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Campaign Setting: Sky Pirates


Steve

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A pulpish campaign setting primarily inspired by elements of Spelljammer, 7th Sea, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Firefly and the online RPG Pirates101.

 

Set within a crystalline sphere of cyclopean immensity, a myriad of islands large and small somehow float within a sea of air. The largest of them are as sizable as Earth countries such as France or Japan, and only some are populated by humans.

 

The only means of traveling between these islands are skyships, vessels capable of floating and powered by special sails that capture sunlight and convert that energy into motive power.

 

It is an Age of Sail, set after the conclusion of a horrific war that broke the backs of the largest nations, allowing a Golden Age of Piracy to bloom. Privateers and corsairs ply their trade on the shipping lanes, hiding their captured booty on out of the way islands they use for their bases.

 

In addition to humans, other sorts of beings share the Skyways with mankind, but one deserves special mention. The Clockworks are machine men, their faces pallid masks with features that do not move. The Clockwork Armada attempted to conquer the Skyways, but they were halted by a combination of other nations.

 

In addition to swords, blasters are the weapons of choice for most. A relic of Ancient Tech, the most common sidearm is capable of six shots from its radium core before needing to be reloaded. Rifles burn through a radium core in two to three shots.

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The distant sun lights the entire sphere, but the day/night cycle is maintained by a half-sphere of unknown material that rotates around it, blocking off Its light for the hours of night. During such times, skyships are often becalmed, their solar sails, another relic of Ancient Tech, lacking the energy to move a vessel. The most modern vessels carry battery packs within their holds that can provide motive power to the keel of a skyship. Some sail designs are even able to use the cold light of the jeweled stars on the inner surface of the crystal sphere that contains this system.

 

No one knows how this world came to be, or why so many races of different origins share it. Some scholars suspect the Ancients created it as a form of menagerie of sentient beings.

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Another race seen on the Skyways almost as commonly as humans are the Eldren, as their once-proud fleet of ships helped carry the day against the Clockwork Armada. As tall as humans and as fast and graceful as a Clockwork, an Eldren is built more lithely than men, carrying a fae beauty about them in their facial features and pointed ears.

 

They are among the finest of duelists with a sword, passing down their skills from master to apprentice. Whispers of them having otherworldly powers are varied as to what those powers are. Telepathy? Magic? Pacts with demons from beyond the crystal sphere?

 

There are some who even wonder if they are the remnants of the fabled Ancients who brought the various races here from other worlds.

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The ship designs are inspired by the "Treasure Planet" film by Disney. I just loved the look of the sails billowing out and lighting up when they were unfurled.

 

The Ancients (working title for them) left various relics that have since been duplicated: Skyships and radium-powered blaster weapons (since I like the idea of sixguns and swordplay) being the two most widespread. Radium is a luminescent mineral mined on certain islands.

 

Falling off an island or a ship means a slow death by starvation and thirst as the body falls "down" (outwards towards the crystal sphere). As one gets farther from the sun, it gets colder. Arctic condition islands are farther out and jungle/desert ones are closer in. There are also predators that fly through the aerial seas. Sky sharks are a possibility.

 

It is possible to fly inwards towards the sun, but it gets progressively hotter as one does so. Outwards towards the crystal sphere it gets colder. Stories are told of frozen ships found adrift, heading in-system on a trace of power.

 

The outer island worlds are also rumored to have horrors hidden, either enemies of the Ancients or degenerate remnants of the Ancients.

 

The islands have their surface facing towards the sun, falling into night every twelve hours. It is a clockwork cosmos, and no one understands what holds the islands in place, keeping them from drifting.

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I'm planning to pick and choose humanoid alien races that would be interesting to have in such an Age of Sail setting. Some of the races in the galaxy of the Hero Universe would make for neat additions, fitted into a 16th-17th century Earth-like culture.

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A pulpish campaign setting primarily inspired by elements of Spelljammer, 7th Sea, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Firefly and the online RPG Pirates101.

 

Sounds vaguely like the One Piece/Spelljammer/Firefly hybrid I mentioned briefly in the Fantasy Hero Complete Kickstarter thread. :-)

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Well, my daughter started playing Pirate101 this last weekend, and the idea germinated as I sat through the opening part with her character being freed from the Clockwork Armada and set on a path of heroic piracy.

 

Stuffy British mechanical men and navies composed of flying ships. It's actually a pretty cool setting. :)

 

I threw in Firefly because everything I run where the characters have a ship seems to inevitably become a form of Firefly. I've only started watching One Piece (3 episodes) so my knowledge of it is minimal.

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The islands have their surface facing towards the sun, falling into night every twelve hours. It is a clockwork cosmos, and no one understands what holds the islands in place, keeping them from drifting.

 

Why not let them drift?  (Slowly?)  Mapping your campaign setting might be a nightmare but there could be interesting plot hooks when a particular island drifts over/into range of another one.

 

How does weather work with respect to the sunlight sails?  I assume the ships can still make headway for a time at night or in shadow.  Does wind still exert force on the sails?  What if there is a storm?

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Larry Niven's The Smoke Ring and Integral Trees are stories set in a natural habitable band of air in the shape of a torus around a sun. There is no planet to speak of, just very, very large orbiting trees (with tufts at both ends). Everything  operates in a dance of orbital mechanics around the star.

 

The trees can grow to tens or hundreds of miles long - long enough to experience significant tidal forces. Like all elongated objects in orbit (even satellites around Earth), they tend to be stable when their long axis is pointed toward the star.

 

There are some cool quirks about movement in a gaseous torus. Remember, every single object is in an independent orbit. If you jump in one direction, you don't go in that direction. For example, jumping forward actually increases your orbital speed, which carries you out toward the rim. Jumping toward the rim puts you in a elliptical orbit, which has you fall back in the orbit. (Apollo astronauts found this out the hard way when they first attempted docking in Earth orbit.)

 

The mantra, as every child learns before he learns to jump, is: Forward takes you out; out takes you back; back takes you inward; inward takes you forward.

If you forget, you will have a long time to spend thinking about it while you starve to death adrift between home-trees.

 

220px-The_smoke_ring.jpg 200px-TheIntegralTrees%281stEd%29.jpg

 

NSFPhys05.gif

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So which direction does the gravity vector point, in general? Hmm, you say castoff objects generally drift outward, but that's a partial answer. (I am speculating on 3-D tactics here, at bare minimum, but also, e.g., which way do the flames and smoke go when a ship catches fire.)

 

Do crew-powered "airpushers" (airscrews) work for ship power, perhaps on an emergency-only basis? If so, da Vinci-style muscle-powered airscrew helicopters might be viable short- range ship-to-shore transport. Large (crew as larger or larger than the skyships) ornithopters of unmatched speed might loom large in legends, and be in the regime of lost tech ... such things are much more effective warships than the skyships and they fought each other to destruction long ago.

 

Skysquid propelling themselves by pulsed recoil, are another option for predatory sky-fauna. The image of a skyship attacked by a whale-scale flying squid has real possibilities. Maybe a race of cephalod sentients (not flyers themselves), who have access, as domesticated? enslaved? servants, to other creatures of their phylum, some of which can fly under their own power.

 

hmmmmm.

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So which direction does the gravity vector point, in general?

 

Gravity draws things outwards towards the sphere, so the various islands are arranged to have their populated surface area facing towards the sun.

 

Since the islands don't really move much from their positions, they are stationed all around the sun, separated from each other into little clusters.

 

My thought was to have each cluster be representative of a different humanoid race, so humans are "native" to one region and Eldren (for example) have another home cluster. Even different human groups have their own clusters of islands, so the local Japanese and Chinese equivalents have their own cluster and the European-like cluster are separated from them by weeks of sailing travel time.

 

For some reason, humans have spread to multiple clusters, and there are a large number of unoccupied clusters.

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I'm familiar enough with physics to understand there is no gravity within a hollow sphere. Gods or very highly advanced beings built this place and populated it with samples from other worlds.

 

Away from each island, there is about 0.1 G pulling outwards towards the crystal sphere. On islands and a ship with its keel under power, gravity is about 1 G. If a ship gets too close above an island, it will start falling, so it is safest to approach from the sides.

 

I like the idea of flying squids, maybe calling them kraken.

 

While "magic " doesn't exist, some forms of psychic powers are known.

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The keel of a skyship under power from its solar sails will generate its own gravitic field, down being towards the bottom of the vessel. With the sphere's weak gravity field pulling towards the surface of the crystal sphere, most vessel find it easiest to navigate by keeping the keel pointed at the distant sphere's surface.

 

There are also golden currents of sorts that flow between clusters, speeding vessels along like jet streams.

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Seasons exist by means of a slow inward and outward shifting of each island, just enough to cause summers and winters. That said, each island has its own equinox point, some averaging farther out than others. The Caliphate (working title) is moderately far inwards, creating a desert island while Asgardia (working title) maintains more Nordic weather patterns by staying further out within the life zone.

 

One of the oddities among islands is Tortuga, which somehow seems to teleport around. Once every 28 days, it will disappear from one location only to reappear in another region of the system. This makes it an ideal home base for many pirate activities and a rollicking port o' call. Visitors find representatives of practically every race (except for the Clockworks), leading to a Mos Eisley kind of feel in numerous taverns.

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