Klaus wrote:
:D
Havard
1. Naturally occuring portals are not completely stable or safe except for extremely rarely, and even then there's still no guarantee. Natural portals are also rare, and if you don't know where one is that is going where you want to go you're out of luck.
2. Artificially created portals could be prohibitively expensive to create and maintain. While something that a god-level entity might create or work with others to create (like the Rainbow Bridge for the Norse Pantheon) it's just not practical for lesser beings to undertake. Temporary portals can be created by powerful magic users, but maybe these portals have limits on how much matter can pass through them before they collapse or become dangerously unstable.
3. Portals cannot be created in places where the creator hasn't been. So even when an artificial portal is workable, they cannot be used to go to "backwater dimensions" or to explore new reaches of the multiverse.
4. Astral ships are more vulnerable to attack than someone going through a portal, and there are other risks such as the equivilent of "storms at sea", but construction of a portal is orders of magnitude more expensive than a ship and a ship is not limited to a single destination.
5. Some destinations may be in dimensions portals are incapable of reaching ever or be populated by beings who would react violently to someone else constructing a portal to their home. Astral ships may very well be a lot more subtle or at least less provacative.
Adding outriggers, thickening hull.. replaing hull with glassteel.. enchanted rudder
Enchanted plating..
MC: B Hull 100 SR 6+3 = 9
Anything less than 90 tons better get running, since ive got a blunt ram :D
What happens to the various iconic parts of Spelljammer, such as crystal sphers and the phlogiston? SJ is supposed to be about fantasy space travel. I'm not certain you get that with this Astraljammer setup where one of the "planets" you can visit is Planet Hell.
Thoughts?
The concept of fantastic adventures from sailing on a magical ship to fantastic and otherworldly destinations is what I'd consider the iconic "core" of Spelljammer. Such a core could be rather well served by "sailing the astral sea" and the fantastic otherworldly destinations could be astral domains. If I decide to incorporate Spelljammer in my campaign that's how it'll happen, I'll leave literal space travel for science fiction.
Back in 1st edition edition you had THE Material planes surrounded by the ethereal. You had to go further out to get to the Astral and outer planes. Within the material planes were your world plus an infinite number of other worlds. If I remember correctly the DMG had ideas for what if you took your characters to Boot Hill(western) and Gamma World(post apocalyptic) which by extension both had the same gods looking over them as the your world (the PRIME material plane?).
In 2nd Edition we had both Spelljammer and Planescape settings with the ability to get you between settings. Spelljammer came first and despite the insane cost of getting a ship/helm was considered the lower powered version of world crossing. As Sigil was available at least in both FR and Greyhawk they both shared a set of outer planes, but for whatever reason there were barriers in place that said these are where the FR gods hang out and this is where the Greyhawk gods hang out.
3rd edition shifted the focus to the individual DM's world rather than a shared world but still wanted the ability to connect worlds. Being without an explicit spelljammer setting (Ships showed up later in some of the art), gave the role of setting connector to the plane of shadow. Sorta like the difference between crossing the street and sneaking through the sewers to get to another diety's house really.
The big question for 4th edition is how they plan on connecting different worlds. While the Feywild and the Shadowfell have obvious images on how a mortal would connect to them, the Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea are both a little more vague as to what they mean to a mortal travelling to them. It could be that the Astral sea has portals that you can travel into. It could be that you can sail to the edge of the Astral sea and pass into the greater Phlogiston Ocean. Hard to tell as of yet.
In fact, I would say they are actively hoping that we'll mix and match given what was said in the last Ampersand article.
You wouldn't believe how many times over the years I've heard people say "I play in [insert favorite campaign setting here] so product X is of no use to me," or "I only play Core D&D (whatever that means) so I can't use that [insert campaign setting here] product." I plan to change that under 4th Edition by getting the word out that it's okay to mix and match. Go ahead. Get peanut butter in the chocolate. Some of the best campaigns I ever ran or had the pleasure to play in had a little bit of [insert campaign setting here] mixed with a smattering of [insert other campaign setting here] and combined all that with homebrew ideas to create something totally new and different.
Well I always felt that the phlogiston was rather useless. That or just plain space doesn't really make a difference, aside from the flammability (which is a nuissance). The phlo was also cut from the rest of the multiverse, but that only affected priests.
I use more of a "real-world" layout for my spelljamming, and the phlogiston is the divine equivalent of a snail-trail, left by the supreme creator deity as it wends back and forth through the cosmos, doing it's creator bit.
The phlo is well beyond the limits of any given solar system (roughly corresponding with old crystal sphere walls) and any ship slipping into it is instantly shot way past the speed of light; the magical nature of this stuff is what keeps ships from coming apart at that speed, as well as canceling out all of the assorted, real-world crap that happens to time when you approach the absolute speed of light.
As an added bonus, divine spellcasters can siphon off small bits of this divine energy to power their spells, but with some risk to themselves (and maybe their ships as well).
It's a system that's still being worked on, but I think it shows promise for spelljamming in my campaign.
Astraljamming begs some of the same questions spelljamming did, the most pertinent of which is: why not just use portals to travel more quickly and with less risk?
That is a good point.So, I think it would have to be the low power way to travel to other worlds. Probably only 1st to 10th LVL PCs would travel this way. It would be pretty desperate adventure.
;)
I can't even begin to fathom where you came up with that idea. In 4e, they are actually removing the setting specific lines and doing a setting per year (for however many years).. which means FR this year, Eberron next year, Possibly ravenloft after that, then greyhawk, etc. (Note I don't actually know anything after Eberron.)
In fact, I would say they are actively hoping that we'll mix and match given what was said in the last Ampersand article.
This isn't really what (Mearls? Slavicsek?) meant by "mix and match." He meant that you should feel free to pull from any published setting anything that appeals to you for use in your homebrew setting (or another published setting, for that matter). That doesn't change the fact that your homebrew setting (or any published setting) is completely independent of any other setting cosmically. The idea of a shared 'planescape' is gone.
I, for one, wholeheartedly applaud the concept of astraljamming as a D&D4 substitute for both Spelljammer and Planescape. Terrible name, though. Don't get me wrong; I'm still planning on a D&D4 campaign utilizing my complete AD&D2 Planescape collection, but that's something else entirely.