up rough. The problem is, I don’t know what Shar wants. She likes secrets and fucking up other people’s plans, but what would she do if left unchecked? She seems so arch and evil-for-evil-sake that I never understood what her goals were aside from just wanting to be a pain in everyone’s ass.

When you can’t come up with a good explanation for some cataclysmic magical bullshit and still need a discrete cause so the PCs can fix it, the ancient Netherese are my go to. My idea is that the Aboleths flooded caves in the Underdark that led to a crashed Netherese floating city that contained a very special mythallar.

Normally, a mythallar is a giant Weave-mining local power source/battery to power Netherese magical items, make cities fly and support Arcanist spells. This one was maybe part of Carsus trying to suck the power out of a deity and could cause disruptive effects like moonfuckery.

Since a giant magical engine with very few ways to be defeated is not really a thrilling BBEB, I want to put a twist on how such a device is controlled. You have to ignore that anyone touching a mythallar gets vaporized, what if it had a “driver’s seat” of sort that used the will of the creature to focus the power. That creature would be held in never ending stasis, unable to die but unable to leave.

That will let me have the party fight an Aboleth piloting the mythallar only to find out that one of them needs to jump in it. That plays into a lot of the overall themes of the campaign and allows a PC to do a bittersweet heroic sacrifice. The PC could use the phenomenal cosmic powers of the mythallar to reverse the moon effects and when that is corrected yhey could use the unused power todefend it against incursions.

They can’t just shut it off or just destroy it because they need to slowly push the moon back into place. They can’t leave it alone because if the Aboleths could get in there once, they could just wait until the heroes leave and turn it back on.

I’ve told my players that their characters are safe from ordinary deaths like getting dropped from a random encounter but that during plot-critical events and boss fights death is on the line. We are doing Daggerheart so that insulates them even more. If none of them are into the sacrifice deal, my backup plan is for them to blow it up and have an Independence Day like run from the temple and hand wave the moon going back into place.

Right now, all the party known is that the moon is speeding up and the tides and getting higher/lower. They don’t really know the larger impacts of this. They are about to go to Waterdeep and that is a good chance to demonstrate lots of these effects.

Waterdeep is a major trading hub and tides that are too high/low would make their famous harbor unusable except briefly maybe. Captains would probably move passengers and cargo with smaller ships or tenders out of desperation but that is hard and slow work. Traffic would back up and ships would seek other ports.

Waterdeep is also home to Selune’s largest temple, House of The Moon, and that seems like a good place to dump some expo. The plan is to have the normally bustling temple mostly deserted of faithful and followers with one kookie old priest to help them.

People are abandoning Selune because they feel betrayed and ignored by her, reasonably blaming the goddess for the changes and her silence. Her blessings are sporadically granted but fluctuate in power when they do work. There could be riots and protests at the temple but that seems like a distraction and a little too real.

I’m not very familiar with Waterdeep aside from skimming the wiki. What other places would make for good exploration and exposition?

I have some sciency smart PCs and some naturalistic hippy PCs so I have a few ways we could approach exposition. Maybe something like this happened before and there are records of it. Maybe there are astrological observations that could give clues.

The part I struggle with is how to bring up the topic of mythallars and the Netherese without having an NPC just throw it out there. I can’t imagine that the anyone in FR thinks about the Netherese like it is the Roman Empire. There is the tenuous connection if they ask “What sort of power could do this to a deity” that leads to Carsus’ Folly but that is a reach.

Is there a more elegant way to direct them to the Anauroch desert and a guarantee that a mythallar exists that could stop this or is causing it?

If you read all that ADHD fever-dream, thank you. I’d love your criticism, insights and feedback.

TL;DR - What are some mundane and magical effects of pulling the moon closer? Is a mythallar a good cause for this? How could players figure all this out and how to direct them?