Re: My corner of the universe. Shield Space 1 of many

----- Original Message -----
From: "Clint Whelly" <Clint.Whelly@?????????.ca>
Subject: [SPELLJAMMER] My corner of the universe. Shield Space 1 of many

This is my third reply to this.

> There are "other" energies or forces that can be controlled and harnessed
> referred to as magic.  There are different kinds and types of magic
> available expressed as the different schools of magic use.
>
> Another force to be reckoned with are Gods.  Gods in this Universe are
> responsive to worship and respond directly or through their chosen agents
> usually referred to as Priests or Clerics.  Just about all sentient beings
> worship or follow some sort of a God.  As a god's presence and power can be
> felt by its followers, there is no need of blind faith for the most part.

The 3e terms for these types of magic are arcane magic (for wizards, bards and sorcerers)
and divine magic (for clerics, druids, rangers and paladins). If you want to bring d20
players into your game, it might be better to use these terms to help them make the
transition to your game more easily. There is no sense in reinventing the wheel.

I like this idea a lot, but I think I'd want to restrict it to just one sphere. It would
then help make that sphere stand out from other spheres. Other people would not know if
their god was with them but people in your sphere would. The church would presumably have
a
much bigger influence on society than other crystal spheres. People leaving the sphere
might either feel a big shock when they loose touch with their gods or would have much
more confidence in their connection with their god than people elsewhere.

This could at your choice either make the people religious fanatics or overly shy when
they were away from their own sphere.

You could even take things further by making a feat for people from that sphere that gives
them one of the granted powers that a cleric normally gets. (By this I mean domain granted
powers from 3e.)

Alternatively you could give anyone with enough wisdom to gain a bonus divine spell. I
haven't got to the reason why you call your setting Shieldspace yet, but if you do give
them a spell, then the Shield of Faith spell would maybe be a cool one to give. How about
making a local feat called something like "Divine Shield". The feat could have the same
effect as a Shield of Faith spell and could kick in whenever the person with the feat gets
attacked. The spell normally gives a target a +2 deflection bonus (+6 per every 6 levels
up to a maximum bonus of +5) and the feat could do the same. The duration is normally 1
minute per level. I'm not sure if people would think that was unbalanced. You could cut it
to 1 round per level if you thought it was overpowered. A cleric that wants to cast this
spell has to have a minimum wisdom of 12, so I would be tempted to make the prerequisites
a
wisdom of 12 and true faith in one of the religions of Shieldspace. Loosing wisdom or
loosing faith would stop the feat working. You could also make it stop working when
someone left Shieldspace and went somewhere else.

> A God's power can only manifest in Crystal Spheres where it has a body of
> worshipers and at least one temple is established.  This can even be a
> Church in a ship with 100 or so followers aboard, ensuring that the
> followers will never stray from the attention of their god, or its power.

This differs from the TSR rule on p103 of the Complete Spacefarers Handbook. That rule
says that a temple must be able to support at least 200 people to establish the church. It
also requires that churches must be stationary. Under certain circumstances, I think that
I
would prefer your version of a church on a ship. However, I only think that a church that
has some association with travel, ships or wildspace (or in your case ether) would work on
a ship. A religion with a portfolio that involves sea creatures should have temples and
churches at sea shores and a religion associated with plants should really have a temple
in
the wilderness or on a farm.

> God's rarely necessitate a choice between good and evil though often the
> traits referred to as Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic play a large part of a
> god's makeup and by extension that of its followers. So, if a God is Lawful
> whatever, most if not all of its followers will be Lawful whatever.

The official 3e or d20 rule for worship is that the alignment of clerics must be no more
than one step away from that of their gods (either on the good/evil axis or the
lawful/chaotic axis). So if you put in additional restrictions on worshipers it will make
almost clerics worship a god with the same alignment. That isn't a problem as most clerics
are supposed to be the same alignment as their deity (Dragonlance also does something a
bit non-standard with gods). However, you should make sure that you have at least one god
of every alignment to help your setting work with 3e.

> Your History: (Yes, this was done about 5 years ago, I've even seen the
> concept in a book about time travel since then..)
>
> Humans came to Shield from Earth about 80 years ago in the Earth year 2001
> in what is referred to as the Event.  A large dome of light and energy
> appeared over the Pacific Ocean.

Are you aware that someone has done a spelljammer crystal sphere based on Earth? I think
they call it Terraspace. If you haven't already seen it you should have a look as it might
help you. You can find it from the Lost Spheres page:

http://lost.spelljammer.org/

Shame you put this over the Pacific Ocean. The Bermuda Triangle would have been more fun!
LOL

> The
> reasoning was good, there was a very large reserve of fuel for the ships and
> helicopters, The Eagle; a three masted 300 foot long sailing ship was a
> great benefit, as was the Wind Surf once it had been refitted to work
> without computer support as all but basic electronic devices had ceased to
> function.

It is quite hard to get technology and Spelljammer to mix. You will need to keep your eye
on the ball to avoid continuity errors and as technology is non-standard you will have
much less support material from other sources (meaning you will need to write more
material
yourself).

>  Humans had not yet clued into the fact that gods are real and that magic
> exists.  It had not occurred to the Gnomes that Humans had no clue about
> magic, as they thought that much of our technology was derived from magic.
> As we had not shared information about our god, they thought that we were
> just private about that aspect of our culture.

Are you going to write up D&D stats for the human god or have only the Shieldspace gods be
true gods? Don't forget that if you are basing this on reality, humans don't have one god.
There are many religions that are still practised and their would be representatives of
several of these in that area of the pacific. However, you need to be a bit cautious with
living religions as people that follow them can get upset if you make an in-game statement
about their religion that they think is a judgment against them. Don't forget that if you
stick this stuff on the Internet (and it is already going onto the SJML) people could
stumble onto it from a search engine that wouldn't normally read D&D or Spelljammer
websites.

> The next ten years were spent building, learning, and exploring.  Rockport
> was never more than a town, as the population remained low.  There was
> enormous pressure on females to have as many babies as possible and they
> were encouraged to have these children with different fathers.  The mix of
> men and women was about 50/50 after the war and by AE10 the Human population
> had reached about 3200 adults and around 4500 children.
>
> As well, by AE (AE refers to the event where the humans were brought to
> Shield) 10, magic had been discovered and many Humans had become
> practitioners of this art.  The power of some gods had also started to
> manifest itself through some people and groups started to coalesce among
> these spiritual leaders.  This proved to be a great benefit as the healing
> power of many "clerics" became quite helpful.

AE refers to the event but what does it mean? Is it After Event? If it is then why not
explain this by saying something like: "The humans that arrived on Shield started a new
calendar system when they arrived and called it After Event or AE."

By the way, what is the year of arrival called? is it AE 0?

> In AE 13, an Arcane ship found us (The makers of SpellJammer helms).

This doesn't scan right. You also shouldn't have a capital letter in the middle of a
sentence even if it is in brackets. I think it would look better if it was more like:

"In AE 13, a ship from the Arcane (the makers of spelljammer helms) found us."

> As Humans visited a few crystal spheres, word spread that there was a Human
> "homeland" It seems that Humans were a minor race with no roots and no home,
> existing in the cites and lands of other races and in short order, tens of
> thousands of Humans found their way to Shield.

A problem you *do* have with this is that at some times you are talking about humans in
the first person and at others you are talking about them in the third person. You need to
pick one and stick with it.

Personally I would ditch the first person stuff and write the lot as if humans are another
race. However, if you want to keep bits where you say "we did this" or "this happened to
us" then I suggest that you read some of the Planscape style stuff and then think of a
similar way to do it in blocks. I wouldn't suggest using Planescape words like "berks" as
it wouldn't look right with this, but how about picking one particular human and having
them write diary entries? You could then give those sections a different style and they
would work like Spelljammer sidebars. Don't make them to big and make sure you don't get
the NPC author to write down things that they couldn't possibly know (like what the
methane breathers think or what the goblinoids are doing that humans don't know about).

I had the same problem with a lot of the content on my website having mixed styles, mixed
tense and first and third person. It took absolutely *ages* to hunt down everything that
didn't match and re-write it. But if you want it to look really professional, I think that
you should go through the text and sort this out.

> Around AE 40 the methane breathers were encountered and successfully
> bargained with.  The methane breathers think differently than any other
> race.  Communication had been impossible without using math as a common
> language.  This turned out to be of enormous benefit to Shield.  Known by
> many races, the methane breathers were feared by all, as their ships and
> weapons just simply overwhelmed everybody else's including the Arcane.  The
> methane breathers would simply take what they wanted from time to time with
> no regard to anything else.  With Shield, they kind of learned the concept
> of trade.  The methane breathers would leave their trade goods for ours.
> Our goods consisted of food, pelts, art and such and their goods consisted
> of potions, magic items, rare gems, and metals and the occasional Helm and
> other SpellJammer devices.

Do the methane breathers have a name? If people have managed to trade with them, I would
presume that they would have one. Even if their name is something that doesn't translate
into English or they communicate by light or heat or something equally weird, I would
expect humans to give them a name.

Rude people would probably call them something like Fart Sniffers! LOL

> These helms were priceless.  Able to move a ship faster with better
> manoeuvrability and of a much larger mass than any other Spelljammer helm
> known.

You are going to need to give this type of helm a distinctive name so that people can find
it wherever you put the stats.

I suppose that you could extrapolate an helm that is one step up from a major helm by
looking at the minor and major helm rules and taking it to the next level. I'll call it an
"Ultra Helm" for the time being (you might want to come up with an alternative name as it
is similar to "Ultimate Helm"). Here are the stats you get if you play one-up-man-ship
with the existing rules:

Ultra Helm

Cost 625,000 gp

(A minor helm is 100,000 gp and major helm is 250,000 - you can get the second price by
multiplying the first by 1.5 so I've done this again to get the ultra helm price.)

Ships Rating Using Ultra Helms

Spellcaster    Ultra    (Major)    (Minor)
Level            Helm    (Helm)     (Helm)
1                  1          (1)           (1)
2                  2          (1)           (1)
3                  3          (1)           (1)
4                  4          (2)           (1)
5                  5          (2)           (1)
6                  6          (3)           (2)
7                  7          (3)           (2)
8                  8          (4)           (2)
9                  9          (4)           (3)
10                10        (5)           (3)
11                11        (5)           (3)
12                12        (6)           (4)
13                13        (6)           (4)
14                14        (7)           (4)
15                15        (7)           (5)
16                16        (8)           (5)
17                17        (8)           (5)
18                18        (9)           (6)
19                19        (9)           (6)
20                20        (10)         (6)

(The logic for this is that a minor helm goes up in SR every third level starting from
sixth level and a major helm goes up in SR every second level starting from forth level so
the next type of helm should go up in SR every level starting from second level.)

An ultra helm can move a ship of up to 200 tons.

(Minor helms move 50 tons and major helms move 100, which is double that, so the next step
is 200. You could make it 150 if you think that is over powered.)

> The coming of the in-human wars brought conflict to man once again.  Though
> Humanity tried to turn its back on this conflict between the Elves and the
> Goblinoid races, both sides came to Shield.  The Orcs, attempting to capture
> Rockport for their own, and the Elves demanding ships, troops, and
> resources.  Though many Humans willingly joined forces with the Elves,
> Shield as a nation did not.

Do you mean the "Unhuman War"?

> The Scro thought that Shield would be an easy target as we had so few ships.
> What they failed to understand was the advantage that higher technology
> brings.  Though we only had 6 capitol combat ships, the Orc fleet was
> decimated.  Twenty out of 50 of the Orc's finest ships had been pounded into
> junk before they could even engage what Shield called Starfleet.  Orcs (or
> Scro) can be smart, they asked for a truce.

You have jumped from Orcs to Scro without explaining the evolution of one into the other.

> As the peace talks were progressing, a huge Dwarven citadel had entered
> Shield space pursued by a Scro fleet.

Are you aware that the normal method of propulsion for a dwarven citadel involves using a
forge. It is impossible to use a forge in the phlogiston as it would explode. You could
have the citadel travel through the flow with the forge shut down, but the dwarves would
then not be able to evade pursuit. Have a think about this. Maybe you can come up with
another type of helm that can move something as massive as a citadel. Perhaps the Arcane
sold the dwarves some sort of artifurnice that was a one shot device. Maybe the dwarves
had to feed all of their magical devices into the artifurnice in order to keep it moving
and limped into Shieldspace with only a few magical items left.

The lead scouts of the scro could have arrived as the dwarves were attempting to restart
their furnace and attacked while the citadel was unpowered. If the dwarves had used up all
of their magic items they would find it a lot harder to defend themselves and might have
only just fought off the scro's first wave.

You could then use the humans, gnomes or elves to ride into the rescue just before the
dwarves were wiped out.

You can get rid of the powerful artifurnice if you want to by having someone rip it out of
its mounting, stick in a magic dagger and send it hurtling into a scro ship as a missile.
It could either be found later whizzing around the sphere or could be destroyed on impact.

> The citadel ship had been badly
> damaged and was now marooned in Shield space. As Dwarves were known to
> Humans and had gotten along well with them in the past, the Government of
> Shield offered them land if they wanted to stay, they stayed.  The
> Government of Shield also made it a condition of the treaty that the Scro
> and their allies would stop attacking the Dwarven holdings.

It would be a shame to have the dwarves land. Why not leave a skeleton crew on board to
fix things and have the rest of the dwarves come down to the planet to mine for gems and
materials needed to pay for supplies and create new magical swords and armour to replace
what they lost in the flow.

The gnomes could do a deal with the dwarves where the dwarves cease the land of the
goblinoids and mine that. I think that the gnomes might like that as they would have
someone else attacking their foes and would not have dwarves displacing them from their
land.

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Virtual Eclipse Role Playing Club
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualeclipselrp/links/d20_system_001071937434/Spelljammer_001071430476
http://virtualeclipse.aboho.com/