JoeGKushner
Adventurer
Go one step further and make it the Sheen. Bruce Cordel's peak into fantasy technology was pretty spiffy and had a whole slew of campaign seeds that you could use (and hopefully update to 4e).
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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
Spelljammer Galactica
- Thread starter Mouseferatu
- Start date
I've been working on a similar idea and I like the Marut angle. I have the Githyanki creating the Warforged and don't have a "final" BBEG yet. I am looking at it for Epic Tier play where the party goes through heroic building towards an unknown something (copping a bit from Scales of War) and Paragon being the quest to save the realm. At the end of Paragon, they think they have saved the realm/continent. As they hit epic however, the world and the very plane is essentially destroyed, setting refugees adrift on the Astral Sea. They are hunted and most planar travel is severely yoinked. They can make temporary, stealthy stops in Sigil, now a dangerous "free port" in the cosmos with very limited accessibility and Githyanki patrols all over heck searching for them. The end goal is to fulfill the epic destiny and help create a new plane.
Olgar Shiverstone
Legend
Cool idea. Basis: new BSG or O-BSG? Which basically boils down to the question: "Skin jobs or no?"
Frankly, I'm pro-skin job, because of the campaign implications of hidden spies, assassins, employment of dopplegangers, etc. The whole resurrection concept can be ported and employed in D&D even more effectively (though you might need to shut down resurrection for everyone else, somehow).
Frankly, I'm pro-skin job, because of the campaign implications of hidden spies, assassins, employment of dopplegangers, etc. The whole resurrection concept can be ported and employed in D&D even more effectively (though you might need to shut down resurrection for everyone else, somehow).
Mustrum_Ridcully
Legend
Either that or make the material plane the end point of their voyage through the Astral Sea. They have no way to just teleport down there, and they have a long way to go (and have to figure out the direction, too.)
Of course that means the material plane itself is off-limits for the purposes of the story.
Though I am kinda more in favor of the idea of having "Battlestar Galactica on the Material Plane". Basically, it could be a real fleet of ships. An advanced (magical) civilization being destroyed thanks to total thaumaturgical warfare with a few survivors looking for a new continent.
They might find islands to gather resources, but they are hunted by a relentless fleet of enemy ships...
A more "modern" scenario would be an aircraft carrier and its support fleet being the last survivor of a thermonuclear exchange, traveling to find the last safe spot on Earth. But that might not take long enough, so a twist could be that instead of thermonuclear war, they fell through some kind of wormhole and landed on an unknown planet covered mostly with water. And with lots of hostiles...
So many possibilities...
Celebrim
Legend
I think the Galactica (or exodus) story is a very sound basis for a campaign, but I would personally not want to draw too heavily on either an existing D&D cosmology or the actual Galactica series except as the broadest inspiration. I think you'd be better off inventing a completely new cosmology to support your campaign, and in particular you'd want to offer up the sort of simultaneous working on several levels journey of exploration that exodus type stories provide. And to do that, your players would have to not know what is going on except in the broadest terms. You want to bring the surprises and plot twists, not rehash someone else's twist. In fact, much of backstory you outlined to me strikes me as campaign level secrets of the sort that cannot be properly revealed except in play. I'd never want to buy a setting book where that much detail about the setting was openly revealed.
One thing that I hope you don't do is the whole, "We have met the enemy and it is us.", trope. I suppose that was a clever twist at one time but I'm really getting tired of it. It's so reutine now it hardly even counts as a twist. And no, that rant isn't directed at anyone here, just my frustration with the big reveal in every TV series and most movies now being the same thing.
One thing that I hope you don't do is the whole, "We have met the enemy and it is us.", trope. I suppose that was a clever twist at one time but I'm really getting tired of it. It's so reutine now it hardly even counts as a twist. And no, that rant isn't directed at anyone here, just my frustration with the big reveal in every TV series and most movies now being the same thing.
Jeremy Ackerman-Yost
Explorer
Repeat it until the society learns from it, IMO.
Or, more accurately, writers will keep using it until they work out their own conflicts and issues with it. As long as our society continues to re-fight the same battles with bad in-group/out-group definitions, it's fertile and appropriate ground for stories.
Herobizkit
Adventurer
Please explain, in detail, with visual aids if possible.
Inspired by Mouseferatu's OP, it occurs to me that you could do a little tweeking of the Shardminds and make them the basis for a FRPG version of the Replicators from SG-1...
Asmor
First Post
I've always thought that Stargate would be really easy to adapt to D&D. In fact, one could argue that the whole thing with teleport circles and sigil sequences in 4e is... a bit "similar."
Go back to the Judges Guild products of the 1970s-80s and you'll see a LOT of "portals" and the like...not to mention the various pulp "sword & planet" or comic book classics (John Carter of Mars, Eric John Stark of Skaith, Adam Strange of Rann, etc.) that used the same or similar devices (and likely, inspired their use in RPGs).
