Should PCs be able to create helms? Was:Alternative helm creation

Sorry for the big delay in this reply. I've been offline since my PC died. I 
just surfed in from an internet cafe and had to join in on this.

>From: Bart Dedecker <dragoth_dm@?????.com>
>Reply-To: Spelljammer Setting Discussion <SPELLJAMMER-L@??????.???????.com>
>To: SPELLJAMMER-L@??????.???????.com
>Subject: Re: [SPELLJAMMER] Alternative helm creation
>Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 07:59:28 -0800
>
>All up to the personal prefferences of the gamer I
>guess...
>
>personnally I never go as far as to give them the
>opportunity to sell a helm... or buy one for that
>matter... going beyond 100k gold is a bit over the top
>I think and it's still a major magical artifact. not
>something to be sold except for a wee little bitty
>service perhaps :)

Don't forget that all rules are at the gamemasters discretion. If he wants 
helm creation rules he can have them. If you don't want them, then they 
don't exist in your version of the SJ universe.

>but that's just me speaking of course. I guess that
>dwarves have to know something of their forges indeed.

Don't forget that dwarves do not need the ability to create forges. Dwarves 
live in clans. The clan "drives" around a sphere* in a Dwarven Citadel until 
they use up all the resorces in it. When this happens they drive up to a 
small asteroid and hollow it out to form a new citadel. The forge is then 
dismantled and moved to the new citadel. If a clan gets too big for a 
citadel they usually build a stationary home on an asteroid *and* build a 
citadel as well so that they can leave some time in the future if their 
population gets smaller or if some of them want to start a new clan.

If a clan was rich enough to split into two, it may well have enough wealth 
to afford a second forge (from the arcane, if necessary).

* = I don't think people make enough of the fact that dwarven clans do not 
usually travel through the flow. Dwarves in Examplespace should be decended 
from dwarves that lived in Examplespace thousands of years ago. PC dwarves 
should have a clan name from the sphere they were born in.

>As to the elves and how they managed it to create
>something able to do what a helm does... well they did
>go as far as to create mythals so I guess a helm
>should be feasable as well for them.

The elves live for so long that it should be possible for them to be able to 
research this. I've always had the impression that the arcane make it easier 
for various races to get helms in order for them to make people think it 
isn't worth the effort of making their own.

Their have been various races that have controlled the spheres in the past 
(including the Juna) and I wonder if the arcane subsidised the Elven 
Imperial Navy in order to undermine whoever was in controll of the sphers 
before them.

The arcane are definately up to something. Look at the gnomes for example. 
99 percent of all groundling gnomes have no interest in wildspace. But then 
(just 1000 years ago) someone gave the Tinker Gnomes of Krynnspace the 
ability to get into space. Since that time this tiny subrace has left its 
sphere and spread across the entire universe! That is an enourmous 
population growth!

I definately think that the arcane are behind this. There is probably some 
long term plan. Considering that most spheres have a tiny population 
(compared to groundling worlds) I think that a lot of the size A and size B 
communities would probably die out without spelljamming helms.

Maybe the arcane are going to build up big populations, then at some point 
in the distant future, take away access to helms in order to force small 
communities to pay over the odds for essential things they don't have on 
their own rock.

>Then again, I
>still have to meet my first band of pc's who manage to
>fight of a dwarven stronghold and even after that
>manage to find enough man to opparate one. same goes
>for pc's vs the EIN... always fun to let em live for a
>while... but eventually... enough said on the
>subject... tough day of reversed database engineering
>at work sorry for the mumbo jumbo.

If by "fight (off?) a dwarven stronghold" you mean steal a dwarven citadel, 
I pity the PCs that do that. Dwarves may not communicate with each other 
much, but you wouldn't need a very high intellegence score to be able to 
guess that anyone with a working dwarven citadel was an enemy of the dwarven 
race. Any dwarven forge (or other bits of the citadel) would probably be 
covered in runes saying who built it, what clan owns it, what King of the 
Mountain was alive when it was build, etc, etc. Any PC group that did this 
should be investigated and then chased by an ever increasing band of dwarves 
eager to seek revenge. The only way to avoid them would be to abandon the 
citade, leave the sphere and change identities.

Anyway, stealing a dwarven or EIN ship would not let PCs learn how to create 
helms any more than looking at arcane helms would.

As for how to actually create helms...

...that's another email.

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
easyInternet cafe
London, UK