It has been quiet lately, lets revive old topics:

What sorts of fantastic beasts have been domesticated or utilized in
ingenious ways in your campagins?

Is there a general understanding that using green slime, jellies or puddings
is against the rules of war or are those things too finicky to maintain
alive in a shipboard setting?  I can see necromancers and liches using
the exclusively flesh eating ones, or having skeletons and other expendable
undead use them, or set traps in their ships with them.


For a port defense:  A large glassee'd steel dome, illuminating a chained
Greater Basilisk, that petrifies by gaze.  Perhaps the dome can also
magnify the image of the Basilisk, like a giant goldfish bowl, enabling
its image to be fatally spotted further away.  This could be placed on a high toh
tower, invisible to the defenders, and only illuminated or uncovered
for major threats.  It becomes less useful against a forewarned foe.


A new question:
In the Spelljammer book, The Radiant Dragon, the Elves are able to maintain
a blockade of Armistice because a detector web over the entire planet has
been set up.  I suppose since there isn't that much in space to block or
distract sensors, the ordinary range of detection spells could be greater,
but still...

What sorts of ranges do the various campaigns have out there for ship
Detection, Identification, and Orientation (where they are going)
Can the different helm types be identified?  Is it an enhancement of
vision or a purely magical, and thus harder to spoof detection gear?
Does it function better or worse near planets?  I'm in favor of simply
waving my hands and saying a mysterious property of wildspace enables
distant objects to seem a _lot_ closer or obvious, especially if moving
at spelljamming speeds.

How many of your encounters, campaign time, is set around the hazards of
travelling and how much is on planets?
Are their high level magics that fleets use that enable fleet battles to
even take place?  And if so, isn't this like the early social effect of
gunpowder, where only the richest kingdoms could afford a siege train,
with the attendant political fall out as well?

Michael Sandy
once of agora.rdrop.com, now or
mehawk@????.com