Well I've Done It Again. The Free Spelljammer Demo Adventure Was Released Last Week And Promptly Disappointed

Well I've done it again. The free Spelljammer demo adventure was released last week and promptly disappointed me because WotC didn't take the opportunity to make Realmspace more interesting (instead almost literally copy-and-pasting the original AD&D canon)... so I fixed it my damn self. Behold my insanity. I hope to god tumblr doesn't scromble the image quality. So tumblr scrombled the image quality, just look at it here instead.

First up, the sun. Named it Solis to differentiate it. Twin of our IRL sun; G2V yellow-white star. Big ol self-perpetuating nuclear explosion. Probably radiates magic too. Nobody lives there, it's the SUN.

1. Phomus: small airless metallic planet; probably a failed planetary core. Tidally locked to the sun; scorching hot on one side and frigid on the other. No endemic life; but the dwarves and kobolds adore the place and squabble over it endlessly.

2. Anadia: canon planet, retooled. Basically Mercury with an atmosphere. 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, so days are longer than a year here. Only habitable place is the poles, where there's abundant water. Halfling clans have set up dozens of domed arcologies in polar craters.

3. Coliar: canon planet; retooled. Small ice giant (like Uranus) with a quirk- its gravity, density, and warmth mean that life thrives here on countless islands floating in the air. Has 3 moons: Cyrretal, a jungle world; Voturna, an ocean world; and Aureline, a tundra world.

4. Toril: canon planet, untouched. Toril (or Abeir-Toril, if you like) is an Earthlike planet with one moon, Selune, and a cluster of asteroids floating in Selune's L5 Lagrange gravitational keyhole.

5. Karpri-Chandos: canon planets, retooled. Both ocean worlds with no seabed; only an ice mantle. Life thrives here, especially merfolk and fishfolk. Karpri and Chandos are basically twins so I made them a binary pair. Pair has two small airless icy moons: Synos and Andos.

The Garden, aka the Garden Belt: canon-ish. An asteroid belt overgrown with magic space trees. At its heart is Garden proper; a cluster of asteroids held together by an enormous space tree with an internal ecology. H'Catha, a (canon) discworld made by Beholders, is also here.

6. Almeron: small brown dwarf substar. So big that it fuses deuterium at its core, Almeron radiates a moderate level of heat and so has its own habitable zone. Has two small ice giants in its leading and trailing Lagrange points: Palocyne and Oranus. Also has 7 moons, almost like a mini solar system in themselves: Tavati is a volcanic world; Sidar is a warm desert world; Phylora is a warm forest world; Wylenir is a temperate Earthlike world; Merinal is a temperate ocean world; Airelyx is a cool ocean world; and Khysethris is a tundra world.

7. Sybil: small-ish ringed gas giant. Its air isn't breathable but folks go in to mine the gas anyways. Has 4 moons: Mingabwe, Nyralwe, and Lumenwe are small airless ice moons; Glyth (canon planet) is a cold Titan-like world with its own rings that has been claimed by illithids.

8. Ziris: large ice giant. Despite the freezing cold, toxic air, and high gravity, it still attracts gas miners... and kindori hunters. Has 2 moons: Kunain, a small airless rocky moon; and Thrinain, a small airless icy moon. These serve as spelljamming ports for space whalers!

9. Dunbaran: large icy world with thin air and rings. Frigid, silent, desolate- it is a relic of the system's chaotic formation. A network of tunnels below its surface holds eons-old secrets. Has 1 moon: Nuldor, a captured comet with something buried at its core.

The Shell: the outer comet cloud of the system, full of drifting iceballs, a handful of spelljamming ports, and flotsam from the astral sea.

If I may be sanctimonious for a moment- this is all facultative of what I felt was missing from SJ. Don't you want to dance a gravitational ballet among twelve shining moons over a violet sky? Don't you want to sail through the eye of a storm the size of your whole homeworld? Don't you want to watch the sun crest a crater rim, painting sharp shadows across a landscape of ancient cosmic violence? Don't you want to witness the glittering silent splendor of a glacial cliff, two billion miles from a sun, with your breath the only company in your helmet as you ponder how many eons your footprints will last?

Where's the cosmic awe? Where's the wonder?

THAT is what I want to bring to Spelljammer. The beauty in solitude and desolation and vastness. The wonder. The kinship of we who sail the endless deep is born of knowing that, out there, we are all alone together; and in a vast and awesome universe, all we have is each other.

OH OH OH a friend of mine did something similar but far more disturbing many years ago! here, have the Third Worst Image I am in possession of:

bonus hippogryph:

(art by Adrian "Yoult" Wimmer, godspeed wherever you are now man)

Mythical creatures and their ‘opposites’. 

apotheosis

/əˌpäTHēˈōsəs/

(noun) - the ascendance or elevation of a person to divine status.

They say I saved the world.

I have tried to tell my people that the world is not safe; that no world is safe. That no world could ever be safe, not forever. Safety is a tranquil pool through which the river of history flows. I know the truth, or at least part of it, thanks to the man I met that day. No one else knows about that man, and he may not have even been real, but I must speak of him all the same, for he taught me something I will never forget. He imparted to me, in a sense, the meaning of life.

He arrived, perhaps against his own better judgment, in a flash of light at just the right moment. And judgment it was, indeed; I had been given a choice that I could not bring myself to make, and he showed me what I had to do. He helped to fix the mistake that I had made, but he seemed so forlorn while he did so. I could not help but to ask him why: why he was helping at all, and why it made him sad. And when I did, he turned to me, and he told me a story.

Long ago, and very far from here, there was a man who lived on a small blue-green planet, under a small yellow sun, lost in the endless cosmic night. This man was gifted; his work alone accelerated the scientific advancement of his world by hundreds of years over the course of his lifetime. To his beloved people, he brought peace, health, safety, comfort, and most importantly knowledge. But it was not enough for him.

He did not seek power. He did not wish for domination, not over his fellow man or even over nature. What he sought was knowledge for its own sake -a nobler pursuit than power and control, but still dangerous. And as must always happen, one day... something went horribly wrong. He did not speak of what happened, not in detail, but in tinkering with the very fabric of reality, he became... sundered, splintered, undone, and then suddenly… remade.

He could, all at once, perceive the whole of infinity around him. He saw the great nothing at the bottom of everything, and the madness at the top. He experienced every iteration of every universe; all of time and space happening at once in an endless forest of infinitely-branching cosmic trees. He saw the space between and could channel the limitless energy from that aether to reshape reality as he pleased. He was, in an instant, more powerful than any god -truly omnipotent. He understood the meaning of existence and he knew, with omniscient certainty, that there was no meaning. There was no reason for existence at all, no purpose within being. Reality simply is. How does someone, formerly finite and mortal, cope with infinity in every direction, when there is no meaning behind that infinity?

The answer, he said, was joyfully simple.

Existence, he told me then, is a blank canvas upon which to paint meaning. And he added another revelation to help me paint my meaning: existence is not unknowing and uncaring, for we know that we exist, and we must resolve to care. We are each the universe made conscious, he said to me with humble awe in his voice, and the only thing missing from a universe without consciousness is compassion. Only that which has the ability to know and understand, can know and understand others. It was so clear to me in that moment: that consciousness exists to be the door through which meaning enters the universe, and that meaning must be kindness.

I asked him, then, why he was sad, for what he had said brought me tears of joy. He told me that every instance of an event with more than one outcome is another node in the tree, another fork splitting into new branches, each one with their own branches, unto eternity. There is no one true timeline, no one correct path. For him to create a new one through intervention was merely an infinitesimal drop in the aether, and he could see all the futures in which I had made a choice. He knew what would have happened without him -if, that is, the choice had been left to me, in my ignorance. He grieved that he could never ensure the permanent safety and happiness of a world, for that would be a task of infinity against infinity. To forge a new path for a world through kindness may not change much, he said, but it is noble.

But then he smiled, and he told me his secret: his purpose. For all his power and knowledge, for all his eternity, he confided in me that he was not infallible. The meaning he ascribes to his everlasting life, therefore, is to strive to be better, for this is a task wherein the goal is always one step further. The quest for compassion is as endless as he and the whole of existence. So, too, is his other task: to maintain the integrity of all universes -as he has seen, there are always some rare few who would seek nothing but destruction. He cares for every infinitely-branching tree of spacetime in Eternity, tends to their ills and encourages their growth.

He told me, then, that his work in this time and place was complete, for now, and wished me well as he left the same way he had come: in a flash of otherworldly light. But I have thought about him every day since then, as my world slowly heals, and I have come to appreciate who and what he really is. He did not create existence, but he bears its responsibility as though he did. He wanders the grand cosmic forest of times and spaces, sowing kindness where it must be sown and fostering compassion across the whole of existence, in hopes of watching it bloom like flowers in an endless summer sun.

I never learned his name, but I know what I will call him.

I will call him the Gardener.

  Figured I should post this here as well, so!

Hey ya’ll, my commissions are open! I’ve had them open on my Twitter for a while but I’ll also open them on my Tumblr.

I currently have five (5) slots open so if you are interested, feel free to shoot me a message! Reblogging to spread around is also appreciated! Thank you!

More info on other art options, payment, and etiquette under the read more:

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(art credits to Duke, sorry to put you on blast there bud)

The only good isekai is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon