- Other worlds and planes accessible from the setting
- Expanded locations around the hex-map
- rival adventuring party
First task we filled out some more on the other worlds of the system; see these links for background on the system and its inhabitants.
First Forge, the mercury sized discworld right up by the sun - here we have Fire Giants who we figured are a strange evolutionary offshoot - like Tasmania but for Fire Giants. They live almost entirely on minerals compared to most Fire Giants that can eat minerals but mostly eat meat. Hence they are scalier and tougher, creak as they move except at their primary joints - shoulder for a smith, etc. Their dialect is strange and their ettiquette is bizarre and insular after so much time on their own on a relatively small world.
Next, on Pond, the tiny water world that is the elven playground, this is a frivolous place, with a portal to the feywild, and the whole world is treated as a combination of resort and theme-park ride. If the inhabitants got more serious, they could aspire to dissolute. A deeply unhappy Elven Imperial Navy station occupies the moon in orbit. It is a place you get sent if you have deeply angered your superiors but not *actually* committed an offense sufficient to be imprisoned or tossed out of the Navy. A handful of bitter officers and resentful sailors crew the base and its ships.
We will go into Skyforest, our airworld in more detail later.
The Deep, our giant primeval ocean world keeps its secrets so tightly we shall not mention them here. People will not speak of this place to outsiders, either to protect it from hunters or to starve rival hunters of information.
The dragons of Smoulder also have been outlined in the world creation - between warlordism among the reds and a merchant republic among the golds they keep themselves occupied apart from attacking anything that comes into their atmosphere.
Lastly we have our enormous frozen water discworld of Ice-disc, where the kuo-toa dwell. We focus some more on their wizards who dominate society. They have a philosophy of magic of making unexpectedly powerful but specific magic items; such as a ring of invisibility that makes your image appear on the other side of your most dangerous foe. They have deeply esoteric tastes and values meaning it can be hard to establish a price if you can open trade with them. They can also be found cruising the sphere conducting weird experiments for their own inscrutable reasons - much more widely spread than previously thought.
For items and means to travel beyond worlds:
- the Guild of Wings on the Great Thicket of airworld creates flying devices from the moulted husks of insects; everything from personal wings to great sails of many interwoven wings.
- the Kuo-toa mostly shape ice of their environs into hulls, which works for the outer system. They also make animal-bone vessels for in-system work and occassionally attempt to hunt the greatest creatures of the Primeval ocean to make still larger vessels
- connections to other planes are few and intuitive - to the plane of fire at the heart of Forge, to the demiplane of Magma from Smoulder, to the demiplane of Ice in the depths of Icedisc and to the plane of Air at the heart of Air-disc. There is also a known connection to the Feywild in the tiny ocean world
For our second task, we expand on locations on Airworld.
Here we decided that the hexmap, the great thicket, is an anomalously large conglomerate of trees - most of the floating vegetation is more akin to bushes, grazed by insects but not large enough to sustain settlement.
The few fixed locations throughout the world include:
- Boring beetle city states, theocratic realms occupying smaller tree agglomerations. The boring beetles take these over, carve out their homes and choke out the potential of the trees to grow larger if not kill them entirely. These tumbling realms are often source of raiding parties when something interesting drifts nearby
- Abeil-hives - grown out from around a source these beefolk hives provide some of the few fixed points of trade for the nomadic giant butterfly herders. The Abeil also keep extensive records but carved into the hard wax of their homes in mural form
- Wood-forged camps - groups of boring-beetle carven servitors who have rebelled and now work against their old masters. Poor in resources but always helpful to those in need.
- Myconid villages - found on the undersides of the larger plant groupings or floating on their own fungal mass, they can be wary of strangers and like others to leave them alone
- Spiderlairs - found near highly traded routes, homes of the silk-trade, places where anything can be traded for a price, the ruthless spiders taking in all that is brought to them and return the finest of silk works, strong, light armours, beautiful garments, whatever the client could pay for
Other mobile sites include:
- goblinfly infestations - whenever a place is left uncared for too long, goblinflies generate. Malicious, greedy and chaotic, their disorganisation and cowardice are their only saving graces in the eyes of those they encounter
- butterfly herding nomads - dragonfly folk with their butterfly herds, possibly trailing a flock, possibly watching them while they drink nectar and lay eggs, possibly tending a caterpillar herd, possibly guarding coccoons before moving on once more with the next generation of butterflies.
For our final task we have a group of rival adventurers - the crew of another vessel.
- in possession of an undercrewed Hammership, the Pied Piper
- from out-system, long-time spacefarers
- they came to hunt the Primeaval Ocean but an incident on arrival in-sphere left them short-crewed. They have been having trouble fronting the danger money any new crew is asking for to go near the Primeaval Ocean and are working any job they can get to try and make up these funds. They know they have a rich buyer for their quarry if they can hunt the Ocean and get home but need to get crew first
- lead by their captain, a grizzled cleric of a weather god (the North Wind) who is a fair but harsh leader.
- the first mate is a warlock, who wanted to be a druid but chose the easy path of pledging to a Fey patron instead. They live the druidic aesthetic and bluff a lot about plants
- the quartermaster is a light-fingered rogue who dresses as a rich trade factor and is the best gambler on the ship
- the bosun is a paladin of Bane and gleefully wields their cat-o-nine-tails to slay foes or maintain harsh discipline in the crew. Wiry, scarred, they look as mean as they are.
- the helmsman is a wizard, onboard to discharge a debt and resentful of everything they are asked to do. A terrible gambler, they have lost all their fine robes and posessions in the course of the voyage and appear as a common sailor in their sailcloth trousers and tunic
- they will attempt to poach the crew of any other spelljammer they encounter in port and will take any jobs that offer cash enough to hire more.
With all this done, the last task is 'play!' and here ends the creative part of our Gygax 75 run. Next we shall wrap the whole thing up and offer a view on how useful a workflow this is.
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