HELP! Last minute request for help with Spelljammer spoof for April Fool's Day!

[thesecretdm]

And we're live!

Check out www.magecrammer.com for more!

Thanks everyone for all of your help! You guys are the best!

--The Secret DM

[Big Mac]

Aha! Found you!

As one of the "victims" of this prank, I'm glad I have not logged onto the Cartographers' Guild in the last few days. Magecrammer has been a great suprise and bumping into this thread would have taken the shine off a brilliant joke. (And I say this as someone who doesn't like April Fool Jokes.)

Thanks to everyone here who made something (even the things that didn't get used).

P.S. Is there an audience for this style of ship drawing?

There certainly is an audience for this sort of ship drawing, Rob.

I am a big fan of Spelljammer (and have been for many years). Spelljammer was (and still is) a fantastic concept, but with it being such an unusual concept, it has been less easy than other campaign settings to find things that can fill in some of the gaps in the original product line.

I actually signed up with the Cartographers' Guild last year, because I think that the only way I'm going to get some of the stuff that I need is to learn how to make it myself. Here is my "hello" thread: Hi folks. I need to learn how to map the *entire* Spelljammer universe. I was more focusing on working out how to create planetary maps there (because I've worked out from the blog of a professional RPG designer called Robert S. Conley that building a map of a planet makes it much easier to build the fanon content I want to create to dovetail with the TSR material). But ship maps (in the style you did) are also something that is really needed for Spelljammer fandom.

Spelljammer has lots of ships, but TSR never made all of the maps. In the original SJ boxed set alone, there are six groundling ships (Caravel, Cog, Drakkar, Drommond, Great Galley and Longship) where they give stats (a keel length and beam length and some nerdy SJ stuff) in Concordance of Arcane Space, but don't provide any description in Lorebook of the Void (or plans on ship cards). For the ships that Spelljammer does cover well (the ones that are designed by "spacefarers") TSR gives pictures and deck plans (for almost all of them) but then they have an "Other Configurations" section in Lorebook of the Void that talks about variant forms of the "standard" versions of these ships. TSR never made any deck plans for these "Other Configurations" and some of them are funky enough that the original deckplans do not do the job. Take the Hammership, for example. That can have "Multiple Turrets" (including weapon turrets on the bottom of the ship), "Greek Fire Projectors" (just a change of the front weapon - but you need to make or scan the deckplan to do that), "Heavy Hammerships" and "Armada Busters" (both mostly similar to the Multiple Turret version from a mapping point of view), "Lizard Man Crews" (same deck plans, but with a flooded gravity plane - I suppose that could be done with a photocopier and a blue highlighting pen), "Mind Flayer Crews" (same plans, but with the windows changed) and "Elven Crews" (the plans would again be unchanged).

I've also been speaking to a couple of the authors of HackJammer (the HackMaster version of Spelljammer) and he thinks that rather than the Hammership being a 60 ton ship that was exactly 250ft long in the keel and exactly 25 foot across its beam, there would be variations in sizes at different shipyards. (This idea also works around the fact that inconsistent TSR artwork shows Hammerships in different proportions - and even with a slightly different arrangement of the top deck and external parts.) Something like that would mean that the Multiple Turret idea could instead stretch the ship and provide space for a third weapon turret.

That sort of thing would mostly only help Spelljammer fans, but less funky looking ships (groundling ships to SJ fans) would be things that could be used by fans of any RPG setting based on the sea. Freeport is a good example of a setting based around a sea-port. I'm sure fans of that setting would love "normal" ships.

Anyhoo, what I'm getting at is: the answer to your question is: "yes" - there is an audience for this style of ship drawing.

[ravells]

Knocked up a tardis deckplan for you! Do post up a link to your April Fool's website when you're done!

[thesecretdm]

@ Ravells: Wow -- that's incredible, too! This has been an amazingly successful day for this project...I really wasn't expecting this! I now know I'm coming right to cartographer's guild for all my mapping needs -- this community is amazing!

I love the pool! This is supremely excellent!

How would you like to be credited on the gag site, Ravells?

Thanks again, everyone!

[ravells]

lol, just call me ravells. It was fun to do.

[MMXAlamar]

Sweet! I especially like the Enterprise blueprint. The Tardis is pretty funny too

Can't wait to see the gag site!

[jfrazierjr]

Ravells, exactly which control room is this? It does not really look like any that I know. Of course, the third-seventh Dr control room always reminded me a bit of an octagonal padded room like in a sanitarium....hehe...It does not really remind me that of the current Dr's either in shape....anyhoooo

[rdanhenry]

Canoe and TARDIS both awesome.

[ravells]

Ravells, exactly which control room is this? It does not really look like any that I know.

I did a quick web search of the inside of the Tardis and found nothing....so I kind of just winged it.

[tilt]

throw in what logo you need and I might be able to make a quick fake one