My player who is a timelord (my cosmology's version of one) taken physical form (they are normally fourth-dimensional beings, but can enter the Temporal Plane at will) decided to grab his prinny slave and flee into the Temporal Plane to reach the Endless Citadel (see Manual of the Planes) for some information knowing it was almost impossible to reach it. In the process he got the party he left behind (and was basically leading) surrounded by enemies and basically TPKed, though a smart player made it so they are insted slaves and I can use them and the village they are in on my homebrewed world/setting as a backup campaign.
So anyway, he failed to get there (obviously), and got tossed around the currents of time itself.
I made him roll twice. The first was to see which of my past ages along with the next one I knew about and the final one (where the Mind Flayers flee from as time ends) to see where/what setting he landed on.
First roll he ended up 6k years in the past during the Human golden age before they killed each other off in their Great Human Wars (great, their goes some of the uniqueness of my games. LoL).
Second roll was to see which setting of those I knew he landed in including mine, all the offical ones I am familiar with, and 3rd party ones like Dawnforge and Gamma World. He rolled Spelljammer.
Thankfully I had been working on a campaign/adventure slightly modifying it from the below Dragon magazine on-and-off for weeks:
paizo.com/store/magazines/dragon/issues/...
For all those who have read this issue, or who remember it from way back the main world there is called "Below", and the primes is that the Arcane Order brings creatures from all over the Prime Material there to scare off people from finding a hidden base/jammer shipyard there of some importance. According to the article "PCs can find everything and anything from modern day soldiers to cartoon characters on Below". I took this and ran with it, allowing players to literally play ANYTHING they want (withn a bit of reason. no tarrasque basically).
So players rolled up some new PCs except for the Prinny, the Timelord who regenerated as a Kobold, and one other PC who mysteriously showed up (for fluff reasons I need to make up. did it on the fly for potential fluff/story in the base later on). One PC is Spideman...
They left off with an antrophormorphic rabbit running up to them from the jungle saying as he grabbed a PC by the shirt: "Doc, Doc you got to hide me. You have to help me. I know why we are here. They are going to ki..." as he fell over with thirty adamantine crossbow bolts in his back. The bolts had been fired by halflings (unknown to the PCs from the Arcane Order), who proceeded to check his body, but took nothing (I am not sure why I did that, but perhaps I left a possibility open for them to have taken something of importance?). Then after they left the PCs started to talk and Spiderman said "Damn, how many times am I going to be kidnapped to a hunting planet?". Then a voice from behind a small rock said "N..n...no amigo, Yoz are wrong. Muy wrong.". The party proceeded to look over the rock to see a small mouse in a sombrero who seemed as though he had just drank twenty cups of coffee shakingly say: "They are gonna kill me like esceron him....". The Kobold picked him up and said "Talk". The mouse said "Amigo, please don't ask me to tal...tal..talk. They will kill you too. You do not want to know. The PC smirked and replied "I have died before...".
So now here are my two issues:
1. I need to know ASAP by next Sunday what I need to read and what parts to get a Spelljammer campaign going by Saturday. I have a learning disability, so I read slow. Need the kep points and parts first I believe would be best.
2. I need to know exactly what is going inside that hidden base. Is it a special jammer ship perhaps I am thinking (the article never said...)? Maybe one that does not need a caster?
Maybe they are trying to make a jammer ship that can cloak Romulan style Hence giving an excuse for the PCs getting past the fleet of the Arcane Order in the sphere if they manage to get the ship?)?
Maybe they are working on a way to sail the Temporal Plane's time currents, hence why PC #3 is there somehow? Maybe they need the timelord for some currently unknown to me the DM reason to get it going? Maybe they want to see the future with it, or retrieve advance weaponry from the future with it, or rewrite history?
I have no idea here folks...
3. I need to basically know where to go from here.
Due to the timelord PC failing a Sanity check and seeing flamingos with fangs he tossed his prinny slave into the jammer chair of a ship which had crash landed (aka how the Wild Elf PC got there in a fleeing attempt from Mind Flayers). Because of this prinny went some miles North, and the rest went with the cabin end of the ship South East. This was before the rabbit and mouse incident. I just thought I would point it out.
4. I need to know if I can make this last as a fun adventure getting out of here, and after that perhaps stop by the moon refuge (need to know the article for details sadly...) for even more fun and adventures.
5. And after that what the frail do I do?
What the frail do I do now?!
LoL. I think this is one of those cases where a potential DM's metal is being tested.
As always, many thanks in advanced!
Making a rod for your own back!
1) Your players are in a confined enclosure, so you if you are in a rush to put stuff together for next Saturday you can probably put off information on space travel and spheres: unless your players are the type to blow holes through adamantite walls you won't need them just yet.
Instead, focus on the unique factions of Spell Jammer and deciding which would be inside the Break influencing the action. I'd recommend reading up on the Arcane and Negoi races. After that and once you're sure you're ready for Saturday's game, spend whatever game prep time is left over reading up on the nature of the spheres and Philogiston.
2) This... isn't something I can really help with. You're players seem like a wild and open bunch, so only you know them well enough to know what they'll accept as a plotline. If you have divine character in the part, make the decision if you are in the Philogiston or not.
3) Fight or flight. Be it through defeating the Arcane Order or jailbreak, that's the obvious thing to prepare for to move this campaign forward at this point. Obvious can be a tricky situation in a sandbox game, but you know your players more than I do. Depending on what you decide with for your quandary number two, cooperation with the Arcane Order might make for a third option.
4) I don't know Plazio, so I don't know the adventure. I can say whether anything is fun is more determined by how a published product is used rather than how they are printed. Fun is up to you and your game table. Letting them get to the moon refuge could help with quandary number five.
5) ...yeah. This is actually one of the problems with Spell Jammer. It's one big sand box, but it relies on the DM to make a lot of his own sand. Mechanics are ok, certain story elements are gold, and the space fantasy flavor has a lot of potential if handled well... there's just a lot of effort on your part to get it there.
This is already a sandbox game, though. I'd say let your players choose a destination based on nav charts you provide for them at the moon refuge once they escape Break. The nav charts of course include spheres, home brewed or published, you're ready enough to take them too. If they express really wanting to keep it in Spell Jammer mode rather then going land side again, then there is always the Andromeda Cluster. Though I'm not sure if Plazio republished that.
Hope all this helps. And sorry if I massacred some of the names like Philogiston. I'm posting from my fathers so I don't have reference documents on hand to check my spelling.
Lore of The Void and Concordance of Arcane Space & just wing the rest!!!
Your idea of a temporal ship sounds like it might be a good idea for your campaign.
My suggestion is to not throw them to a random world with some ideas what you intend to do there. Randomness has it's place but when the timelord fails to get where he wants to be I'd put him in an area I'm prepared for.
1. I need to know ASAP by next Sunday what I need to read and what parts to get a Spelljammer campaign going by Saturday. I have a learning disability, so I read slow. Need the kep points and parts first I believe would be best.
Well, I've only just noticed this, but you might be interested in the crystal sphere article at Spelljammer Wiki. That will give you a quick and dirty summary of what crystal spheres are and (more importantly) it has citations that will allow you to flip through your gamebooks and see the sections where the rules are explained in detail.
Spelljammer Wiki is still pretty small, so you are not going to find everything you want there, but it is fully searchable (unlike your gamebooks) and the citations on each page should allow you to grab the right gamebook and flip to the correct section.
I can't help with specifics on Dragon 159 as I don't have my PDFs at the moment. But I agree with Famoth 83 that you don't need to define the entire universe at this point. I doubt your players could even get to the crystal sphere wall if there was a ship sitting there.
If you concentrate on the action, then your PCs could learn about the SJ universe at the same speed that you learn it.
It is Dungeons and Dragons... IN SPACE!!
You can run a Spelljammer campaign with that phrase and the following picture:
The spider thingies on the left are "neogi" who are psychic wolfspiders the size of gnomes that use enslaved Umber Hulks to beat on people. The squid and fish looking ships are things that PC races use. The things that look like bat/butterflies are elf ships. The two ships that look like nautiluses are Mind Flayer vessels. and you didn't even need to know any of that. focus on the Dungeons and Dragons... IN SPACE!! bit and you should be fine.