Greetings from Wildspace

[Big Mac]

Hi,

Looking around the other introductions threads, I see people from Canada, Germany and Poland...

...but I am an illithid from wildspace! RARW!

Just kidding. My name is David, and I am a big big fan of the Spelljammer Campaign Setting, but I do use an illithid as my forum avatar (whenever I can). It is one of the three figures from the front of the AD&D Adventures in Space boxed set. (I actually bought a print of the boxed set painting from Jeff Easley.)

I've been interested in Spelljammer since back when it was published (in the AD&D 2nd Edition era). I'm fairly active in the Spelljammer community and am hoping to make fan material that can be used both by myself and other Spelljammer fans.

Sadly, there is a bit of a problem with Spelljammer. There is a lot of stuff that does not have a lot of detail (so new information needs to be "written between the lines" to make the various worlds of Spelljammer more interesting). And the setting has a lot of celestial bodies (planets, moons, asteroids, etc) that have never been mapped. So I need to read the descriptions of various planets and make maps for them.

So I'm hoping that Other World Mapper can help me here. I am hoping that OWM can help me translate the sort of ideas I have in my head into maps that are good enough for other people to understand.

I have accounts (usually as "Big Mac") on many RPG forums, but the place you will see most of me is a campaign setting forum, called The Piazza. The Piazza was set up just over six years ago and I've had so much fun talking to people there that I have a crazy-high post count there*. I mostly talk about Spelljammer and the various other D&D worlds that have a direct link to Spelljammer, but I'm also interested in various other fantasy worlds (partly, so I can find out if I can put them into the Spelljammer universe).

* = I later became one of the moderators of the Spelljammer forum and eventually a junior admin for The Piazza.

I live in London, in the UK. My gaming group (Virtual Eclipse) is not currently active. I do meet people that are playing, but a lot of the people I talk to, want to play things other than D&D.

[unklStewy]

Big Mac,

I've seen Spelljammer on the shelves before and I'm not sure why I kept passing it by but it sounds like a lot of fun. I've been a Space Cowboy/Hard Core Sci-Fi fan for longer than I have been a tabletop gamer. I should have jumped on this bandwagon a long time ago. I will be heading out to my LGS this weekend and I will see if there is any Spelljammer content on the shelves.

I will also have to check out The Piazza, I don't get a lot of forum time usually so I've had to be picky about the one's I am on or passionate about the topic of choice. Unfortunately that has also left me in a bit of an information desert where I don't hear about a lot of the popular boards.

Welcome and I hope to see some killer planetary maps in the future...

Casey

[Big Mac]

I've seen Spelljammer on the shelves before and I'm not sure why I kept passing it by but it sounds like a lot of fun. I've been a Space Cowboy/Hard Core Sci-Fi fan for longer than I have been a tabletop gamer. I should have jumped on this bandwagon a long time ago. I will be heading out to my LGS this weekend and I will see if there is any Spelljammer content on the shelves.

I'm not sure how likely it is that you will find any Spelljammer content in your local game store. It was a 2nd Edition AD&D campaign setting, and it was only published for the first part of the 2e Era. I've not seen any Spelljammer products in the shops in London UK since before 3e D&D came out. I look for Spelljammer products (and other 2e, 3e and even 4e D&D products that mention Spelljammer) online now.

The Piazza, has a sister site, called The Book-Case at The Piazza, that lists RPG products. It is still under construction, but the list of Spelljammer products is almost complete (only the SJ computer game is missing).

If you check out the pages, they have a special gadget to show you current prices on Amazon in the US, UK and Canada*. Prices of old D&D products sometimes get really silly. But if you make a list of things you are interested in, work out how much you want to pay, and check back from time to time, you should hopefully find some books that are at the right sort of price for you. I've managed to buy about 80 percent of the books I need and am now trying to locate reasonable deals for the things I am missing.

* = If you have an ad blocker it might block the Amazon gadgets that show the prices, so you might need to turn it off to see the deals.

WotC pulled the PDFs for a while, during the early 4e Era, but they are now coming back onto D&D Classics, and if you are OK with electronic versions, you can buy them instead. D&D Classics sells some of the PDFs fairly cheap and prices seem to drop from time to time. D&D Classics is run by DriveThru RPG, and they do Print on Demand products for companies other than Wizards of the Coast. I am hoping that, at some point, WotC will do a deal to allow D&D Classics to do PoD versions of D&D products, so that I can afford to buy the minority of D&D products that are constantly at silly high prices.

I will also have to check out The Piazza, I don't get a lot of forum time usually so I've had to be picky about the one's I am on or passionate about the topic of choice. Unfortunately that has also left me in a bit of an information desert where I don't hear about a lot of the popular boards.

The Piazza was actually set up by a lady who used to hang around the "Other World" area on the WotC COMmunity Boards (later Gleemax). Back in 2008, the Gleemax staff decided that not enough people were talking about pre-3e D&D worlds and decided to dump all the threads about all out of print worlds into a single forum. A lot of fans begged them not to do this, but they did it anyway. And that meant that the fans of the least popular campaign settings had their threads pushed off of the front page by the fans of the more popular campaign settings. It set us all "against" each other, because the most active people had the visibility.

When Gleemax refused to listen to our requests for the forums to be "unmerged" that lady (who goes by the forum name Ashtagon) set up The Piazza and recreated what had been taken away from us. So The Piazza started off as a fork from part of the WotC forums. But it has become much more than that. It has grown from about 10 forums to 93 forums. If a bunch of fans for another campaign setting turn up, and create enough discussions about a new setting, it eventually gets given its own forum. The Piazza actually set up a Nentir Vale forum before WotC did. And The Piazza now has forums for non-D&D settings, like Talislanta, Scarred Lands, Calidar and Midgard.

One thing I have noticed about fans of campaign settings is that a lot of them have enthusiasm for things, but not all of them have the same level of skill. I am hoping that OWM will make cartography so easy that at least one fan of every campaign setting (no matter how obscure it is) is able to create fan maps of the setting they love.

Welcome and I hope to see some killer planetary maps in the future...

Thanks for the welcome Casey.

I'm still deciding what I will start with, but I will most probably go with Reorx, a planet inside the same "crystal sphere" as Krynn (the Dragonlance world).

[unklStewy]

Big Mac,

One of our local game stores, Event Horizon, has a old school tabletop player at the helm and they keep a goodly number of out of print modules on the shelves. I agree it might be rare to find something from Spell Jammer but I wouldn't say you can't get lucky.

Casey

[Big Mac]

One of our local game stores, Event Horizon, has a old school tabletop player at the helm and they keep a goodly number of out of print modules on the shelves. I agree it might be rare to find something from Spell Jammer but I wouldn't say you can't get lucky.

You are right there, Casey. I can't get any of the RPG stores in London to stock out of print games, but it isn't like that everywhere. Someone on Faceborg was boasting about getting 5 or 6 really rare modules for $15 a few days back. Maybe it is eaiser to get old stuff in the USA.