Basic Information
An Ice Giant is a large planet composed mostly of water, ammonia, and methane. The outer 15% to 20% of the planet may also be made of Helium and Hydrogen. The chemical composition of an Ice Giant gives them a bluish tone - from powder blue to deep ultramarine.
Don't let the name fool you into thinking you can land in their oceans, or on their icy surface. Ice Giants are a subtype of Gas Giant - what appears as surface from a distance is actually clouds and thick atmosphere. If you penetrated far enough in to land on something even remotely solid, you'd be experiencing incredible crushing pressures both atmospheric and gravitational. Despite being icy on the outside, the inner cores of these planets are still molten.
Our solar system has two Ice Giants in it - Uranus and Neptune.
Sources
Game and Story Use
- For more ideas, see ice planet - but know that that page doesn't assume the planet in question to be huge. An ice giant will also be a high gravity planet, and have significant atmospheric pressure as well. Being a gas giant, it's significantly more alien than the ice planet page assumes. It's not much at all like the north pole.
- An ice giant planet may be a source of naturally-occuring metallic hydrogen fuel. If so, it would probably be mined by robots and remote-controlled devices, as the planet itself is very dangerous to human life.
- More generally, a large supply of water, ammonia and methane is likely to be a great deal of use to any civilisation with the spacefaring chops to extract them. Certainly any construction of human occupied megastructures is likely to need more water and organic carbon than Earth alone can supply.
- Adventure Seed: Ogres of the Ice World