S: Spelljammer

Aah, my other beloved campaign setting -- though, ironically enough, one I have never managed to actually run though I tinker with the setting all the bloody time. (reasons for this are varied and in some cases withheld to spare someone who crops up on this blog from time to time ~)

Spelljammer was by and large already on the way out by the time I seriously dug into 2e, but that didn't stop me from pining after the material. It took some doing -- and moving away from the virtual barrenlands of my native terrain -- but I snapped it up and have been happy as a clam ever since.

I mean come on. Giant space hamsters. Of course I love Spelljammer ;3

Joking aside, those same hamsters and other strange critters seem to have cursed the setting with a label of "goofy" and "stupid" that it doesn't really deserve. Are a lot of the SJ monsters weird? Sure they are, just like the bizarre critters found in classic scifi. Is the idea of sailing ships flying through space stupid? Well, I guess that depends on just who you ask -- some of us enjoy the sheer out-there factor and, well, swashbuckling piratical derring-do. In space. Because it's just that awesome. That some other SJ features are the most gleefully, brazenly obvious easteregging of scifi and sci-fantasy anime (elven bioroids = Guyver units, to say nothing of the name "bioroid"; and the flamboyant reigar and their shakti are ripped clear out of Tenkuu Senki Shurato ... just the two most obvious examples) just adds to the fun.

I do have to address one SJ critter directly just on principle, and that's the giff. Here we have burly, hippo-headed humanoids with an obsession for both overly-grandiose military trappings and explosive firearms ... Now, I've seen giff called goofy, silly, and various other things that basically boil down to "not good for much other than bad comedy". Maybe I'm just looking at them sidewise, but it seems to me that hulking militaristic humanoids that look like one of the most dangerous mammals alive, with a fascination over the most unpredictable weaponry in the setting and no self-preservation instinct to speak of aren't goofy, they're downright impressively imposing (if not just a little panic-inducing). Especially when your enemies/antagonists/rivals have hired on a few ships' worth of them ...

The crystal spheres and phlogiston are a clever sendup of antiquarian cosmology, and I was sorely disappointed when the 3e/d20 Polyhedron mini-campaign "Secrets of the Spider Moon" discarded them in favour of more conventional space. (you even need to wear spacesuits. how .... mundane.)

But then SotSM was really a kind of disappointment all over, I'll freely admit -- there's adapting and updating, and then there's deliberate gutting. SotSM very deliberately removed everything that was Spelljammer except the concepts of ships in space and created a bland system (game and solar) that reads more like generic scifi than it's predecessor as often as not. And it was wrapped up in a kind of faux-grimdark set of trappings (dwarves as grim former illithid slaves, ditto half-orcs, gnomes had lost their planet and not a tinker in sight, etc etc) that all but screamed "Look! Look, a Spelljammer that you can take seriously we're being serious yes we are". The scant nods to original SJ's liveliness, like the spelljammer ace prestige class (or whatever it was called) were oddly dissonant.

Oh, and of course one of the major adversaries, the source of the game's name even, were the damned drow. Of course.

Bleh.

(at least the elves were rightfully called out as arseholes. that was kind of nice.)

Not being one to turn up fresh fodder, mind you, I've been happily tinkering around with SotSM to make it into a serviceable crystal sphere in Spelljammer proper. Because why not?

P: Planescape ~

The first "proper" -- i.e. not picking up the pieces after our first DM had to contend with a new addition to his family, but a fresh start -- campaign I ever ran was a Planescape campaign, having snapped up the original boxed set pretty much when it first arrived. We did awesome, awful things, both myself and my players (including capturing rogue animal spirits, attacking Robocop and crushing fiends under super-strength walls of ice), and we enjoyed every minute of it.

So naturally there were many more Planescape campaigns ;3

I have an immense attachment to this one setting, it is very true. It combines everything I find fascinating in a D&D game -- steampunk, elementalisms, dimensional travel, poking around oddities like god-corpses, and stomping on fiendish types when not inadvertently aiding them -- in one magnificent package so long as you look in the right place. And then there's Sigil, which was like the answer to my grimy pseudo-Victorian-evoking wishes. (favorite ward? Lower. favorite faction headquarters? the Great Foundry.) The answer to my wishes, and oh-so-conveniently riddled with portals that came and went and spun interesting encounters just from working to get the right key on occasion.

(would you like some politicking mixed in with your planar stomping? Sigil will tackle that just nicely.)

And yes, I bloody well called and call them fiends when I'm working with Planescape, because I like the tossing-off of the slim shreds of real-world trappings that cling when I use "demon" or "devil" or whatever. It might work passably in a Prime campaign but out in the planar reaches I like to ditch that, an it please ye -- ditto with "angel", though PS never inflicted that on me thanks be to the gods.

The first- and second-wave of PS online was right up my alley and then the heyday hit. I still have fond memories of mimir.net -- I had a scant article or two on there, as "Kristias Fireflight" -- and the old Planescape-L. But there's a certain dividing-point in the evolution of Planescape's fandom, prompted a little by the ending of the line but a little more by the advent of something very specific: Planescape: Torment.

Torment's an interesting game, there's no doubt about it. But it conveys (for me, at least) a rather different aesthetic and "feel" to the entire campaign setting, one rather grating and at odds with the original. Sure the line evolved over the years, but under the accumulation we do not speak of Faction War one could still see the original PS box and In The Cage. Torment brought a different vibe, and as time ticked by the Torment-influenced people became the dominant voices. This ebbed away again eventually and left an odd hybrid in its wake; the Planescape 3e project being likely the greatest single example.

Me, I never was one for Torment much and the post-2e iterations of Sigil and various Planescape trappings in 3e and the like never quite cut it even when I liked chunks. But I still have my PS collection, so what odds? I can still venture out and plunder the Plane of Mineral and map dead gods whenever I please.

"My" D&D; or, oh yay a meme.

"when you think about Dungeons & Dragons, the cover of what product comes first to mind?"

Oh yeah. I went there. *snorts*

I may be happily pittering about with the Rules Cyclopedia off and on at the moment, but AD&D2 is my home and always will be -- and one of these days I'll be getting that Spelljammer campaign up and running. And my next Planescape campaign for that matter.

Elementally, my dear adventurer --

I'm stepping away from strictly low-level things for a moment to mull over one of my favorite subjects -- the Elemental Planes.

(Don't worry, the cavalcade of odd little critters will resume anon ;) )

Since the day I started playing D&D, elemental things have fascinated me. I love the elementals, elemental effects, spells using elements, you name it; and I like my dragons with a bit of an elemental touch, when I can fit it in there somewhere. And I love the Elemental Planes, wonderful sources of the primal stuff, in both D&D and AD&D.

Now, I've been and am an avid Planescape fan. (Put down those pitchforks!) Predictably enough, I picked up the setting because of the elemental goodness it could give me -- the rest was a nifty side-benefit -- and the complex interactions of the 2e Inner Planes in all their variations make me a happy hamster indeed. Plane of Fire? Check. Plane of Ooze? We have one! Plane of Killer Death RainbowsRadiance? Drop on by, bring the kids!

But one of the most interesting bits of Planescape elemental goodness were the hints that things were not always as we currently saw them. Not only was there still the pre-PS djinn-efreet war -- something which makes little sense in a game where fire is opposed by water -- but in the PS elemental supplements they dropped in little suggestions that the Elemental Planes, just maybe, once had a different configuration. And I ate it up.

That different configuration, of course, comes from D&D.

I love the D&D Elemental Planes, stripped to their basics -- only four -- as they are. Not only do we have a different scheme of opposition (Fire opposes and is opposed by Air -- there's our djinn-efreet conflict! -- and Earth opposes and is opposed by Water), but there's also the idea of dominance, flowing in a circle:

Air -> Water -> Fire -> Earth -> Air etc etc ~

And these factor into both damage in combat and social interactions between elemental creatures. I love it.

Naturally, the D&D schema is lacking both the extended "sphere" of Para- and Quasi-Elemental Planes and it also lacks the two Energy Planes. While I can do without the extras, I think for my campaigns I'll restore the Positive and Negative Planes; I rather like them, and will probably slip them in as an unusual opposing pair of elements. (Since I'm tinkering with a six-element system already, it should work nicely ...)

Of course the trick with the Elemental Planes -- traditionally speaking -- is getting there and surviving. AD&D has the odd vortex (and, of course, Sigilian portals if you happen to be using PS) and ethereal travel, but you had best be well-protected when you arrive or expect a swift and terrible death upon arrival in the vast majority of the Inner Planes. D&D makes the travel both simpler (wormholes seem considerably more common than AD&D vortexes, with ethereal travel still an option) and less potentially fatal.

There's a good reason why I say that. While directly travelling to a D&D Elemental Plane still requires one to use magic to survive the environment (or at least to breathe, except on Air), there seems to be a convenient loophole on p. 263 of the Rules Cyclopedia:


"Creatures and things in a wormhole are magically changed into the "proper" element when they reach the elemental plane, unless protected by powerful magic."


Excellent! Fit in with the natives, enjoy yourself, have a good time. Just make sure you take a wormhole back to the Prime again, or you may wind up with some interesting problems ... A pedantic DM might rule that the trip back won't reverse the process, but bah! to that says I.

All and all, I'm quite in love with the D&D situation. My desire for the Positive and Negative Planes I think I shall fill with a lovely Dragon article from Issue 42, wherein Len Lakofka wrote up an interesting take on the Inner Planes comprising just the core four and the Positive and Negative. I have to admit, though, the drawing-point for the article isn't the pages and pages of (frankly soul-numbing) tables, but the descriptions of the planes that make up the end.

Differently-coloured and translucent soils on Earth, with pebbles that can be passed through but large rock and mineral formations cannot? A Plane of Fire where heat doesn't harm a traveller and lava flows might be sentient, even psionic? Positive and Negative Planes filled with crystals, some of which are also sentient? Solid cloud islands filled with dungeons in the Plane of Air?

Time to start filling out planar passposts, methinks!

More mental meanderings: oldschool, editions, and the hamster

As the "retro" phenomenon picks up speed at the same time that 4e is launched and appealing to many, I'm finding myself caught in the middle. With my preferences falling in 2e AD&D and BEMCI D&D, I don't really speak the language of the "old-schoolers" enough to fit in well and I'm not that fussy about the newer editions -- even if I did give 3e a try.

Luckily for me I suppose, I really don't mind most editions of (A)D&D. I'm loving the retro phenomenon, and happily snap up servings of 0e, 1e, 2e, Basic, BEMCI ... I've been spending time reading old-school blogs here and there, and picking things up at Dragonsfoot by reading the forums. My 2e books see plenty of love, and I've kept a good pile of 3e because I like to borrow ideas from them. I've happily chewed over Labyrinth Lord, Swords and Wizardry, OSRIC ... and on and on. I like it all.

I don't want to say this is an old-school blog, because it really isn't by the definitions currently being used by the retro, old-school movement. I came late to D&D, and late-ish to 2e (in the early-to-mid ninties) at that. I like the pulpish swords-and-sorcery feel of the movement, but my posts here probably aren't really going to reflect that feel in their "fluff" all that much. My game style is more old-school than new-school, but it's not truely old-school because I'm a 2e player and DM at heart. (Please don't shoot me!)

Still, I hope that my bits and snips appeal to someone out there -- and hey, fluff can be changed. Rules can be tweaked. That's the whole point, isn't it? ;3