PF Spelljammer

[Tom_Kalbfus]

Staffan Johansson wrote:

Tom_Kalbfus wrote:

The whole crystal spheres in phlogiston thing seemed rather arbitrary to me I could not find a justification for it. And if giant Dyson Sphere like things are floating in a sea of explosive phlogiston, then how can one tell if one comes out of the sphere at the "waterline" or not?

There's no "waterline" in the phlogiston. The phlogiston is not a liquid where the crystal spheres are floating, it's more of a space/gas thing.

I, for one, liked crystal spheres, especially given Spelljammer's design constraints (which was that the previous settings, especially Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk all were part of it). As someone else pointed out, the constellations changing have been an important part of Krynn's history - and it's hard to justify a setting where you can travel from Krynn to Toril but changes in Krynn's constellations don't affect Toril's.

In addition, they mesh very well with folklore and mythology. People have believed all sorts of crazy things about the sky and its construction, but the whole "infinite universe where the stars are actually just different and very distant suns" thing didn't show up until the 16th century. And let's not even get into the whole "world on the back of a turtle" idea, which is explicitly supported by Spelljammer, as is something along the lines of Yggdrasil (one Spelljammer adventure even had a crystal sphere where the planets basically hung off branches of a celestial tree).

Greek mythology also had many instances of things being turned into constellations in the heavens, to honor them. That kind of thing works poorly when the stars are just big fusion reactors dozens or hundreds of lightyears away.

This would see to argue for my second idea of using the deep ethereal plane instead of phlogiston outside of the spheres. I don't think the spheres should be solid though, they should be a function of each sun's brightness, that is the suns radius pushes outwards on the deep ethereal, producing a sphere of empty vacuum/border ethereal where planets can orbit, and as the sun's rays get weaker the further they travel from the sun, they reach a point of equalibrium with the deep ethereal.

Quote:

IMO, the main problem with Spelljammer was that they focused on the wrong thing. They spent a lot of page count in the core manuals on how to turn your regular campaign into a Spelljammer campaign, and on the makeup of Greyspace, Realmspace, and Krynnspace and traveling between them (I recall that there was something weird...

[Tom_Kalbfus]

Mt main problem with Phlogiston is the fact that the crew of the ship entering it has no control over where the Phlogistron currents take them, and they can't see where they are going, the Phlogstron is opaque over long distances and the distant spheres can't be seen, and such crews don't know if they could ever get back trusting in faith that the currents will also return them. A realistic reaction is such crews would not take a chance and not go in the first place.

I'd rather the sphere surfaces be transparent and insubstatial, marking the boundary between Heliopause and the deep ethereal. The deep ethereal being transparent allowing the light of distant stars to pass through so that interstellar navigation is possible.

Since the ether is the medium through which light waves pass, the deep ethereal is denser than the border ethereal within the spheres, light travels faster outside of the spheres than within and much higher spaceship velocities are also possible outside the spheres than within.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

On the otherhand, maybe the Astral Plane can go on the outside of spheres, the spheres would then mark the boundary between the Astral Plane and the Ethereal Plane. Prime planes would then be contained within each chrystal sphere, though the structure of each sphere is ethereal and insubstantial to normal objects. I believe one can push themselves around in the astral plane by thinking about it. Since the astral plane has a silvery appearance, the spheres would appear as dark spots on the silvery background as if a negative was taken of the night sky.

[Staffan Johansson]

Tom_Kalbfus wrote:

Mt main problem with Phlogiston is the fact that the crew of the ship entering it has no control over where the Phlogistron currents take them, and they can't see where they are going, the Phlogstron is opaque over long distances and the distant spheres can't be seen, and such crews don't know if they could ever get back trusting in faith that the currents will also return them. A realistic reaction is such crews would not take a chance and not go in the first place.

I was under the impression that navigation was, to some extent, possible in the phlogiston, or at least there were possibilities of following different currents. So while your choices may be limited by what spheres your current sphere is connected to, it's not like you're rolling dice to see where you end up (unless you don't have charts and stuff, in which case the situation is similar to ocean navigation).

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I'd rather the sphere surfaces be transparent and insubstatial, marking the boundary between Heliopause and the deep ethereal. The deep ethereal being transparent allowing the light of distant stars to pass through so that interstellar navigation is possible.

Which again brings us to the point that constellations are far too important to many settings to allow them to be interfered with by something like space.

Addendum: this all applies to old-school Spelljammer. I know it's pretty clear that space as per Golarion sourcebooks work more like our space, I just prefer the weirdness of Spelljamming, which makes no excuses for its weirdness. :)

[xorial]

Some of the rules I am working on. No Phlogiston. I have a separation between the Astral Plane & what I call the Deep Astral. Inside the Crystal Sphere, you only have access to the typical Astral Plane available in you native cosmology. You must sail thru Wildspace to the Edge, where the CS would be in 2e SJ. Once past that, the Helm is able to transition to the Deep Astral. You navigate to the next Sphere, which is visible & solid while Astral. Once you encounter it, you can transition to normal space & enter the System. I explain much of the functions of magic on Aether. Not from the 19th Century physics, but as the Ancient Greeks thought of it, the air of the gods. That sounds like magic to me.

I use three classes of helms, to bring them in line with the style of 3e/PF conventions on magic items. Minor Helm, Helm, Greater Helm. The Arcane do not have a monopoly. They are the cheapest producer of helms, though. Nobody realizes, they have invented magical mass production.

I use a smaller ton than in 2e. It is 10' x 10' x 10'. I have other things that go along with this, but that is all I am posting for now.

i suggest when converting SJ over, don't cling to 2e conventions. research how something similar is done in PF & go from there.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

Staffan Johansson wrote:

Tom_Kalbfus wrote:

Mt main problem with Phlogiston is the fact that the crew of the ship entering it has no control over where the Phlogistron currents take them, and they can't see where they are going, the Phlogstron is opaque over long distances and the distant spheres can't be seen, and such crews don't know if they could ever get back trusting in faith that the currents will also return them. A realistic reaction is such crews would not take a chance and not go in the first place.

I was under the impression that navigation was, to some extent, possible in the phlogiston, or at least there were possibilities of following different currents. So while your choices may be limited by what spheres your current sphere is connected to, it's not like you're rolling dice to see where you end up (unless you don't have charts and stuff, in which case the situation is similar to ocean navigation).

Quote:

I'd rather the sphere surfaces be transparent and insubstatial, marking the boundary between Heliopause and the deep ethereal. The deep ethereal being transparent allowing the light of distant stars to pass through so that interstellar navigation is possible.

Which again brings us to the point that constellations are far too important to many settings to allow them to be interfered with by something like space.

Addendum: this all applies to old-school Spelljammer. I know it's pretty clear that space as per Golarion sourcebooks work more like our space, I just prefer the weirdness of Spelljamming, which makes no excuses for its weirdness. :)

The only setting I'm aware of where the constellations figure importantly is Krynn, and I don't know of any Krynn Pathfinder settings. Constellations are usually determined by human imagination drawing a pattern in a random placement of stars. When I look at the night sky, I only see stars, I do not see contellations. The utility of having constellations appear and disappear when the gods walk the prime plane is small, the utility of using the stars to navigate through fantasy interstellar space is large. If one world has one set of constellations and another has a different set, then thats just the human imagination at work. The gods don't usually draw lines in the sky to indicate which constellations are which, but there maybe a fantasy world where this is the case. There may be crystal spheres that include just one planet and a tiny sun that circles around it to give the planet night at day. This is a fantasy universe so anything is possible, including worlds that aren't round. One could have a giant tortose swimming in a ocean at the bottom of a crystal sphere, on top of whose back stand four giant elephants on top of whose backs rest a disk-shaped world where the direction of down is consistent throughout the entire crystal sphere, the Sun is just a light source crawling on the crystal sphere as it rotates over and under the disk shaped world. The elephants and the tortose are the size of worlds themselves. The elephants appear motionless to the casualy observer and the giant tortoise only slowly seems to move his giant flippers. The crystal sphere is basically just a giant hamster ball with water filling the bottom which the tortose swims through. Perhaps their are gates to the elemental plane of water on this disk world to continually replenish the water that continuously spills over the edge of this world. The oceans are as a result filled with fresh water. The diskworld doesn't have a north pole or a south pole, it has temperate zones up against the extreme north and south edges of the disk, the Sun is small so the parts of the disk furthest away from the sun are cooler than the parts which the sun directly arcs over in its daily cycle. A spelljamming ship retains its own atmosphere when flying in this crystal sphere, but it subordinates its gravity to that of the entire sphere, which has one universal direction of down throughout.

[Ambrosia Slaad]

It was announced a little bit back, but Clockwork Gnome is working on what looks to be "Pathjammer:"

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/06/upcoming-products-added-to-release.ht ml

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/07/sailing-starlit-sea-preview-major_11. html

Hopefully, they'll have a little more info and/or another preview out before too long.

[Kruelaid]

Ambrosia Slaad wrote:

It was announced a little bit back, but Clockwork Gnome is working on what looks to be "Pathjammer:"

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/06/upcoming-products-added-to-release.ht ml

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/07/sailing-starlit-sea-preview-major_11. html

Hopefully, they'll have a little more info and/or another preview out before too long.

NINJA'D

HAYAH!

Like seriously... I clicked on it and suddenly your post was there.

[Freehold DM]

Ambrosia Slaad wrote:

It was announced a little bit back, but Clockwork Gnome is working on what looks to be "Pathjammer:"

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/06/upcoming-products-added-to-release.ht ml

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/07/sailing-starlit-sea-preview-major_11. html

Hopefully, they'll have a little more info and/or another preview out before too long.

As usual, Ambrosia, you bring awesomeness with you every time you post.

Slight disappointment in that they plan to bring more real life elements to space, but still...PATHJAMMER!!!

[Freehold DM]

Kruelaid wrote:

Ambrosia Slaad wrote:

It was announced a little bit back, but Clockwork Gnome is working on what looks to be "Pathjammer:"

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/06/upcoming-products-added-to-release.ht ml

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/07/sailing-starlit-sea-preview-major_11. html

Hopefully, they'll have a little more info and/or another preview out before too long.

NINJA'D

HAYAH!

Like seriously... I clicked on it and suddenly your post was there.

It's okay Kruelaid. You're still awesome. Just Ninjaed awesome.

[Kruelaid]

*drool*

Speeeeelllllljammmmmerrrrrrrr

[Allen Taliesin]

Freehold DM wrote:

Ambrosia Slaad wrote:

It was announced a little bit back, but Clockwork Gnome is working on what looks to be "Pathjammer:"

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/06/upcoming-products-added-to-release.ht ml

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/07/sailing-starlit-sea-preview-major_11. html

Hopefully, they'll have a little more info and/or another preview out before too long.

As usual, Ambrosia, you bring awesomeness with you every time you post.

Slight disappointment in that they plan to bring more real life elements to space, but still...PATHJAMMER!!!

Thank you Freehold!

That decision mostly stems from the desire to remain compatible with what Paizo is doing. Well, that, and I kind of prefer a more "scientific" approach personally.

But one of the important parts of the book will be the Campaign Overlays. These are sizable sidebars that discuss how to take the assumptions presented in Sailing the Starlit Sea and making it work with your preferred style of space fantasy. So if you like crystal spheres, there will be a Campaign Overlay for that. Enjoy the idea of "breathable space" by way of an aether, there will be a Campaign Overlay for that as well.

While parts of the book are still amorphous, I expect there will be roughly 8-10 Campaign Overlays.

Making Sailing the Starlit Sea as useful for as many fans of space fantasy as we can is a major goal.

[xorial]

Sailing the Starlit Sea Preview on the Piazza Messageboards. The author, Allen Taliesin, is now on the boards there & answering questions about the product.

[bigmac]

Tom_Kalbfus wrote:

Spelljammer was fun. Now will Pathfinder adopt the whole nine yards, with 500,000 gp Helms, hammerships, and planar gravity fields for small objects?

They can't do an exact copy of Spelljammer, as that could be seen as IP theft. But they can do some pretty close stuff, especially as Spelljammer was inspired by real things.

Take helms - you can't have a "Spelljamming helm" as a giant seat that uses a spellcaster's spells to move a ship. But given the number of SJ fans that moan about the cost of using a Spelljamming helm*, I think that Paizo might actually be better off not having them. If Paizo come up with a ship that just gets treated as a magic item, they can start with a clean slate and everyone is going to accept that.

* = As opposed to the other fans who moan that people that want to remove the disruption to spellcasting are ruining the balance of SJ.

Hammerships are out, but Paizo wouldn't be limited to the sort of ships that sail on the sea. They could have ships that look a bit like real-world airships as well as ones that look a bit like aeroplanes or helecopters**. So while they might not be able to go with the exact sea-ship, fish-ship, insect ship, birdship mix that D&D used, they could invent new categories of fantasy space ships and give each one a different way to handle movement***.

** = "Airships" could for example be filled with a fantasy type of air rather than scientific air. Gnomes that collect the marshgas that bubbles up in swamps might be a good way to avoid doing it scientifically. "Planes" could instead have wings that flap or could be made by killing a dragon, skinning it and then fitting the skin and wings onto a frame. Helecopters could be based on Leonardo de Vinci's "Aerial Screw".

*** = An airship could be able to hover on the spot and launch attacks on buildings. It would also tend to stay the right way up. A plane could swoop around the sky and make the same sort of attacks as birds. This could add dogfights to the game. A helecopter could take off and land in a very small area (like the courtyard of a castle). This might make it a specialist ship that is great for invasions, but poor at ship-to-ship fighting.

Tom_Kalbfus wrote:

I'm working on a Spelljammer version of Earth's Solar System, which includes a fantasy version of Mars, and Venus, and a Roman gods pantheon where deities of the same name reside on each planet, doesn't mean they are easy to find, if one lands on the planet, but each planet reflects a bit of the character of the residing deity.

Are you aware that several other people have started (but not finished) this idea?

Check out Terraspace on Beyond the Moons.

Tom_Kalbfus wrote:

Mars for example, has a lot of warring nations fighting for scarce resources on Mars' dry surface, it includes a Lowellian canal system. Venus is a cloud covered planet who's entire land surface is covered with jungle, even at the poles. The Moon looks starkly different, covered with crater lakes, mare seas, and sylvan forests on the shores. Earth looks like Earth, though this is a fantasy version of Earth, the continents and geographic outlines are the same, the nations inhabiting the surface are different, as well as there being fantasy races and monsters populating it.

As I said to someone else working on Terraspace (over at The Piazza), you might want to check out Sean K. Reynolds work on Barsoom. You might also want to look out for a campaign setting called Sundered Reaches. If you are not trying to make something commercial, you could just drop one of those in.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

I think doing Earth's Solar System, lets call it Urthe, would work if we divided the Solar System up into two pieces, the inner solar system, which would consist of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars and Phobos, and Deimos, which would orbit a sun like our own,

and the Outer Solar System consisting of the Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and some dwarf planets, which would orbit a larger sun with 1.75 times our Suns Mass and which is 6.5 times as bright, in astronomical terms it would be a type G0 IV star or a subgiant. The asteroid belt would receive as much average illumination as the Urthe does orbiting the smaller dimmer sun. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would have their own satellites turned into little fire bodies to compensate for their increased distance from the second brighter Sun. The diameter of the crystal sphere which would house this Solar System would be 250 Astronomical units, to take into account that the two stars would be separated by 90 AU to keep the planets in stable orbits.

[Freehold DM]

Allen Taliesin wrote:

Freehold DM wrote:

Ambrosia Slaad wrote:

It was announced a little bit back, but Clockwork Gnome is working on what looks to be "Pathjammer:"

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/06/upcoming-products-added-to-release.ht ml

http://www.clockworkgnome.com/2011/07/sailing-starlit-sea-preview-major_11. html

Hopefully, they'll have a little more info and/or another preview out before too long.

As usual, Ambrosia, you bring awesomeness with you every time you post.

Slight disappointment in that they plan to bring more real life elements to space, but still...PATHJAMMER!!!

Thank you Freehold!

That decision mostly stems from the desire to remain compatible with what Paizo is doing. Well, that, and I kind of prefer a more "scientific" approach personally.

But one of the important parts of the book will be the Campaign Overlays. These are sizable sidebars that discuss how to take the assumptions presented in Sailing the Starlit Sea and making it work with your preferred style of space fantasy. So if you like crystal spheres, there will be a Campaign Overlay for that. Enjoy the idea of "breathable space" by way of an aether, there will be a Campaign Overlay for that as well.

While parts of the book are still amorphous, I expect there will be roughly 8-10 Campaign Overlays.

Making Sailing the Starlit Sea as useful for as many fans of space fantasy as we can is a major goal.

DUDE! I just updated the link to your stuff on the F!TSOW page.

[Ambrosia Slaad]

Freehold DM wrote:

Allen Taliesin wrote:

...Clockwork Gnome Sailing the Starlit Sea stuff...

DUDE! I just updated the link to your stuff on the F!TSOW page.

DUDE! If you'd just join Facebook, you could follow Clockwork Gnome stuff automagically. :)