Sisters, The

The Sisters
Looking out at the Nine Sisters
Basic Information
Other names	The Nine Sisters
Crystal sphere	Greyspace
Type	Cluster
Size class	C
Shape class	Octagonal
Type class	Quasi-starlike objects
Satellite of	Oerth
Day length	12 months (to rotate about the central star)
Year length	400 months
Orbit distance	7,500 million miles (75 days)

The Sisters are a group of nine bright star-like objects that orbit the system primary Oerth in the crystal sphere known as Greyspace.

"For I have looked upon the Nine Sisters and tasted the wine of distant lands. My life was rich, and my death is a resting." - excerpt from Songs of the Wanderer, an anonymous collection of tales and poetry.

Description

From the surface of Oerth, the Sisters appear as a single bright star in the night sky. However, from wildspace, when viewed from the direction of the primary, the nine bright star-like objects (quasi-stars) form a perfect octagon, with the ninth star in the exact center. The entire octagonal formation is 500 miles (800 kilometres) across, while the Sisters themselves are spherical objects 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) in diameter.

The star-like objects burn with a brilliant blue-white light bright enough to dazzle anyone looking directly at them, even as far as a million miles (1,6 million kilometres) away. Within 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometres), the Sisters are bright enough to permanently blind anyone looking directly at them. Despite their brilliance, the Sisters do not radiate any heat.

It is physically impossible to touch any of the Sisters. As a ship approaches one of the star-like objects, the spelljammer begins to experience the effects of a repulsion field, in effect a form of negative-gravity. At about 100 miles (160 kilometres) from a quasi-star, the field is equivalent to half Oerth's normal gravity (0.5g). However, the repulsion effect of the field increases exponentially the closer the ship gets to the quasi-star, meaning that every time the distance to the star is halved, the field doubles in strength. At 1 mile, the field is equivalent to 32 times Oerth's normal gravity; no spelljamming vessel, no matter how high the ship's rating could ever come closer to one of the Sisters than 1 mile.

If a ship passes through the Sisters, penetrating the plane along which the star-like objects lie, the ship can end up travelling through space and/or time. The crew may discover that the ship has traveled to the opposite end of Greyspace's crystal shell, covering 16,000 million miles (25,600 million kilometres) in an instant, or they may have traveled to another crystal sphere entirely. Even worse, the crew may discover that the ship has been transported days, weeks, years or even centuries before or after they traveled through the Sisters.

Sargasso

The Sisters are surrounded by a magic-dead region, known as a sargasso. 700 miles in diameter and 5 miles thick, this disk shaped region causes all magic to cease functioning, including a ship's helm. As soon as a spelljammer enters the affected region, the helmsman at the helm will feel the lack of magic as a kind of sickening emptiness, similar to the sensation of falling. The helm will cease to function soon after, and if the helmsman remains at the helm during this loss of power, they will fall unconscious, and will remain so for a number of days. While within a sargasso, the ship will continue to move in a straight line at tactical speed due to its own inertia. Unless the ship has a very low rating, or it enters the disk-shaped sargasso along its edge, the ship's residual speed should be enough to carry it through the magic-dead zone in less than a day. However, the greatest danger faced by a ship caught in the sargasso is that it may drift through the Sisters themselves, and end up being transported through space and/or time (see above).

Appendix

External Links

• The Sisters article at Greyhawkonline.com, a wiki for the Greyhawk campaign setting.
• Greyspace at Beyond the Moons (the official Spelljammer website)