Masters of the Pentacle

Status: transcribing notes for magic system

The Moons of Saturn

Status: developing map board
This game will be based, in part, on my "Powers of the Pentacle" published in the Fall 1987 issue of Different Worlds magazine:
and on the magic system I had been developing way back in the 1980's based on "The Powers of the Pentacle" because I loathed AD&D's magic system but that I never finished. I recently discovered an outline I had printed out decades ago using a dot-matrix printer, have scanned, OCR'd using Adobe Acrobat Pro--good Murphy, all things Adobe are worthless!--and am now fixing all of Adobe's OCR errors. When I'm done fixing the outline, I'll decide how much of it needs to be fleshed out for Masters of the Pentacle and get to serious work on the game.
Who knows? Maybe I'll write up the entire magic system and publish it as well.

They have a beautiful map like what I was looking for, about halfway down the page. They present the orbits to one side of Saturn, and I've taken it and mirrored it about Saturn:

Saturn Moon Distances Mirrored about Saturn - from https://skymarvels.com/infopages/saturninfo.htm
Saturn Moon Distances Mirrored about Saturn - from https://skymarvels.com/infopages/saturninfo.htm

The thing I hadn't realized is how dispersed Saturn's major moons are.
The following table summarizes the moons' (and major rings') orbital radii:

Moon/Ring Orbital
Radius (km)
Orbital Radius
(Saturn Diameters)
Inner Rings 69.27 0.6
Outer Rings 142.27 1.1
Mimas 185,520 1.5
Enceladus 238,020 1.9
Tethys 294,660 1.9
Dione 377,400 3.0
Rhea 527,400 4.2
Titan 1,221,830 9.8
Hyperion 1,481,100 11.9
Iapetus 3,561,300 28.6

What this means is, if I were to include Iapetus on the game board, 82.7% of the board, the area between Hyperion's and Iapetus's orbits, would be empty space.
I could have random minor moons in this otherwise empty space, but the map board I'm envisioning would make this next to impossible, so either Iapetus will have to be inaccessible to players or I'll have to figure out how to have a separate board for this outer-most major moon and some specialized way to reach it.