Fantasy Moons

What does the moon do in your fantasy setting? Is it magical or divine? A hole in reality, the egg of a god, another world?
Do people live on the moon? Can you teleport to it? Are you at war with the Moonians?

Tell me about moons in your setting, of stuff you've done with them.

It's not just a lump of rock that is tidally linked to the main world right? Right?

I haven't thought about the moon. Fuck.

There are three moons in my setting; each the roiling centeal physical expression of the greater gods. One of them, the daymoon, "blinks"; lighting and dimming slowly over the course of the day. Hence, a nickname of The Dragon's Eye. The other two - the sister moons - move about the sky and over the continents according to seasonal patterns and divine whim. One moves the winds, the other, water. When they get close, monsoons happen.

There's a gitmo style prison on the moon where the new world order send especially heinous terrorists

Moons are small sphere-less rocks floating around continents. Some continents have several, some don't have them at all.

In one setting I think about on and off the moon is the remains of a god who helped another god destroy the sun. The rest of the pantheon killed the shit out of him as punishment for it and threw him up into the sky to serve as a temporary light source until they could figure out what to do about the sun. But, even though he was dead, the god's rage lingered on and radiated down to the world below, creating werewolves, trolls, orcs and other creatures of the night.

The moon changes phases becaue he was one of the OG gods, who didn't have true physical forms and were just kind of big shifting magical beings, so his corpse shifts and warps over the course of a month and looks different.

The real moon is much like Earth's moon: tidally-locked, slows rotation, protects the surface from bigger impacts, etc.

The smaller, second moon is basically a gigantic magical creature that regulates the planet's tectonics and climate and protects the planet from much bigger, less natural threats.

Two moons. The closer one is just rock and dust, no known inhabitants, but the further one is the Fae realm.

Don't go there.

Oh yeah, the first one is also wrapped in massive chains. It'll probably be just a red herring, the players will focus on that detail but I'm not likely going to do anything with it.

The bad guys (well, bad guys from the PCs perspective, and they're a bunch of vampires) are trying to beckon it closer to the Earth, in order to fulfill a prophecy that predates mankind by millions of years.

No-one's really sure what will happen if they succeed, but it probably won't end well for the vampires.

I only originally thought of the moon's of the material plane very little. I knew I wanted at least two, and that was about it.

Since then, I've expanded the cosmology a bit. Each plane is like a planet. Art the center is the Great Wheel (name subject to change), a plane of neutrality and where all magic stems from. In the next ring, sits the material plane. And orbiting the material plane are the four elemental planes; the Sun, fire; Lune, Water; Mal, Earth; and an unnamed invisible entity, Air. Currently, only three known entities orbit the world, and while the plane of Air affects certain things, scholars and scientists are just now hypothesizing that it might exist

It's not very clever, I know. But my players seem to like it, and one of them is playing a scientist trying to figure it out.

I know I'd be interested in why someone felt the need to IMPRISON THE MOON.
What, did some Titan just put their chains there and forget?

The moon is the home of the chief goddess of the main plane. It's a geocentric plane so the moon is luminescent and cyan due to being composed primarily of a certain kind of crystal that conducts magic very potently. The goddess usually has to defend her plane against other ones (hells and the like) but recently there's been peace so she's been chilling and courting a mortal girl who ascended to demigodhood after living a saintly life and sacrificing herself during a major war

It's just a completely mundane run-of-the-mill cheese moon.

It's a remnant of an older campaign idea I had, based on "In the Court of the Crimson King" (the whole album, not just the song).

The titular song opens with "the rusted chains of prison moons are shattered by the sun", which I was going to tie into the sun child from the previous song, "Moonchild".

So, wait.. the moon really is a prison for something else.. but the players can't really do shit about it for now?

>Cheese moon
Why dont you have a teleport specialist wizard carving out chunks of moon cheese and selling them for exorbitant prices user?

Mine has five, some of which cause various effects on the world when the most prominent in the sky.

Blood moon is dark red, all covered in lava and shit, usually brings violence and sorrow. Anyone can enter a barb rage, and barbarians get much better rage bonuses.

Gold moon brings all kinds of crazy fortune and misfortune into the world. I let any character reroll any dice roll when that one is active.

Iron moon is actually home to a bunch of Inevitables who got booted out of their home plane and now make weird clockwork tech. Sometimes they launch things down to the surface.

Black moon causes anything that dies to have a 1 in 4 chance of immediately rising as an uncontrolled zombie.

Phantom moon appears randomly one night a month and causes dreams to start leaking into the waking world.

I think I had two more actually, but I can't remember what those did. It's been a long time since I ran dungeons and dragons.

because nothing stinks worse than moon cheese, friend. nothing.

Like that ever stopped people before. People will eat durian topped surströmming one day. If only to say they did.

It's a manifestation of the Goddess of Justice, who watches over the innocent in the darkness of night. The phases of it are caused by her clashes with the evil God of the Sea who has stolen control over it from her and plagues those who travel by ship with deadly storms so he can harvest their treasures from the seafloor and take their dead for his own army. The stars were once her greatest paladins, turned into angels so that they can continue to protect the world long after their deaths.

The campaign I'm going to be running in that setting has nothing to do with the Crimson King or the moon.

In fact, having them adventure in that world and not using the moon for anything might throw them off if I use the setting again for its original purpose.

The moon itself is the "face" of one of the goddesses of the sky, with the other governing stars (that aren't really stars in the real sense) and clouds. Both of them come together each night to work on the void tapestry, but each night the moon goddess changes her mind, showing a different part of her face or sometimes hiding it entirely. However, the moon goddess has another, secret role as a guardian. She stays close by to ensure that the planet never wakes up again.

This is the only image I have that prominently displays the moon.

Woah what a coinkydink I'm running a 'Court of the Crimson King' campaign right now.

I wonder if you're one of my players because he apparently once had an idea for a campaign based on the song/game too

anyone else think the IRL Moon's origin story is a lot more interesting than the vast majority of fantasy legends?

Nope, I'm not in a campaign like that. Though I'd be interested in hearing some of the stuff you've done. I'd been having trouble finding a way to turn "I Talk to the Wind" into a series of adventures.

Admittedly the plot draws only from the main song rather than the rest of the album. The rest of the songs on the album are character themes because my group has this meme where almost every single player character and NPC has a theme song: in fact, a lot of the enemy encounters in the first half of the campaign were built on old rock and metal songs, including some King Crimson: 'Cat Food' was a gypsy magician who could control cats, 'The Howler' was this nasty diseased sorcerer who attacked by screeching and 'the Great Deceiver' was a bunch of mimics down in a wine cellar; from other bands 'Thunderstruck' by ACDC served as the basis for a fight with a handgonner and 'Overkill' by Motor Head was some huge berserker guy. Good, righteous religious dudes are often based on DIO songs because DIO did the whole grand and good thing pretty well: the good religion in the setting worships 'the Sacred Heart.'

The campaign is a medieval low fantasy thing. The world is slowly being taken over by an apparently immortal tyrant called the Crimson King, who's forcing a religion called the Prison Moon Cult on lands he rules. Every year he hosts a tournament in his capital, and people from around the world are brought there on prison ships in order to take part. The players were brought to the city on a ship called The Wake of Poseidon, fought and diplomanced their way through the tournament part, then killed The Keeper of the City Keys in order to gain access to the King's court. Refusing the King's offer to join the court, they're now making their way through the castle and its grounds, trying to tear down the tyrant's rule from the inside. They've talked to the midly friendly Gardener who's discontent with the king's rule, hastily gotten away from three Wise Men who won't stop telling awful jokes, and are now on their way to slay the necromantic Black Queen, who raises the Crimson King's vast armies by reanimating the dead.

Sounds pretty cool.

My plan was for them for them to eventually (sometime during I Talk to the Wind, or perhaps during Epitaph) meet a comedian in a yellow coat (the Yellow Jester) who would subtly manipulate them into freeing the Crimson King (the whole world is his court). His manipulations would only be revealed when the campaign reached to point where he's name dropped in the song.

The overall idea being that each verse from each song would be turned into an adventure, with some elements first being introduced earlier in the plot (for example, the Three Lullabies in an Ancient Tongue were written by the Poet in 21st Century Schizoid Man and gifted to the party)

bump

3 rotating half-bodies that follow the same phases, save that they do not exist when in a phase where our moon would be in shadow. When all 3 are full, nature's divinity is at its most powerful. When all three vanish, arcana reigns.

I play Eberron a lot, so twelve moons and a ring system. All the moons are smaller than Earth's, but most are much closer.

They may or may not literally be the other planes. Not shadow or astral, but places like the plane of death dollurh, mabar the endless night, syrrania the eternal sky (a small gas planet, like Jupiter only tiny?), Thelanis the fairie court, etc.

You can see Eberron, the actual world, from the surface of those planes.

Yes, this isn't normal. However, there are twelve visible planes, twelve visible moons...

The moons and frankly all pieces of the sky are forces in the world that shaped many gods to the world. Different regions have different gods due to the varying visibility and exposure of the celestial objects.

Originally two moons and one ring, that turned to one moon and two rings... The moons crashed and the smaller one, while being eaten up by the larger one (this was also the case of the larger moon's god killing the smaller one's) turned into another ring for the planet, which in turn formed into a new god.

little moth people live on it and come down every blue moon to trade with people on the planet itself. If they stay away from the moon too long they turn into little balls of fluff and die.

The moon used to be just a lump of rock that was tidally locked to the main world.

Now it's an illusion concealing that the moon has become the home of a colossal tentacled monstrosity once it floated in, hollowed it out and used it as a coccoon. The same magic is how its star-spawn come down to the world and infiltrate the population, start cults in its name, kill off dangerous elements, and harvest what it needs to grow.

There are two moons, both inhabited, and a rings around the planet made from the rubble of the third moon.

The first moon is inhabited by radioactive moon liches that don giant suits of armour to do martial battle when their not scheming and seeing schemes going JUST AS PLANNED. The other moon has more benevolent moon elves

I'm not sure what the moon is in my world yet.

Its some strange future earth where the sea level is 5000m lower than it is today, exposing new landmass etc.

Maybe the oceans formed a huge ice mountain that froze the moon to the top?

Or maybe the atmosphere is so large that the moon is actually within it and you can fly up there?

It's a prison for the elder one who was struck by dark magic and went crazy.

The Moon is a gigantic beast that is constantly flees from an even larger sky monster called the Sun. Every day it ducks beneath the ocean to the west, swims under the world and rises from the Eastern sea. The Sun occasionally gets close enough to take bites out of it, causing the different phases if the moon, but the more bites taken out the faster it can fly. Luckily it can regrow the buts that were bitten off. Unluckily, regrowing makes the moon bigger and slows it down so the Sun get close and start biting again.

It's a giant piece of quartz laced with huge deposits of starmetal, and the moon glows with its own inner light. The stars are made of the same glowing quartz/starmetal and orbit the planet below at various distances. They are magically "repulsed" by the planet, ensuring that they don't crash into it, although the star can burn out. When that happens, it falls from the sky.

On a related note, the Sun is made of solid gold and magical fire and is actually slightly smaller than the Moon, but it looks larger due to its glow. It also orbits the planet below, and the same "repulse" that keeps the moon and stars from crashing into the world below also keeps the Sun from doing the same.

Two incredibly powerful beings on the planet below control the orbits of the Moon, Sun, and Stars, or more properly one controls the Day and the other controls the Night.

They are sisters.

Named Celestia and Luna.

The moons are where the game takes place, because they orbit a gas giant. All but one of the four inhabitable moons has its own civilizations and peoples. The closest moon is too irradiated and volatile for life, while the furthest moon was subject to a Third Impact style apocalypse, which left behind an imprisoned entity that the former inhabitants of that moon couldn't kill.