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The US economy genuinely might collapse within a week. lol

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Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door: Midcentury style

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POLILOP (POLIWHIRL + GIRAFARIG)

Each hand has its own brain with a distinct personality. It performs manzai comedy routines to disarm its foes.

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You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the company store

original midi at http://www.acroche2.com/mid_h/Sixteen-Tons.mid

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Some thoughts for a D&D Spelljammer setting I'll probably never get around to actually write:

Spelljamming ships should be a revolution in transport and not only for fantasy space, they're basically flying ships, they could transport things from one end of a planet to another. Worlds that know spelljamming must be very different than those that don't.

What's the limitation here, then? Spelljammers themselves, that is, the guys who pilot the ships. They need to be magic users and you would need at least 2, preferably more, for shifts. That means you need to have mages that could be doing other useful magic stuff piloting a ship.

There's also the cost and skill required to make spelljamming helms. 5000 GPs in materials and level 5 spell apparently. Now, gold and levels in D&D don't mean much to me, so for the purposes of this scenario, I will assume making a spelljamming ship is costly and needs a lot of skill regardless of the actual numbers involved. So you don't have ships flying around the skies of every world, just a few have both the "human resources" (that is, trained mages) and material resources (I assume the spells and components are expensive and rare) to make spelljamming helms and crew ships.

Do we have equivalents of this in the real world? Yes, actually! The entire aircraft industry! Airliners, which are among the most complex machines produced in mass, are basically built only by Boeing, Airbus, and recently Comac on China (there used to be more) and pilots aren't easy to train either. There might be few worlds with the concentrated *productive forces* to build spelljammer helms in "serial" production, outside of some crazy wizard in a tower.

In fact, this is a bit besides the point but in general, the world(s) of D&D are pre-industrial, and this makes sense as for complex tasks you wouldn't really think of using a machine to do it, you seek a magic user who can do it instead. They are very jealous of their trade secrets too. We are looking at a kind of Renaissance economy in a large scale then, with guilds and church(es) and other institutions for "artisanal" complex goods instead of industries. Fantasy settings have always been strange about the demographics of mage users, but I think knowing the role of monasteries, alchemists, etc. during the real-life Renaissance helps you get closer to the dynamics.

Returning to the ships, I think spelljammer ships (or helms) might be hard to make but very hardy, long-lasting and easy to pilot, sort of like DC-3s that were built before WWII and are still used in Colombia. So that fits with the adventurer idea of getting an old ship and going into the stars. And maybe there is a surplus of them in some worlds that used to have large navies (like post-WWII surplus of airplanes and ships).

In Spelljammer you can stick a spelljamming helm on anything and make it fly, even seagoing ships (which are preferred for many reasons) but the true spelljamming ships like the Hammerhead Ship, the Squid Ship, etc. have strange shapes. I will say that those are not just decorative (because that's frankly a bit silly) but actually designed for better navigation through the currents of the Phlogiston or Astral Sea.

The 5e rules of spelljamming navigation basically say that ships go into the Astral Sea and then the spelljammer at the helm just thinks where to go and flies "100 million miles in 24 hours", that's it, just think about it and you're wherever you want, or, if you're not in a ship, you can just fly through the astral sea and, I quote "The more intelligent a creature is, the faster it can move." Which is frankly too stupid for words. I'm actually kind of angry at how stupid it is.

I'm completely ditching the 5e Astral Sea with its whole spiritual thing (to me that's a completely different thing) and making it a material plane of phlogiston (or aether, that sounds better) where the crystal spheres float. They aren't fixed, they move and flow with the stellar currents, but you CAN navigate them if you're attuned to them, you can use navigation equipment to find particular spheres and you can use your sails to get more favorable currents, this is a skill you have to learn and can cut travel times or let you find some things in space.

Doesn't that sound much better than "you just think and you're there xdxddxddxdxd"?

So how fast then? I think we'll just play it safe and see the top speed of sailing ships on the real world. Clippers, the fastest sail ships before steam ships, took roughly 100 days to cross the Pacific. The usual before was about 4-6 months. It depends on how big your setting is, but I think that's a good estimate to go to "the other side of the world" as one would say. And it of course would depend on how well known the routes are. It could be that you simply CAN'T fly to other spheres without doing extensive navigation first.

So instead of having 10 to 100 days at random to go somewhere (like in the original Spelljammer) or the somehow even stupider rules of 5e, you would have a map of well navigated, average, poorly known, and completely unknown spelljamming routes. Every time you got farther away from the well-known routes, navigation becomes more dangerous and travel more slow. You need (both in game terms and in setting terms) to have good navigation skills to get anywhere fast and safe.

You could have crystal spheres grouped in "constellations" (in my setting I do) that are easier to navigate inside, where the currents are known. This is also useful for worldbuilding "regions" in fantasy space that share cultural traits.

There must be all sorts of magical and non-magical navigation means, especially for landing on planets. Magical lighthouses, compasses, communication (a kind of morse code that can be communicated by lights, when magical communication isn't an option). I would think that for convenience, since planets are so big, spelljammers might sort of memorize the land of the main port and not bother with the rest. It might be that in an entire world, only one or two ports are truly visited by spelljammers. This also means that it would be very easy to set up a new base somewhere, even in well-travelled worlds.

What about power projection and star empires? We can read about colonial empires and age of sail trade to get a hint here. Empires where you rule by posting armies in every planet are very unlikely, since we established spelljammers are kind of expensive to make. Imagine invading and controlling, say, Earth in the 1600s with a dozen ships.

But imperialism where an external power controls key trade routes and ports, economically controlling a world, is very possible. This control means that those worlds must be integrated into the *galactic* economy somehow, as a large world can be self-sustaining, but its connections to the greater galaxy can be controlled. So, an imperialist power might succeed into controlling the economy of a world by controlling its trade centers and politics, without needing large armies or simply enlisting local collaborators. In fact, many might not be even aware they belong to a interstellar empire in their maps. On the other hand, *more* *voluntary* associations similar to the Hansa or Greek leagues might arise.

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Another slow shift and i was feeling like drawing armour so i drew a bunch of Metroid fanart.

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streaming more rusty lake with @citadelofswords!

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so i wrote another ttrpg

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comm for @moonshotpods !!

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You are not immune to werewolf dog boy

ID: a pencil sketch on a white page of a werewolf Rendog grinning at the camera and doing a finger gun with his right paw, his left resting on his hip. He has on a collared shirt that's open to expose some of his chest and suspenders. There's some anime sparkles near his face and a floating cartoony crown above his head. he has square sunglasses on]

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Posting it separate, but I've got 8k words written for a Shoka/Al Reapers Game AU!

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new one