And so another little tale of mine has been posted. This one is a curious mishmash of ideas and as is my wont, I will be putting this little chapter in to tell you where I got them. Having been a professional writer in my past, I pass on these sorts of things to those future writers who stumble into my little forays and wonder how I do it. If someone is inspired to do something because of what I write here, well, I might not ever know it but still...

Back in the 1980's SPI put out a science fiction role playing game which was titled Universe. It included, among many things, a full three dimensional map of the Milky Way within thirty light years of earth, giving the GM dozens of systems to work in. Likewise, there was a set of tables which enabled the GM to generate the planets which could be found in such a system, based on the type of star. Thus I spent hundreds of hours hand making planets with which to populate my stellar expanse which I called The Imperium Principali. And being the pack rat that I am regarding gaming materials, I kept all that paper work safe in three ring binders for years. And just last year, it appeared that it would remain just that, reams of papers that would be sorted through upon my future death and consigned, no doubt, to the furnace.

Then my son in law challenged me to come up with a campaign that would take place in the Spell Jammer Universe. There was just one problem. I've developed a meh attitude about the DnD multiverse. But! I had hundreds of hours of lore and maps in those eight inches of three ringed binders and what was Spell Jammer, but magical sailing ships flying from planet to planet? With all those planets filled with various nationalities, all I had to do was come up with a reason why those planets were not filled with just human Irish, or Chinese, or Polynesians, or Brazilians, or even (God Forbid) Americans, but also elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc. And let's face it, while a Japanese Anime girl is cute, a Japanese Anime Halfling girl is even cuter. And if I continue this series, you'll meet a pair of them, twins to be exact.

Thus the dire comet. Now this is not original by a long shot. The You've Got To Be Kitten Me comic has a mysterious comet sail by the earth and turn all the cats into people. Mine turned people into Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Gnomes, etc. And taking my cue from Bethesda's Starfield, I killed the earth. Granted Bethesda had the magnetic poles collapse. I merely had the dire comet poison everything. The results were the same. The earth began to die, and humanity sailed out into the universe with Spell Jammer ships which are known as Fuscers. Fuscer itself comes from a really cute girl I knew back in my misspent youth. That was her last name you see. In the original Imperium, there was the gyroscope which the Navigator adjusted psionically to enable the ship to jump from star to star. Back then it was psionics. Now it's magic. But it's the same thing. DnD 3rd edition had an entire psionic college for character creation as well as monsters. Those creatures and monsters are still in 5th ed. but the old psionic rules have been rewritten a bit. Either way, the navigator still makes the Spell Jammer jump from one system to another. The chief differences is that instead of sailing through the Astral Sea from prime material plane to prime material, the ship merely 'shifts' to the new solar system.

Thus, I was able to pretty much keep everything intact from my ancient sci fi universe now repurposed to DnD. And so I have a wonkin' big universe to play characters in and can do this for A Very Long Time if I so choose. I dumped so many hours of my lifespan into making planets and lore, there is simply no way any player group will be able to explore the whole thing.

However in the campaign I began to run into a snag. I'm not a college dude any longer and neither are my players. We all have real life issues and while officially the campaign contains six players, I average three. Thus I could not turn the real life players into their DnD persona's and simply novelize their running through the campaign. But at the same time, they did lend much to the color of the story. Two women who in real life practically do everything together rolled up a drow and tiefling respectively, hence Maia and Toffee. Now those two women, no doubt flattered that they inspired those two characters, are hopefully not disappointed that personalities by which they role play those two women are not portrayed in the story. For I pretty much concluded I would have to gen up four characters to tell the story with, and as I'm a DnD traditionalist, I had, as expected, a traditional and balanced team of four; Fighter, Cleric, Thief, and Wizard. First and Second Ed players will know what I'm talking about. So you have Aiden, Paddy, Maia, and Toffee.

This isn't to say that the players have not set the pace for some of the story telling. I planned to have the Brown Boas slither into the cooler car so that the team would have to be careful (e.g. roll at a disadvantage on occasion) to not break open cartons of eggs whcn fighting the snakes. But one of the guys (who's playing a Thri-Kreen) got up on the top of the train to intercept the snakes before they could get to the cooler car. So that ended up in the story.

The next thing I figured out was the time frame. DnD has stats for guns and the entire Spell Jammer vibe is that of the age of exploration, a sort of Pirates Of the Caribbean on steroids. So you have to have pirates. The Imperium had pirates too. So far so good. But the Imperium also had ray guns and that was not going to fit. But the Age of Exploration, e.g. the seventeenth through nineteenth century had gun powder and I could work with that. So you have flintlocks and cannon and there's these gnomish high tech guns which are called percussion which can fire six shots before reloading. It's all black powder and unless you have a percussion revolver rifle or pistol, you're going to get one shot off before you move on to more traditional DnD methods of sword and shield. Of course one of the marks of the rise of gunpowder in real history was to make the shield an obsolete bit of armor but we're not going to worry about that because this is DnD.

But I also wanted to keep all the nations which I had used to populate the Imperium back in the day. And as Promethius had always been a bit of a western frontier planet due to the fact that it was settled by Americans. I couldn't put the death of earth prior to the declaration of independance. So I set 1825 as the cut off date. That left me with plenty of modern national groups. So the planet of Circe could still have the Amharic, which are an Ethiopian group. Likewise as many of the First Nations were still politically viable at this time, the planet of Tezcatlipoca not only could have the Aztecs, but likewise the Sioux and Cherokee. Of course in the story Bridget has the Irish and Hermes has the Danish, but if this continues as a series, those planets will show up as vistas for adventure.

But 1825 gave me another option; steam power.

The Japanese have never been afraid to mix technology and magic in their games and stories and so I took my lead from them. Thus you have steam power which can run a railroad and steam boat. And it should come as no surprise that magic will slow down the development of technology since magic can often take much of the drive to improve certain things (say central heating and lighting) and turn it down more than a few notches. Why work for thousands of hours trying to invent a light bulb when you can have thousands of magical glow orbs hovering along the top of the ceiling for the same amount of time and labor? There are more than a few arguments which could be leveled against this but as it is DnD... not to mention my world... I can choose to have a world set in the very early ninetheenth century for the proceeding five centuries in spite of the fact that human technology should have gotten them to computers and internal combustion engines.

But it also helps that having sci fi rp games gives you some insights into the overall make up of the universe. And Astronomy has advanced considerably over the past fifty years. When I was a kid, we had no fly by photos of Jupiter, let along Pluto. We had no data delivered from the Keiper Belt. Likewise the Hubble Space Telescope was not around to give us even more information, not to mention the discovery of more than a few planets in other systems. Probes have landed on comets and we've seen the little geysers which spout from their surface leaving the tail behind them. With all this new information, colored with the poetry of creative writing I've been able to use that information to add to the story. The swirling clouds of Enceladus for example, are taken straight from the photos of the various probes that flew by Jupiter. Enceladus you see, is also a gas giant. And that's not the only scientific information about a gas giant I retell in a poetic fashion on this story. Thus this dry astronomical information which tends to ho hum most people can, with a bit of creative writing, lend itself to the vastness and mystery of a Spell Jammer world. The Mare is a take off on the french word for ocean. Because for a space faring society space itself is the new ocean. And while I've not been on a space ship, I have been on a sailing ship in the Atlantic during gale force winds. And by the time I got to experience those gale force winds, I knew enough about handling a ship that size that the entire thing was simply a new and exciting challenge. Other crew members were terrified, but I took another shift at the wheel because I wanted to say I could take those twenty foot waves.

And I did.

The story itself hints at a much larger world that these characters are in. And I leave a lot of unanswered questions. That was deliberate. In part because the entire thing would have turned into a very dry and academic lecture if I had. You are given hints as to the government, it's power and limits, but you are not given a full layout. You know there are more stars out there that have humanity (might as well use that word, otherwise we'd have humanelvendwarvenhalflinggnomishorcshthriality) on them. There is a reference to The Seven Hundred Planets for example which tells you that this is a pretty expansive place. But you were only on one of them and even then, there was just a small section.

Now the final question is this, will I write the 'next chapter'? Well that depends. And by depends I don't mean the usual fan fic "Review or I won't write again ever!" sort. It really boils down to my time and drive. I've got several writing projects going on at the moment and this was a brief forway into the fun and frivolity sort of writing.

If I don't giggle at my own jokes, I don't write them. J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the group that hung out with them in that pub in Oxford, set their projects up to write books which they wanted to read. I do the same thing. If I don't enjoy it, I won't write it. And if folks say "I cried at the ending this was so wonderful!" I get a little smile. But if I get a "Meh, can't get exited about this..." well to each his own. And for the record, I've gotten both types of reviews for my most reviewed works. There's no accounting for taste. I never know where my next set of fans will come from and so maybe yes, maybe no. Until then?

This from Jack.