DnD 4e Spelljammer - SlaveShip (1.01 An Idea Is Born)

I'm starting a new campaign for my DnD 4th Edition gaming group, and it's going to be a Spelljammer campaign. Since there are no official rules for Spelljamming in 4th edition I'm just making them up based on the 2nd edition/3rd edition rules. Much of the information is from the box set I have, as well as the spelljammer.org website.

I've always loved the Spelljammer campaign, as you can use every campaign setting without it feeling hokey. However, the primary event that got me interested in doing it was a 3D paper ship model I found from World Works Games.

Once I bought the plans for it I knew it was going to take a lot of time to build, and I didn't want to just use the ship for a one-time adventure. So I thought, how about if I use the ship as their base of operations and have the PC's go to different ports for each adventure, kind of like the original Star Trek. They could also have pirate encounters or even become pirate hunters, like Captain Deudermont in the books from R.A. Salvatore.

I started building the ship, and at the same time was playing in my friend Stu's adventure, which is located in a campaign called Westron he started, and where we have been playing in for over 30 years. We have 5 different DM's, all of which have been given permission to run adventures in various parts of the world, with consultation from Stu. The world of Westron is fairly traditional D&D, more akin to Forgotten Realms than anyplace else, and fairly vanilla, considering we've been playing in it for so long. 

The more I thought about it the more I didn't want to just visit ports where I was restricted by the previous stories told there, or the existing government, laws, NPC's, etc.  It didn't take me long to decide to shift my idea to a Spelljammer setting. I've always loved the setting, but only used one hammership in our campaign. We never used it to travel to different spheres or even different planets in the same Crystal Sphere. So, I had to figure out how to get the players engaged enough to want to move away from Westron and get them interested in Spelljamming, which was fairly new to almost all of them. 

Continued in the next Blog..... 

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