This is also one of my first posts, I'm interested.
What will the character build be? And what rulebooks are we allowed to use?
I would love to play this a planet hopping adventure! Love it! See my self a Cleric of Shelyn, infact this profile would do.
Planet hopping! I've wanted to play a character in the vien of the protagonists of Arthur Conan Doyle or Jules Vernes in a Golarion space adventure for a while now. Could set up a Lore Warden, going into Student of War (Something I've tried to do a couple of times now but has never gotten off the ground). Might toss in amateur gunslinger and firearm proficiency for flavor as well.
That would be a good plot hook. A patron offers us our own ship in return for completing certain tasks. The patron could be anything from an Outsider to an eccentric wizard.
If we are in debt to a bank then it could be a little more Firefly-esque, where we are constantly looking for the next job to take the edge off the interest payments on our loan.
Sounds interesting. I'm not familiar with Spelljammer or Psionics rules and such, but this seems like a great open game.
Our own ship sounds fun. Getting the crew together sounds like a challenge—perhaps they stumbled on (either individually or by group) on a person with an old spelljammer who's stuck without a crew until our party joins him? Makes me think of an alien joyriding until he finds himself stuck and promises the barely-working ship in exchange for getting him home.
The debt sounds more fun though, so perhaps the ship broke down after another ride and they eventually had to take a loan to purchase a new one or be stuck.
I've never done a PBP before and have been interested for some time. I've read the forum and think I have it down. However, how would you be doing dice rolls/confirming them? Also when you say all builds, are you going to do point buy or something else (that way we are all on the same page).
I have some interest and will make a profile for the character as soon as I get the information :)
Ok so I am interested in this too. Is the Alien captain going to be an NPC or do you want all the crew to PC's? Is the PC crew new to each other or do we need to build them as if they have been a crew for awhile?
Since this is a spacefaring game how will you rule the level of fire arms tech? They could still be rare, or the could be everywhere which allows lots of classes to be tooting them with out feats.
I'm leaning towards free-roaming Mikka but with a lot of goal-oriented quests that you guys can get involved in. Also got ideas for several possible threats to the universe you guys can oppose...or join! MUAHAHAHAHA!
I want to play an anarchic anti-paladin now.
I like the suggestion of the above poster: hitching rides, or buying tickets for transport before somehow gaining a ship of our own (STEAL ONE! WOOH!).
Ooh, we're forced to join a crew and then we MUTINY!
Haha, to be honest, that might be hard to play but the fun potential is there.
How soon are you wanting to get started. I am in the last two weeks of an intense semester and don't have a lot of time to work on a character but I am interested in playing a gun totting something, maybe a wizard or a sorcerer. I think once you nail down the group dynamic this will be easier to do. I like the pay off the debt idea, a group like fire-fly owing a merchant or a crime boss money could be fun.
This is me, dotting for interest.
There's a lot of questions raised by flying ships, I'm curious how you'll handle them.
As for flying ships I have no idea how I'll handle them. Suggestions?
More than it's fair to make. Figure out the role you want the ships to play in the game. Are they shorthand for 'we get there', like the Star Trek transporters were intended to be? Are they mostly like the 'travel by map' line in movies? Or are they settings, characters, plotlines in themselves? Figure out the role you want the ships to play. Then think about the travel space, what kind of attention do you give it, and what kind of cool can you harvest from that attention?
Is the party's ship the only such, rare as a space shuttle / aircraft carrier / winnebago / minivan / skateboard? Will you want ship-to-ship battles? encounters?
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Will the ships operate like spell jammer, you need magic to pilot them if I rememver correctly...its been years since I played in a spelljammer game and I never was the DM of that setting so I don't remember? If so I might like to play a pilot, an Oracle with the Heavens mystery.
Do you want to worry about things like air and heat? Is a crew used to tack the sails and such as usual? Are sails even needed? What sort of travel times do you want? I have a fully fleshed out methodology in a can, but I don't want to inflict it on you.
Well I am interested in playing a Monk or Ranger.
How will non fire arms work like crossbows or bows?
I noticed someone said Anti-paladin, will this be an "evil" campaign, or something different with regards to alignments?
I think it's very much open/free so there're no restrictions, which is why I wanted to play an anti-paladin.
I think it's very much open/free so there're no restrictions, which is why I wanted to play an anti-paladin.
Oh I have no problem with that at all :) just wanted to know if I should decide on playing an evil type character (something I have wanted to do for a while)
This campaign sounds like loads of fun.
I love the old swords and planets stories.
FWIW, I don't mind owing money for the ship. It is a ready made hook/carrot/stick when it's needed, and gives us something to do.
As far as a character goes, I haven't really checked out the psionics stuff yet, but I can see re-skinning a wizard as some sort of mystic-powered type thing. Particularly if you're good with item creation stuff. Yes, my "blaster" is actually a wand of scorching ray.
What kind of stats should we start thinking with? That will help me nail my character down immensely.
I think he said 25 pt character buy.
Yeah, 25 PB and 1st level.
This sounds pretty damn cool, and if we're voting I say the patron campaign.
For other means of powering ships, you could look at "harvesting" elementals (maybe they like doing it, maybe they lost a war a long time ago and this is their terms of surrender)
As for choosing? hmm rolling is random, or you could say the first 8. Another interesting concept would be to have 8 people, and say if you had many more 12 or more, you could make them alternate crew members or have them be a sort of PC/NPC hybrid who work on the ship or with the main pcs on a daily basis, but only go out on "adventures" when either a main PC is down (say injured, or the person cannot post for some reason) or maybe they need "help" getting out of a situation that needs more than 8.
Ley Lines. Dragon Roads. The lines of power that seem to connect important things. Assume they are real, for all that we can't sense them.
Then that begs the question: If Ley flows between Stonehenge and Winchester Cathedral... what about between Earth and the Moon? And Mars?
It seems obvious, of course there is Ley stretched between all worlds.
What if we could use it?
In the setting we were calling Vault of the Heavens, Brian Hollenbeck and Leo LaLande and Morrione Deems and I had answered some of those 'what ifs'.
So... I've got a LOT of ideas. Like I said, so many it's probably unfair to dump them on you. So close the spoiler, or read on... :)
Does this completely transform the setting, Ley Railroads and such? No, it doesn't have to, and we preferred it didn't, and so VotH has the concept of 'Manataxis', the bubble of wild and chaotic Ley in which planets sit. Pure Ley streams in from other planets, and the Sun, but it bounces and scatters and changes and does it all again, and so it's not useful as a Ley source for the types of magics we use in space. Magicians might find ways to use it, but by calling it chaotically scattered, we handwave away the potential for Ley Trains, except as the work of archmages, who could have done it anyway. Let me say it clearly: adding Ley between your worlds does not have to change your settings default assumptions. Manataxis, got your back, Jack.
OK, so it's not useful on the worlds. How does it get to be useful in space? Well, it IS useful on the worlds. It's not GATHERABLE on the worlds, except very slowly. Like solar-charging a battery, once you are out in the pure Ley, outside the chaos and shadow of the Manataxis, it goes much better. You can have a properly-built machine tune to it like an antenna, and convert it to Mana, and use that Mana to push sails, and you're off!
That machine, we called a Crucible, or Crux. It's a dwarven invention, from a place where they had an unusually pure Ley tone to work with. It's called a Crucible because they used the waste heat for forging. It makes a lot of heat. Which turns out to be a good thing for us, because space is COLD. Not 'DR 5 Cold'. C.O.L.D. Oh, you're Undead, immune to cold? Not THIS cold, you ain't, Lich-boy. So yeah, anyway, waste heat? Good. :) We need it, to melt the Ice.
Ice is gasses, frozen solid. Blue, White, Silver, Green... Blue is what you need, one-fifth of your gas needs to be Blue. White is what you don't. Silver is what you use to mix the Blue, so you don't die from THAT being too rich. And Green is just poison, flat out. So, we put some Blue and a lot of Silver near the Crux, to turn back into gas we can breathe.
Of course, we start with some gas. Some follows us into space. Well, the gas doesn't follow, the Ariels do, and they bring the gas with them. Because they like the Mana, see? So they all gather around us, while we're flying out, and when we leave the Highest Winds behind, they are still there, with us...
This has got huge. More if you want it. Every solution has a wrinkle, every wrinkle a solution, because that's VotH. Because it's way more dramatic when you do the math yourself, and SEE you don't have enough Ice to get home, than when you GM just tells you so.
You know I said all that way better, years ago...
Since you are getting a lot of interest and I have other irons in the fire, so to speak, I will back out and make room of others. Sounds like it will be cool, so I may lurk along once you get going. Have fun.