Re: Sphere Guides

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Hackman" <scottbert85@?????.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 8:46 PM
Subject: Re: [SPELLJAMMER] Sphere Guides


> Wow. Mr. Shepherd described excellently how space feels small to me, and
> great ideas about what to do about it.

Thanks Scott.

> I am also reminded of my explorations of the abandoned space area on an 
> old
> MUCK. Most of the systems were small and undescribed -- while perhaps this
> is appropriate for someplace where the only notoriety is some mineral-rich
> asteroids and no habitable worlds or colonies, in many cases a world _was_
> sort of described, but there wasn't much to see, just a single room
> describing the port and what it's like looking at the planet from orbit, 
> or
> something.

To be fair to game designers (both professional and amateur) writing fluff 
takes time and deadlines and/or page limits mean that you are going to have 
to stop at some point.

Night Druid is one of the best SJ authors in the community, but even he only 
has time to finish one moon in a month. I would expect every town, city or 
unbuilt up country (or county) on a larger world would take as much effort 
as a small moon. A quick look at the contents page of DLCS tells me that 
Ansalon has 24 geographical areas in that book. So if Night Druid tried to 
do a planet in the same detail as the DLCS hardback, I would expect it to 
take him about 2 years to finish it! And Night Druid is one of the best 
writers in our community - most of the rest of us take a lot longer to write 
things than he does.

So I'm more than willing to accept a small description of something...as 
long as the author tells us "this is just one bit of the planet". When you 
only have one detailed location on a world it makes sense that the location 
described happens to be the "random villiage/town/city" that the PCs ship 
lands at.

Sparsely detailed crystal spheres are better than no crystal spheres. But, 
I'd be more happy if the person who built your "world with a port", 
revisited it and added something else from time to time. I would rather have 
half a dozen crystal spheres that are each worthy of epic SJ campaigns than 
100 crystal spheres with hardly any background.

> Other times, a system clearly existed for the gratification of
> the player who built it 'behold, my mighty SDF-1 ripoff is here, look how
> great I am muwahahahaha!'.

I'm not sure what SDF-1 is, but I see what you mean. I think that many 
players start off wanting to create powerful things that will improve things 
for their character or the other characters in their party. Some of these 
things newbies write might seem a bit cheesy to people who have played D&D 
for a while, but it is all part of the natural learning curve. I sometimes 
think it is a lot harder to write "bad guys" who are not cheesy and two 
dimensional as it involves having empathy with things that you probably 
don't agree with.

Writing is a learned art - not an inate ability. I think we *all* turn out 
poor quality material when we start off. You have to be willing to rewrite 
material and occasionally throw something away and start again to get 
better. I think we all need to write "Turkeyspace" before we can write 
"Coolspace". And who knows, if you keep adding better stuff to Turkeyspace 
and then strip out a few older things that don't fit in with better ideas 
you have after you get going it might even turn into Swanspace! ;-)

> Often, a spaceport would actually be described in
> a bit of detail, but not the rest of the planet. But in a rare handful of
> cases, someone had actually described an entire space station and its
> interior, or not just a spaceport but the city surrounding it and 
> sometimes
> a bit of the area beyond that!

This reminds me a bit of Greyhawk, where (in some GH products) the city 
seems to be more important than the rest of the planet Oerth. I think that 
wilderness areas are as important to SJ as civilised ports like Bral. Worlds 
in SJ seem to be classed as "spacefaring" or "groundling" worlds. I'd like 
to see "semi-spacefaring" worlds where NPC spelljamming ships are only 
interested in trading with big towns (maybe port towns) as they collect 
together all the goods that they are interested in. These towns can be 
treated as part of the spacefaring community, but the people living in the 
countryside away from these SJ friendly locations can be treated as 
groundlings.

Semi-spacefaring worlds like this could be used as homeworlds for 
uncivilised PCs like barbarians.

> Perhaps it would be a good idea for someone to actually describe what
> settlements on a given world are like?

That is a good idea, but I don't one "global" rule *can* cover an entire 
world. A sea-port on the equator and a sea-port in the artic would both have 
different environments driving their culture, as would a nomadic dessert 
tribe or a city built into the side of a clifftop. I think it would be 
better to modify your idea and make it apply to a section of the planet - a 
continent (like Ansalon on Krynn) or a country (like Sembia on Toril) is 
something that you can more realistically describe in general terms.

I know it is a bit of a fudge, but I think that we should copy settings like 
Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance and develop specific geographical areas on 
most of our larger SJ planets. As we add in other areas they can sometimes 
have similar cultures to the existing areas, but single-world governments 
(like that on Thesalys) should be rare.

> If there is a specific spaceport then
> certainly that place, but if there is some civilization on a world then
> perhaps some idea of what their settlements are typically like so a DM has
> some idea if the party decides to land there.

Don't forget the uncivilised areas. They should get some attention too. I 
see no reason why PCs couldn't land near a desert, play through a series of 
Arabian Nights style adventures and then fly back into wildspace to carry on 
with their spelljamming activities. Areas without civil authorities can have 
cultures that are just as interesting as ones with more government control.

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Virtual Eclipse Role Playing Club
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualeclipselrp/links/d20_system_001071937434/Spelljammer_001071430476
http://www32.brinkster.com/virtualeclipse/

> Adventure hooks for given
> planets would be good too.