Call me the anal retentive PhD physics player - but this system does tend to strain credulity, and I'm not even that good at planetary physics (so take everything I say with a healthy grain of salt). You're more than welcome to just handwave the physics or call it magic - but the synthesis of the two (physics and magic) makes suspending disbelief a little harder (at least for me). I'm a huge fan of more complex planetary systems for interesting fantasy worlds - but I must say I've never incorporated quite so many different elements into a single world.

My chief concern isn't that you have two moons, or two exceptionally large moons, or a moon with rings, or a moon orbiting one of those moons, or that neither of the moons has approached tidal locking, but the addition of not one but two separate L5 systems are pretty unusual in a system this complex. L5 (and L4) are incredibly stable orbit points - but only for a two-body system. Once you add another body of any non-trivial size in close proximity, that body tends to destabilize the Lagrangians of the two-body system. You can feasibly have Hodr and Mani - but unless one of them is really small or really distant, I wouldn't also include the Wolves and the Tears.

Let's say, for the sake of the story, you want to keep all of the major elements currently in play, but you want to keep some semblance of real-world physics to explain it:

  • Unless the world is really "new" (and thus probably long-term unstable) I would tweak Mani to be tidally locked with no angle from it's plane of revolution - as the closer moon, it's the most affected by Torn's gravity and likely to get captured over the geologic timescales necessary for life
  • Keep Mani's rings - but make them pretty close in, and relatively dim - like nearly invisible except when Mani is in the new moon phase
  • Increase Hodr's axis of revolution by 10-20% - putting it further out decreases the likelihood of tidal locking and interference with Mani's Lagrangians.
  • Hodr's moon - which I assume is on the scale of a small asteroid (ala Phobos/Deimos) (and does it have a name?) - needs to be pretty close to avoid perturbation by the rest of the system
  • To dramatically decrease the Lagrangian instability, you could put Hodr and Mani in opposition - i.e. they'd have the same orbital period and always be on opposite sides of the planet - obviously this makes having both moons in the sky simultaneously impossible, which is less story fun. As a compromise - you could try some level of orbital resonance - maybe a 2:1 or 3:1 resonance would lend some stability to both systems - but I can't say for certain without doing the math - and I'm not even sure I could with a system this complex (plus it's been 10+ years since I've tried at all)
  • Skoll and Hati - I'd probably reduce to just one Wolf given the system instability, but if you're keeping both, make them very small and tightly bound to each other (otherwise one or both will wander out of the Lagrangian region and get spun out of the system) - they'd almost have to be very small, looking more like a pair of stars chasing Mani rather than moons themselves.
  • As for the Tears - my instinct is that from the planet, given the size/distance of the particles, I'd imagine it'll look more like a fuzzy cloud (similar to the Milky Way) that twinkles occasionally - if you want them to look more like a herd of stars, they'll need to be reasonably sized, which dramatically increases the likelihood that they'll coalesce into a single body. You could also assume that the instability of the L5 point (due to Mani's influence) is what keeps the Tears broken up.
  • Another possible addition - if the system managed to recently collect a large amount of high-albedo particles, that could help explain both Mani's rings and the Tears - my best idea would be a major comet impact with Mani, which would fill the entire system with debris, causing some spectacular meteor-shower effects on Torn itself for a few months/years (campaign background?), Mani reclaims a fair portion, but some falls into a ring pattern - meanwhile most of the rest gets cleared out, until only the Tears (and maybe a companion set at Hodr's L4?) remain


The easier answer is to say screw the laws physics, and just use them when you feel like it.