Adventure taking place on a large airship?

[Oryan77]

I've been itching to run a sailing adventure ever since the Pathfinder Skull & Shackles minis came out. Then a thought occurred to me, I've ran a sea adventure before years ago, but I've never run a sky adventure before.

My group will eventually be going to the Elemental Plane of Air, and how cool would it be to have a side quest involving air pirates! I'm imagining something along the lines of the PCs getting attacked by a small pirate airship and for whatever reason, the party ends up sneaking on the pirate mothership. I'm imagining this ship being big enough where it feels like they are storming a fortress. Even better would be a scenario involving this ship crashing and the PCs need to make skill checks or use spells to help exit the thing before it crash lands (it could rotate around every few rounds).

Is there a published adventure already like this? I suppose I could just use a normal pirate adventure and turn the ships into airships. But my concern is with getting maps of the airships. I've never even seen a map of a ship as big as a fortress.

Maybe I need to be looking for a sci-fi adventure? Star Wars perhaps? Or what about Eberron? I'm running a fantasy game, so I can't use technology like that. But I can convert it.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

One of the official 3rd Edition Eberron adventures has a long scene like this, but I'm not aware of any full adventures like that.

 

[Darth Illithid]

You might also want to look into some Spelljammer stuff.

 

[Kinak]

Well, there's the Voyage of the Golden Dragon for Eberron. I don't have a copy personally, but it includes a pretty good map of a luxury airship.

There's also a number of old Spelljammer supplements that had deckplans for big ships. A mammoth ships was used as a floating dungeon in Dungeon Issue 41, which worked out pretty well. There are also deckplans for the Spelljammer itself, which is almost a floating town with a dungeon underneath. Just in general, you can grab a ton of free maps from spelljammer.org

As far as whole adventures, I'd look into Goblins' Return (SJS1). It would take some conversion and a new hook, but it's about infiltrating the base of a goblinoid (including orcs, super orc "scro," and kobolds) pirate armada.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Stormonu]

There's also Top Ballista, a mini-campaign set aboard a skyship run by gnomes. I haven't looked through it in some time, but it's sure to have some adventures included.

 

[Herobizkit]

Star Wars, Star Trek, any future setting, really... Copy any starship map and "fantasy" it up.

Or use Spelljammer's own Dwarven Citadel (flying fortress) as a model.

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Anytime Mario boarded Bowser's airships. [MENTION=36150]Herobizkit[/MENTION]'s got a great idea there, any sci-fi with a large spaceship and a small group goes room by room, deck by deck to get the to engine room, or the bridge, or the brig.
Alternatively, you could design a floating castle, a standard castle layout on a large, floating rock.

 

[Oryan77]

A mammoth ships was used as a floating dungeon in Dungeon Issue 41, which worked out pretty well.

I've checked out everything that has been mentioned so far and I think the Dungeon Issue 41 adventure (Mammoth Problems) has the sort of ship I was looking for, thanks. It even gave me the idea to make my pirates be undead pirates. I can't think of a reason why undead can't be hanging out in the Elemental Plane of Air.

Now I need to come up with the type of undead that have the intelligence to run an airship and the will to want to hunt down other aircraft and flying creatures. If they can pass as pirate undead without being corny, even better. Any ideas?

 

[Kinak]

I've checked out everything that has been mentioned so far and I think the Dungeon Issue 41 adventure (Mammoth Problems) has the sort of ship I was looking for, thanks. It even gave me the idea to make my pirates be undead pirates. I can't think of a reason why undead can't be hanging out in the Elemental Plane of Air.

Now I need to come up with the type of undead that have the intelligence to run an airship and the will to want to hunt down other aircraft and flying creatures. If they can pass as pirate undead without being corny, even better. Any ideas?

Glad you like it

As far as undead, really anything other than the standard skeletons, zombies, or ghosts should do fine. I'd personally lean towards ghouls (appearing in storms on the material plane, swooping down and devouring entire towns) or shadows (cursed skeleton crews are overdone, but cursed shadow crews...).

I'd tend towards a lesser undead with class levels and unique abilities for the captain, but lich or death knight should work fine too. A lich makes sense as the creator of a flying fortress. A death knight could have been its commander in a war long forgotten.

Another tack, since you're on the plane of air, would be undead djinn. There are specific monsters for that in Pathfinder, but I'm not sure of 3.5 equivalents. I'd probably reflavor the belker... maybe shadow or greater shadow, and make the captain a leveled djinn lich or death knight.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[MichaelSomething]

Just throw a bunch of snake monsters on there and the plot will write itself!