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Ally: Lexxia Mare, Scholar of the Ashen Wastes

The sage put down her scepter, and spoke with a sympathy unfelt in her expression.  “I’m sorry, it appears you and your companions have appeared at an inauspicious time, the dust-storms last for weeks this time of year, and afterwords the saltskitters will be out claiming new territory along the dunes..”  

“ What is this place? “ Asked Rhorgar

“ Who are you?” queried Verna

“ Where in the nine hells are we?!” Demanded Ogierd, which drew the stranger’s reproachful glare.  

“Not so far as that, I assure you.. but much farther than any of you have likely been before. Come, we will shelter in the lower catacombs away from the howling wind, and I will answer any question you may have. Questions are why I found myself in this ruin in the first place, and I have uncovered a few answers to share in my hermitage.”  

-A journey beyond the horizon: a tale of the Patrisford five

Setup: Though it features prominently in the mysticism of nearly all cultures, few pay much attention to the moon, far as it is beyond the reach of mortals and too constant in its cycles to never warrant scrutiny. Scraps of lore speak of divine palaces on the outskirts of the firmament and while some scholars see the truth of these tales, most other consider them little better than the fairy-stories hinting at the existence of foggy gardens and pearlesant seas. 

Lexxia Mare was one of these scholars, a deacon of a dogmatic faith who’s patron had long since ceased his visitations to the mortal world. Dissatisfied with endless postulation on the abstract nature of their absent benefactor and the vagaries of his last commandments, the deacon decided to seek a means to meet with the god on her own terms. Seeking out a relic from the founding of the faith said to have come from the god’s own halls, Lexxia used her substantial power to teleport herself back to the relic’s origin, finding herself in a deserted ruin where the world of her birth hung in the sky like a glistening jewel. 

While it might have once been the realm of palaces and pearl gardens hinted at by the stories, Lexxia found the moon to be a far cry from that splendor: an endless, ruin dotted wasteland filled with nothing but glistening silver-white sand and the windcarved canyons. Here she spent several years in isolation, combing through the wastes for clues to a forgotten past and meditating on the foundations of her faith.  Though her hermitage has led her no closer to her god, it has greatly increased her wisdom and occacular powers, and should the party seek a guide to the cosmos, they could ask for none better. 

Adventure Hooks: 

A teleportation mishap under an open sky leads to the party being deposited into the wastes or a lunar ruin. Disoriented and preyed upon by strange beasts of the wasteland, they are saved from their predicament by Mare, who offers them her own hermitage as a place to retreat and recover their strength.   

Lunar ravagers are towering fey raiders who live in floating fortresses among the clouds and descend to hunt dangerous prey by the light of full moon. Though they are rare and secretive on the planet below, they maintain a constant presence above the lunar surface, able to utilize their full abilities whenever they wish and finding no end of game among the dangerous scavengers of the palace-moon.  Those abducted by the fey as slaves may end up escaping to the silvery wastes below, or may be freed by Lexxia when she comes to parlay with yet another ravager fortress infringing on her territory. 

There are more ruins across and beneath the lunar sands for Lexxia to ever explore herself, and any one may hold the secret to what happened to exile the gods from their luminescent perch. A properly equipped party may have many adventures ahead of them in the wastes, each one enriching them with treasure and whatever answers the lunar sage can supply in trade.  

Plancescape: The Palace Moon

Hovering beyond the reach of mortals and beneath the notice of gods, this eerily tranquil wasteland awaits those who would explore its mysteries and discover the fate of a vanished pantheon.

Gods die, this is known, as their fossilized bodies are sometimes found floating in the astral sea or interred in great monuments hidden throughout the cosmos. Sometimes they are slain by other gods, or die as part of their own mythology, or shift and reoccur as new deities as the people who they are pledged to go through ideological changes.

This does not explain the absence of the gods that built the palace moon, a demiplane hanging just outside the material realm in much the same way that a regular moon might orbit a celestial body. In its time it was a hanging garden, a lush green paradise where one might lounge in mountain sized castles and observe the goings on of the material plane, basking in riches and radiance and all the splendor their divine might could conjure. Today the moon is a dust-riven wasteland, with its halls and city sized gardens smothered under colorless particulate with those remaining edifices exposed to the air slowly being worn away by time. It is a land ripe for exploration, as the relics of divinity lay scattered among the towering pagodas and basilicas covered with petrified ivory, amounting to not only the treasures of unknown gods but to the flotsam of various celestial courts and clergies born to serve the now absent divinities. It is for this reason that both scholars and terrible warlords choose to make the Palace moon their home, sifting through the rubble of the dead world in the hopes of finding some fossilized trace of the ineffable.

Hooks:

The a powerful druid who’s influence once kept the region stable has gone missing investigating strange omens from a set of ancient megaliths contained within the foundations of an overgrown temple. As tensions between the region’s factions escalate, those who would seek peace reach out to the party to find her and bring her back. After delving the dangerous ruins (and having to overcome some of the druid’s on defenses along with the local critters) they discover her journal. In attempting to stabilize the ruin, the druid activated some kind of portal and pulled something through, after which the party can deduce that whatever it is she summoned dragged her back with it before the portal closed. Their only hope of rescuing the peacekeeper is to retrace her steps, activate the portal and plunge through themselves, surviving the lunar wasteland and get her back, all before war breaks out at home. 

In the light of the full moon, the silver inlaid skull of a particular aasimar possesses the power to teleport those holding it to a graveyard on the moon, the spirit of it’s departed owner desperate to return to the land from which it was banished. A fortune hunting thief has purchased this skull from an occultist, and has been using it to loot the graves of the celestial court and turn a tidy profit. The players might find a few of these objects in the local magic shops, with a chance to trace them back to their source.

Seeking visions of the divine, a group of mystics cast their mind out to the aether and were cursed with visions of the lunar tomb palace. Extracting from this foreboding omen that the true gods of their world were dead, and all others were merely invading presences, they set about forming a heretical order and stirring up no end of trouble, even after their deaths. These followers of the Lunatic’s Canto can be responsible for all manner of blasphemous crimes across the realm, eventually drawing the party into one of their moon mad rituals the way that cultist are wont to do.

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Rival: Eseris, Dancer of the Edge

Can you folks hurry up and surrender already? I’ve got a hot date with a smuggler captain and the bastard son of a supernova and that bounty on your heads is going to pay for one hell of a night out.

It’s tough being one of wildspace’s most prestigious bountyhunters: the action, the glory, the riches, the hot alien babes hanging off every word of your latest adventure… but the Eseris persists none the less. Born of a union of between an inspiration seeking painter and the majesty of the cosmos itself, this aasimar duellist now skates about the stars on a torrent of her own light, hunting down outlaws mostly for the thrill of it.

Hooks:

Our heroes first encounter Eseris as part of a random encounter, when their transport is ambushed by a bit of space-faring wildlife that’s decided to take territorial exception to their vessel. While the party is fighting for their life, Eseris spends most of the fight showboating and performing for the other passengers, stepping in to strike the killing blow or if the party REALLY needs help.

Some time later, after the party has earned the ire of some galactic warlord or planetary government, Eseris comes hunting for their bounty. Taking advantage of her ability to fly and the party’s ignorance around strange planear geography, the bountyhunter will attempt to separate them, incapacitating them in ones or twos before finding one last opponent to engage in a duel. While the coin helps speed her along towards finding her opponents, it’s the challenge that serves as Eseris’s primary motivation… and the party might be able to avoid being captured by persuading her that it would be more fun to overthrow whoever it was that put the bounty on them in the first place.

Though a talented swashbuckler in her own right, Eseris’s skills are only bolstered by the aid of a blade that can dance through the air and be controlled like one of her own limbs. Forged from an alloy of starmetal and her own living light, this sword leaves quickly fading after-images with each swing, each of which is just as solid as the original. Should the party be able to get on the bountyhunter’s goodside ( which involves buying her some drinks and making an absolute idiot of themselves), she’ll point them in the direction of where she got it.. a strange celestial operating a forge on a lonely little moon out in the vast night.

Doesnt the Skyscour Clan feel like the sort to follow the Revolation Tyrant Mnyull? Or, rather, ride at his front...

Imagine the days leading up to impact, portals tearing onto unsuspecting planets, ships descending from the silver void, legions of untold number raiding whole wildspaces.

Then they suddenly scatter, with or without their prize, the star vikings and astral war boys clear out as if smoked like bees.

Only days, if even that, are given to the raided few before a cosmic armageddon makes impact.

Campaign: Shore of the Silver Sea

As this eagle eyed reader mentioned, there’s been a trend in my writing over the past few months, seemingly unconnected occurrences that herald something great and cosmic, the emergence of a new campaign to launch your parties from the beach of the mundane into the vast and wondrous depths of the astral sea.

Our Story begins as many do, in the aftermath of a great storm: With the party having only a few nights past taken shelter in a portside tavern known as the Long Walk, waiting out the rain and the wind in the traditional manner: sitting by the hearth with the other patrons as they listen to the old salts spin yarns. One of those patrons was fellow of the royal botany society, who was more than happy to hire the party on as guides and escorts as he explores and documents the flora of the coast. This intrepid ( if a bit tepid) expedition rapidly heats up as the party stumble across a hidden cove and the fresh wrecks of two ships, one civilian, one royal navy, cast far from the sea and left without survivors.

This discovery leads the party to getting caught up in a silent tug-of-war between the navy and a secretive faction of smugglers, with one wrong decision ( likely them filling their packs with plundered goods) ending the party up on the wrong side of the law.  On their way back to town however, the party watch as a light falls from the sky over the barony, forever changing their fates as they return to a realm that’s been touched by the stars.

Early Game

One of the tall tales told by the sailors at the Long Walk was of a marauding reaver king who invoked the ire of the sea god, who in turn brought down a wave so mighty that it smashed the reaver’s fleet to splinters and buried him in the rubble of his own castle.   Buried so they say.. along with all the treasure he had taken from raiding richer ports... and while the story is likely exaggerated... it wouldn’t hurt to go take a look, would it?

Strange rumours trickle in from the hinterlands, odd folk on the roads, sightings of unnatural animals, talk of a cave where whispers of the past and imagined tomorrows dance. All of these threads will lead the party to a meeting with a potential mentor, an old lighthouse keeper who holds the mystery of the stars and stands against the cold cruelty of the void. Perhaps he can shed some illumination on the party’s current struggles

The star’s falling has caused chaos in the region’s capital: an arson spree, the baroness forcefully conscripting oracles,  sightings of a dragon out in the wilderness. Trekking along with a professional hunter, the party discover that they are not on the tale of some feral drake looking to move into new territory, but a full dragon who seems to be purposefully searching the region with the help of a masked rider.

As it turns out, the dragon and rider are travellers from the astral sea, pilgrims following an omen from the goddess of guidance and starlight. They followed the star across worlds until it landed in the barony, and was eventually misplaced by a hapless young man rounded up by the baroness’s agents shortly after becoming an accidental oracle and asking the party for help earlier on their travels. Reuniting the star with its chosen seekers grants the party a vision of the future, of an attack they will not have time to avert.

Mid Game

Hollowed out by eons of immortality and war, a clan of astral elves has ripped open a portal and begun raiding the original port city the party started their adventure in, snapping up goods and taking hostages. Here is a decision point: should the party rush to save the innocents before help can be raised, they will be overwhelmed, taken captive and hauled away to the raider’s stronghold. Should they rally their new allies and arrive in force, they will be too late, and will have to seek out another means of travelling beyond the reaches of the waking world.

In the latter option, the party will find themselves portalling to Lydestrum, a city of glass floating in an eternal gyre of mist and wind, and the hub of their outerworld adventures. Here they might begin their search for the pirates by seeking rumors at the alien filled docks, make an alliance with local powers by helping to wrangle some storm-tossed architecutre, or simply sign on to a spelljammer ship and begin to learn their space-legs.

The bright maiden Urania is not the only goddess at work among the stars, for as the party explore the city they hear the name and see the handiwork of Nyx, Mother of Primordial Darkness. Catching a night blessed thief is enough to earn the party Nyx’s attention, who decides to rope the party into a little wager involving her astronomic counterpart and the disaperance of a sacred lantern before an imporatant voyage.

After meeting an artisan who can make marvelous weapons out of light, the party end up getting snared in local politics after this new friend is kidnapped from their shop. The trail leads them into conflict with blackmarket dealers from the plane of exiles and getting mixed up with the glass city’s political powers. 

Tangling with the astral sea’s criminal element may have just paid off, as the party have managed to snag themsleves a star-chart pointing to what just might be the haul of a lifetime: The long abandoned manor of an archmage hidden in the vastness of the silver sea. What they find instead is a labyrinth of nightmare and splendour and fungus, which just might hold power and secrets that will aid them as the campaign closes.

One of the expeditions sailing out of the star port has its aim on discovering the much speculated origin of an eerie signal coming from a haunted nebula. As luck would have it, this happens to be a regional base of the elven pirates who attacked the party’s homeworld, who destroy the ship they’re travelling on, capture their companions, and leave the party stranded in the frigid barrens of a meteor field. Searching for shelter, they find the origin of the signal: the partial wreck of a long abandoned jammership still attempting to deliver its message. With a little elbow grease and some ghostly aid, the party can take this ship as their own, bring vengeance against he pirates, and begin hunting for the villains who set this all in motion.

Late Game

The party’s enemies are not simply slavers and pirates, they are recent converts to the following of Mnyull the revelation tyrant, a god of interplanetary conquest. He has tasked the rabid immortals with the reunification of their long scattered army, and the reactivation of the ancient weapon they were once tasked with guarding, a labour to which many including the party’s old friends have been put to work. If Mynull’s plan comes to completion, whole systems will be forced to submit, and if the party can bring evidence of this to their allies in Lydestrum, they may just have a chance to fight the pirate fleet on equal terms.  

Fighting an army is one thing, defeating a god is another, and so the party are counselled to seek out the great celestial sage who makes weapons at the star-goddess’s behest. Therein the party must undertake a sea-spanning quest to gather the materials necessary to withstand their struggle: Venturing into shadowed vaults within the core of a moon-sized forge, seeking out the most dangerous and beautiful of lights at the edge of known space.

The Revelation Tyrant cares nothing for the fate of his pawns, merely that victory is achieved in his name, and so has planted the same vision of supremacy into the Skyscour elves as he did the leaders of Lydestrum.  The idea of a weapon that could strike far away worlds, tribute and glory delivered by subjugated neighbours, a threat to that glory by a challenger from afar and the need to strike before that challenge is made. No matter who wins the battle, Mnyull benefits from the outcome, as the leader of the victorious force will be struck by further visions and ascend as the Tyrant’s physical avatar.

The Party will be hunted, possibly by former allies, into the depths of wildspace, unable to return home lest they single out their humble world as a target for the weapon. In that lonely and desperate moment the goddess will appear to them: Nyx, merciful but resigned will offer them a shroud, a means of hiding their world from Mnyull’s sight and sparing themselves the conquest others will doubtlessly suffer provided they give up sailing the astral sea forever. Bright Urania offers them a chance, a divinely ordained heading to slip back around their pursuers, back past the fleet they helped to provision and the weapon they ensured would be completed, and right to the foot of the tyrant’s throne. It is only a chance though, no guarantee they can pull it off without loss and sacrifice, no guarantee that they will win in the end.

We all know what the party will choose, Nyx does too, and when the heroes jet off to go on their suicide mission they’ll do so with the ancient goddess working from the shadows to turn aside the eyes of wary sentries. She’s had a cold, dark vault beyond the boundaries of reality picked out for Mnyull for quite some time. She just needed him to make the mistake of incarnating himself in one place so she could stick him in there all at once.

Art

Monsters Reimagined: Thri-Kreen

D&D lore has never been kind to human/animal hybrid characters, especially to those who resemble animals stereotyped as being “evil”, such as gnolls or lizardfolk. This goes double for Thri-kreen the game’s default bugpeople, who etither get no ore at all, or get a few paragraphs describing how they don’t have emotions or personalities and see most other humanoids merely as food.

That’s the personality of a monster species, not a player option, and that general flatness of concept is expressed by almost every piece of thri-kreen art: depicting them mostly naked in a barren landscape brandishing a weapon at something.

While there’s a few seeds of interesting worldbuilding in the different versions of the Thri-Kreen , I’ve found the best way to make them conceptually rich is to continue my trend of combining two lackluster bits of canon into something distinctive, in this case, the mostly forgotten race of creatures known as dromites, who share the Thri-Kreen’s traits of being insectoid and psionic, but have a lot more interesting notes about their culture, Here’s What I’ve come up with:

The “Kreen” evolved on a distant world as a singular psionic hivemind, functioning much in the way you’d expect any colony of insects might save their ability to learn and retain information was far greater than that of any simple arthropod. Developing knowledge of engineering and magic that let them spread across the planes, they eventually suffered some kind of disaster that caused their hivemind to dissolve, leaving the “Thri-Kreen” as free willed individuals for the first time, where as before they were merely fragments of a consciousness that spanned planets.  The chaos was immediate, as if each organ and cell of a single body suddenly gained awareness, forcing the fragments of what was arguably a single world spanning organism to begin constructing cultures and civilizations from scratch.

While in the many millennia since the end of their hivemind have seen the Mantises take numerous different paths, the concept of “wholeness” is a reoccurring theme. The name “Thri-Kreen” literally means “un-whole”, referencing their psionic bond with one another, and hearkening back to their undiminished “Kreen” or “whole” state of the distant past. This search for wholeness leads the Thri-Kreen to live in small, closely bonded groups where each individual may be in contact with every other individual, much in the same way that creatures in cold climates will stick together to share bodyheat. While it’s not unsusual for smaller groups to break off from a larger one, absolute isolation is considered to be a terrible state for a Thri-Kreen.

Outsiders who come into contract with the Mantisfolk would describe them as a strange mix of dependant and standoffish: offering help without ever being asked but challenging every opinion ever voiced. This is because unlike most mortals, who tend to become resistant when their opinions are challenged, Thri-Kreen seek group consensus above all and when faced with a crisis will begin checking their ideas against others to throw their weight behind the best option possible. This leads to Thri-Kreen settlements being largely non-hierarchical, through prone to sudden political swings.

Thri-Kreen are mostly genderless, through groups looking to expand ( or larger enclaves looking to maintain their population) will yearly elect “queens” and “consorts” for the reponsibility of producing young.  Most other species mistake these individuals as leaders of the Thri-Kreen, when really their job is to fuck for days to months at a time.   Smaller, nomadic groups of Mantisfolk gather together to have these sorts of elections, and the young are divided equally to be raised by the different packmembers as they enter their pupation stage.

 The umberhulks that populate the underdark and slave pens of the cruel neogi bear an uncomfortable resemblance to present day Thri-Kreen, hearkening to the fact that while many of their kind found new beginnings across the astral sea after the dissolution of their singularity, many others found terrible ends. Likewise, the clockwork horrors that swarm across spelljammer ships and junkworlds communicate in a codified form of the Thri-Keen language, hinting at the existence of what might be an extinct conclave of mantisfolk engineers, or a hidden coterie of insectoid artificers intent on recreating their kind’s previous numbers in metal.

Footnotes on Foes: Psurlon/Moonbeasts

There are way too many aberrations in d&d who’s whole deal is “these gross aberrations use their psionic powers to practice slavery, and will likely eat you” a niche that’s already more than filled out by the illithid,  who have enough material lore to spawn more adventures than all of these creatures combined. There’s even more when (like me) you collect 3rd party and homebrew material looking to flesh out your enemies roster spelljamming adventures.

As such, I decided to cram two of these baddies together to create a far more interesting beast, the idea of which I largely credit to a writeup by @thecreaturecodex, who’s discussion on how the creature’s lore changed over editions gave me a solid idea to work with.

Travellers of the deep desert tell tales of strange temples built atop subterranean warrens, of the things that lurk beneath blind and witless, and how on some nights these creatures emerge and are transformed: growing in intelligence and cruelty and engaging in raids or wild revels, before the sun rises and they return to a bestial state once again.

Given the name “moonbeasts” for their habit of reaching toward the darkened heavens with their mass of facial tendrils as part of their nocturnal ritual, these creatures were infact hosts for a seperate group of entities called the Psurlon. This alien species had “ascended” beyond the need for physical bodies but periodically inhabited the flesh of the moonbeats to enjoy all the corporeal pleasures they could. The Psurlon believed that this ascension over flesh made them inherently superior, and led them to view the lives and bodies of other creatures, including sentients, as material to be dominated, enjoyed, and consumed.

Adventure Hooks:

On their own, moonbeasts are relatively harmless, subteranian scavengers more than actual predators, living alone or in small packs. They only truly become dangerous when the stars are right and they are possessed, or when they are are compelled to gather food for the Psurlon’s feasts and end up hunting people and animals alike in order to stock their larders. In a mixed bit of fortune psurlons prefer to consume their prey alive, giving captured creatures a chance to escape or be rescued from the cavernous pits where they are stored before the stars align and the Moonbeasts drag them out for eating.

Above all Psurlon want comfort and indulgence, and will willingly squat in a decaying ruin/moonbeast lair for centuries. When they do get bored of their surroundings, one of their leaders uses planeshift to warp them to a new world where they can find some locals to bully and enslave. The Psurlon’s set themselves up as gods or lords to be worshiped and provided tribute, choosing  or constructing new hidden cave warren for their moonbeast hosts and having their subjects build a temple around it to deliver riches and sacrifices to. In this way the Psurlons hop from world to world, leaving moonbeasts and crashpads in their wake.

While they have an easier time inhabiting the minds of the animalistic moonbeasts, Psurlons are capable of overtaking any humanoid with psionic talent using physical contact one of their regular hosts as a sort of “signal booster”.  The process of prying the victim’s mind free of their body takes hours, and leaves them drifting lost in the astral sea while the Psurlon acts as a physically and socially clumsy imposter. The alien invaders mostly consider this to be a dumb party trick, but occasionally use their stolen vessels as blackmail material, or to lure others to the feast. 

Hiya! In repsonse to your recent request - not sure if you do Sci-fI stuff, but I find myself in need of a good adventure set on a comet/asteroid, if you fancy. (love your work btw!)

Art source: 

(Happy to help friend, hope you don’t mind a bit of science fantasy, as my art-archive dosen’t contain many pictures of hurtling space-rock)

Wilderness: The Anvils of Osgrul

Setup: This Barren little worldlet streaks through the astral plane at high speed, shrouded in an every billowing frigid fog. From banks of these cold and chemical scented clouds rise jagged peaks, some which are topped by cryptic monuments of floating metal and stone that defy explanation. 

The various “monuments” that give the Anvils its name consist of borad stone platforms, seemingly shaped from nature but unnaturally smooth on their upper surface. Each one holds fragments of levitating stone, some the size of mountains, others the size of boulders, all veined through with some glowing, runic mineral native to Osgrul and nowhere else. 

Exploration of Osgrul’s surface reveals cavelike warrens, dug out seemingly by hand but boasting the remnants of advanced, arcane technology. Alien etchings within these warrens tell of a powerful, celestial individual that strode among the peaks ( usually interpreted as “Osgrul”), and a brood of minuscule thrall-beasts that served it.  The etchings depict great projects of construction and labor, no religious or historical context, nor scenes of daily life, and could just as easily be schematics as memorials. These Warrens are usually found outside of deep quarried valleys, riddled through with that same mineral as the monument stones, though lacking their eldritch glow. 

Osgrul is not a hospitable place, with no settlements and little in the way of life supporting sustenance. A party that finds itself on the worldlet’s surface would be wise to dedicate themselves to off it as soon as possible.

Adventure hooks: 

A famed adventuring scientist has led an expedition to the Anvils, but has disappeared, likely being stranded within that unfriendly realm. The party is rallied to go rescue them, and will have to trace the expedition's progress over hash terrain if they wish to find any survivors. 

On rare occasion, one of the great monument stones will detach from its plinth, hurtling upwards into the astral sea and striking out into the void. For long ages, no one could , until a clever scholar matched up the record of the “launches” with a series of disastrous impacts throughout history. In their theorizing, The Anvils are a weapon, set loose millennia ago to hurtle through the abyss and deliver death along the way. Whether this was a planned attack, or simply disaster as a byproduct of the Anvils’ decay, divination reveals the worldlet is coming closer and closer to the prime material plane, and may bring any number of dangerous “gifts” in its wake.  

Challenges & Complications

Fully aware of the danger these jettison-stones pose, astral pirates have been known to seek out the Anvils of Osgrul in order to “commandeer” them, either to use as part of their own raids, or to sell to dangerous customers. The process is exacting, involving careful untangling of the wards that hold the stones in place, and small fleets of astral ships  tethered to the stones to aid in the extraction. Given the work they’ve put into stealing these weapons, they’re unlikely to welcome the party’s intrusion into their “digsite” 

A nest of Mi-go have taken up residence in a deep quarry hidden beneath the mist. Unbothered by the hostile environment of the worldlet, these fungal insectoids pursue its secrets with reckless curiosity. Their current fascination is the Anvils’ unique mineral and its properties, named “Osgrulite” in their notes: The mineral is naturally inert, and the process for “activating” it was lost with whoever carved the stones and set the worldlet on it’s course in the first place. At the moment, this means the Anvils’ destructive power is limited, a finite number of stones, each with their respective targets.  Should the Mi-go discover the process, they’ll be sitting on a potential weapons cache for them to quarry, distribute, and target at their will, a resource that many of the astral sea’s heavy hitters would love to possess. 

Adventure: The Star gone Astray

The road has led your party to Etelva, a backwater barony who’s small capital hugs the banks of an icy lake and trade river. Happy to have the town’s walls as shelter against the early winter chill, you find the citizens of Etelva in a state of confusion and disorder: Strange signs have been seen in the sky weeks past, followed by tales of monsters and disappearances in outlaying settlements. Best take tonight to warm yourselves by the hearth, because tomorrow there’s hero’s work to be done.

Adventure Hooks:

Looking around for work, the party are eventually pointed towards a dwarven monster hunter by the name of Red Jess. Well seasoned in tracking and trapping all sorts of beast, Jess will (after some convincing) invite the party along on a scouting expedition to the snowy hillsides. Rumours have been circulating that folk have seen a dragon, but Jess is experienced enough to know that rumours don’t pay for lodging and the next resupply. Better to head out, get the lay of the land, and determine is there’s truth to any of this hearsay. Worst case there’s no quarry to be had and the hunters come back with a few beast pelts to sell for their troubles, best case scenario they can come back with proof of something and get the baroness or the crown itself to lay a bounty on the creature. A Few days travelling on with Jess and the party do indeed spy a dragon swooping low over hinterlands, not marauding as the rumours said, but obviously searching for something. Taking care not to be seen, the party realize that someone is riding the dragon, both mount and rider surveying the landscape, though for what they cannot be sure. 

Having lost important cargo to bandits and up to his ears in debt because of it, an over the hill merchant by the name of Ravell has been pushed over the edge by the paranoid air in Etelva and has begun a series of arson attacks focused first on the property of those he owes money to, and now starting on his own. Confused at first for accidents, these fires are spurred on by a demon that’s latched onto Ravell’s shoulder, feeding his latent desire to “Burn it all and walk away” , a demon that will be quite hostile should the party try and cut its fun short.

After some time in town the party are approached by Ryldyr, a diviner and minor soothsayer who seeks the party’s protection as he beleives someone or something is after him. Ryldyr is only so so when it comes to predicting the future, mainly offering his agrarian neighbours insight on upcoming weather events that might affect their crops. His runes never lie though, and speak of some looming danger that will affect him in particular if he doesn’t keep moving.   Just as he’s given the party a few cryptic hints about their future in order to get them to beleive him, the door is kicked in, and several of the Baroness’s guards pour in to take the addled scryer into custody.

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Adventure: Bright as the Night when the Goddess Does Smile

Life in the coastal village of Caromyr has been odd of late, with folk reporting sightings of odd creatures out in the hinterlands, strangers on the roads, and vivid dreams that seem to carry on into their waking hours. As the party end up drawn further and further into these uncanny happenings, they creep ever closer to the step that will take them from their sleepy ocean home and to the shore of a vaster, more wonderous sea than they could ever have imagined.

Hooks:

Though it will be a while before they discover it, the oddness in Caromyr is caused by the activated of a long forgotten astral portal out in the countryside. Opened by a group of extraterrestrial travlers on a mission and never properly closed, this portal is leaking alien entities and living dreams out into the unsuspecting countryside, and will continue to do so until someone with extraplanear knowledge manages to put it right.

Always a place of superstition and rumour, something’s taken up residence in the seacave a few miles down the shore. Its sneaking into town to collect people’s dreams and then letting them play out in the cave, inadvertently tempting people to investigate with the voices of friends and long lost family. One of the kids who pick over the shoreline’s gone missing after their gang of friends dared them to check it out, and are now quietly terrified now that they haven’t returned after the tide’s gone in and out.

With all these happenings about and the beats prowling at night, the party are asked to help with a supply run out to the local lighthouse, more than a day’s journey outside of town. When their camp is ambushed on the way to their destination, the party are saved by the old elven lighthouse keeper Altierien wielding a blade made of starlight. Far more than he first seems, the withered old figure will offer to explain once they’ve made it back to his tower, as he thinks he has an idea what’s behind all the recent mishaps.

Bright as the Night is a great setup/starter adventure when you want to tease the wonders of the astral expanse without jumping straight into spelljamming misadventures, giving your party a base of understanding in a more mundane reality before exploring the wonders of the cosmos. I highly encourage you to give the party a surfeit of seaside adventures before setting them take off into wildspace. Plus, giving the party a reason to give their characters backgrounds in sailing and other nautical skills will make for an easy transition when they find a star-ship of their own.

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Settlement: Lydestrum, City of Glass and Mist

Attracting artisans, merchants, and those who wish to go unseen among its splendours, Lydestrum is a centre for trade across the astral sea, a glimmering jewel of a port city set in the centre of an ever swirling cloudbank.

Surging aetheric currents surround the planetoid Lydestrum is built into, not only making unauthorized approach to the city nearly impossible, but also contributing to one of its greatest industries: capturing the magical potential carried along with those currents and storing them in great batteries that can be used to power jammerships, artifice, or great acts of spellcraft.

Adventure Hooks:

Though far less rowdy than many other astral ports, the Lydestrum harbour district is a paradise for adventurers, able to pick up rumours, goods from exotic reaches of wildspace, and potential employment across any number of vessels (of varying repute). If nothing else, the party can always pick up some extra work rooting out void beats and wild elementals that are attracted to the aetheric currents that surround the settlement, and frequently make their nests in the great tunnels that run beneath the city and its outreaching rockmass.

Lydestrum is a beautiful city, founded by architects who now use the great wealth brought in by its harbours and aether trade to build marvels across the plannetoid and in pockets of calm scattered throughout the churning clouds. One of the greatest of these marvels, the Mirador, was lost when an attack against the city centuries ago destabilized the winds and sucked the spirelike structure out into the ever shifting winds, never to be seen again. Driven by a desire to recover lost history and believing the structure has merely been trapped in the currents, not destroyed, an up and coming vedalken architect wants to hires the party to help him find this needle in the cloudstack, needing their help in exploring the dangerous reaches of the city and just maybe breaking into a few off-limits meteorological archives to get him the data he needs?

While many wonders might attract the party while out browsing the city’s aether-lit bazaar, what might most draw their eye is the Beacon Brightsmithy, a shop peddling a series of weapons and other devices seemingly made of solidified light. Operated by the Turevas, a father daughter pair of gnomes, the Beacon is a wonder hidden among wonders, Supplying many of the city’s military officers and warships with lightwrought weapons and willing to do the same for the party. On a subsequent visit however, the party find the shop in disarray, the younger Turevas distraught at her father’s apparent disappearance and possible kidnapping… more on that mystery below the cut.

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I just discovered your blog and I love it a lot! You have such a rich understanding of dnd and a lot of creativity! I was wondering if you could do a monsters reimagined on illithids/mindflayers? They are so iconic and I love them, I think a good idea for them is to keep the weird hivemind and brain eating and psionics, but ditch the tadpole concept. I would also just like to know how they came to be as they are right now, like. How did we get here?? Thanks!!

Monsters Reimagined: Mindflayers

The illithid have been a popular ask for reimaginings but It's taken me a while to get around to them in part because unlike a lot of the other features on monsters reimagined, their lore/execution within the game doesn't rest on a specific problematic trope or inconsistent storytelling. Mindflayers as they stand IMO are one of d&d's great villains, and if anything suffer from being too successful to the point of overexposure.

It took the asker remarking on how much they liked mindflayers for me to give them the onceover they really deserved. Yes, they worked great as antagonists ( being irredeemable slavers who violate the minds and bodies of those they subjugate, working inevitably towards the most awful ends), but their villany was born out of the same shallow bioessentialism as “always evil” orcs,IE inherent to their character. I’m a firm believer in the idea that if something is capable of making decisions, it’s capable of deciding not to be a bastard, so If I was going to overhaul the illithid, I’d need to get to the roots of why the squid headed bastards were the way they were.

TLDR: What we know today as the mindflayers are in fact the remnants of a long dead world, with many of their most monstrous qualities being bioengineered attempts to stave off the inevitable and hold onto their power. The “Elder brains” which rule the illithid are tyrants, the ultimate class parasites, who indoctrinate and mentally dominate the other mindflayers into acting as tools of domination over the peoples they consider chattel. Is possible for an individual illithid to break free of this system, but doing so is difficult, as it requires them to not only break out of any magical compulsion, but to abandon the paradigms that have defined their existence.

Spoiler alert: we’re going to be talking about white supremacy in this one

I think someone described it pretty succinctly that alien invasion stories are something that industrial nations invented when they started imagining what would happen if a more advanced people came along and started doing to them what they’d be doing to everyone else in the world.  Mindflayers (and a few other aberrations) fill that niche in oldschool d&d, with the low levels made up of the feudal heroes largely picking on “uninteligent” tribal brutes, only to hit level 7 or so where all of a sudden they’re fighting creatures who’s intelligence exceeds their own. 

The weird thing is how in the alien invasion stories, the aliens always want to enslave humanity.. Despite imagining the technology required to cross the vastness of space, the authors were unable to conceive of a world outside of the hierarchies of exploitation, even in the case of benign colonization like “day the earth stood still” and “childhood’s end”.

I’ve talked before about how d&d has a lot of baked-in tropes that assumes colonialism and racial supremicy as a default, but today we’re going to look at things form the other angle. Namely: can we use the mindflayers to talk about systems of oppression and how they manipulate us into being complacent tools with colonialism and genocide. 

First though, a detour on illithid biology/feeding, and how I’ve tried to make it make sense:  

In addition to a mostly vestigal digestive system, mindflayers possess adaptations that allow them to turn psychic energy into health and wellbeing, with their feeding being something like running a magnet over a computer screen except that the screen is a brain. This can be done delicately so as to case no long term damage, but sometimes it’s faster to just shuck the brain out and be done with it.

On their homeworld, the illithid cultivated a form of “thinking fungus” that draws in stray thought energy from the astral sea, the stray equivalent of radio static. This fungus grows around many mindflayer settlements and is one of the dead giveaways that they’ve moved into the region.

 The goal of every illithid is to prove themselves so at the end of their life (or sooner) they can join with the elderbrain, a grotesque amalgamation of all the most bastardly awful mindflayer’s brains that lives in a big tank in the center of their settlements ( or pilots their spelljammer ships) and mentally influences everything in a 5 mile radius. The elder brain creates a reinforcing social pressure: if you’re not doing everything you can to serve it, you’ll be culled, and if you don’t do your absolute best ( or if the elderbrain is just feeling cruel) your whole life will be for nothing. These brains are not a natural part of the illithid lifecycle, and are instead more equivalent to liches: influential mindflayers that learned that they could force others of their kind to tribute psionic energy through thier bonds, extending their life long beyond where their bodies can keep up. By ensuring that only those most useful join the gesthalt, the original ego ensures that no other personality is capable of overtaking their own.

Every so often in their life, mindflayers reproduce by regurgitating a load of parasitic tadpoles into the elderbrain pool where the weak ones get to be its snacks, and the strong ones get implanted into the skulls of promising candidates who’s brains are eaten as they’re transformed into new midnflayers. All of this is super squick, but what’s almost nonsensical is the fact that left to their own devices the tadpoles grow up into colossal, borderline feral worm monsters, meaning that in their natural state no one would be around to put the tadpoles in anyone’s heads. I rationalize this as the result of extensive biomancy augmentations that occured in the illithid’s development, a “cure” for the sterility imposed by their dying world and a handy means of population control/indoctrination for the elder brain, who’s able to etch the basics of its own personality onto each tadpole as it prepares to take a host.

And here we’ll bring the two ideas together, about how illithid can help represent white supremacy:  Like all imperialist or autocratic systems, the society of the mindflayers is self reinforcing, creating a population of desperate individuals and using their desperation to turn them into a tool to benefit those at the system’s top. Every illithid is not only born with the elderbrain’s world view as the foundation of its mind, the society in which it is raised is set up so that the only metric of growth or success is being useful to the elder brain, with any deviancy from expectation ( incluging over ambition) are dealt with harshly to the point of execution.

An indivual illithid could break free, but that would require a depth of personal examination is frowned upon in mindflayer circles, as well as the acceptance that there is a way to live outside the elderbrain’s guidance without going hungry and devouring their own sapience like the pale and wretched creatures that outsiders call “illithid vampires” 

Much like racism,misogyny, imperialism, capitalism and fascism, the society of mindflayers creates a desperate population that are convinced that the only way to be is to be in a particular way that ends up benefiting those at the very top. Breaking free takes a tremendous amount of bravery, and a willingness to alienate yourself from all you thought familiar and true in the process.

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I was wondering if I could request a diety? If so may I request a goddess that is for the Gith what Moradin is for the Dwarves?

Deity: Urania, The One Who Names The Stars

Hear me, brothers, sisters, my fellow orphans of the vast,

We are lost, but we are not forgotten,

The Bright Maiden has set a Star Burning for us,

And she calls us Home

The wild unknown and the simple laws that govern the universe, the cold embrace of space and the warmth of distant stars, the mystery of the infinite horizon and the knowledge of your course through it: The goddess Urania is a being of contrasts. Patron to astronomers, navigators, and any who find themselves alone with only the stars for guidance, the bright maiden is called upon by many who sail the astral sea to bless their journeys into the vast cosmos and to guide them back home again. 

Legend says it was It was the Gith who found her, aboard a lost and aimless refugee ship too full of desperate souls who’d just escaped from the tyranny of the ilithid. They saw a stranger cast adrift in the void, and though they did not have enough to go around they cast out a line and pulled her from the void because the thought of leaving anyone behind without hope of rescue was too terrible to bear. In rescuing her they rescued themselves, for when the captain gave up his ration of water the goddess awoke with her eyes full of grateful tears, whispering to him of a course towards sanctuary just as a new star flared on the horizon.

Since then it has been tradition among the Gith ( and those who have learned the art of astral navigation from them) to keep a star shaped lantern burning in the goddess’s honour, and to rescue any they find adrift, no matter who they might be.

 Adventure Hooks:

Knowledge of the stars is sacred to those who follow Urania, whether it be in charting new courses through the astral sea or divining the movement and influence of celestial bodies. An acolyte of such an order believes she’s had a star-granted vision of a previously unexplored reach of the astral sea but her superiors won’t let her mount an expedition as much of the nearby territory has a reputation for being dangerous, or downright hostile. To this end she hires the party to help her go delving a long abandoned archive-moon in the hopes of discovering ancient records that her research hints might just contain a means of traversal through this hostile stretch of space.

Much ink has been spilled over the potential connections between the bright maiden and Nyx, matronly goddess of primordial darkness, with most scholars agreeing to disagree as to whether the goddess are enemies, aspects of the same being, or somehow related.  This debate comes to a head when a night-shrouded acolyte of Nyx steals the star lamp from the vessel of a famous spelljammer captain on the eve of an important voyage, darkening the lamp with occult magics to use in some mysterious ritual. Both men are, as the party discovers after being hired to recover the lamp, brothers, and as their pursuit goes on it becomes wildly clear that the two goddess are having some kind of a wager over the outcome of the theft, subtly influencing events in their own favour

Along their travels, the party discover a reinforced capsule containing an ember of celestial fire, a nascent star that some enterprising mage plucked from the sky in an attempt to tap its power. The item is tremendously useful, (acting as a pearl of power that refreshes after short rests), but in moments of channelling the star’s energy the attuned creature is more and more filled with feelings of loneliness and need to return to a home they’ve never seen before. The ember is alive, if not sentient, and longs to be returned to the patch of sky from which it was stolen. Doing so can be quite an undertaking, but will reward the party with the Bright Maiden’s favour in the process. 

Titles: The Bright Maiden, Lady of Far Horizons, The Infinite,

Signs: The appearance of new stars, astronomical lines and diagrams appearing in the sky, a sudden awareness of a heading leading either home or into the unknown

Symbols: A star and sextant or other tool of navigation, lantern with star iconography or burning with celestial fire. 

SPACE MAD MAX FUCK YEAH

Astral Elves as War boys, holy fuck. I need more of that, dear gods, give us more of THAT.

Villain: The Skyscour Clan

“However beloved or useful, a knife can only be sharpened so much before it is scraped down to nothing”

-old dwarven proverb

Having decided to take a lull in their adventures to enjoy their day off, the party’s well needed self care is interrupted when a jagged portal opens on the edge of town, spilling out raiders wielding strange weapons accompanied by alien warbeasts. Scattered around town and potentially recovering from previous wounds, The party must face their foe unprepared before they cause too much damage.

After confronting the strangers, the party’s best combatant comes face to face with a void-scarred elven warrior who seems to be one of the ones directing the whole fiasco. The ensuing duel is epic, but the elf is clearly the superior fighter, relying on centuries of hardwon lessons to send the hero into the dirt and give them a scar to remember her by.

The raiders weren't just after things, they were after people, and disappear back into the portal with innocents and loved ones in tow. With no direct way of following them, the party must either seek out some arcansit capable of backtracing the rip in spacetime, or use the clues scattered on the bodies of the fallen invaders to discover who their new foes are, and where they originate.

Background: Tasked in an age before remembering with garrisoning a series of cannon fortress capable of downing meteors and warships from across wildspace, the astral elves today known as the Skyscour clan are the last remnant of their now dissolute empire. Millenia of immortality and brutal war have seen these elves honed down into a cruel edge, having long deserted their post to raid about the territories they once defended taking what they believe they are owed.

While the majority of their clan is scattered about the multiverse in a state of distracted listlessness, always looking for the next fight, the leaders of the Skyscour have greater ambitions: drawing their errant comrades back to the snow world they once abandoned, repairing great canons, and using them to extract tribute from any plane they can get target lock on. The one barrier to their plan is the fact that despite the fall of their civilization and their decent into banditry, the Skyscour still consider themselves warrior caste, and would thus never lower themselves to actually ever learning how their technology works. To compensate they’ve begun building up a labour force, kidnapping skilled technicians and random bystanders of “lesser races” to do the backbreaking work of getting the canons back online while the elves hold them at knifepoint.

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Dapper!! This Thursday I'm running the second out of three sessions in a setting taking place in the Astral Sea. The party is on its way to (your very own) Nacrebright Sanctum.

I would love for them to obtain their own spaceship (a small rowboat isn't gonna last), but I don't know how the characters will be able to get one. What are your ideas?

Adventure: The Unanswered Plea

Little more than a stretch of asteroids shrouded in a deceptively cheerful nebula of astral haze, what separates the Cavilis Vale from any other choppy patch navigators might steer around is a persistent signal that pervades the surrounding space. This mysterious and wordless cry reverberates through psychic fields and sensor arrays, expressing nothing so much as forlorn loneliness. Most astral travellers are rightly creeped the fuck out by the signal, and so the Vale has gone largely unexplored. 

Hooks:

Astral pirates are fond of using the Vale as a means of avoiding detection, racing into the unmapped asteroid fields to shake pursuers, or using the roiling pink clouds to conceal their strongholds. When one of these vicious bands kidnaps the party (either through a portal or while they’re passengers on a different vessel), our heroes  are forced to rough it over the fragmented landscape after making their escape, looking for some kind of shelter from the void.  

The mournful signal eminating from the vale is throwing off the deep-sea telemetry of the local protectorate base, and so one of their communication officers has decided to put together a little off-the-books expedition in hopes of clearing his instruments. In addition to hiring on the party, the group will be assisted by a few protectorate grunts in need of a misadventure off base bankrolled by a gnomish virtuoso who has become enchanted with the call’s musical potential. Driven by creative obsession, the instrumentalist has invited herself along on the trip, as well as a half dozen of her auto-gnome porters.

Regardless of how the party ends in the vale, they will eventually be drawn to the remains of a spelljamming ship that appears to have made a rough landing on one of the asteroids and gotten stuck in the process. Mostly derelict and half buried in snow, this vessel is the origin of the signal, as well as a host of void addled shades that haunt the surrounding rocks and any who would tresspass within.

Backstory: Despite its sorry state, the ship once known as The Answered Plea was once the fastest vessel in the navy of a kingdom now forgotten across the astral sea, dispatched to carry words of the crown or on missions of greatest import. On the eve of a great betrayal, the crew of the Plea discovered evidence that would have saved many innocent lives, and took off across the cosmos in the hopes of delivering a message. The conspirators knew that if the Plea got through, their ambitions would be thwarted, and had sabotaged the vessel while it was in port to ensure it would fly off course.

Knowing that they had no chance of rescue, the survivors of the crash did their best to jerryrig a wide band transmitter, broadcasting their discovery into wildspace in the hopes that some one would hear it before it was too late. It has been many centuries since that broadcast first went out, the transmitter inexplicably hanging on despite the rapacious distortions of the void.

Future Adventures:

The Plea is a bit of a fixer-upper, not only asking the party to dig it out and repair critical systems while in the field in order to get it flying again, but requiring a full retrofit in the nearest spaceport in order to get it spaceworthy again. If the party is feeling extra gutsy they might raid a few of the local pirate base for spare parts, using their damaged but superior vessel to take revenge on their one time captors.

In addition to any of the potentially hostile astral wildlife that’s hidden itself away on the plea during it’s long convalescence, it seems the vessel has additional stowaways the party could never account for: ghosts. Manifesting as the slightest flicker and other strange occurrences during deep space flights, the phantom remnants of the Awnsered Plea’s original crew will make themselves known when the ship is truly in danger, lending a phantasmal hand when and where it’s needed most.  These apparitions are addled from their long time floating in the asteroid field, having forgotten much of who they were and what their point was. Adventuring with the party will help them remember, potentially allowing them to finally tell their mournful story, and seek their final rest.

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Spelljammer is coming out soon, do you have any adventure ideas for Spelljammer? Or at least some open sea adventures you have that we could reflavor appropriately ?

Drafting the Adventure: Spelljamming

It’s been a while since I penned my initial thoughts on sailing the astral sea, and since that time, a few things have changed:

WoTC revived the setting with kickass art and not much else, disappointing just about the entire fandom and yet again requiring us the players to do the design work for them.

I binged all of @dimension20official‘s “A Starstruck Odyssey”, which not only got me really hype to run a space game but showed me a mechanical basis on which it could function ( seriously friends, go watch Starstruck)

 My Friend group decided to rewatch Treasure Planet, one of the formative pillars of my love of fantasy, and it got me thinking about how amazing the concept of space-pirate-fantasy is. I am and always will be a slut for cosmic wonder and there’s just something about the combination of these concepts that makes my brain come alive.

And so, I’ve decided to take a crack at overhauling Spelljammer, partially to bring it in line with my own version of the d&d cosmos and partially because as a game designer I can’t help but stare at all the negative space WotC gave us and imagine various possibilities. Mine’s not going to be a be all end all, and just like every homebrew fix I encourage you to look at different options until you find one that feels right to you and your table.

Now, below the cut I’m going to go into things about the spelljammer setting and specific mechanics I think will be useful, but before I do I’m going to give you folks a little preview of my opinions by going off on a meaningless tangent:

WHY THE HELL ARE SPELLJAMMING HELMS CHAIRS? No really, think about it. Apart from the fact that “Helm” specifically refers to the wheel and steering apparatus of a ship, the fantasy that spelljammer is supposed to be pulling from is nautical adventure; steely eyed captains masterfully piloting their vessels along the edge of a storm, the ship and their body pulling as one against the elements. The decision to make the helms chairs that channel magic rather than a wheel that requires sill turns the act of cruising through the cosmos into a mostly passive act, which I suppose mirrors the design decision to not actually require any input on the part of the jammer’s crew in order to sail it.  It’s not even that the designers were trying to emulate other popular sci-fi properties like starwars/trek, because despite the fact that people sit down while piloting in those settings, ships have an entire crew manning different stations and doing things. It’s almost like in trying to simplify a complicated game system, WotC decided that it would be better to remove ANY chance at interesting gameplay rather than put out a rules system that wouldn’t please everyone.

First off, I have to plug SW5E, The Dimension 20 crew used it as the architecture for their space game and after multiple hours of stress testing I couldn’t be more impressed. All the info is available for free online, and the more I dig into it, the more genius I find it:

Characters are given a second “deployment” class, which represents their position on the ship and the actions they can take in ship to ship combat. This not only means that ship to ship combat can actually happen ( unlike the limp pre-boarding actions of default spelljammer), but they get a chance to grow and customize their character. These deployments are synergistic with how their mechanics work, facilitating a feeling that the crew is actually working together.

Lost of gear and upgrades for ships, which make a great resource sync for a mid to high level party that’s sorely lacking in default d&d.

A well fleshed out “power” system for the engineer to tinker with. I’ve had lots of players who’ve wanted to fulfill this role before but I’ve never seen a better version of it in numerous other space games.

Actual timeframes for how long it takes to get places at both impulse and warp speed to provide a guideline for narration and adventure building

An actual navigation system for ships that’s so good I’m considering backwards engineering it into regular exploration rules. Simple enough to breeze over in non-hostile situations but perfectly tuned to be a centerpoint of mid combat drama for those characters who want to do more than shoot things.

A mechanical tug of war: Apart from other controversies with Spelljammer’s release ( which I’m not going to get into here), the main problem is that the audience for d&d has grown so large that they’re never going to be happy with one level of complexity. On one hand you have a casual audience who’s entertained with doing the yearly cinematic adventure module, and standing on the exact opposite side of the room from them are the people who are furious they didn’t get an update to the super clunky rules from 2nd edition. Between them are the ACTUAL core d&d audience, people who are into the game enough to want some mechanical complexity but not so much that they want their enjoyment of things choked out by having to refer to a chart every 10 minutes.

In my personal opinion, we are best served by remembering that 5e was built on the idea of having a streamlined core system into which rules modules ( which would hopefully be equally streamlined) could be slotted, dialing up focus and complexity as needed depending on the different campaigns you ran. 5e was never meant to be a comprehensive ruleset, and even if WotC has forgotten to do the actual work, we the audience can kitbash something together to get the game the way we want it.... not that we should actually have to. 

It’s not space, and that’s the point:  what makes the spelljammer setting so interesting is that it’s a radical departure from most other “realistic” scifi settings out there.  It harkens back to Flash Gordon, Jules Verne, and Edger Rice Boroughs, the things that inspired starwars and the original d&d. Planets that are the forgotten colonies of long vanished empires, mad tyrants ruling haunted moons, smuggler ports built into asteroid fields, all these things are shlocky, pulpy, and/or campy as hell and we should lean into that when we’re considering spelljammer adventures in the future. Personally I can’t even think about the name without imagining vast reaches of stars and nebula matter resounding with the sounds of a sickass 80s inspired guitar solo. Where I think the reboot fails conceptually is that it’s ossified: the same weird but not too weird iconography and alien species from the original publishing without daring to make it any more wild. I’ve been hearing about the gun hippos since I got into the hobby 20 years ago, they’ve surely had more interesting ideas since then, right?

Here’s some kitchen sink ideas to help make your wildspace a little more wild:

 It’s not a lack of air that’ll kill you in the astral sea, it’s a lack of coherence. If the astral sea is the realm of dreams and thought from which gods and worlds are born, it’s safe to say that the major threat to travellers isn’t the cold vacuum we’d expect from our own off-planet adventures. Instead, prolonged exposure to the astral risks a character becoming less and less real, slowly hollowed out into a barely-there concept of their former self. Ships, celestial bodies, and void suits assert a degree of reality in the space around them, not just providing an environment where characters CAN breathe, but an environment in which they MUST, in order to prevent their respiratory system from being forgotten. Similarly this is why you need to pack food and other supplies from a physical world (narratively encouraging trade and battles over resources), because eating nothing but imagined delicacies or simply ignoring your body’s need to eat is liable to make your digestive system imaginary as well

When I read the entry on astral elves, I couldn’t help but be horrified: entire empires of immortals who never slept, ate, or aged, existing in a perpetual state of emotional and chronological detachment. While the packed in adventure did paint some of these elves as the villains, I feel as if they didn’t do enough to follow through on the concept. Knowing how badly sensory deprivation fucks with the human mind, I couldn’t help but imagine the astral elves as twitchy, impulse driven wrecks existing only in the moment and carrying around tens of millennia of unresolved trauma. We’ve seen space empires before, but what we haven’t seen are derelict warships of maddened immortals hurdling towards conflict with eons of combat experience and an unquenchable desire to feel something, ANYTHING, even if it means ramming your ship along with theirs into an asteroid to ensure a confrontation.  Elves as warboys, tell me that doesn’t rule.

If you want the age of sail/pulp scifi themes of spelljammer to be anything more than a surface level aesthetic, consider reading up on some of the underlying economics that fuelled it, namely colonialism, slavery, and the exploitation of the frontier. While it’s perfeclty fine to have a rose-tinted cosmos where people adventure for adventures sake, WotC’s own missteps with the hadozee show that its all too easy to step into fucked up territory if we’re not mindful.  Suffice to say, if you’re going to have space pirates in the space caribbean, figure out who’s growing the space spices they’re raiding from the space merchants.

Also, for those who might want direct access to my catalogue of adventures:

Astral

Sailing

Spelljammer

Drafting the Adventure: Astral Sanctums

As someone who’s fasinated with the idea of dreams and quasi-real things, I’d like to share a concept I’ve been chewing on for a while both as a reference and in the hopes that it’ll provide a useful backdrop upon which you can build your own adventures.  

Picture your party stepping through a portal onto a derelict courtyard, overshadowed by the edifice of a great building. The atmosphere is cool and oddly weightless, like the air they’d been breathing just a moment ago was like the depths of water pressing down on them, and they’d only now surfaced for the first time in their lives. Through the mist that surrounds them they can make out the twinkling of innumerable distant stars, as well as the spires of more grand buildings cresting the fog like a bank of islands in the far distance.  The floor beneath them is skewed at an odd angle, but in a moment of inattention they reorient themselves, the paving stones flat beneath their feet and their surroundings taking on a strange angle. 

It is in that moment they realize that nothing here is aligns, and the structures are slowly drifting in the banks of mist. 

They have entered a strange and unwelcoming place

Lets hope they can make it back. 

So now that you have the vibes, let me lay the groundwork for a new type of dungeon for you to use in your campaign:  The astral Sanctum, the middle stage between a mage conjuring a magnificent mansion and jetting off to create their own demiplane. 

In my telling, The astral plane is the palate upon which the gods created the innumerable worlds, so it stands to reason that a powerful wizard (read: hubris engine) would attempt the same on a smaller scale. If the astral plane is the realm of dreams and imagination, what’s to stop them from creating a space fully of their own design,  building without the restraints of laborers or materials or even physics to constrain their vision? 

Nothing really, aside from actually getting to the astral plane, and then manifesting enough will to shape the raw potential of creation into a form they desire.

This process creates a really interesting environment both narratively and from a gameplay perspective, especially when that wizard kicks the bucket and their creation floats listlessly through the astral sea slowly decomposing over millennia and waiting for a band of adventurers to come plunder it. 

Here’s some ideas about what could happen in this sort of space: 

There are two main ways a party can enter the astral plane, physically through a portal, or by projecting their consciousness by way of dreams/some magical means. The latter provides a degree of safety, as if they die while projecting they snap back to their bodies and awaken (unless something extra terrible happens to them), where as if they die bodily, they’re dead for real. 

This also has super interesting ramifications when taking things to/from the astral plane. A party that’s dreamwalking will be sustained by their bodies back on the material world, were as a group that’s entered the dreamscape bodily will likely need to pack up on supplies, as it’s highly likely the only sustenance they encounter will be phantasms conjured by the space’s arcane architect. Delicacies to be sure, but no more nourishing to the body than a picture of food or a memory of water. 

Play around with loot: have them fill their bags to bursting with wealth while projecting into an astral vault, only to have it fade into mist when they return. Give them a powerful item to play with while they dream, safe in the knowledge that it’ll stay out of theri hands when they wake. You could also have this work in reverse, a child’s wooden sword has the power to slay demons when taken into the realm of imagination, while a madman’s crude scribble becomes the key to a foreboding door. 

If you want to get really creative, have them enter the astral realm physically to do a bit of inception, planting an idea in someone’s dream or heisting the memory of a great artifact from a long dead sleeper. 

Creatures from the astral sea can come to populate these spaces, whether they be psychic predators like the quori , astral pirates, or figments of the architect’s imagination, all of which can stumble back through portals to the material plane that the original builder used to access their realm. 

Escher-esque architecture tricks, including inverted gravity, warping corridors, and reshuffling floor plans. These places strain the credulity of your average dungeon,  but are perfectly at home in an impossible dreamspace. 

Astral bleed, where powerful magic has rent the fabric of the waking world and let the impossibilities of dreams infuse it. This bleed is likely to cause chaos if not undone, but could be involved by those who feel themselves too constrained by reality.  

I hope these give you lots of fun ideas to work with in the future, as well as make my own writings a bit more sensical. 

A magic space elevator. Im mad i didnt think of it.

Heist: The Starspan Sanctum

“I’ve got three tips for stealing from a mage’s tower: 

 1: Do it when they’re not home, skulking your way through twisting halls will be easier without being hunted by someone who can shoot lighting from their eyes. 2: Know what you’re stealing, if you go in without a plan you’re going to be distracted by something shiny that’s more dangerous than it is valuable. 3: Don’t. Stealing from magefolk is more trouble than it’s worth and you’re likely to end up disintegrated or turned into a toad for your trouble. Stick to stealing from rich folk like the rest of us, and you might live long enough to actually spend the coin you pinched.” 

Setup: Isolated and oppressive, the Starspan Sanctum is the traditional residence of the realm’s most powerful mage, inherited by court wizards, sorcerer-queens, and power hungry arcanists for centuries. Possessing unrivaled archives of arcane knowledge, vaults of magical artifacts, and oubliettes containing the world’s most dangerous secrets makes the Sanctum too tempting target for those who number themselves among the world’s greatest burglars. 

The current master of the Starspan Sanctum has established a stable portal to the astral plane, and takes frequent sojourns to the dreamlands in order to conduct research and commune with the great scholars of the unreal realms. Such transit is heralded by a bright flash at the top of the sanctum’s tallest tower, and a beam of light parting the clouds as the mage transitions between dimensions. Waiting in the cold for just such a sign, the party has only a few hours to break into the fortress, find their prize, and get out before the most powerful and dangerous mind in all the kingdom returns and discovers their unwelcome intrusion. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Well established as capable and daring thieves, the party is contacted through one of their fences by a up and coming wizard by the name of Urica Eltz. Ambitious and self taught, Eltz has designs on the position of court magician to a powerful local duke, but is in direct competition with a renowned and well connected mage who apprenticed under Starspan’s master. Knowing that her rival’s tutelage puts him at a distinct advantage, Eltz wants the party to break into the Sanctum and steal a number of exquisitely rare books in order to help narrow the gap. 

Abandoned for over a decade after its master and several important attendees of a royal gala disappeared in a flash of light, movement has been seen in the Sanctum. Those that live in the locality report seeing an eerie light in the structure’s darkened towers, hinting that one of the abducted guests has at long last returned. Who or what is now lurking in the Sanctum’s lonely halls? Where have they been? and what happened on that fateful night almost a generation ago?  Its up to the party to find out. 

While mostly suitable for mid to high level parties, the dungeons beneath the Starlit Sanctum could provide a novel starting adventure for a group of overly ambitious criminals. Having each individually tried ( and failed) to overcome the Sanctum’s defenses, the thieves end up sharing cells together and are eventually presented with the opportunity to escape when a disastrous arcane experiment rocks the fortress to its foundations. Fleeing through broken hallways and malfunctioning construct servitors, the newly established party finds themselves teleported out of the Sanctum half way across the empire and must rely on each-other’s skills to make it back to their old stomping grounds. 

Been trying to make a planehopping campaign based around the Nacrebright Sanctum, but can't figure it out

Campaign: Cosmic Gate Pilgrims

doesn't that title just make you want to put on a prog/pych rock album and just float away on a 17 minute guitar riff?

So I've had this idea bouncing around for a while, mainly because of how neat an idea a world hopping campaign could be, and partially because It served as a great framing device to visit a bunch of diversely different biomes without having to abandon a central cast of characters. I've also been growing increasingly interested in the astral sea as a setting, and think it makes a great backdrop to these sorts of journeys.

Setup: centered around The Nacrebright Sanctum,  this campaign sees the party as a group of planear travelers cast adrift from their own worlds by fate and chance, who have all come to live in an interdimensional monastery that shelters pilgrims, exiles and refugees. By working as security and able hands for the monks who maintain the Sanctum, the party get to visit many worlds, which may one day let them discover a way home across the impossible cosmic vastness.

The actual story kicks off when a strange star appears in the astral sea, somehow visible across a smattering of distant worlds and acting as a portent of some long-forgotten doom. A sage of the monastery decides to go on a fact-finding mission, and the party is sent along on their various outings as an escort. From here follow the events of my Quickstar Cypher campaign, retheming each of the subsequent adventure prompts as it’s own “worldlet”. Eventually it's revealed that this strangely burning star is an ancient, worldkilling weapon turned loose across the cosmos by unseen hands, and the been the cause of mass destruction and countless refugee crisis throughout the ages ( perhaps creating some of the very same dead worlds the players originated on). Figuring out how to diffuse a moon-sized planetoid is difficult enough, but throughout their journey the party is Hounded by astral pirates, eventually dealing with the corruptive influence of the plane of Leng. and a sinister intelligence bent on taking control of the weapon or at least selling it off to the highest bidder.

Gameplay: Journeys out into these different planes can take as long as they need to, but having the Sanctum always just a portal away allows them to interspurse the loneliness of long wilderness exploration sessions with a truly "homey" feeling cast of NPCs.

Also, If you’re going to be doing a planehopping game, its important for you to practice your starwars technique:   “ This is the _____ plane, it has X striking environment, and serves Y social function, these two elements combine to explore pulp adventure trope Z in a fresh and interesting way.”

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Your adventures are awesome, just getting that out of the way. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about spelljammer, due to rewatching treasure planet most likely, and I’m curious how you would handle it

Drafting an Adventure: Setting Sail in the Astral Sea 

Forgive the break from my usual format for this prompt, but as it deals with past versions of d&d and how I implement some of these ideas in my game, I figured I needed to change up my authorial voice for this one.

For those who might not know, Spelljammer is d&d’s answer to starwars style planetary adventuring, and is both its own setting as well as an “addon” to other campaigns involving a magical means by which adventurers could fly out from their homeworld into an version of space modelled on archaic views of the universe as a way of explaining why their wooden spaceship didn’t have to worry about things like gravity or vacuum pressure. 

I was never into Spelljammer myself, as it was primarily a 2nd edition thing and i started playing the game with 3/3.5. While the idea of fantasy spaceships was always intriguing, I felt that Spelljammer itself was a bit silly, with its space hamsters, British hippo gun fetishists, and reliance on “ D&D trope, BUT IN SPACE” to prop up much of its material. 

That said, we can all agree Treasure Planet, and the idea of fantasy space pirates is SICK AS SHIT, so I’d be doing a disservice to myself and the campaigns I run if I didn’t have that sort of thing running in the background. 

So lets talk first about how I run the astral sea, as I use that as my backdrop for such adventures:

The Astral Sea is an expanse of starry void, filled with glittering mists and nebulae and aurora, as well as the occasional field of crystalline coral.  It is the raw canvas of creation upon which the gods ( and other great powers) paint their myriad creations. This morphic quality is also utilized by powerful arcanists to create their own worldlets and mind-palaces, making their dreams into physical domains of impossible wonder. When these arcanists die or otherwise move on, these realms endure, slowly drifting together into ruinous archipelagos that provide habitat for astral denizens.

There is no such thing as distance in the astral plane, more of a notional geography of one landmark in relation to another. Part of the reason this great expanse is referred to as a "sea" is that navigation in such a realm requires either the following of particular " currents" that follow predictable routes through the expanse, or by the charting the relative position of various landmarks in relation to one's desired destination. One could also make use of the vast network of portals to get about, trace the boughs of the cosmic trees, or take a walk on the infinite staircase.

Its bad to be out in the astral sea for too long, as that primordial chaos can either unweave one's being or make some unwanted "Creative additions". This necessitates an astral ship for a long journey, or sheltering in a crystalline reef or other structure.

The Shallows of the astral sea reside in the realms of mortal dreams, and the phantasms of imagination and flotsam of fantasy spill over into the starry expanse.

Running Astral Adventures:

Since the Astral plane is by definition so far removed from the "grounded" state of traditional fantasy adventuring, I like to think of it as a sort of secret/background/bonus lore that's never touched on in most games, until the party starts having dealings with high level wizards and the like. A wonderous thing they get to discover when they cross over the threshold from practical heroics into the realm of the fantastical. That threshold is likely an unintentional one, as an unknown portal or teleportation mishap sends the party hurtling into the unknown, only for them to have to struggle through a strange world and find their way back to reality.

The construction, reclamation, or chartering of an astral ship is then a later benchmark where the party has taken control over their destiny, allowing them to travel between the realms by their own agency.

Adventure Hooks:

The diaspora of innumerable dead worlds spread out through the astral cosmos, survivors of realities that collapsed under their own weight or the mismanagement of their gods. These Starry pilgrims can find new homes among the reefs, or travel from world to world as astral nomads. Such an existence is a hard one, and it's not unusual for some of these peoples to turn to interdimensional raiding and piracy as a means of survival. Often the loot of these raids ends up in the markets of Leng, where the treasure of a thousand worlds flows through wicked hands of that world's miasmic masters.

In the most twisted and surreal expanses of the dreamscape, the Quori hold sway, formless tyrants incapable of creation themselves and so desperate to claim the minds of mortals to give shape and order to their nightmare realm.

The ruins of civilizations beyond count float in the astral sea, just waiting to be explored. Expeditions to these dream palaces can be great undertakings, but can provide campaigns without frequent dungeon crawls a chance to get their delve on without having to leave an important central location of a campaign.

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A god of fire and void, meteor king of conquest, plumiting downwards to its next victim (bonus points if its a blue like a commet)

Deity: Mnyull, the Revelation Tyrant

Fasinating stuff my friend, my latest translation of old imperial accounts reveal a previously unknown confession from the rogue general Paldermot. As you well know, current historical narratives have the general sacking the capital city in a failed attempt to seize power from the Tribunes, but if this text is to be believed the Tribunes captured Paldermot and dispersed his rebel legion before he ever entered the city. It goes on to say, in a transcription of Paldermot's own words that he had "Followed a star" to the "seat of a new imperium", and claimed that the star had promised great allies to aid him in his conquest. The text is unquestionably authentic , but it throws our entire understanding of events into question; If Paldermot was captured in the midst of his rebellion, who or what destroyed the capital and turned the surrounding countryside into a crater?

Setup: Hurdling across the void of the astral sea, the meteoric god Mnyull brings ruin wherever he goes, the embodiment of unrelenting invasion at the hands of an inexorable foe. Unlike other gods which present themselves in abstract forms felt across the multiverse Mnyull prefers to exist as an incarnated singular being, a towering construct built around the mummified yet undying body of his current mortal avatar.

This living reliquary leads an army of crusading zealots scattered throughout the multiverse known as the starry horde, followers and adherents of its former vessels who believe that by serving the Revelation Tyrant, they continue the legacy of their particular heaven-chosen liege. It is important to note then that Mnyull and his followers do not adhere to any one ideology as they hold the act of conquest itself sacred, whatever form that conquest takes. Like a shooting star the tyrant god is constantly on the move, dragging his followers into one conflict after another before retiring to a palatial demiplane of rock and ice for decades or centuries at a time to rule those realms where his cult has taken hold.

It is for this reason that some theologians have considered classifying Mnyull as an outergod, those divine beings considered actively hostile to the stability of realities they interact with. Debate rages in those lofty circles however as the hostility the Revelation Tyrant represents usually takes the form of “ Invade them with an alien army before or after hitting their world with a big rock or series of big rocks”.  While the scholar dither, Mnyull bides his time, growing ever closer to some innocent world that has no idea of the disaster that is about to strike it.

Hooks:

The Party’s homeland is struck by the invasion force of a kingdom that fell to Mnyull’s influence generations ago. While more traditional warfare occupies the early adventures of the campaign, they begin to uncover hints of lore about their enemy’s newly arisen (and apparently immortal) theocratic leader along with the strange monument she’s building. Just as it seems they might have an upper hand against the invaders, their enemies deploy new and terrifying weapons and otherworldy allies, sourced from the portal they’ve just finished building.

Sometimes Mnyull decides to feed his urge for conquest by invading a random plane, riding a chunk of astral rock through its firmament and establishing a kingdom wherever he lands. The Revelation Tyrant is not a creature of foresight however, and on his most recent outing ended up impacting into one of that plane’s moons. Refusing to give up he’s carved out a realm among the strange creatures that live among the palid rocks of that blasted planetoid, and now sets his sites upon the verdant world below.

While enjoying a trip to the local archives and observatory, the party are interrupted by agents of the starry horde, looking to plunder the vaults looking for information regarding great weapons created to break worlds known only as “The Anvils”. Predating even the Revelation Tyrant’s earliest memory, Mnyull once used his divine will to steer these ancient tools towards ever more destructive ends, until a coalition of forgotten heroes toppled him from his throne for fear he would turn the weapons upon them. 

Background: None can say where Mnyull first emerged, but planear scholars have charted the tyrant god’s course across world after world and have noticed a self perpetuating cycle:  Some would be warlord sees a silvery star or comet and it awakens in them a desire for conquest, though more often than not they would have began life as someone who already exerted authority over others. Strange powers and allies allow these conquerors to amass a fanatical following and become a true threat to the powers of that age, leading to a climatic confrontation where they are either killed, or rise to claim a throne and immortality. A harsh and “glorious” reign begins, and the ruler demands the construction of great monuments which will serve as portals in Mnyull’s next conquest. Should the Revelation Tyrant lack a body at the moment, one of these ascendant rulers becomes his next vessel, feverishly instructing their underlings how thier body is to be mutilated and interred in preparation for their apotheosis. When the reliquary is built around them, Mnyull’s silver-blue light strikes them full force, their soul igniting to serve as the perpetual fuel for the tyrant god’s engine.

Titles: The Tyrant’s Star, All-conquering Meteor King, Khan of the Starry Horde, Imperitor-Celestium.  Along with any other titles inherited from his innumerable vessels.

Signs: A silver-blue comet or star blazing in the sky, Meteor Showers that produce snowfall without clouds, Ecstatic Visions of victory and conquest, weaponry shining silver 

Symbols: The arc of a Comet above a Crown, Chariot, or Other sign of Lordship.

Followers:  Warmongers of all kinds, be they authoritarians or Rebels. Mnyull has also accumulated followers across the astral sea, so numerous entities which range the cosmos looking for battle are drawn into his service voluntarily or by indoctrination.

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