I recently finished Ringworld and I can't get it out of my head how perfect it would be for a fantasy setting

I recently finished Ringworld and I can't get it out of my head how perfect it would be for a fantasy setting.
>an endless world full of countless stories
>countless homid races that range from humans to giants to dwarves and halflings to eleves...
>high tech artifacts that everyone regards as magic
>alien monsters to slay

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mediafire.com/download/z4azhkghg858qrd/Ringworld Boxed Set with Companion.pdf
twitter.com/AnonBabble

I've been wanting to use a Ringworld for my setting too, although probably sci-fi over fantasy. I'd make my own stuff for the Ringworld's inhabitants, but definitely base the construct itself on Niven's ideas.

That's what I was thinking.

I have this habit of coming up with science fiction rationalizations of every fantasy setting I immerse myself. The countless races of hominid in Niven's Ringworld setting is particularly interesting for explaining many fantasy-esque races evolving alongside one another.

I don't know how casted magic would work aside from maybe nanomachines or machinery that only reacts to specific genes.

Most campaigns never really go far enough to have their maps anything bigger then maybe Europe and Asia at the most.
The idea of the world forever arching skywards would be little more then window dressing really. That is unless this actually became important, plot wise.

I've played a campaign based in a craft that was pulling four Dyson spheres once.
We were cowboys using Savage Worlds rules, the sheriff was killed by lighting shot from a strange gun no one had ever seen before and we were the posse out to bring the crook to justice.
He had set up his inside a mountain and as the campaign continued we saw stranger and stranger weapons and gear, magic being preformed and many of the gang didn't actually want to fight, claiming they'd literally seen hell and didn't want to return.
Long story short, under the mountain was the entrance to the ship itself and among robotic crew we found a few odd communities of people.
It's a shame the campaign died as half the group ended up getting jobs, as this was just after we had finished high school, but the story was really just starting to ramble and lose focus. Years later the DM admitted he was making everything up on the fly and had no real plan past what was meant to be Cowboys and Space-Magic Indians.

Have you read the sequels? They're pretty good as well.
I once played a game of Dawn of Worlds in which we created a Ringworld. The Ring was actually a serpent god encased in rock by the Great Stone Dragon of the Dwarves. The Serpent was moral enemies of the evil Sun God and were constantly trying to attack each other, but the efforts of the other god kept the two at bay.
The moon gods repulsed the sun and ring away from each other and the Stone Dragon kept the Snake God locked in place.
Meanwhile, a Tree god created a habitable surface on the belly of the Snake and it was home to many environments included blightlands created by the sun blasting the land sterile.
A game based on the setting we made never materialized because one or two players got butthurt from losing wars in the Third Age and quit suddenly.
It was a game with Veeky Forums and it's not surprising that they made horrible characters that barely fit the setting we had spent days creating together.
I won't be hosting any games with Veeky Forums anymore since then.

I'm reading Engineers right now and it's super relevant to the discussion but I didn't want to risk spoilers for the last half of the book.

I was considering running a game set on a Halo-style ringworld for a while, but In the end I just opted for a normal planet instead. I kinda want to bring that idea back some time.

Just use the spoilers s you are right now. Just use all caps at the beginning saying that there are spoilers ahead. Use individual spoiler tags for each paragraph

Pure old fashioned science fiction or fantasy esque?

It was a near-future modern setting actually, but with the substructures of the ring essentially being dungeons and with guardian drones instead of monsters.

Basically kinda like Megaman Legends, but without the airships and with normal guns instead of energy weapons.

there was a Ringworld RPG that had a lot of interesting tidbits in it

i'd love to do a "love story" between two beings that are almost opposite of arch of each other
they communicate with signal mirrors and telescopes
the adventure would be getting them together

I hope you are talking about a halo sized ringworld instead of a RINGWORLD ringworld, because it would take some huge ass telesceopes and huge ass fields of mirrors maybe you sunflowers? to get a message across the other side of the solar system.

I'd love to run a huge ringworld-based hexcrawl game. I'd use magic or gods to make the Ringworld seem more like a functioning world rather than an artificial construct tho.

The game I run in 5e is set on a ring world. The origin story is that the ancient galactic empire collapsed after a scientific experiment resulted in the release of magic. The campaign takes place on one of the ring worlds built to house the vast population. magic transformed it into a full world. deep enough for mining, salt in the seas, etc...

AI gods?

>Most campaigns never really go far enough to have their maps anything bigger then maybe Europe and Asia at the most.
Fair enough. What I was getting at was the shear size of the world makes it plausible that something akin to a fantasy setting could play out.

The ring is unstable.

It has Bussard ramjets for that, tanj it.

Is there a scan of this?

What is the thing on the right?

Should be the fist of god, a very tall mountain.

Oh, that is supposed to be a desert?

Also I imagined Fist of God being less steep. Like a forty-five degree angle at most.

So, okay, I've seen a few Ring World's before and something has always bothered me:

Can you fall off of a ring world?
Like, if for whatever reason you get over the "ledges" on the world do you just fucking fall? Do you fall into space or up into space? What happens?

Are the birds safe in a ring world?

Ungodly tall rims keep the atmosphere in on the sides. If you made it to the top of the rims and jumped off into the void, you would be flung away by centrifugal force.

As I understand it most of what we'd classify as gravity on a ringworld comes from centrifugal force. picture the entire system, atmosphere and all as a flat disk spinning around a central star. If you go off the edge you'd probably just float more or less in parallel with the edge since at the time you stepped off you were moving with the same angular momentum as the edge.

You'd have a tough time getting back though with nothing to either pull yourself back on or bump you back towards the edge. I'm not sure how the atmosphere would respond around the edges either.

Birds would be fine I'd imagine. Atmosphere is subject to the same centrifugal effect as anything on the ring allowing things such as air pressure and all the conditions needed for atmospheric flight to exist.

With the original Ringworld by Niven, he includes 1000 ft high rim walls to keep the air in.
In the next book, he includes the Spill Mountains to combat the natural erosion the Ringworld would experience from soil getting stuck in the ocean.
There are pipes from the bottom of the ocean than transplant the much to the rim walls where mountains eventually formed.
These mountains are so far apart that even if you hot-air ballooned to the next travelling with the wind, you would never return home since the air currents don't go both ways, if I remember correctly.
I suppose it is a bit of artist rendition, but Fist of God is supposed to be huge and imposing.

>If you go off the edge you'd probably just float more or less in parallel with the edge since at the time you stepped off you were moving with the same angular momentum as the edge.
That is incorrect. If there is a feeling of gravity on the interior of the ring then the ring is spinning faster than an orbit would would otherwise require at that distance from the sun and you would be flung away from the center of the ring in the same way if you were spinning a ball on a string it would fly off if you cut the string.

>1000 ft
That can't be right. That is ridiculously short. All the atmosphere would immediately fall off the edges. 1000 ft isn't even a mile.

it's 1000km

That's more like it.

my bad it's 1000 miles!
or 1600km

So what you're saying is the Birds are okay?

Yes, except when they are flying over the hole or a sunflower field.

I don't think you fully understand how goddamn huge the Ringworld is. It's THREE MILLION times the surface area of the whole Earth.

You can have EVERY setting take place on it, nearly simultaneously. Evolution will run rampant. You think Australia or Madagascar bred some weird shit? Separate two breeding populations by three Earth diameters and see what the fuck happens.

It's mind-bogglingly, staggeringly, nigh incomprehensibly huge. Every tech level, every story, every variant of damn near everything, is all there.

In fact it's SO big that any individual story that's not blatantly overpowered is so small in proportion as to be irrelevant. Think of how hard it's been, how many real-world empires have tried to conquer the world. Or even just a continent. Or a nation.

Now imagine the folly of trying to expand that. By THREE MILLION TIMES.

Not just conquering Russia once, but millions of times.

That's a Ringworld.

It's not a natural mountain, it's an artificially distorted puncture pressed into magically durable metal. It can support a MUCH steeper angle, no problem.

I don't understand what that has to do with my post.

Ringworld is a form not a size. You can have a small ring.

Obviously I've read the book, else I wouldn't have said I imagined it any way.

That map doesn't seem right to me. I thought the oceans took up like tens of degrees of Ringworld's circumference.

I was actually agreeing with you. It's not just plausible to have a fantasy setting there, it's, idk, "hyper-plausible". Almost inevitable, even. (leaving the existence of magic aside, of course).

it still has to surround a star at a safe distance for life

When you fudge material strong enough to hold a ringworld together, you can fudge the energy output of a star. At least for me it is fair game. Beside you can have a orbiting ring like Halo.

Wat? You just place the ring in the Goldilocks zone. It doesn't have to surround the star.

Ringworld's Ghouls look way nicer than I thought.

Would you?

And would Veeky Forums a Kzinti?

Their breath can't be that much worse than mine. Would rish.

Their women aren't even sapient. That goes beyond rishtara. That's bestiality.

>G-grass giant sempai...
I think this comes from the Ringworld RPG so it might have some flaws. The Sunflower field in particular looks really tiny on this map.
Flying animals would be fine but would probably avoid the Eye Storm created by Fist of God.

>Eye Storm created by Fist of God.
There was no eye storm created by the Fist of God. The Fist of God is so high that very little air escapes through the hole at the top. The Eye Storm is from an impact that hit from the opposite direction.

There are multiple Eye Storms of vary severity.

However, the Fist of God is unique, and it's too tall for atmosphere to leak through it.

Oh that's right! Even though I re-read the series every few years it starts to blend together you know?
Are the all caused by punctures and
SPOILER were the punctures repaired by protectors?

I honestly have no idea whether Eye Storms had to be manually repaired by the Protectors or if there was an automatic system in place similar to the stabilizing jets before the Puppeteers fucked everything up.

Who is the most attractive Ringworld hominid?

Vampires no doubt

Pheremones don't count.

The City Builders will give you a fetish for widow's peaks.

Or you could have it orbit the sun like a planet instead and have a much smaller ring that rotates to produce a day-night cycle, like the Orbitals in Iain Banks' Culture series.

How is the Culture series? I tried reading the Foundation series but it was pretty boring.

Funny coincidence, the Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman was a fantasy setting with four dyson spheres. I felt like they didn't really do much with the unutterably vast scope of the world they'd described though.

I've only read about half of it, but haven't been overly impressed. There are some fun ideas, but I keep getting this feeling that Banks was aiming for something more "literary" than science fiction, which is not how I like my sci-fi.

Use of Weapons and Excession were especially bad in that respect. Player of Games was probably my favorite of what I've read, but I'm told that Matter is one of the best in multiple ways.

I actually enjoyed the Foundation series a bit more, but I've never minded slow series.

The one in that picture (or at least, the short story that picture was cover for) is. Got abducted by... Outsiders, maybe? several millenia ago when kzin hadn't managed to breed them dumb yet.

>I felt like they didn't really do much with the unutterably vast scope of the world they'd described though.
How could you? That's just so absurdly huge. x4.

The Kzin royal family also still has intelligent females but they're a state secret.

Protectors don't bother much with computers or AI

pheromones aside, they looked like wild/savage/unkempt albino humans. they were small. maybe you have a thing for wo/manlet

yes, it's 82.6 mb

Didn't know that. Must be a tough game keeping a breeding population secret.
What book?

One of the Man-Kzin Wars book about the prince of the royal bloodline. He has a sister who is intelligent and she helps him avoid assassination.
The King's rival wages war against him using Jotok-bred beasts of war that are effectively bioweapons that are against the honorable traditions of kzin-on-kzin warfare so the prince and his sister escape into the wilderness to reorganize with a secret tribe of kzin that have intelligent females. I think a human woman is also a main character and tags along with the prince.

Bizarre. Neat.

It is on the pdf thread

PDF thread?

In this one presumably, although I haven't found it yet.

Here it is:
mediafire.com/download/z4azhkghg858qrd/Ringworld Boxed Set with Companion.pdf

God bless you user

the captcha said select all pies but I thought it said select all piss

Nice! Thank you so much. I've been looking for this for awhile and I think this might be the first time it has been shared on Veeky Forums

np, I didn't put it online, I only copied the exact link from the archive pdf

Has anyone read the Smoke Ring books? Millions of cubic kilometers full of sky, an ecosystem that evolved in microgravity, footbow wielding tribals who fly on artificial wings, a navy of steam rockets made of old piping and giant coconuts. Cool stuff.

I read Integral Trees.

...

Huh, I didn't realize there was another star. I just thought the energy for life came from the neutron star itself.

Integral Trees and Smoke Ring are both really good. I find it humorous what Smoke Ring folk call dwarves are just genetic throwbacks to original humans.

I think the neutron star alone wouldn't be bright enough.
But speaking of neutron stars, has anyone read Dragon's Egg? Apparently, it's about life forms ON a neutron star.

>I think the neutron star alone wouldn't be bright enough.
That depends on how close you are.

Huh, that book looks interesting.
Sundiver by David Brin also deals with lifeforms living within a star and the crew of humans and aliens that investigate them. It takes place in the Uplift universe.

If you get too close you're going to get some nasty tidal forces, though.

You don't have to get that close though. Neutron stars can be very hot.

Since we are recommending books, I recommend Stephen Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams. It's many short stories describing a lot of creatively exotic forms of life ranging from trans-neptunian sentient spiders, sentient parasites living in the bodies of fish in pockets of water at Mercury's pole, and even feudal societies made up of being of neutronium strings within neutron stars.

Also Niven realized that an industrial civilization could develop using alcohol.

...

...

A herbivore race that is cautious and fearful to a fault is an interesting concept and I love how Niven explores it.

I really like this redesign by Abiogenesis

Meh. I read the novel having already seen so that's how I pictured them. Plus I'm pretty sure they are described as having nubs on their lips for handling stuff, not spikes.

Reading the RPG right now. I can't help but think the rules were designed by math majors.

It's not supposed to be anatomically correct to the letter, hence a "redesign" rather than a straight depiction.
THE RULEBOOK IS UNSTABLE

bump with ancient psionic precursor species

Are those the slavers?

Yes they are.
They conquered the galaxy but before they lost control of it they destroyed all intelligent life in the galaxy with a psychic killswitch except for Bandersnatch and the nonsapient Pak breeders.

Have gods ever been explained as AIs in a fantasy setting?

The Book of Swords setting features a world turned fantastic after a nuclear apocalypse. The Empire of the East series describes how this happened, but I haven't read that series yet.
Around 3000AD a intelligent supercomputer ARDNEH that was originally a nuclear response system that initiated the Change which brought gods and magic into the world and turned the nuclear fallout into a race of malevolent demons.
50,000 years later, Ardneh is long dead but worshiped as a god of healing, but doesn't actually exist like the other gods in the setting.

Huh, nothing quite fits the bill for what I am imagining.

One of these days maybe I should put some more thought into a story about a newly terraformed planet that devolves into a pre-industrial setting where various genetically engineered races live side by side, technological artifacts are seen as magic, and caretaker AIs are worshipped as gods.

I blame Dragonriders of Pern for this.