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

[MMXAlamar]

Haha wonderful site! It certainly looks professional

[thesecretdm]

I can't say thank you enough.

If someone had told me three weeks ago that I'd have a site like this put together, I would've laughed in their faces. Words cannot express my gratitude to everyone who contributed -- especially everyone here at The Cartographer's Guild -- the fact that so many fine artists were able to produce so much high quality product in such a short amount of time has me at a total loss of words.

Thank you very much for helping me take my goofy "magecrammer" idea and turning it into something that was truly spectacular.

If anyone would ever be interested collaborating on a project, I'd be happy to work with everyone here. Who knows? I may start poking around the rest of the forums, as well.

If you ever need anything or would like to work together, please don't hesitate to e-mail me at thesecretdm at gmail dot com.

Thanks again -- have a great weekend!

[tilt]

you too - I hope the recipients of the joke enjoyed it

[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.

[bartmoss]

Awesome idea - and nicely executed, good job all!

[MadCartographer]

Thanks, and sorry it took me so long to reply... Life has been... Challenging to say the least.

-Mad