Ship Happens
Chapter: Season Three
Characters: Dagger McStab - PC, Gerta Stonesong - PC
For first time players unfamiliar with the module this is always a great “oh shit” moment.
Expedition catches some flack for the inclusion of science fiction elements in the world of D&D but as a one-time event, I’ve always enjoyed the oddity of the adventure.
COMMENTERS: How often do you cross genres or include random bits of oddness?
Awesome. Such a great module. Did you see where Jeff Dee has been recreating his art from it?
I try to find a balance of oddness. Used well, it can demonstrate to the players that the world their characters inhabit exists beyond the campaign or adventure they are currently living. After all, our world is full of random oddness, so why not the campaign world? But I try to avoid odd for the sake of odd; I’ll try to tie it back to one of the players or the plot, however tangentially.
Also, I frickin’ loved this module! I can’t even count the number of characters we lost trying to figure out how to use some of the “magic items”.
Crossing genres is bad and people who do it should feel bad!
I wrote some thoughts for the Going Last site about sci-fi and horror in gaming. It may be of interest to those enjoying (as I am) this story arc.
Also, I enjoyed discussing this subject with AngryDM while writing the Vegepygmy article for Dungeon. My writing was fueled by his anger and suffering. 😉
I still love Gygax’s signature on the first level of the spaceship…
Second level. When I redid the maps on graph paper, I substituted my own initials for his. 🙂
this is how I houserule the wild magic planar trait: Shit’s gonna get freaky.
Also, I once had a dungeon room containing an ostrich which would reapear whenever you left the room, no matter how you killed it, just to piss off our ranger (who took animals as his favored enemy). It was explained by being the test subject of a dark wizards immortality experaments.
I will have to try that in the next campaign I run! lol
me i sometime put stuffed animals or monster in my dungean,,, i love it when i tell them as they enter a room;; Ok,, the room appear to be rectangular, with hwen stone ceiling and wall,, not much decoration you can see from the entrance because there is a huge black dragon in the middle of the room!
and then when they atack it,, bam,, ok you see that you attack is very effective and you also realise that the dragopn is stuffed 🙂
Hah! I did throw a spaceship into my colonial era homebrew RPG once (timeship?). Now I want to check out this module.
I try and mix horror elements with mine often, although I don’t do a very good job of it. But my buddy did a much better job of mixing randomness and other genres in his game with this old insain ghost of a wizard who made weird things. Our party has a 9mm Handgun, but none of us know what it is or how to use it.
also a dancing sombrero… and a eye patch of seeing that makes you sick… and other weird oddities.
I was a Spelljammer player back in the day, so spaceships don’t really throw me off a D&D game. Cyberpunk elements, that would be hard to swallow.
As a Spelljammer GM I use ALL the genres!
Gamma World GM says hello!
I want to hear a song of heroic tales and glory on the fuck me runnin’!
I’ve considered several times taking D&D characters and dropping them in to a Gamma World (*writes check!*) scenario.
I ran a fantasy campaign where the world was in a 10,000 year time loop. All the various PC races outside of humans were genetically engineered, along with most monsters. The main villain was a Super Computer that had been in control of the Nation’s defense forces, that was hooked up to a Nuclear Reactor, that was the cause of the Time Warp.
It was a pretty fun campaign and all the players enjoyed it.
Taking fantasy as a baseline, it’s very easy to include horror elements. I’m not averse to scifi elements, but very much prefer them to make sense within the fantasy setting. Introducing rocket ships and rayguns would break the feel of things for me.
So if I wanted to run an alien invasion plot I’d have mind-flayers taking over a small village and turning the locals into obedient drones, that kind of thing. Re-skin the superscience things as magic or psionics and the job’s a good ‘un. Plus it means you get to see how long it takes for the players to realise what you’ve based it on.
Wild West Cthulhu
I ran an espionage campaign where I introduced hidden aliens midway through; turned THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. into THE INVADERS at the twist of a dial. (Yeah, I ran this game a LONG time ago, you can tell…)
I also did a lot of superheroes, which was carte blanche to throw just about anything at people every now and then because we all had a Silver Age sensibility that allowed for that.
My players bring enough weirdness that I spend more time worldbuilding and creating and interesting environment than getting my gaming freak on. One of the players has a character who’s experimenting with what he thought was new kind of magic, but turned out to be reinventing the way dragons do magic. His experimental rock grew legs and escaped. They spent several sessions trying to find the rock as it ran loose in the city.
After I finished this module I ended the run and pissed the party off – but why not: A self sustaining spaceship / castle that is easy defended and with “magic light sticks” (laser guns) there was no reason not to either retire or make my base of operation. And yes I still have all my D&D stuff from 1979 on up .. aaahhh memories.
Mixing genres? As a former RIFTS player, how about ALL THE DAMN TIME??!
My Amber campaigns mixed the hell out of some settings.
I play Gamma World, so same here.
Lot of fond memories of running this module. I particularly remember the characters convincing one another that the viewing binoculars were a cursed weapon that would suck out their eyeballs and fire them like crossbow bolts…
I had odd players. We were a great match.
I have run that one twice!!! Can you imagine the person whose paladin shot a party member testing of the laser weapons….
The problem with that kind of thing happening (and the reason DMs who force players to do them are dicks) is that firearms are easily similar enough to crossbows for anybody in your typical fantasy world to recognise them as clearly being weapons. You have to be seriously Chaotic Stupid to think that pointing an unidentified weapon at a friend and pulling the trigger is a good idea.
I picked up this adventure recently just for that sci-fi twist. There is nothing better then a jaw dropping moment during adventure and this module set that bar.