#Spelljammer 5e

[tanookijon]

Casual Anna Fireheart

Anna Fireheart doin' a pose,'nuff said.

[cryptixcreations]

2024 vs 2022

Bug bard finally shed his baby colors

[olgadrebas]

Fish Suit for going out into the Astral Sea, complete with its own light bulb and grappling hooks 🌌 fits every size, get yours today! #spelljammer #spelljammer5e #dndartwork #dndartist #dnd5e #dndcharacters #dndadventures #astralsea

[lockheartes]

new elf new elf new elf

[elbiotipo]

yeah I've met lots of people from there

[picturesofgrandma]

Ermily Freemoon, plasmoid artifcer. A former human that, through an alchemical mishap, got turned into an ooze

[terrafey]

all things considered, she’s taking the news that everyone in her life that’s been hurt or killed by mindflayers was directly because of their proximity to her quite well.

[funkwitz]

Couple of cowboy centaur sketches!

[honourablejester]

Spelljammer Campaign Concept

Since I’m space-ttrpg brained at the minute. One thing specific to spelljammer’s Astral Sea setting that I really wish they’d added more to is the idea that it’s full of dead gods. And live ones, yes, but it’s the gargantuan celestial corpses that I’m interested in. (Which sounds weird when I say it like that, but anyway). There’s a canonical city, the githyanki city of Tu’narath, built on one of these corpses, and apparently in older lore Red Wizards of Thay pulled an artefact that beat like a heart out of it. There’s an idea that some aspect of divinity or even life still resides in some of these vast remains, some spark of godhood that provides power and even some animation to a thing long dead. In whatever sense gods can die.

And. Look. That is a hell of a concept to just throw out there and dismiss in a single sentence and small sidebar in your new setting book. I’m mad about it. Anyway.

The Astral Sea is littered with the corpses of dead gods, strange and forgotten deities from thousands of worlds. Strange beings that have become strange places, islands in a silver vastness, sometimes still pulsing with the echoes of divine life and perhaps divine natures. Places big enough to build cities on. Or dungeons in. Big enough to explore. Searching for what?

So. Picture this campaign. A mysterious backer is approaching the crews of adventurous spelljammer vessels, sponsoring expeditions to strange places in the Astral Sea. Terrifying places in the Astral Sea. The remnants of what were once gods, and now are bizarre islands full of strange magic and the echoes of old divine domains. This backer is searching for something specific from these sites, these corpses, and, on top of actual payment, is willing to allow crews to keep anything else they find on these expeditions for themselves, provided they bring everything they find back and allow the backer to examine them and choose a single item for themselves. Upon receipt of this item, they will pay the crew what they owe, and allow them to keep the rest.

This is because it’s not an item they’re searching for, as such. It’s a shard. A shard of lost divinity. A fragment of celestial life, still throbbing at the hearts of vast corpses. The form it takes will be different every time. The form of the deity will be different every time, and so the seat of their last remaining fragment of divinity will be different also. It might look, and feel, like anything. But the backer will know it when they see it. And they’ll pay for it.

They’re not going to say this, of course. They’re not going to tell anyone what they’re looking for. But they’re sending crews out. Maybe they’ve been sending crews out for a while. No one ages in the Astral Sea, so maybe they’ve been on this quest for time without meaning. One shard isn’t enough. Not for their purposes. Many of them are so small and so faded, bare motes of potential after aeons of death. They don’t want a single fragment of divinity, this person, they need enough to make a whole one. A whole divinity. Necromancy of the rudest sort, a frankensteined apotheosis. If you eat the fractured souls of enough dead gods, sooner or later, won’t you become one yourself?

I’m picturing an eldritch lich, personally. One that’s been listening to whispers from the Far Realm for far too long. A puppetmaster being puppeted themselves, maybe. What forces in creation have an interest in the ascension of a frankensteined god? What would the results be of a god made of pieces, torn fragments, of so many lost and disparate and unwilling dead deities? Any and all deities. Good, evil, alien, of any and all domains, scavenged and consumed into a single, roiling whole. What sort of divinity would result from so traumatic a process? And what would that divinity then do?

But all that’s in the future. An endgame perhaps aeons or only a few remaining shards down the line. For the moment, what’s being asked is this:

Travel the Astral Sea. Find the body of a god. Venture into its depths. Bring me everything you find.

Now. I’m going to take objection to the description of the dead gods provided in Astral Adventurer’s Guide, and offer a different direction:

“The Astral Sea is also where one can find the petrified remains of gods who were slain by more powerful entities or who lost all their mortal worshipers and perished as a result. A dead god looks like a gigantic, nondescript stone statue that bears little resemblance to the divine entity it once was. Githyanki, mind flayers, psurlons, and other natives of the Astral Plane sometimes turn these drifting hulks into outposts and cities, many of which are hollowed out beneath the surface.”

A giant nondescript statue that looks nothing like the deity once did. No. Boring. Even Tu’narath still has six arms, so there’s some resemblance happening there. And besides. It’s just cooler, more fun, more interesting, if the dead gods do resemble what they once were. If they are influenced by what domains they once held. Because then … the universe is your oyster.

They’re all different. All these island corpses. These slain gods. This is the Astral Sea. These are the deities of a thousand worlds and a thousand species and a thousand forgotten realms. They might look like anything. Shaped by the echoes of the god’s nature and its domains and its species. The dead sea god that looks like a vast alien whale, whose gut is filled with strange waters and strange creatures, and into whose belly the party must venture. A forgotten deity of knowledge whose vast skull now contains a calcified, crystalline ‘library’ with aeons of knowledge written in light onto spun fibres of crystal. A deity of madness, darkness and despair whose corpse is a labyrinthine maze of passages that leech will and soul the further you venture into them, a lingering undead malice that doesn’t want you dead so much as maddened and undone. And your sponsor won’t care, so long as at least one of you makes it back, that shard of dark power clutched in your trembling fist.

Some of the bodies might still be guarded. Some of them might be inhabited, with cities and realms nested into their bones and calcified flesh. Some might be considerably more ‘alive’ than others. Some might be just stranger than others, deities so lost and far-flung and alien that nothing about even their inert remains makes sense. You have … an infinity of options here. Let your inner dungeon designer completely off the chain. These are the corpses of dead gods made physical, floating in an infinite silver sea of possibilities. There are no rules, not even physics. You could do literally anything you wanted here.

It'd make sense if the backer was sending crews to less well-known, and therefore perhaps stranger and more dangerous, corpses, just to be sure that no one had taken or destroyed what they’re looking for already. The more alive ones, more likely to still contain lingering power and divinity. So you have an excellent excuse to get weird up in here.

Basically, if you want a vast, eldritch, apocalyptic dungeon crawl, or series of dungeon crawls, in space, then the Astral Sea is very much the perfect setting. Although, yes, this is likely a high level campaign, unless you want to guide the party in with more accessible godly dungeons first. Even then it’s probably on the high side.

There’s also the shards themselves to consider. They’ll likely be potent magic items. You’re holding a piece of a god’s divinity in your hand. With powers probably themed to what the god would have been in life. Although they don’t necessarily need to be powerful. The divinity might be faded enough, shattered and torn by death, that it doesn’t do much externally anymore. Its power is intrinsic to what it is, not what it does. And maybe that makes more sense for how crews are willing to give them up afterwards, if they’re only mildly impressive amidst other loot.

Though that could be a thing. If it’s a magic item that you know for a fact your party will want to keep, and then that could bring them into conflict with their ‘backer’ before they ever maybe twig to the greater issue going on.

And there is a question of how and if they do twig to that. How would they find out the goals here. Are there other interested parties who’ve figured out what our backer is trying for? Or simply parties who are aware that they have been desecrating dead gods and who object on purely moral and philosophical grounds? How has society in the Astral Sea evolved around the fact that there are dead gods just drifting around?

How do living gods, deities with living dominions in the Sea, deal with the idea that there is a creature going around looting the corpses of their deceased forebearers? Grave-robbing in the Astral Sea can potentially be a couple of orders of magnitude more apocalyptic than the terrestrial equivalent normally manages, and I do love that.

(Or maybe it’s not apocalyptic. Maybe there’s nothing left in the dead gods that could actually make a new one, no matter how many you eat, and those few deities who are aware of our backer’s quest, deities of knowledge, perhaps, just look at them with pity for this obsession, delusion, of theirs. They don’t want them stopped because of the danger, but just because of the disrespect, the desecration. That, and the fact that eating bits of dead gods, while it might not make you a god yourself, still won’t do anything good to you, and perhaps there is a certain amount of not goodness happening that does need to be dealt with. Dealer’s choice.

Or perhaps the gods think that, and they’re wrong, and now you have to convince incredible all-powerful entities that there is a genuine threat there, whether they believe it or not)

I just. You can’t just put that out there, that this setting you’re casually sailing around is full of dead gods, and not … do something with it. Expand on it. Play with the implications of it. The Astral Sea is a vast, infinite celestial graveyard, and the remains of dead gods are locations you can interact with. That is a concept, and you can have a bit more fun with it than ‘nondescript statue asteroids that people can build on’ over here. Lingering echoes of what those deities once were, fragments of divinity, the sheer magical and theological potential of being able to grave-rob a dead god. Come on. You have divine corpses, in a setting where necromancy exists. Somebody’s gonna do something apocalyptic with the implications of that, you just know they are.

And in the process, you can get some really cool and weird dungeons to explore. Heh.

Spelljammer has such potential as a setting. The Astral Sea allows so many possibilities. How do you open with ‘you are sailing through a setting where you can make port at a god’s house or at a rock that is a dead god’ and just … park that there and leave it? Good god. Good gods. And bad ones, and weird ones, and completely inexplicable ones too.

I’m not sure Wizards quite understood how much they jumped the scale by bringing spelljammer back and putting it in the Astral Sea. So many settings have archmages and other people spend so many resources to try and reach the realms of gods, and in spelljammer you and your dinky ship can just sail up and knock on their door. Maybe not get in, but you can totally just heave up to any deity who has a Dominion in the Sea and at least knock. You can put your smuggler’s cache in a dead god’s skull. The deities are now, in this setting, significantly more interactable. If you want to try and necromancy a god’s corpse, that is a thing you can attempt.

Which is probably why they tried to tone it down with the whole ‘nondescript statues’ thing, that dead gods in the Sea are just rocks that people build on/in, but … Honestly? It’s still a dead god. You can’t undo the raw scale of that. And maybe you shouldn’t, either.

Nah. Play into the bonkers scale and setting implications of a potentially infinite number of god corpses just littered around the place, with the astral floating kingdoms and vacation homes of living gods keeping them company, and you in your dinky little boat sailing cheerfully out among them. Because that’s amazing, it really is.

Anyway. Have fun. Moving swiftly on.

[silvercompassmaps]

The Cloudsplitter, an airship that can separate into four smaller ships!

The Cloudsplitter sails far above the clouds, a unique airship created by gnomish engineers. This ship is able to separate at will, splitting into four smaller ships.

This provides the ship with another level of utility, and allows the ship to better maneuver during combat, scout in different directions, or escape when attacked.

Thank you to my Patrons who suggested this cool concept. The idea of smaller ships being able to combine into one larger ship instantly lit a lightbulb in my head, and I had to make it!

These maps come with day/night versions, water & space variants, and tokens to give you full flexibility with how you want to use this ship.

You can download all 4 maps for free here.

Check out my map archive here.

[izzybdoodles]

Very excited to start spelljammers soon! Got my cleric girl locked and loaded o7

[tanookijon]

Spelljammer: Breaking the Curse

A movie poster type drawing of Anna Fireheart walking down the streets of Mordent, ever closer to finding out the truth of her family…

[dailyadventureprompts]

Planescape: Acheron, the Ironshod Realm

There is no method to this madness

A surreal landscape of infinite conflict and meaningless strife, the calamitous void of Acheron is one of the multiverse’s foremost hells, a realm wallowed in apocalyptic war that has never known peace. 

One could almost describe the geography of Acheron as an asteroid field, save that the asteroids were infact massive iron cubes which hurled through the smokefilled void, ricocheting off one another like billiards across some mad titan’s table.  Some cubes were as broad across as a single buildings, while others were as large as mountains, or even continents,  with each cubes faces boasting a patchwork of ruins and jagged rents, or simply wastelands pounded flat by previous collisions. 

Nothing good survives on acheron. Multiversal warlords salvage and strip mine the place for their foundries and invariably get caught up in territorial wars with locals or each other, establishing outposts and fortresses of millennia old battlefields. Damned souls run rampant here, collected by spirits of cruelty and bloodlust who marshal them into ramshackle battalions and raiding parties and set them against each other than for no other reason than to feed off the conflict. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Looking to empower a king who’s driving his realm to ruin, Lord Asmodeus has gifted the tyrant with a set of chess pieces forged from Acheron Iron. When placed on a map, the pieces will cause a manifestation of fiendish spirits in the corresponding area, giving the king hellish agents he can redeploy at will. After the third time fighting the same demonic knight, the party gets it into their heads to sneak into the fortress where the chess-set is being kept and destroy the damned thing... now if only they could figure out its hidden location. 

One of the most predominant species to inhabit the ironshod realm are the so-called “Bladelings” a xenophobic people with metallic flesh who fled to acheron after their own homeland was consumed in a plague of rust. Mistrustful to the point of not sharing their language, or even their own name with outsiders, they sharpen their edges into natural spikes and razors so as to harm any that would come too close. The bladelings have the unique talent of transforming the smaller cubes of acheron into spelljamming ships, so players are most likely to encounter them and their floating fortress-homes acting as pirates, slavers, or mercenaries out in wildspace.

Having surviving the horrors of war as a young child, the artist Disaldi of Harrowheath has made a name for herself painting abstract masterpieces that chillingly convey the nameless terrors all to familiar to those who have seen such strife first hand. For decades her work helped her process her trauma, but in recent months her dreams have been more and more, troubled forcing her into isolation as she attempts to work the nightmares out of her system, concerning her friends and patrons.  In truth Disaldi has been touched by the psychic emanations of an extraplanear doomsday weapon, a thing long-dying in the forgotten battlepits of Acheron which now seeks to use its connection with the painter to open a portal to the material plane.

[homebrewbydek]

I did the Technology Cleric with Spelljammer in mind, because I was so excited for those books.

Man, but did they suck.

Still, I ended up really liking the subclass, and it spurred some other modern cleric ideas. I also really enjoyed designing the Servitor. This class took a lot of inspiration from WH 40k, if I'm honest, and I thought it would be good fun.

As always, you can read the homebrewery for it here or view my other subclasses and other homebrew things on my pinned. If anyone plays this, I'd love to see what you make of it if you end up using it.

Stay fresh, cheesebags!

[ossuarywarden]

Seras (they/them), our Spelljammer campaign's god of love and devotion.

aka the og god that carrie is a reincarnated fragment of

a more polished sketch of what I think they look like. here's the first attempt

more design notes under the cut

i wanted them to look grander and more imposing compared to the og sketch so i decided to make them fatter and gave the gown/tentacles more bulk and im p happy with their build now

my dm described seras to have skeletal features (which transferred over to the other fragments borne out of them) so i mixed and matched parts from noirak and carrie's supposed final form. i kept noirak's jagged jaw bc and carrie's skeletal arm/s bc i like the contrast. a gentle god taking care of people with monstrous hands and singing you soothing lullabies with a scary visage

also thought of giving it transparent skin esp around the chest bc they quite literally bear their heart to the universe

and a black hole for a halo bc love can be all-consuming and whatnot

other notes copy-pasted from the post with the og sketch so all the design notes on seras are in one place lol

i like the idea that they were so endeared by the mortal concept of marriage that they adopted a "wedding gown" kind of look. the gown isnt a separate outfit its like. translucent rainbow-y fins protruding from their body. looking at them is supposed to feel like staring directly at the sun but the sunlight is also scattered into rainbows. thought that made sense because they're also the parent of our campaign's goddess of light. also yknow. love as a beacon of hope and warmth but also an intense blinding searing force.

[borroweddice]

Wild Space ✨