Re: Introducing SJ to a World

>    But I was wondering how did the rest of you introduce it to _your_
> worlds?

   Well, we were talking about retiring our 7th-10th level PCs, and I
decided to retire them to another planet. I'm the experimenter in our
group, and had wanted to bring in SJ for a while, but the rest of the
group was kinda leery, but finally they agreed. We take turns DMing in
our group, each running our own complete scenarios. The guy who DMed
before me left off right after our group had almost single-handedly
stopped an invasion of Greyhawk by Iuz during the Great War. Our help was
so great that the city didn't have enough money to adequately reward us.
Besides, they didn't want to give us that much money anyway. Also, they
didn't give us grants of nobility because no one wanted us as their
neighbors.
   We were known as an adventurous try-anything group, so the Lords of
Grehawk let us in on a secret: Spelljamming. It seemed that there were
other worlds and peoples and, most importantly, a tremendous opportunity
for an industrious group like ours. Up until now, the Lords had kept SJ a
secret until they could come up with a way to gently break the news to
the public. If we were agreeable, they would introduce us to a friendly
space captain and ask him to take us into space.
   From here I segued into the SJ module that involved a vampire usurping
a solar system kingship (I forget the name). After the PCs helped the exiled
prince regain his throne, he made them nobles of his court and gave them the
lands of various traitors who had helped the usurper. The fight was
difficult, strange, and sometimes humorous, but the rewards at the end
were great.
   Imagine, if you will, the mind flayer who has just mind-blasted the
mage with the exploding magical rod into infancy. The befuddled mage
proceeded to have a temper tantrum because the mind flayer scared him,
and scared the crap out of the PCs because of the way he was waving the
rod around.
   Or, how about the dwarf with the boots of speed, a recurring case
of space sickness, and a magical axe that made him afraid of open spaces?
During ship to ship battles, he'd hide below decks. Whenever he could get
his courage up, he would dash up onto the deck, hit somebody, barf, and
run screaming back down below decks.
   In the final battle, the PCs must face a vampire lord who is also a
13th level necromancer, and who has control of an entire planetful of
lesser undead to fight for him. He allows the PCs to enter his castle,
and intends to toast the most powerful ones before letting his zombies
swarm them. Unfortunately for me, and for the titanic battle I had
planned, the cleric uses his ebony fly (which I forgot he had) to fly
around behind the vampire, and rolled a 20 with his mace of disruption.
End of vampire, fight, and story. I made up for my disappointment by
involving them in a space battle against the traitorous elements of the
spacy navy. During this, the ranger with the ring of telekinesis used the
ring to propell a heavy bench up to respectable speeds and launched it at
the attacking Galleon's sails. Of course, he was aiming at the fighters
on the deck, but was gratified when his bulky missile took out the sails,
which dropped down and entangled most of the enemy troops.


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 Stephen Mann                                                    smann@??.com
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