Rebellion Themed TTRPG Campaigns: Guerrillas, Freedom Fighters and Pirates

I’ve been wanting to get back into writing campaign settings and ideas down, so thought I would once more blow the dust off the blog. Yesterday I encountered some really interesting blog posts about trying new ways of writing D&D to avoid some of its western and colonial tropes. The general idea that has been kicked around for, well, pretty much forever at this point is that D&D is about killing things and taking their stuff, and that is generally a bad idea with a lot of really unfortunate parallels in real-world history; many much more well read people have already written about this, so I don’t think I need to go into that further. However, it is also true that killing things and taking their stuff and getting more powerful is one of the core attractions of D&D. In Playing at the World by Jon Peterson related that back in the first proto-D&D campaign, Blackmoor, the GM Dave Arnesson got frustrated with his players as they kept going down into the town’s dungeons to gain treasure (a side game) instead of engaging in the main wargame he had built.

Which brought me to thinking: What type of narrative would leave the players in a similar situation as to D&D? They can’t be working for an organized military, or they’d be issued weapons and uniforms and not have the freedom to choose what they’re doing. They can’t be in a situation where they can just go to the store and buy what they need; they need to either be out of money, or the weapons and armour they want to buy can’t be available in stores.

This all took me back to the Star Wars novels I read as a kid, where the rebellion had to raid Imperial convoys for weapons and supplies; to Skies of Arcadia where the (Spanish-inspired) Valuan Empire is raided by the Blue Rogue sky pirates, who live on hidden floating island bases and use the money to support their families and community; to Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor; to The Crimson Shadow trilogy by R. A. Salvatore, and to Daybreak 2250AD by Andre Norton (Also known as Star Man’s Son by Andrew North) where a lone explorer searches through a deserted city looking for books, tools, and other useful items he can take back to his community to help them.

I’m seeing a setting where an invading force, the Malonusian Empire, has pushed the heroes far from their original home and walk of life, forcing them to become part of a hidden community. Think of Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest settlement, a small ‘fishing’ community (pirate haven), or a small frontier town, just outside of the expansionist power’s sphere of influence (or just within it, so while it nominally pays taxes to them, they don’t have much actual influence).

The heroes break into dungeons not just to take money and seize weapons, but also to free the prisoners in that dungeon. They steal money and valuables that were stolen from their people originally, or to fund the war effort, or possibly even to pay the unfair taxes that the invaders have levied on their home. They steal weapons and magic items to turn them back on the invaders.

That also removes some of the more tried and boring moral cliches that have been injected into the hobby since the 70s: Why are there no orc children in the dungeon? They orcs are mercenaries brought along with the invading army; their children and non-combatants are back in their homeland, or at an encampment between there and here. Why are there a bunch of weird monsters in the dungeon? Because a sadistic noble brought his pets along with him, or maybe they’re guard animals for a military base. Why are you delving into an abandoned temple? Because your forces cached a bunch of weapons and magic items there as they retreated last time. Why are you looting that tomb? Because your great-grandfather fought the Malonusians in his day with a magic sword, and you are dead sure he would want you to bring it out and let it do it’s job again.

Now, this isn’t just going to be a blood-soaked romp through enemy forces; you’ve also got a community at home. That could be a poor district in a large city that is keeping its head down and hiding you between adventures, a camp in the woods, or any of the other options I mentioned above. That is where you keep your non-combatants, remnants of the army, or other bands doing the same thing. Some of the blog posts below have listed some cool ideas about how to model helping out a community like that; I’ve also thought that it would be cool to see the type of treasure you bring back helping the community. If you’ve brought back a bunch of weapons and armour you don’t need, perhaps the town doesn’t lose so much to bandits the following year, or you meet other groups of rebels using familiar-looking gear; a load of medicine causes the wise woman’s cough to clear up, letting her help more people; a load of lumber means a stronger palisade or new barns; and so on.


I’m thinking there will be convoys and ships of supplies going to the garrisons that you can raid for food and weapons, convoys of treasure headed back to the enemy homeland, corrupt sheriffs and tax collectors, armouries that can be raided, and even municipal offices full of records that can be burned to hide people or things from the authorities. I see rich nobles moving outwards, building mansions on stolen land, prime for raiding and burning. Also once those records are destroyed, I see mines and quarries full of prisoners of war and unjustly imprisoned common folk, ready to be raided and liberated and either sent home or taken to your hideout with you, depending on how hard it is for them to blend in once again. Perhaps you liberate such a group, then need to attack the local courthouse to burn the records so they can go home.

Now we come to some old advice from a column in Dragon magazine I read many, many years ago: An altered D&D, not an altered setting. What needs altering will of course be rather different between GURPS, OD&D (and it’s various retroclones), D&D3e (3.5, Pathfinder, etc), Alternity, and so on, but I can think of a few general things. First of all: Scrying has to go. It is going to be really hard to be dashing rebels if the enemy can just cast a spell to find you. You could do this by removing those spells from the game, limiting how many enemy spellcasters are powerful enough to cast those spells, or restricting the use of those spells. If you have a lot of powerful, secretive nobles and politicians stabbing one another in the back, it could be they’ve restricted research into those spells or even outlawed them. Yes, it hampers their own military and occupation efforts, but that is less important then getting away with assassinating the Minster of Trade so that someone’s failson can take up the post.

The other thing I would suggest altering for this setting, or have an in-world reason for, is city and military base construction. What I’ve seen in a few cases is DMs altering the world around player powers, as if these things are really common, so they don’t put open courtyards on castles, they have military facilities mix metal and stone and glass shards into the foundation to prevent earth elementals and spellcasters from using their abilities on it, and so on. Pretty soon, everything looks like a modern military camp or industrial facility more then a fantasy castle or such, and this kind of change in tactics can restrict player creativity if it looks like the enemy has accounted for everything the party can do.

Instead, develop the enemy in ways that force players to keep being creative. Give enemies cultural or political reasons to not be ready for the players’ basic tactics, and then let them react and adapt to what the players do. One place to start is limiting the number of high-level casters in the military: that could start as a cultural blind spot with spellcasters mostly being upper class, making them more likely to be officers than sappers or engineers. There’s plenty of historical examples to draw on for reasonable blind spots: sure, not letting enemy flying cavalry units swoop down on you seems obvious, but given that multiple highly successful empires (Rome, China) had to have training manuals telling their generals not to attack across rivers, as it was a good way to lose an army, it isn’t at all unrealistic that they would miss a few things. Remember that historically, lots of civilizations’ military leaders weren’t full-time, career officers. They were rich men and politicians who’d paid to command an army as a chance to make even more money, or to get a better job after the campaign was over, and a lot of the enlisted officers would be 3rd and 4th sons of rich families. But there’s always room in the command structure to add someone who actually knows what they’re doing, who can develop countermeasures to spells and tactics the party use repeatedly, and make players keep thinking of new ways to accomplish their goals.

Anyway, that is all I can think of for now; I’d love suggestions of other adventure ideas, or additional sources of inspiration.

Influences and further reading:

  • An Arrow for the General: Confronting D&D-as-Western in the Kalahari
    • The Ava Islam quote about the Jungle Book was very inspiring (I don’t think it was this article, but another one I can’t find now, that adapted it: You can’t take the killing things and taking their stuff out of D&D, that is the fun. Really the whole rest of the blog post came from there.
  • Occupy Greyhawk
    • I wrote most of this setting in my head, and then while trying to find that Ava Islam quote found this, which is basically the same idea, but done before I was born.
  • A Spectre (7+3 HD) Is Haunting the Flaeness: Towards a Leftist OSR
    • I have been thinking about a TTRPG about building up a small, isolated town for a while, with my inspiration being Daybreak 2250 AD by Andre Norton. In it, the person scavenging a lost city isn’t looking for weapons or treasure, but is excited to find a stationary store with good quality paper and books he can take back to his town, and a bookstore with old textbooks in it. This has a system I might try that out for; I might return to this in a future post.
  • Marx & Monsters: A Radical Leftist Fantasy Sandbox
    • I really like the XP ideas in this one, where you get XP for helping the community and lessening the burden on others.
    • Also “The world is ruled by the corrupt and powerful./We can’t possibly destroy all of the corrupt power structures./But if we destroy enough, we might lessen the burden of the proletariat or inspire a broader revolution.” is a really good basis for a campaign.

Thank you all for reading, and I think I’m going to go take The Crimson Shadow trilogy out of the library and reread them; It has been a lot of years, and I think it would go with my mood right now.

Published in: on February 8, 2026 at 4:25 pm  Comments (6)  
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From the Phoenix’s Ashes: Adapting The Sunless Citadel

This year I am trying to run The Sunless Citadel in my From The Phoenix’s Ashes setting that I’ve posted about here before. It was the first adventure I played through, with my Dad running it for me and my friends when it came out, when I was still in elementary school. It seems simple enough to run, and roleplaying Meepo should be fun.

Anyway, the main thing I keep thinking about is how would the various setting elements would fit into my settings so here are some ideas, nothing that should be too spoilery for my players though, in case they read this. 

The titular citadel

I’m thinking it was a Eburneum citadel, part of their very outer line of defences that fell early in the war after brutal fighting. The front lines quickly moved passed it, causing it to be only lightly occupied, and was used as a researcher base. Eburneum arrived back at the fort many years later, with the fort changing hands a number of times, and it isn’t known today who unleashed the magic that dropped it below the earth.

Goblins

These were the standard raiding troops of Zlodin. They can’t stand up to trained soldiers in a straight up fight, but are good at raiding enemy camps, trench raids, attacking supply convoys and attacking civilian populations. They were twisted into their current form from common small rat-like predators native to Zlodin, which, mixed with how early they were developed and how easy they were to make, means there are a lot of them. Like most of Zlodin’s monsters, they can’t reproduce, so they will one day all die out, but until then they fulfill their final orders, or failing that, their design goals, which unfortunately were to cause as much death and chaos within the enemy kingdom as possible.

Giant Rats

Giant rats weren’t actually created to fight Eburneum. They were used for that, sure, but it isn’t why they were created. They were created by the Fleshcrafters Academy of Zlodin to weaken the Necromancers’ College of Zlodin during one of the many periods of internecine conflict the Enchanterdom had. The giant rats were twisted and bred to eat corpses, in an attempt to weaken the Necromancers supplies. While it didn’t work on a practical level, it did 0n a political level, making the Fleshcrafters the foremost suppliers of irregular and specialty troops to the Zlodin army, guaranteeing them the first and best supplies. From a strategic perspective this was likely a mistake, given the excellent logistics that many undead supply, and examples of this type of infighting are thought to explain the sudden losses of momentum and periods of indecision that Zlodin suffered throughout the war.

Dragons

Dragons have always been there, probably for longer then humans have. They fought in the war, but were recruited by each side, drawn in by treaties, bribes or diplomacy. I’m still undecided if I’m going for old fashioned D&D metallic vs chromatic dragons, or Eberron-style moral ambiguity.

Kobolds

Kobolds were created as a bribe to a powerful council of chromatic dragons, to lure them into the war. They were given over as an engineered species of minions to the dragons, to replace their disloyal and treacherous servants. Like most of the creations of the Zlodin fleshcrafters, they cannot reproduce, which was Zlodin’s means of keeping the dragons in the fight and loyal: if Zlodin fell, there would be no one to produce more kobolds for them. However, rumours have it that the dragons, being smart and used to intrigues that last hundreds of years, had the research project infiltrated with spies from inception, and have begun creating their own kobolds.

Skeletons and Zombies

Exactly as in normal D&D: The Zlodins used them heavily, though, as discussed above, not as heavily as they could have due to political infighting. While they make for poor troops due to the lack of intelligence (They will keep walking into an ambush or into a clearly marked trap for example) they make excellent troops due to the fact they don’t need logistical support. As such, you could station a large number of undead and a few officers in a defensive position and would barely need to feed them, greatly simplifying supply lines. In locations where large amounts of necromantic magic was used, they sometimes would spontaneously rise, and were often left behind as traps by retreating troops.

Quasits & Other Summoned Monsters

I’m just going to leave these alone; they fit the theme of a world damaged by magic very well. The one change I’ll make is that none of them have ever directly interacted with a deity, to keep things less certain (cf Eberron).

 

Published in: on January 5, 2025 at 9:00 am  Comments (2)  
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From the Phoenix’s Ashes: Politics and Intrigue

While I wrote this campaign setting for the dungeon crawling potential, while moving away from at least some of the problematic tropes of the genre, I think it would also work quite well as a setting for political intrigue if a DM more skilled then I were to run it.

Read more: From the Phoenix’s Ashes: Politics and Intrigue

You’ve got a young queen, much beloved, but one who has spent much of her youth in a foreign culture with very different politics and social customs. She is scared that her country could go down the same past as their just-defeated opponent and wants to move to a system of government with more checks and balances, or one that puts less power into a small number of people. She is leaning towards a Commonwealth style constitutional monarchy, but could be persuaded towards backing other forms of government.

Meanwhile the nobles are split: Many of them want a return to tradition, with the rights afforded them that were curtailed during the war returned, the Queen to marry into one of them, and so forth. However, many of the richer nobles have actually allied with a number of wealthy non-noble merchants to push for a form of plutocracy, or at least laws that favour the wealthy.

Meanwhile, many of the returning veterans want a form of government that gives them more say. They saved the country, and as a result, they want their voices heard. This ranges from demands for democracy, to socialism (democratic or otherwise), to anarchism, hitting all points between. Many of the farmers and workers that supported the war effort with long hours and rationing have joined in these movements.

To give more foes for the players to fight, there is a small (optional) group of fascists, formed mostly from a group of rear-line troops that didn’t see actual combat and want to see their nation grow in power and influence over its remaining neighbours, by force if needed. This faction ensures that no matter what composition of players you have, they have someone they all hate to work against.

Published in: on February 5, 2023 at 9:45 am  Comments (1)  
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From the Phoenix’s Ashes: Helping the Citizens

The war is over. The Wizard-Lords, Genemasters and Sorcerer-Generals of Zlodin are dead or missing, and Eburneum is disbanding her armies under the leadership of Queen Eliana. However, things are still dangerous. Losing access to much of her farmland in the west, Eburneum turned to it’s easternmost farms and pushed them as hard as possible to produce as much food as they could. Forests were reluctantly cleared and planted. The standard Spring/Autumn/Fallow field system was abandoned and all fields were farmed whenever the ground was not frozen. This will burn the land out, but it was the only way to produce enough food in the final years of the war.

This means that the battlefields must be turned back into farmland as soon as possible. Already many of those driven from their homes are returning to the outskirts of the plains, repairing and rebuilding villages. This is dangerous however, as many of the biological horrors (Read: D&D style monsters) are roaming the wastes, driven by their final orders to kill and destroy the enemy. Almost as dangerous are the automatons and golems* used by Eburneum in the early parts of the war, as they are even more strictly guided by their orders and unclear or poorly thought out orders have left many of them laying in wait for the enemy, covering retreats long over, or other dangerous situations.**

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Published in: on January 29, 2023 at 9:45 am  Leave a Comment  
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From the Phoenix’s Ashes Campaign Setting: History

For a long time there was peace between the Federated Enchanterdoms of Zlodin* and the Kingdom of Eburneum*. However, as the Enchanterdoms reached for ever greater heights of magical and alchemical power they began to ravage their lands in search of resources to power it. These quests bore fruit and the secrets of life and death began to yield themselves to the wizards. It was thought that the secrets of eternal youth and immortality must not be long off and mining for the minerals needed grew more and more extensive, and less and less care was taken with the waste from magical resources. Forests and swamps were ravaged in the search for rare plants and reagents. It is at this point that Eberneum, Zlodin’s neighbour, got involved.

The first sign of something going badly wrong for the citizens of Eburneum was when strange, hostile, mutated animals began to cross into their lands. Then the waste from Zlodin’s mining and rituals had reached the vast, fertile plains that stretched between the two nations and began to poison the crops. This caused a rapid chilling of relations and many angry words between the two, and Eburneum began to prepare for what would happen if Zlodin did not cease to poison their farmland. The final straw was when reagent hunters from Zlodin were found to be poaching rare and magical creatures from Eberneum’s lands, and Eberneum began to march to war.

In truth, Zlodin was far from unhappy with this outcome, as they looked greedily towards the larger kingdoms mostly untapped magical resources. Soon the plains were churned to mud by marching armies, and cropland and wild plains alike were watered with blood. The war spread to every front, the mountains, the swamps, and even the air and below the ground. While Eburneum used traditional soldiers from across its vast kingdom, and reinforced them with magic and artifice, Zlodin took any creatures they could find into their fleshforges and warped them into semi-intelligent soldiers and weapons of war.

Eburneum counted on the bravery of her countrypeoples to counter these horrors, and luckily, was right. A small group of commandos slipped through enemy lines and stole the secrets of the fleshforges. Re-engineered into less-brutal augmentation engines, volunteers walked into them and came out as elves (faster, better adapted to archery), dwarves (To mine and fight deep underground or in trenches), foxfolk, catfolk and more. Though these specialized troops were not significantly superior to stock humankind, their loyalty and flexibility gave the kingdom what it needed to hold against the increasingly horrific monsters.

The tide began to turn when the Princess Eliana, sent away for safety at the start of the war to the lands of the Morski sea-peoples returned, having wed and become the chief advisor of the most-influential leader of these people. While in these peaceful times living as the best naval traders and merchants around, they had a long history as raiders and pirates, and had never allowed these skills to fall away, and given an excuse and cause to fight for, the various sea-peoples took up their axes and warlike ways with little hesitation.

The combination of many stout Morski joining their forces and Zlodin burning through its magical resources at a reckless rate early in the war finally turned the tide and allowed Eburnian forces to cross the plains and enter the mountainous heartland of Zlodin. There, in a once lush and pastoral valleys, the Eburnian and Morksi forces found twisted hell-scapes, choked with the effluvia of the gen-forges and scared by the sheer amount of magical and physical resources pillaged from them, barely capable of supporting life.

What happened at the final battle is not known, for there were no survivors among either command, and the reports from the surviving troops are confused and conflicting. What is known is that a cataclysmic force was unleashed, destroying the central force of the Eburnian troops and almost the entire Zlodin army. The blast levelled mountains, made armies vanish or incinerated them and warped reality with its force, to such an extent that geography itself changed in waves away from the blast, moving some landmarks by hundreds of miles.

This wiped out most of the higher nobility of Eburneum and all known surviving wizard-lords of Zlodin. Queen Eliana, forbidden from fighting on the front line by her status as heir, led the first relief forces into Zlodin. They found the common people malnourished and weak, poisoned by crops grown on tainted land. Even the remaining soldiers, given the best food available so they could fight, were eating sawdust-filled bread. Horrified, she invited the survivors back to Eburneum with her, leading the first group of refugees there herself. While it is taking adjustment after so many years of hatred, the images of bedraggled and hollow looking refugees entering the capitol, lead by the strongest bastion of hope their nation had in the final years of the war have done much to drain that anger. Armies are being demobilized and veterans allowed to return to their pre-war forms, or not, as they wish.

This is where the campaign starts. A badly damaged kingdom trying to stand back up, helping the few survivors of its bitter foe. Next time I’ll go into the present issues of the campaign and what I see players getting involved in.

*Names are placeholders made by throwing Google Translate at a bunch of near-random words. Suggestions Welcome.

 

Published in: on January 23, 2023 at 9:00 am  Comments (3)  
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From the Phoenix’s Ashes: Introduction

I’ve been thinking of writing my own d% RPG since 2010 for a variety of reasons: I could send it to people without worrying, I could only write the parts we will be using, to make it less intimidating to new players, and I could make it look exactly how I wanted. The biggest however, was I could make a game that was D&D-like, with players growing in power and taking on bigger and bigger threats over time, but using a skill-based system that wasn’t super crunchy like GURPS.

About five years ago I actually set pen to paper and wrote out the core system in a LaTeX document while spending a day doing a series of particularly long and boring fluorescence measurements at work. The core mechanics were pretty simple and ready for playtesting. I could have run a Call of Cthulhu-type game in it right then. However, problem: I already have Call of Cthulhu, and that doesn’t reach my goal of a more D&D-style d% system. When I sat down to do the things I’d need for that; spells, equipment lists, I just hit a wall. How do I do that without just blatantly copying D&D?

Then a few years ago I got the idea to write my own campaign setting to go with it, that wasn’t basic D&D fantasy. I decided on a transhumanist, post-war Renaissance/Enlightenment-era setting with anthropomorphic influences. My biggest influences are Eberron (particularly Keith Baker’s idea that the most interesting place to set a campaign is right after a big world-shaping event, not ten or a hundred years later), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the Bolo series by Keith Laumer, and the scene you see in a number of anime series where a group of people are walking through a ruined city or desert and suddenly a war machine senses them and activates (For example, Wolf’s Rain. I know I’ve seen it other places but am drawing a blank: I’d love it if people left examples in the comments.) I got busy with finishing my degree and was too stressed out by the pandemic to write anything creative for a long time, but I’m finally warming up to writing again, and I’m seeing a lot of people pushing for blogs to make a comeback in 2023, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Published in: on January 22, 2023 at 9:01 am  Comments (4)  
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More images to inspire non-pessimistic post-apocoplytic games

I wrote last time about how I wanted a less depressing post-apoc RPG then Fallout and most modern ones. It was an appealing setting when I was a lonely teenager or undergrad, but now that I’ve got a partner I want to spend my life with, a life I don’t hate and so forth, the end of the world is a lot less appealing.

So I thought I would post some of the pictures that bring up the old fantasy of wandering through a ruined city and finding useful things to help my community out, that don’t depress me at the same time. Spending too much time on Tumblr has inspired this somewhat, particularly after discovering it has RSS feeds.

A figure with long hair and an open jacket, seen from behind overlooking a small town. No other people can be seen, though there is smoke coming out of one of the buildings. The town is in forested mountains. The image starts in dark purples at the bottom of the image and uses a gradiant to become pale pink at the top, implying sunset.
This is an image from an RPG named Alice is Missing, played entirely via text message, which is a damn cool idea. While there is nothing post-apocalyptic about the image it gives me the feel I want for a cozy, cooperative post-apocalypse game.

The above image, found on Tumblr, is one of the inspirations for this series of posts. I don’t know why, the town is clearly meant to be inhabited, but I looked at it and thought about how peaceful it would be to be a lone traveller after the end, coming across a nearly untouched town in the pacific northwest or a similar region. That or possibly this person is coming home after a trip to the outside world and is taking a moment to enjoy the view of the town? Something about it just strikes me as peaceful and the fact there is only one person shown is striking.

“Fire Truck” by Huhsoo.
I don’t know if this is fanart, or was done for The Last of Us, but it is surprisingly peaceful in how it shows nature reclaiming the town.

I like how this shows nature reclaiming a city: Usually when I see post-apocalyptic artwork, the focus is on broken buildings falling apart, but not how beautiful the nature reclaiming it can be.

This art is apparently by Johnny Bruck

This one is more silly, as is obvious. Levity is a great way to keep games from becoming depressing, and honestly, this picture is hard to take seriously.

Published in: on November 6, 2021 at 6:56 pm  Comments (3)  
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Art to inspire an Optimistic Post-Apoc Game

Like a lot of people my age, my image of the apocalypse is largely filled with the green-tinted DC wasteland of Fallout 3 the bleak, ruined Boston of Fallout 4 and countless images of the Zombie apocalypse from the zombie craze that filled my time in high school. However, I do like my settings a bit more colourful and optimistic then these games. As I went over last time there are plenty of good literary inspirations, but these often don’t have any art aside from the cover. Lately I’ve been posting a ton of dragon art over at my Tabletop Games focused Mastodon account. A lot of this art I find via the Vintage RPG tumbr, and while going through it I’ve found some good art to inspire an optimistic setting that just happens to occur after the world has broken.

A bear in Napoleonic garb, including one hand in it's coat
From The Second edition of Gamma World (1983)

When I was young, I wasn’t a fan of Gamma World due to its much discussed “Gonzo” attitude and wanted something more serious. While I’m still leaning towards something more serious, ehhh, it had some good ideas.

Another account giving me ideas for this is Black Ray Gun: An exploration of the world after the Apocalypse, which has the excellent URL of “Post Apocalyptic Flim Flam”.

A figure larger then the trees, made of twisted wood but wearing armour, or possible with technology as its face and around its wooden body
A second view of the previous figure

These images from Magic the Gathering also inspire me with their vaugly Studio-Gibli style look. As if you’d be walking through the forest and come across one of these left over from a much more advanced civilization, just waiting to be awakened, or still doing their final task.

The inside of a torus-shaped space station, extending off into the distance. It is clearly abandoned and overgrown, but done so as to look more peaceful then anything.

I also found this image via Post Apocalyptic Flim Flam/Black Ray Gun and it really resonated with me, emphasizing the peaceful, serene side of the fall of civilization.

I’ll probably post more of these as I come across them.

Until next time, Stay Geeky

Published in: on July 20, 2021 at 2:24 pm  Leave a Comment  

On a Wildspace Deluge

Continuing my series of finding the best Spelljammer bits from around the web, Hack & Slash has a post showing some of the best

Ghost Ship by Brom, showing a group of people with drawn weapons on a very battered hammership.

Spelljammer could have used more art like this. It feels like something is happening in this picture, rather then just people standing around.

official art. For example, I did not know that Brom did Spelljammer art. It also shows off some of the problems with the art: Designs that didn’t match the rules, or descriptions of the ships, a lot of the art being reused too many times to save costs, and some of it being um, rather bland to be honest. You’ve got a swashbuckling setting with people leaping from ship to ship, and most of the art just has people standing around.

Hope you enjoy this little bit of Spelljammer,
–Canageek

Published in: on July 23, 2016 at 9:00 am  Comments (4)  
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The Cosmonomicon: Spelljammer + Dragonstar + 5th Edition D&D

Another post on some cool Spelljammer stuff I found the web a while ago. Jordan Short over at The Mox Boarding House has written up a cool mashup of Spelljammer with Dragonstar, and given advice on how to run it in 5th edition. It strips down a lot of the stuff blogging down both Spelljammer and Dragonstar, mostly edition-specific rules that neither are really enhanced by, and makes a pretty cool setting out of it, known as The Cosmonomicon.

For those that don’t know:

Spelljammer was a 1st and 2nd edition AD&D setting that took D&D into space, and let you fly ships from one campaign setting to the next using magically enchanted boats. It never really caught on, due to how strange it was, and, likely, due to a lot of rules and bookkeeping related to the flying ships and spellcasting in space. Mostly though, I think it was how strange it was, an odd mashup of swashbuckling, D&D and planar travel. There was also a Shadows of the Spider Moon article in Polyhedron magazine that attempted to update things to 3rd edition with a new setting.

Dragonstar was one of the setting that came out in the rush of 3rd party products after the OGL came out and was mostly lost in the rush (The company killing Living Dragonstar didn’t help.) It added a lot of Science Fiction elements to D&D, and made the players trying to exist on the edges of the Draconic Empire, right after a red dragon took the throne and has begun sending out his orc legions and drow secret police. This gives a very Star Wars + D&D type vibe that I find really cool.

The Cosmonomicon takes the Dragon Empire from Dragonstar, some setting bits from Shadows of the Spider Moon, removes the technology from Dragonstar and replaces it with Spelljammer’s flying ships. It doesn’t have all the details from Spelljammer (no crystal spheres or such), but I think that enhances things and removes a lot of the unnecessary complications. He also gives some useful details for playing in the setting in 5th edition.

I encourage you to check this setting out and enjoy: I think I’ll be borrowing some of this if I ever run a Spelljammer game. As a note to my readers: these posts on Spelljammer material are being shared to Wildspace: The Spelljammer Fanzine, which is something you should check out.

Until next time, stay geeky
–Canageek

Published in: on February 2, 2016 at 9:00 am  Comments (12)  
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