OSR OSR Planejammer (+ thread)

[Fenris-77]

OK, this has been in the wind today, so I'm just going to see what ideas our illustrious posters have to add here. An ongoing project of mine is an OSR treatment that mashes up Spelljammer and Planescape. So take Sigil, add some Treasure Planet, and plop it into the midst of the Astral Sea (more or less). Here are the moving parts I'm looking at right now:

Into the Odd and Skycrawl, revamped for BX play, are the heart of what I want to do so far. Some other touchstones are Troika (for a little delightful oddness) and, of course, the original Spelljammer and Planescape stuff. The project is certainly not to try and reproduce that enormous wealth of published material, to that I say blargh and double blargh. What I'm looking to do is to set out the broad strokes of a Sigil-like home city and layer on some rules for what I guess you'd call an Astral Sea hex crawl (but using the Skycrawl nav rules). I want psionics, and I want weird science. Worlds Without Number is a good model for what I think I want the end result to look like (but probably neither as large or as well done ). I want it to look like a toolbox, not just a written setting. As for the city, I think Yoon Suin is the model that most closely adheres to what I want the text to look/play like, although perhaps smaller, especially when most GMs will unpack their D&D archival material to fill in a lot of blanks.

Anyway, I'm just looking to spitball what people think could work for Planejammer. Supplements, systems, whatever. If this was your baby, what would you do?

 

[loverdrive]

OK, this has been in the wind today, so I'm just going to see what ideas our illustrious posters have to add here. An ongoing project of mine is an OSR treatment that mashes up Spelljammer and Planescape. So take Sigil, add some Treasure Planet, and plop it into the midst of the Astral Sea (more or less).

Oh God this sounds awesome! I'm happy you are doing it, otherwise I'd have to be put in chains to stop me from doing it myself after reading this pitch.

I'd also throw in plane generators like in SWN. And factions. Factions at war, so the PC could engage in privateering and naughty word.

 

[Fenris-77]

Part of the reason I posted this is that a crowdsourced approach would make me very happy. This is an ambitious idea, so adding in some other creative people who really like the idea is fine by me.

 

[Fenris-77]

The faction rules I like the best are the one's from REIGN, so I think I'd see about how to make those elegant and BX compatible, at least to start,

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The Dungeon Dozen has some really great ambitious tables, that include random generation of world-spanning consequences. Any of the Jason Sholtis stuff has parts worth stripping out. Operation: Unfathomable has a ton of competing factions, many of which are weirder than anything ever seen in Sigil.

I like the idea of random generators for this, potentially with lots of nested tables so things can have increasingly unusual details, even if the broad strokes of a planar island or plane are broadly similar.

 

[Fenris-77]

Here's a couple of things I banged out a while ago. Nothing set in stone or even close, just trying to get some flavor down on paper.

 

[Fenris-77]

The Dungeon Dozen has some really great ambitious tables, that include random generation of world-spanning consequences. Any of the Jason Sholtis stuff has parts worth stripping out. Operation: Unfathomable has a ton of competing factions, many of which are weirder than anything ever seen in Sigil.

I like the idea of random generators for this, potentially with lots of nested tables so things can have increasingly unusual details, even if the broad strokes of a planar island or plane are broadly similar.

Nested tables was very much how I wanted this to look. Like here, take two minutes a roll up a shard of a world floating in the aether...

 

[Aldarc]

Any of the planar books from 4e. 4e IMHO had a solid grasp of making the planes a place for adventure and plot hooks.

 

[Fenris-77]

I have Astral Sea in my toolkit already.

 

[Malmuria]

I've been thinking about an astral pointcrawl as well, though I would keep the idea of Sigil's portals (I love how it gameified a core trope of fantasy lit). The factions would be less about belief and more about finding and trading treasures, rare magical items, and drugs; the interplanar factions in Hot Springs Island might be a good model for that. Sig: City of Blades also intrigues me though I have no idea how it actually turned out.