Hollow Moon Exploration: 3... 2... 1... LIFT OFF!
by Sharon Dornhoff Luftkapitan Kauser's Log, AC 968,
Heldannic Warbird "Adler":
Felmont 19 (Orbit) -- By the Grace of All-Conquering Vanya and by
the Manifest Righteousness of our Purpose, success! Our vessel has
taken orbit 'round Matera on this, the fifty-eighth day of our
voyage across the Void. Come the dawn in Freiburg, the banner of
the Knighthood will wave above the silvery hills and valleys of the
moon! Already, Matera yields her secrets to Vanya's questers; her
dark side, never yet seen by eyes of worthy Men, shall be revealed
in all its vastness to us within the hour. What great unknowns will
lie beneath us, upon this undiscovered country -- what untold
realms to explore, what new lands to claim, for our Patron's
greater glory...?
Felmont 19 (later) -- Strange world, this lunar landscape, and none
so hospitable as the heathen Myoshimans' lands! No sooner did
Adler's orbit bear us within close view of the daylight's
terminator, than the fiery radiance of the far side's surface
struck our lookout near-blind through her spyglass (Herr-Chaplain
Straus will restore the Ensign's bedazzled vision, when next Our
Lady Vanya favours him with new spells). I have ordered the
sun-baffles, which served us so well in crossing the Void's glare,
kept in place whenever Adler moves beyond the moon's shadow, and
find I must limit our plans for exploration. Troublesome though the
cold and darkness of the lunar night threatens to be -- and dearly
as I would have relished being the first human, to behold the dark
side! -- our enspelled hull will not retain its atmosphere for more
than six score days; to linger the half-month necessary for Matera's
hidden face to lie once more in shadow, would strand us here ... or
worse, force us to shelter on Myoshima, where any cat-faced savage
who learned of our doings might squall word to their Emperor. No
flag but Vanya's Lion must ever fly upon lunar soils, least of all
that of insubordinate subhumans! But I will not grieve, there will
be other moonflights....
Felmont 20 (Touchdown, Nearside, foothills of the Cordilleras) --
Wonders upon wonders, but a bitter disappointment above all. This
world is not habitable to human folk. Matera's Skyshield grips as
do other worlds', yet as divinations implied (would that we had
interpreted them more truly!), she clasps no breathable air unto
her surface. Bereft of a warming atmosphere, the blood-freezing
chill of this drab, rock-and-dust wasteland is beyond imagining;
for all their hardiness, only the spells of our priestly personnel
allow my crew to endure it. A strong breath, that carries vapour
beyond our protective magics, falls frosted into snow before the
next one! Our scouts are beset by troubles, for lack of landmarks
or of stars in proper array, and have espied neither sign of water
nor of living presences. We shall take samples of soil and rocks,
in hopes this world may offer resources worth the having ... but I
feel it in my bones that Vanya's Lion-Banner -- which, to my
regret, hangs limp and listless for want of wind, though I have
propped it to unfurl despite the lack -- gains little glory by the
conquest of so barren and unpeopled a realm.
Felmont 24 (Sea of Rains) -- From rocky hills and crater-scarred
wastes (Fools, all those who name these darker blights upon Matera
"seas"!), we have crossed an open stretch of bedrock: an exposed,
translucent crystal that seems almost to drink in Mystara's light.
Our geologist, Herr Kaupf, has insisted we put down upon this flat,
cheerless vacancy, that he might compare the bedrock's qualities
with some curious shards of fragmented rock he gathered in the
mountains, where first we landed. (The man has conceived some
improbable theorem to account for those -- admittedly-weighty, and
of a veritable razor's edge -- fragments; but his pleas that we
return to those highlands, are as unreasonable as they are
unseemly.) I grant, the stone on which the Adler perches at anchor
is odd -- our strongest crewman's sledge, delivered with all his
Vanya-given might, makes not a scratch, and Herr Kaupf has broken
both his diamond headed picks with his puttering! -- but rocks that
will not be broken cannot be mined. More and more, I brood that the
Knighthood's efforts in this forsaken place are in vain: that it
has naught but cold and dust to offer, to us or to our Patron.
Felmont 27 (Palus Somni, beyond the Sea of Tranquillity) -- Our
lookout took sight of a faint glow within the crystalline ground,
in the "Sea" just ahead*, and (rightly wary, now, of lunar light!)
alerted the officers and I to this curiosity. The exposed bedrock
now shimmers with a faint, deepest-blue radiance, visible to
untrained eyes only when the Adler's lanterns are doused. Cautious,
we alit upon the lowlands so as to investigate from a judicious
distance -- no telling what fell magics might lie sleeping upon
this dead world, for we know by now it is no meet place for men!
Only upon landing did a humbler solution present itself; Herr
Kaupf, in delving the soils and rubble at this new landing site,
unearthed bits of quartz -- more crystals, but of a common stone
this time -- which gleamed with an eldritch, moon-silvery
luminescence. As single stones, these gemlets give but scant
illumination, but a score gathered in the hand may easily suffice
for reading-light. It would appear these lands have one gift, at
least, to offer our Order and the Heldann Territories.
[* -- Mare Crisium]
Fyrmont 1 (Return journey) -- It is the month of fire, and never
was its name more meaningful! As Adler took wing, the terminator of
sunlight, which has rounded the far side to intercept us, crept
over the last of our landing-sites. The sudden transition into
sunlight left us sweating within the baffled hull, till we broke
through the Skyshield; daylight temperatures are every bit as
extreme as those of night, on Vanya's new world! And indeed, Matera
WILL join the Heldann demesnes, for the luminous quartz Herr Kaupf
has gleaned from her surface will spare the Order from squandering
its tithes on torchlight, and free the brethren of the abbeys from
their onus to illuminate our forts and vessels with spells. Six
bushels of these exotic jewels lie safe in Adler's cargo hold,
secured in taut iron coffers against the rigours of space travel. A
worthy tribute they shall make, to Our Lady ... and a demonstration
to every heathen foreigner that the Order prevails over all
adversity and doubt. By the Grace of Vanya and for the Glory of Her
Eternal Dominion, let all beings who gaze upon the moon by night
know: Matera is ours!
**********
Fortunately for the good Luftkapitan's ego, he never knew the
truth: the Heldannic landing on Matera, though much-trumpeted by
the hierarchy of the Knighthood, wasn't the first successful
mission to the moon in Mystaran history. It wasn't even the second,
third, or fourth! (Not so fortunately for Herr Kauser, he'll NEVER
know: upon finding the vaunted coffers contained nothing but
ordinary, dirt-grade quartz rubble, the Order's commanders stripped
him of his rank and sentenced him to a life of hard labour.) In the
preceding four millennia, the HKs had been beaten to their
destination by Blackmoorian astronauts, Nithian pilgrims,
curiosity-driven gnomes (ouch!), and venturesome Myoshiman
tiger-riders... not to mention the elemental-earthen spirits know
as "desert ghosts", who've dwelt there since almost the beginning
of time.
The only thing that might have hurt Luftkapitan Kauser still more,
would be to learn how very close he'd come to discovering the one
remaining secret of the Mystara-Patera-Matera cluster's
planetology: that Matera, like Mystara itself, is a "hollow world",
home to races and species that have long since passed into
extinction on their planet of origin. The Hollow World we know is a
refuge for those races which thrive under Ixion's eternal sun, and
for subterranean cultures that have burrowed their way entirely
through Mystara's gravity-plane to arrive there. The Hollow Moon --
a world even less accessible, and even more cryptic, to
daylight-races -- is a haven for doomed nocturnal species that
cannot easily adapt to life underground, as the HWs Schattenalfen
have. It is a realm where humans are, at best, a minor and
disreputable race... where nomadic cryions cross "oceans" of
frost-rimmed crystal that shines beneath their feet... where
araneans and phanaton-kin are the best of allies... where grim
mountain empires of kopru and pteryx loom over vibrant city-states
of traders, tricksters, and thieves. It's a world where the dome of
the heavens shimmers with an eerie blue glow half the month-long
day, where coral reefs shine up from the depths of the seas like
light-sculptures, and where eclipses really do cause disasters.
Most importantly, it's a place that can keep on surprising your
players with weirdness, even if they think they know the Known and
Hollow Worlds and the Savage Baronies backwards and forwards.
But before we look inside the Hollow Moon, let's take a peek at
Matera from the outside, as well as its IRL twin, Luna. First, some
facts about the real-world moon, with comparisons of how it and
Matera are similar; next, three significant ways in which Matera
differs from its real-life counterpart; then some thoughts about
D&D space travel and reconciling the HM setting with the
Spelljammer and/or Voidship rules; and finally, a whole bunch of
REALLY bizarre ways to get your PCs to Matera ... most of them from
a wonderful book I discovered -- "Voyages To The Moon" by Marjorie
Nicolson (too bad it's OOP, copyright 1948; it's worth reading, if
you can find it!) -- while researching lunar exploration as it's
portrayed in historical fiction.
Luna: the "real thing"
One of the first things to remember, about the moon -- whether
you're talking about Luna or Matera -- is that, compared to
Earth/Mystara, it is TINY. With a diameter of only 2160 miles, it's
so small you can actually see its curvature falling away in the
distance. If the Empire State Building were moved to the moon, it
would disappear below the horizon if you walked more than 8 miles
away from it. In the Hollow Moon setting, virtually the whole of
the Nearside is habitable by one species or another; yet that's
only about 1.8 million square miles of land, sea, and
crystalbarrens, for the entire Nearward Hemisphere. The Alphatian
Empire at its height, before the Thyatians broke free of its
clutches, encompassed more than twice the land area of the Hollow
Moon.
The second important fact about Luna and her OD&D counterpart,
is that compared to Patera and the various artificial satellites
Earth's humans have launched, they're VERY far from the planets
they orbit: 238,600 miles! By comparison, the orbit proposed for
Patera on Daniel Boese's Web page, "The Mystaran Moons", is a mere
34,200 miles... practically the house next door. Such distances
should pose a mind-boggling challenge to any Voidship headed for
Matera, using the CoM rules strictly as written, as even the
fleetest of these vessels travels only 327 miles through the Void
in 24 hours. (For Spelljammers capable of "warp speed", of course,
it's a distinctly-undramatic four minute hop; but more on how to
modify the spaceflight rules for a moon-visit, later.) This means
that Luna travels slightly less than 1 1/2 million miles every
month, at speeds of roughly 2300 mph; merely catching up to Matera,
which moves with equal speed around Mystara, should prove nearly
impossible for even the swiftest Warbirds or Alphatian airships, if
their navigators neglect to plan ahead. (Sorry, Bruce, but I don't
think the ol' Princess Ark will be stumbling upon this one by
chance! ;-D)
The real-world Luna has an orbital period of 27.3 Earth days,
during which it circles the Earth completely and experiences one
lunar day. (The slower, 28-day lunar phase cycle we witness on
Earth is partly an effect of our own planet's simultaneous
movement.) Because of a "dragging" gravitational effect of its
sister-moon Patera -- and for DM convenience -- Matera has a 28-day
orbital period. Explorers on the Nearside are always able to see
the Earth/Mystara, except on those dates when the moon in question
is full (and hence, the sun is on the planet's opposite side).
Visitors to the Farside of either moon had best carry accurate
chronometers or spells to keep track of time, as no such cues to
time's passage are visible in the Farward skies, and to be caught
by the terminator -- the boundary line between dark and light which
sweeps across the Nearside's surface each month, starting over the
Mare Foecunditatus and disappearing beyond the Oceanus Procellarum
-- can mean instant blindness or a fiery, UV-seared death.
Having no atmospheres, Luna and Matera are both alternately exposed
to blistering, brilliant sunlight, and the icy chill of space.
Visitors to the bright side of either moon must cope with "high
noon" temperatures of up to 210 degrees F, as well as glare that
can blind in microseconds and direct UV-rays which burn exposed
skin just as fast. At the opposite extreme, the shadowed lunar
surface gradually drops to -240 degrees F after sundown, with lunar
bedrock temperatures rapidly equalising to -30 degrees at depths of
1 meter or more. Night on the moon's Nearside is surprisingly
bright, as reflected sunlight from the (full or gibbous)
Earth/Mystara sheds five times as much illumination to the lunar
surface as the moon itself would shed, in similar phase; stars are
also considerably brighter, and they do not twinkle in the absence
of a screening atmosphere.
The axis of rotation of Luna is less steep than Earth's, lying
almost perpendicular to the plane of the "ecliptic" -- the plane of
Earth's orbit round the Sun. Thus, apart from lunar eclipses which
temporarily cause surface temperatures to plunge, on an annual but
irregular basis, there are no seasons on Luna. Matera, too, has
none of the usual seasons for an Earth-like planet; however, near
passes by its invisible sister-moon occur on a predictable basis,
and affect HM weather and geological activity through Patera's
tidal pull. None of these climatic influences can be felt, on the
inert exterior of Matera.
Luna is a dead world, composed largely of basalt and interstellar
dust, along with the remnants of countless meteors of all sizes.
Elements of high atomic weight are rare or unknown, on Luna ... so
much so, that theories have been advanced that Luna didn't even
originate among the dense planets of the inner Solar System, but
drifted away from one of the outer planets or even from another
nearby star-system. Native iron rich in nickel is common, as are
native brass (unknown as a natural alloy, on Earth), quartz,
spinels, and less-exciting minerals of low atomic weight. In the
interest of parallelism, I have chosen to let Matera's geology
resemble Luna's in regards to mineralogy ... even though Matera's
origin is even more exotic than Luna's hypothetical one!
Neither Luna nor Matera have a magnetic field, making compasses
useless. Orientation by stars is also virtually useless, as the
near-vertical North/South axis of either moon means the stars are
skewed from where they would be visible from the two moons'
respective planets; Polaris, for instance, is NOT directly above
the North Pole, on Luna. Combined with the extreme curvature of the
horizon and the lack of prominent landmarks, explorers face a very
real risk of getting lost -- a risk too often ignored, in Hollow
World adventures -- and one that could easily be the death of a
careless scout, who ventures too far from his or her vessel in
areas where moondust is too sparse to hold a clear footprint.
Matera: how it's different
"Golden dome's grandeur,
Oh captain, only I have known;
Ever will I tell thee...?"*
[* - amateur haiku composed by Lady Abovombe six months into her
captivity on Myoshima... before Prince Haldemar's continued absence
made her want to "tell him" a few things far less poetic]
While Matera resembles Luna to casual inspection through a
telescope, it departs from its Earth-bound twin in three important
respects: heights of visible external features; composition of its
dark-coloured maria or "Seas"; and the appearance of its
long-unglimpsed "dark side" (a misnomer, since the far side of both
Luna and Matera are illuminated during the new moon).
When astronomers on Earth first endeavoured to map Luna's surface,
they assumed that the stark shadows cast by upland features
indicated great mountains, deep valleys, and cavernous rifts in the
landscape. They were sadly mistaken; while some lunar features IRL
appear very tall through a telescope, this is an illusion generated
by the extreme reflectivity of porous moonrock. On actual
inspection by probes and later by human astronauts, Luna's
"towering mountains" turned out to be the gentlest of hills, and
the "deep basins" of lunar craters are seldom more than a few
thousand feet ... this, in craters dozens of miles across.
Matera, on the other hand, is a fantasy setting, and for Mystara's
satellite, those fanciful maps are correct! Altitudes for exterior
features of Matera -- which correspond to Luna's exactly, right
down to the bright rays surrounding Tycho and other prominent
craters -- are increased by a factor of 10, from their counterparts
on Luna. Hills of 500 feet grow to nearly a mile high; crevices
Neil Armstrong might have hopped down into unhurt, now gape open as
treacherous chasms in the rocky ground; ridges of rock that proved
mere ripples IRL offer meaningful obstacles for overland
travellers. This is why Luftkapitan Kauser could plant Vanya's
banner on the peak of a mountaintop rather than a hump on the
ground, and why DMs who opt to set adventures on the outer Matera
will have something besides flat, uninteresting terrain to
describe.
Another feature that differs from Luna -- though in this case, the
IRL early moon-geographers are just as wrong -- is the series of
lunar maria or "Seas" which cover large regions of the Nearside
(these make up face of the Man in the Moon). On Luna, maria are
upwellings of dark-coloured magma which cooled into igneous
rock-flats, back when both moon and Earth began cooling off after
the creation of the Solar System. On Matera, most of these features
are something quite different: gargantuan plains of weathered,
crystalline rock which, by all appearances, cannot be broken
through by any mundane or magical force known to mortals, and
resists even Disintegrate spells. (Too bad Herr Kaupf couldn't try
those!) Their open surfaces have been minutely scratched by aeons
of tiny meteorite-impacts, but chipping a piece loose or digging
into these expanses of seemingly-indestructible bedrock is beyond
the capacity of anyone but the Immortals; only they, or the patient
erosion of time, can wear down these deserts of dark glass. One
other "sea" -- Mare Orientale, just beyond the Farward rim of
Oceanus Procellarum and the Cordillera Mountains -- is an immense
impact crater that provides the only permanent access-point for the
Hollow Moon. A few of the smallest Materan maria (Undarum, Spumans,
Marginis and Smythii) really ARE inert magma-flats, like their
counterparts on Luna.
Quirks of altitude and composition aside, none of the geography on
Matera's Nearside should be particularly unfamiliar to players, or
even to their PCs; they see them every time they look at the moon,
after all! Matera's Farside, however, is another story. While the
Nearside's maria, craters, and other physical features correspond
precisely to those of Luna, the seldom-seen side of Matera which
faces away from the planet in no way resembles the drab,
featureless far side of our IRL moon. In fact -- as Lady Abovombe
first observed, shortly before composing her poem -- fully 82% of
the Farside's land area consists of the same open, crystalline
plains which comprise the maria of Nearside. Floodlit by the
intense ambient sunlight striking its airless surface, this vast
dome of translucent crystal reflects back higher proportions of the
red, orange, and yellow components of the spectrum -- glowing, by
"day", with a rich golden colour, in a manner not distinguishable
in Nearside maria (their colours are "washed out" by white light
reflected from non-crystalline rocks and moondust) -- even as it
allows greens, blues, and shorter wavelengths to pass through its
dense, unbreakable barrier. The unique optical properties of the
Farside can be plainly seen by observers in orbit around Matera or
from the farther reaches of space; and the bright edges of
Farside's "golden dome" are also visible from Patera, when that
diminutive moon's skewed circumpolar orbit takes it farthest above
or below the plane of the ecliptic.