Skies and Zodiacs

The world of Keys & Kingdoms is called Cosmos. Weird name for a planet, I know. Because it's a planet, not a cosmos. I believe it's called that because the setting was originally a take on the Kingdom Hearts universe, before shifting gears to be much more generally Disney-esque. Kingdom Hearts takes a lot of its elements from Final Fantasy, and Final Fantasy has a crossover series called Dissidia, in which the good guys are united under a goddess of light named Cosmos. So... that's the connection.

Being of the mind to create many different fantasy settings in the multiverse of the AE:GIS gaming system, one thing consistently bubbling under the surface is that each world should have a unique sky. This started when I saw Starcrash, a 1970s sci-fi B-movie which was riffed in the Netflix revival of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Space scenes in Stacrash feature a sky full of multicolored stars. I knew I wanted that look for Realm of Stars, the default AE:GIS setting.

So we're here to talk about the Keys & Kingdoms sky, whose general vibe is having the least alien-looking sky in the AE:GIS multiverse, it's fairly standard. Most of the work on this sky was done by our own Casey Gosselin.

 

Here's the basic gradient and star patterns you'll see in the background of day and night scenes in the K&K world. We also prepared similar gradients for dusk, dawn, sunrise, and sunset; and different star patterns depending on which direction you're facing, this being the north sky. There's also a set of what clouds look like, in both a peaceful and stormy state, at each time of day.

And here we have the design for the evening star, the sun, and the moon. The moon was the very last thing Casey worked on, for old times' sake, as it was based on various moons she designed for the Deities Project, only bluish where it was more gold in that project. We worked out a 21-day cycle for the moon's various phases, which presumably work a little differently in this fantasy world than they do in our physics-based real world where it's all about reflected light and shadows. I assume this is one of those worlds where the moon only comes out at night and therefore there are never eclipses.

One thing that makes the sky of K&K particularly unusual is that if you look sorta indirectly at the evening star, moon, or sun, you'll be able to see a zodiac symbol which will help you determine what day, month, and year it is.

I invented this days-of-the-week zodiac based on the mythological meaning of the days of the week. There are various ways of naming the seven days of the week but they all have the same motifs in both Germanic and Latin traditions: the seven days being respectively named after the sun, the moon, a god of war, a god of travel, a god of storms, a goddess of love, and a god of the harvest. So if you look at the evening star, you'll get a faint impression of the current day's symbol, and so you'll learn what day it is.

I decided to do kind of a riff on the Forgotten Realms calendar system by having every month in the K&K world consist of exactly three seven-day weeks, meaning months are only 21 days long and so the year is only 252 days. So, everything in the K&K world kinda ages faster to keep things simple from our perspective.

And if you look in the general direction of the sun, you'll see a symbol from the eastern zodiac, which changes at the beginning of the year. All these zodiacs will be fairly significant and frequent topics of discussion in the world, with astrological signs presumably having a bit more tangible validity than they do in real life.

Now, Casey agreed to do the moon but said she would be passing on doing the western zodiac, as she had her own projects to focus on. What projects? Well, I've asked, but she evades the question. Not for me to know, I guess. We've worked together a long time, but we ain't that close.

So I had my sister-in-law Nicky start working on the western zodiac. Two years later, I decided she had officially missed the deadline, so I approached freelancer Nyxthedragon225, who had just done a bunch of character poses for me, about taking on the task, and so that got cleared up in about a week.

And so you see the symbol of the current month when you look at the moon. Yes, in this setting the twelve months correspond directly to the twelve zodiac symbols and are named after them, a little shake-up from reality.

So from there a time will come to work on the skies of other worlds. For Irregular Fantasy!, I asked David Morgan-Mar if there was anything special about the skies of the Demesnes, and he said he'd never thought of it and was reserving judgment on it in case he came up with a one-off joke regarding ways the sky was different from our own. A lot of fantasy worlds, for example, have a weird moon, or multiple moons.

I'm having this idea of basing the sun and moon on images that explore the idea of "what would it look like if Jupiter or Saturn were as close to Earth as the moon is?" So the sun and moon on the Demesnes will be massive and detailed and probably have rings. Still thinking over the specifics, nothing yet on what the stars will look like. Thinkin' about it.