On: Inspirations and Helpful Guidelines

My current interest in reading up on B/X & BECMI products have been related to what I've labeled "Setting Material," while many of the adventures and rule books had some setting stuff, it was the release of the Gazetteers and Creature Crucibles that really began to be BECMI's "Campaign Setting" information.

As I've leafed through them (I will sit down and read them in publication order one of these weeks), I stumbled across PC2 - Top Ballista: and realized I had found a good chunk of stuff we could look at when dealing with aspects of our game, after all, the area defined in that product was a floating city!

Firstly, there are Sky Gnomes, which, as the book states are "mechanical maniacs, filled with a consuming desire to invent newer, bigger, ever more bizarre and complicated contraptions for the weirdest, most impractical purposes." Well, parts of that sound familiar! We've already recognized that the Gnomes in Deminar are the most adapted to their new environmental, they're the species that started working with steam power, and some (not all, many are more grounded mechanically to stick with practical inventions) are exactly like that description above. That's not to say we're going to take all the stats and personality from PC2 and copy it over wholesale (legally we couldn't anyway), but it certainly a good thing to read before sitting down to write out our version.

Second, there are rules for flying machines in the book, and while they're more styled off of WWI-era fighters, and some of our airships are HUGE, again, we can use these for details we may have not thought of. Or current plan was to take the rules for naval movement and tweak it some, but I think that plan, mixed with some reading of PC2's rules for flying may come up with a system that's still "Basic Rules Lite" but helps sell the aspect of flying about.

See, sometimes inspiration just falls right on top of you!

Musing: Airships Part Deux, Identify That Airship!

Gnomes airships are often over done, with a variety of embellishments and overly complicated steering mechanisms, proposal systems, and weapons. Gnomes like making something just to see if it's possible, not always because it's needed (like the Japanese or Electronic Nerds) and this carries over to their airships. They're more likely to use nontraditional materials and sometimes makes hulls out of things other then floating rock. Some places even make gnome airships dock separately from the main docks to do less damage when they inevitably explode. Gnomes are also the leading manufacturer of airships and make many conventional models to sell to others.

Humans and Lizardfolk tend to contract their airship construction out to the gnomes, but that is not always the case. Both these species make more practical airships, though both portray ascetics pleasing to their species.

The other "friendly" species don't normally construct airships, dwarves are busy securing their lands, halflings would never build such crazy technological things, kobolds try and rarely succeed, but more often it ends in disaster. Minotaurs may open a airship construction facility or be part of a group that constructs them, but none of their identity comes through due to no large species presence.

Of the "monster" species, only the gnolls will receive mention now, many live on airships, using them as the ultimate raiding vehicles, and indeed, the very vehicles are raided themselves. Gnolls do not build their own airships, they take them, and many are in desperate need of repair, barely holding together with no attempt to fix them. Gnolls don't bother with such things, they run it till it breaks then take another to ruin, after all, they didn't put any work into making it in the first place.

Musing: Airships

Airships are awesome, everybody loves them (if you don't, you're not a person obviously, so you don't exist, that was deep), they make for great imagery, and they're just damn cool.

Obviously if you do floating islands as your world, you need airships.
Sean started the ball rolling with some really cool ideas:
"Extrapolating the idea of water based boats out, using the rock as hull material, we could get all kinds of ships,

I'm assuming there are a lot of smaller rocks floating around, aside from the islands, ranging from the size of your fist to large boulders and upwards. They'd probably be fairly scarce around populated areas, as they would be mined for airships and other purposes, but away from the population, it would probably be pretty densely packed. Common shipping routes would be clear of them. Traveling outside of the shipping areas or areas around population centers would require clearing, some sort of scoop that would push the rocks out of the way. I'm thinking reminiscent of the icebreakers in the Arctic."
~Sean

It might be just how I think, but anytime I read cool ideas like this, I immediately see it as images in my head, and this is some really cool stuff, it's a shame I can't draw (if somehow you fell onto here and can and for some reason feel like you don't draw enough, Sean and I could give you material for YEARS and pay you in cookies).

But anyway, how awesome is the idea of using the floating stone as the hull? It's a readily available resource, they know it floats without worrying about some failure sending them crashing into the wasteland below (hopefully), and it would just be intimidating to see.

Of course, I thought of other ways to go about making air ships, I see these as ways that people use to just be different, or show off:
Magic Powered (there have to be a few mages out there with the power to do it)
Elemental Powered (borrowed a bit from Eberron)
Steam Powered (Only for those really along the tech. path, and even they still need floating rock to keep the ship in the air)

Also, Sean's idea of rock fields is where the sense of Age of Discovery and Swashbuckling came about, Sean's mention of vast debris fields is what I see as what's stopping islands from all meeting one another, too much space and scariness out there. Of course Air Pirates would make bases in the fields so they wouldn't get killed, smugglers would know hidden routes through them, and even places where there wasn't rock debris, huge aerial creatures (real or imagined) could end your trip real fast.
So a simple idea about where airships came from, helped create an essential "feel" for our world.