Wolfspider
Explorer
Kae'Yoss said:Yeah. Those scientific-minded players are weird that way. Personally, we usually just call them heretics and torture them to death. Then we take their stuff.
I heartily approve.
crystal spheres ?
- Thread starter freyar
- Start date
I heartily approve.
freyar
Extradimensional Explorer
Kae'Yoss said:
Sure, why not?
Well, I think I had a revelation on how to deal with this IMC (at least to my own satisfaction, anyway, which is all I'm going to worry about
). The crystal spheres can all be layers of the same Prime Material Plane, connected by the plogiston in much the same way that the Abyssian Ocean and River Styx connect different layers of the Abyss. And, I'll just throw out canon and say that the planar cosmology is the same for all the different settings. 
Wolfspider said:What? The scientific-minded player has no problem with wizards flinging fireballs or changing shapes or dragons being able to breath fire and fly but will somehow find the idea of crystal sphere too unrealistic?
Oh, hell, yes. Just the same way that people can be fine with Orcs and Dwarves, Disintegrate and Raise Dead spells... but still insist every time someone uses universal solvent in asking, "But how is it stored?"
(These people evidently don't have much luck getting superglue out of the tube, either)
In all seriousness: people who sit down to a fantasy game are usually cool with traditional fantasy conventions, like the dragons or the magic, but will assume the standard universal laws apply if they have no reason to think otherwise. For example, is my campaign world flat? I nver bothered to specify. Answer, says the scientific person, must be yes if it has a traditional horizon. It's just what the players will assume is the default because, well, what else have they ever known?
Spelljammer perhaps pushes the suspension of disbelief too far for some people because it breaks this: while a fantasy game might give some people the framework to accept that, OK, the sun is Ra's solar barge, they didn#'t expect said sun to be floating in a non-vaccum space, or for their planet to be held up by the ten eyestalks of a giant beholder. ;-)
Kae'Yoss said:
Yeah, this the answer that's coming to my head right now as I cement my own world's campaign setting. It's like the question of having multiple pantheons in your world, with their own creation myths, that don't overlap: if Khensu and Selene are both the Moon, then does that mean they're getting a lot more friendly than their respective pantheons realise?
Some of it may just be a case of different names for the same thing: perhaps the moon, in all it's rocky orbitting glory, really is the physical manifestation of a god: perhaps where they hold court, or some sort of focus of their power. Perhaps one or two beliefs, however, don't turn out to be true - hey, if anyone has a predicent for lying in fantasy, it's goddamn Gods who think they're so clever. ;-)
Kae'Yoss
First Post
GQuail said:Yeah, this the answer that's coming to my head right now as I cement my own world's campaign setting. It's like the question of having multiple pantheons in your world, with their own creation myths, that don't overlap: if Khensu and Selene are both the Moon, then does that mean they're getting a lot more friendly than their respective pantheons realise?
They work in shifts. Selene usually takes the early shift, while Khensu's fond of the graveyard shift for some reason.
Kae'Yoss
First Post
GQuail said:Having just looked after two of my little cousins (a 15 year old trainee D&Der, and a 7 year old who would try to play it as well if we let him) I was feeling a bit tired: this gave me a proper LOL. Thanks!
If you need to laugh some more about some utter nonsense, I'm your man!
Kae'Yoss said:
An interesting approach. It's nice from the perspective of individual worlds, which get a more consistent cosmology and a more cohesive feeling, but I think it also detracts from the Planescape setting by making the multiverse too, let's say, crystal sphere centric. You no longer have the global threat of the blood war, the limitless armies of demons that are too big to be explained by mortal action/thought/belief itself, and generally the feeling that you are a small part in something very big.
Just to be clear, I am not trying to tell you how to run your game, just offering a perspective.
Voadam
Legend
IIRC
Spelljammer set up is that on the material plane there is the flow, the phlogiston energy. Floating in this are crystal spheres. Within the crystal spheres are basically solar systems including campaign setting planets, GH, FR, and Dragonlance are each in their own sphere.
This is similar to some Ancient Greek thinking on the subjects of space and to some references in Fritz Lieber materials.
In spelljammer cosmology, gods can only grant power to their clerics in areas where they have dedicated sources of followers, so basically only in the spheres where they are part of the native pantheons and have churches, though a select few travel deities have temples in the flow and can grant their followers power their (ptah, celestian, etc.).
Spelljammer physics is wierd with gravity planes and phlogiston flammability based on some older discarded scientific theories about the nature of fire.
Planescape is that mortals are on the material plane and gods and outsiders are on the planes where belief and faith shapes reality.
The only real disconnect between SJ and PS is whether gods can connect through to any material plane setting and whether each of the normal base settings are in one big prime material or on separate alternate prime material planes.
Spelljammer set up is that on the material plane there is the flow, the phlogiston energy. Floating in this are crystal spheres. Within the crystal spheres are basically solar systems including campaign setting planets, GH, FR, and Dragonlance are each in their own sphere.
This is similar to some Ancient Greek thinking on the subjects of space and to some references in Fritz Lieber materials.
In spelljammer cosmology, gods can only grant power to their clerics in areas where they have dedicated sources of followers, so basically only in the spheres where they are part of the native pantheons and have churches, though a select few travel deities have temples in the flow and can grant their followers power their (ptah, celestian, etc.).
Spelljammer physics is wierd with gravity planes and phlogiston flammability based on some older discarded scientific theories about the nature of fire.
Planescape is that mortals are on the material plane and gods and outsiders are on the planes where belief and faith shapes reality.
The only real disconnect between SJ and PS is whether gods can connect through to any material plane setting and whether each of the normal base settings are in one big prime material or on separate alternate prime material planes.
Kae'Yoss
First Post
Tal Rasha said:
Well, for one thing you'd mostly tell Wizards how to create their game: Though I added the part with the crystal spheres (since 3e hasn't officially handled Spelljammer at all), the rest is how official D&D is now: The planes are different ones (even those who have the same name, like the Abyss in both GreyHawk and the Realms), the deities are essentially different ones (FR's Lolth isn't quite the same as GH's).
I must say, though, that some of the newer books seem to go a different direction: Expedition to the Demonweb Pits for example talks about a couple of different Worlds - read material planes - that Lolth and her followers have conquered, and the portals that link all those worlds to one Abyss. Of course, this is the Abyss, who doesn't care whether it's supposed to be connected to all worlds or only one.
But it's not all that bad: The Abyss still has an infinite number of demons - in each cosmology, and each cosmology still is a very big place (as is each material plane). It's like the difference between being told that the galaxy you're in has a billion planets or a trillion.
Man in the Funny Hat
Hero
A key problem with Spelljammer is that its basic design is that of a means of connecting seperate game worlds, but fun as it was it was slapped together rather heavy-handedly and without a tremendous amount of forethought to the consequences of its rules. Then, after its release, TSR wanted to treat it as if it were ANOTHER setting all its own - which it clearly wasn't. The first supporting products for it were sourcebooks detailing how the Spelljammer rules were to be GRAFTED onto the 3 main campaign settings - The Realms, Greyhawk, and Dragonlance. Out of the box, it required either a GREAT deal of work from a DM to SCRATCH BUILD an actual setting from the Spelljammer rules, or else having OTHER game worlds to slap those rules onto. Neither was able to really be done well.
Spelljammer rules had noteworthy design flaws so it seems understandable that many designers as well as players would tend to focus on the more gonzo elements it introduced, all the better to gloss over even glaring errors. Planescape, on the other hand, took ITSELF much more seriously. It's unsurprising that it should do a far better job of connecting existing D&D game worlds while maintaining the basic D&D cosmology.
Spelljammer took the Prime Material Plane and effectively split it up into two parts - the Phlogistion, and Wildspace. Wildspace is that space contained within the crystal spheres, The crystal spheres float in the "ocean" that is the explosive Phlogiston. Deities were specifically limited in the extent to which they could contact their clerics depending on how large a presence of worshippers the deities had within a given crystal sphere. With a few exceptions for specific deities or magic items, contact outside of a crystal sphere within the Phlogiston was blocked entirely and clerics were limited to 1st and 2nd level spells (those not granted directly by a deity or the deities agents).
How the rest of the cosmology fit in/on/around this new arrangement was almost entirely unexplained as far as I can recall. I'd have to dig out my Spelljammer box and re-read it to say beyond a 99% certainty. I seem to remember that AFTERWARD they began to sort that out, for example stating that the ethereal plane did not extend beyond the crystal spheres (?) and so could not be used for inter-sphere travel.
ANYTHING Spelljammer-related one should feel no guilt at all about just making it up and fearing no contradiction. Anything the average player comes up with may actually fit BETTER into the cosmology.
Spelljammer rules had noteworthy design flaws so it seems understandable that many designers as well as players would tend to focus on the more gonzo elements it introduced, all the better to gloss over even glaring errors. Planescape, on the other hand, took ITSELF much more seriously. It's unsurprising that it should do a far better job of connecting existing D&D game worlds while maintaining the basic D&D cosmology.
Spelljammer took the Prime Material Plane and effectively split it up into two parts - the Phlogistion, and Wildspace. Wildspace is that space contained within the crystal spheres, The crystal spheres float in the "ocean" that is the explosive Phlogiston. Deities were specifically limited in the extent to which they could contact their clerics depending on how large a presence of worshippers the deities had within a given crystal sphere. With a few exceptions for specific deities or magic items, contact outside of a crystal sphere within the Phlogiston was blocked entirely and clerics were limited to 1st and 2nd level spells (those not granted directly by a deity or the deities agents).
How the rest of the cosmology fit in/on/around this new arrangement was almost entirely unexplained as far as I can recall. I'd have to dig out my Spelljammer box and re-read it to say beyond a 99% certainty. I seem to remember that AFTERWARD they began to sort that out, for example stating that the ethereal plane did not extend beyond the crystal spheres (?) and so could not be used for inter-sphere travel.
ANYTHING Spelljammer-related one should feel no guilt at all about just making it up and fearing no contradiction. Anything the average player comes up with may actually fit BETTER into the cosmology.
