Campaign.Introduction
Way back in my last year at The University of Toledo, I ran an AD&D® Spelljammer campaign for my college gaming club. Anybody who was there will gladly tell you what a mess of a campaign it was: unruly players walked all over the campaign's nominal plot with juvenille antics and warped logic, so I graduated and moved on to grad school before they could ever finish their quest. In the end, though, most of them had fun, so I don't regret the campaign that much.
The campaign itself revolved around the Sirrolian Arm, a string of crystal spheres explored several thousand years ago by the elven explorer Sirrol. The spheres trace a route from the three major AD&D; worlds (Krynn, Oerth, and Toril, collectively referred to as The Triangle in my campaign) to the Illithidae Expanse, a group of crystal spheres where Mind Flayers have actually suceeded in their endless quest to extinguish the sun(s). Highlights of the region include Wildstar (an Elven asteroid fortess with a random orbit), Reaver's Rock (an all-pirate colony that serves as a sort of Port Royale in space), and Candlespace, a crystal sphere where all the stars are giant candles. (OK, so maybe that last one isn't as impressive as I first thought.)
As much as I'd like to bombard you with all the detailed information I have on the Sirrolian Arm, I haven't gotten around to digitizing any of the maps. So, what you get instead is random bits of text information that I can convert to HTML without much work. (Like most RPG sites, this is all shovelware.) Hopefully, somebody somewhere will find this worth reading.
Fragments
- General Knowledge: Oerth is a sample player aid. I figure if you're going to suddenly throw a groundling PC into fantasy space, you should tell the player what the typical character knows about planets, stars, etc. Players can roleplay discovery better if they have a clearer idea of what their characters already know. This is the handout I gave to players with characters from the World of Greyhawk ™. (I can't seem to find the handout I had for Forgotten Realms ™ characters.)
- Find Familiar (in Space) explains what happens if a magic user casts Find Familar on an colonized asteroid instead of a planet.
- Gnomish Technology for Spelljammers uses the gnomish tinker rules from DragonLance Adventures to describe some gnomish devices that appeared in my campaign.
- Magic Items for Spelljammers describes a couple of magic items that popped up (or were scheduled to pop up) in my campaign.
- New Nevermind is the history of New Nevermind, a gnomish citadel orbiting Krynn (the world of the DragonLance campaign). This is one of the few settlements I can share with you, because I never bothered to draw a map for it.
- Modified Proficiencies represents one of my few forays into the dreaded realm of "house rules", and explains how some traditional AD&D non-weapon proficiencies need to be adjusted for use in space.
Credos & Concepts
Ad astra per magica
(amateur Latin for "To
the stars through magic") is my personal Spelljammer's Credo. The
Credo is meant to emphasize two themes:
First and foremost: This is a fantasy campaign. I not one of those equation-obsessed types who's going to rewrite Spelljammer physics for realism. I like Spelljammer's binary gravity, disc-shaped planets, flying boats, and radioactive golems. Fantasy space is allowed to fantastic, as long as it's a self-consistent fantasy. (Just as a personal aside: Most DMs harping about realism haven't got a good enough grasp of the social sciences to write realistic campaigns, anyway.)
Second: this campaign (like all my AD&D campaigns) is top-heavy with historical details and classical references (if the title of this page didn't clue you in, you may be in the wrong place). You can expect an overabundance of conspiracies, heresies, folklore, medieval/renaissance music, drink recipes, and whatever else I think is necessary to remind players they're not in the 20th century anymore.