#weirdjamming

each species has its own home system/crystal sphere. they also have control of most of the spheres in an area around them. the further out from their territory the more likely they are to share a sphere with a nearby species. so there's a homesphere for elves, for dwarves, orcs, and halflings but where the territory overlaps you'd start getting crossbreeds.

so like an elf and a dwarf would be something like a Mul from dark sun. an elf and orc would be like a combo of a typical half-elf and half-orc, something like a wild elf or a voldur. and elf and a halfling would be like a wood elf, making the "regular" elves something like a high elf. a halfling and a dwarf would be a gnome while a halfling and an orc would be a goblin. not sure what a dwarf and an orc would be but google comes back with something called a dareog. and then when you mix all of them together you get a "mutt" called a Human.

so in this case Common isn't the human language because of imperialism bullshit but because its the trade language all the other groups share and when you're lineage is super mixed its more likely your parents had different languages and thus spoke a common one while you were growing up. it would also finally explain why humans are in that whole "jack of all trades, master of none" thing when it comes to stats and abilities.

not sure what to do with the drow though. like i don't want any "pure evil" races. like sure they won't all get along but no need to be all scapegoaty either. prolly make the dark elves part of the "high elf" group. so it'd be dark elves, sun elves, and moon elves as the "original" elves. maybe in their home sytem they've got three habitable worlds. one in the warm end of the goldilocks zone, one in the middle, and one in the cool end of the zone. so you'd have the dark elves in the warm end, the sun elves in the middle, the moon elves off by elf pluto.

the dark elves wouldn't be as sun-adverse as they normally are but hey their whole schtick was fucked up from the start. besides i like the elder scrolls version of dark elves better. still assholes but not inherently bad.

also not sure what to do with the "beast" races either. like where do dragonborn come in? are the dragons a spacefaring race too? would that make dragonborn part of the human category? or are they something else?

similar problem with tieflings, aasimar, and genasi.

ship designs:

i get the squid ships because there are mindflayers

i get the spider ships because there are space spiders

i even kind of get the elves = plant-based butterfly ships thing

but why do so many of the ships either come in ye olde watership style or random bug style?

like where are the dirigibles? where are the geometric shapes? where are the modernish spaceship and airplane designs? where are the birds?

WHY DON’T THE ELVES PILOT GIANT LIVING TREES A LA TENCHI MUYO?

like actual giant trees not giant plants in the shape of bugs?

we got lots of sealife inspired stuff, and lots of bug inspired stuff, why not other clades of animals? why not birds and terrestrial animals? why not reptiles?

WHY ARE THERE NO MERMAIDS IN SPACE?

ITS A MAGIC SETTING, YOU COULD TOTALLY BRING UP A SMALL OCEAN OR LAKE UP THERE WITH YOU!

worlds:

instead of having a new way to connect old settings, why not a whole new setting?

why not do some kind of elven space empire and dwarven homeworld and stuff like that?

you could make these places new and fresh and not have to have some kind of arbitrary separation between the culture on the surface of worlds and the culture in space

its getting to the point where its less Spelljammer With Extra Bits and more...something else

like im not just stripping it down to bare bones and laying new flesh over it

im stripping it down to bare bones, replacing some of the bones with other bones, then laying new flesh over it i’ve scavenged from elsewhere

at that point its less a zombie and more a frankenstein’s monster :/

*edit* like im still figuring out how i want to handle magic, psionics, and gods

and all of that is kind of intrinsic to the feel of d&d but also kind of frustrating for me, so i’m liable to change it up

but when i do that im also fundamentally changing the overall thing

its not “inspired by spelljammer” its “inspired by spelljammer among these 20 other things”

already knew about eberron and forgotten realms

didn’t know so much about some of the others

after learning more i think my ideal setting would be:

spelljammer space travel

planescape general weirdness

eberron warforged

so this is a quick doodle of what ive got in mind for weird-jammer cosmology

the Great Wheel has become the ring you see between Mechanus, Elysium, Limbo, and the Gray Wastes. Tieflings and Aasimar have parents that come from here.

perpendicular to that are thick disks (seen on their sides above) in three layers:

the bottom is the Elemental planes where elemental spheres and dragons lie. the origins of Genasi and Dragonborn

the middle is the Mortal planes where the spheres of Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Halflings lie. hybrids such as Humans live here.

the top is...undecided

where the Great Wheel meets the Elemental planes lies Limbo in all its elemental chaos

where the wheel meets the Mortal planes you find the Gray Wastes on one end, Elysium on the other, and Sigil within the Outlands in the center of it all

where the wheel meets the ??? planes you’ll find Mechanus

my problem is what to put in that ??? plane

do i put the far realms themselves there or have them hovering above in a plane of their own only tenuously connected via Mechanus?

do i put the True Gods there, keep them within the Great Wheel as normal, or have them dwell within the Outlands at the Heart of the Know Universe like something out of k6bd?

do i put the beast races there? stuff like neogi and illithids and lizardmen and naga and such? or do i tie them to the feywild or nearby parts of the Great Wheel and keep the illithids and other “aberrations” separate?

so i got what i wanna do with the “normal” races figured out but im still not sure about the “outsiders.” 

do i want to keep the planes as a separate thing or find a way to mix them into the crystal spheres thing?

do i want to combine the two and have like sub-space and super-space type of thing going on?

do i want to just have the outlands and associated outer planes a different “loop” of the philostawhatever?

where are the illithids gonna come into play? they’re too cool to leave out

no matter what i decide i’ll definitely be keeping tiefling, aasimar, genasi, and dragonborn in the mix. but the way i’m doing the “races” is gonna change some things.

im thinking instead of bonus feats or other stuff for humans, they’d get like a pick-2 option and a list of lesser versions of the bonuses the other races get. so you’d be able to cover the most recent lineage OR the most present lineage in a  human. so like if you’re a generic mutt but your mom was an elf you’d be a little more noticeably elf-like than a typical human. but if your whole family was fond of elves even though your last several generations were all human you’d prolly still have more elf traits than a typical human but not quite so distinct. functionally both people would be the same. i figure that way you could handle someone having an elf mother and an orc grandfather without getting into semidemiquasi races.

so if im already doing stuff like that with the “normal” races i’d make the whole planetouched thing even easier. instead of them being a mix of human and something else they’d just be a mix of any of the normal races and that same something else. you’d get like the planetouched version of “human” that way.

as for the planes im thinking something like a separate ring of spheres in a slightly different parallel space. so the elemental planes would be one ring in a subspace and the outland planes would be another ring in superspace. so the elementals could all breed with each other, the demons/devas could all breed with each other, and both could breed with the human set but maybe not with each other.

that way they function as both regular planes like in the normal d&d settings AND as their own crystal sphere spelljammer stuff, which solves most of my problems with it.

still need to figure out illithids and such. maybe they can be from the far realms and its another weird space plane? or just really far out ring of spheres?

if im taking the inner and outer planes as separate layers of spelljammer space then there’s a pattern already emerging. the elemental planes as spheres would make for 4 groups that intermingle to make more elements, the “human” spheres would be at least 4 groups with greater subgroup variety that intermingle, and then the outer planes as spheres would give us something like 16 different main worlds with various mixes.

so its like the further “up” in space layers the more complex things get

so im thinking stuff like the positive and negative planes could be a layer below the elemental in a kind of chaotic swirling state, and the far realms would be above the outer planes where shit gets REALLY weird.

wondering if that would make the etherial and astral planes something like the philostiwhatever stuff.

either way it’d turn the Great Wheel cosmology into more like a pillar that gets bigger the higher up you go.

not sure what i want to do with the gods in that case. like would they just be super big and powerful outer planes people or something entirely removed? what if they were starbeasts? what if part of the outerplanes kind of wrapped around to the elemental stuff?

like i could imagine Limbo being super linked to elemental chaos. and it might be possible for places like elysium and gray wastes to be more closely linked to the “human” layer of space kind of like the feywild and shadowfell. or even having those two be the connection points between the similar outer planes and material plane.

but that would make nirvana/mechanus closest to the far realms which is...weird :/

and i realized they prolly meant the original star trek

but what if later star trek?

what if we threw in some different space settings? some more modern ones too?

like what if there was some star wars elements thrown in? what if some space anime elements?

like, hell, the helms themselves could come in a lot more forms and add to the setting that way. change up the ship themes and you’ll get more cool shit. change the power sources and you’ll get some cool shit too.

and i get part of that was the age of the original setting, and part was the balancing act of “is there too much scifi in my fantasy?” but when your group includes an elf, a tiefling, and a dragonborn, and you’re off fighting a space dragon i think you’ve got the fantasy bit covered pretty damn well, even if there are more scifi elements in there too