Are there any good twists on this kind of setting? Any stories that apply themselves well here? Any unique races that work well? Do you prefer endless sky or earth somewhere far below? I want to run a campaign and I'm looking for ideas to augment the usual stock of piracy and adventure.
Art thread as well.
Other urls found in this thread:
1d4chan.org
kickstarter.com
twitter.com
...
...
...
...
...
...
Once again, I point to this.
>Sky setting where the one resource that allows large masses to fly is in the earth itself
>Rather than mining it, cut it loose and build a literal flying fortress with it.
An odd game that had fun elements, and a pretty interesting premise.
Always liked the Mortal Engines take on it
>Because cites are mobile, roads outside cities are not a thing
>Because post-post-post-post-apocalypse, the only flight technology that still exists is zeppelins and airships
>Airships are the only real way any inter-city commerce takes place
Of course, the cities don't have to be gigantic rolling megafortresses that move around and eat each other; any way of making the countryside utterly unsuited to
travel through would do.
...
Is that from Sky Galleons of Mars?
...
It looks like it to me but the Martian ships weren’t rigged like that iirc
I would love to do a 28mm scale Skygalkeons of mars game. The laser wood cut ship kits are about $80-$100 apiece but the crews aren’t massive.
Yes, it is
I remember that game. I made a ram based island and drift raced around chucking mines. Good times.
Remind the players they aren't land-lubbers. Earth weather above ground level is not Babytown frolics. The tl:dr history of rigid lighter-than-air craft is "heavy winds/up/downdrafts, everyone dies". Your challenges adventure hooks could be a lot like ocean-going ships turned up to 11 i.e. no resources save what you bring, exposure to harsh elements, hiding/escape more difficult, etc.
>Art thread as well.
Well done retard, now it's just gonna be an art thread and nothing else.
The Blue Yonder seemed to have something good going on as well.
>The Elemist.
>Primary species of the world is a bunch of sentient birds that form massive communities/flocks that hold up low-density crystal formations cultivated into enormous floating perches. Their society forms based around the flight rotations and unconsciously keep flapping while sleeping/dormant.
>Surface of the world is largely molten, inhospitable or highly concentrated aggressive arboreal patches that are semi-mobile to avoid lava flow changes or else generally heat resistant.
>Large sources of heat also generate constant thermals to help keep the crystal formations up.
It’s called Cloudships of Mars and it’s played by hardcore Grogs at (primarily historical) Wargaming conventions with mostly homebuilt ships and Victorian minis. I’ll tell you those dudes don’t fuck around and have really nice stuff. You won’t find any unpainted or primer painted only miniatures like you see with the 40k kiddies.
Doesn't look much like a flying city.
More like a flying airport.
Bump for airships!
...
I think it's an interesting opportunity to play around with wildlife and monsters. The sky is the limit (pun intended). The Wildlife of Star Wars has a lot of great ideas, especially in the Alderaan and Bespin chapters. The thrantas are so cool, imagine having the great thrantas flying around, serving the role of cruise liners while dwarfing most airships.
I wish that I had the full page pictures from the book. I definitely recommend buying them or anything else by Whitlatch.
...
Kenneth Oppel's Airborn trilogy also has some interesting high-altitude fauna, cloudcats being the primary ones. Aerial krakens and space whales disguised as meteors show up as well.
World of Kong is another great art book/fauxbestiary. It has a whole section on giant carnivorous bats and another section on giant crustaceans which live in abyssal caverns.
Just imagine nests of these things living in the deep crevices on the undersides of floating islands. It could make for a good sidetrack into survival horror during a campaign.
OP, check this out
For obvious reasons, I think the aesthetic and even much of the substance of Treasure Planet would serve this type of setting well. It's obviously more of an adventure oriented story, but there is a backstory of imperial intrigue in the lore.
Having your players engage as privateers or other agents of imperial powers in the 'sky world' would be an adaptation of an old story, but it would be fun.
tfw your dieselpunk/ghibli/final fantasyish setting is a sky/airship setting in a huge epic war across the planet and is basically the end of the airship era and you've written two and a half big 100k word novels set in it since 2012 and as depression has caved in your mind you've somewhat lost interest to keep it going and try to get it published
feels bad.
...
What's the gist of it man? Lay it on us.
...
Space-sailing ships are rad, and treasure planet was a good film.
The naval strategy game was basic, but fun too
...
Someone already did it.
kickstarter.com
Personally I can't stand steam/magic airship settings, as they are pretty much all the same tropey bullshit. I do really appreciate straight dieselpunk airships though, and mixing them with ghibli like the above user is the tastiest way.
Once again, just opinions.
In said setting I actually did have things such as skysharks who were a sort of giant bloodthirsty shark with bat wings and talons. I also had skycrabs who lived in floating fields of rock (usually in very dense cloudcover) and would just drop on passing ships en-masse and devour the crew.
In the "center" of the world map, there was a floating mountain-continent known as Valhalla where the World Serpent dwelled and it destroyed anyone dumb enough to come close.
On the surface of the planet there're dinosaurs and normal mammals and shit. Humans, dwarfs and elfs lived all around.
Yes it was!
That's too bad, the tropes may get tired, but they're good. Comfy even. My problem is that there aren't too very many enjoyable executions of the concepts, in whatever form they may take, dieselpunk or otherwise.
Castle in the Sky is obviously a good example, though it's not a 'sky setting' by any means.
Bird people are always good
...
the gist is that it's a world stuck in a stagnant dark age. A long time ago there was one big human empire united after the First Apocalypse, and these split after the Second Apocalypse. The two empires were now Embrush (who are devout, god-fearing men who are super zealous) and the Baisher (who are more based on science and tech and just want to keep moving forward). The Embrush are evil and just want everything for themselves. They're basically North Korea/WWII Imperial Japan, they follow an Emperor who they don't even know is real and are led by a council of counts made up of the Emperor's son and his children.
The Embrush also, a long time ago, as a tax would go around the world and take in psionic families from various towns, cities and skyports as a way to 1. make sure no one had any dangerous psionics save for them and 2. to keep them from unleashing what psions they did possess on enemies for fucking with them.
The gist of the story is that after years of peace, the Embrush start a war to reconquer everything. There's a prophecy about some Chosen One.who would be a psionic born outside of the Embrush Empire (as by now in the timeline, all psionic bloodlines were taken by the Empire, and so are all Embrush)
A rebel psion supersoldier of the Embrush (the first supersoldier and first psion to ever be punished to prison time and actually managed to escape) finds a psionic girl who somehow fell into his lap, and he tells her she is this outborn psion. Though, in reality, he made the whole entire thing up in order to scare the Embrush and bring hope to everyone else in the world.
It's got sky vikings, pirates, samurai, roman legions, supersoldiers, ghosts, orcs, goblins, all that good shit. I'd been working on it since high school and didn't start until 2012 but I kinda dwindled down in like 2016/7. I sometimes like to go back to look at it and fix some things.
...
...
But I went INTO it. I explained how the psions work, I explained how the airships and sky continents stay afloat (through eldritch abomination giant generators built by an alien race. They just appeared in space after the apoc and edged into orbit and a bunch of these generators built into the surface of the world caused an upheaval of continents)
but yeah. It's a big mix.
Don't worry, I'm half joking, I read over "Upwind" when it got funded. Its some cringey kitchen-sink bullshit, I have no idea how it nabbed 30k funding.
The tropes get boring because the most exciting part are the sensory experiences. In your head it feels SO COOL to stand on the front of your ship that's cruising through the sky, firing shots at a boarding party that has your craft harpooned. But in reality what the majority of your gametime boils down to is:
PC: What do I see?
GM: More sky, its kind of blueish, theres some cirrus clouds.
It gets boring so people throw in lolmagicflyingmcguffinz but all that really does is muddle your setting down. Not to mention why do you even need elves and dwarves at that point.
I'm saying this from the point of view of someone who has pretty much done the same thing, creating a huge setting, before realizing the limitations of Pen and Paper for it. I still think it can work, but the coolest parts would be by far the sensory experience of actually being there.
>Castle in the Sky is obviously a good example, though it's not a 'sky setting' by any means.
Really? I think its certainly a "sky setting" the opening shows a cruise liner of people on an airship, so sky travel is definitely a common thing. And even if the movie itself is a bad representation of it, the opening credits show that previously the world that CitS exists in was almost entirely a sky setting.
...
Why is your setting's topography nowhere as rad as that of Xenoblade and Xenoblade 2?
A "floating islands on a sea of clouds" setting? Been there, done that, a hundred and one times.
A "takes place on the back of a titanic, pseudo-godly entity"? Hello there, A'tuin.
To combine the two, so that you have multiple titans in an ocean of clouds, each of which boasts their own thriving populations along the exterior and/or interior of the titan? Now we have something interesting.
Sure, the idea is nothing original, even by the standards of generic old D&D. 2e's Spelljammer had something exactly like this in the crystal sphere named Herdspace, where moon- or world-sized megafauna grazed across a solar-system-sized savanna. Spelljammer also had a gas giant called Alabeth, where people lived atop and inside massive, floating creatures called "holbags."
But it really took until Xenoblade and Xenoblade 2 (the latter more so) for me to visually grasp the majesty and exoticness of it all. Such a setup looks incredible when properly depicted, especially when looking upon the more identifiably creature-like parts of a titan in motion.
This could even be used for a more multiversal cosmology: the Plane of Fire as a conflagrant titan blazing across an Elemental Chaos would be rather rad, especially when it crosses near the leviathan that is the Plane of Water, boiling the sea and kicking up plumes of steam.
Do you have any plans of using a similar setup for a setting in the future?
It's been a good five years since I've seen the movie and I never have read the book, and I recalled that a good portion took place on the ground.
However, now that I think about it, you're right. I really need to rewatch it.
And in regards to the sensory stuff, you're right. The DM would have to be someone very good at painting a picture. I think using a soundtrack and using audio and visual cues correctly would help.
...
...
...