Salutations, my curious congregation! I'm about to babble to you about the science fantasy campaign setting I've been working on for the past couple of years. My home group playtested it in its first campaign iteration just before Covid hit, took the campaign from 1-20 and I'm currently running another game for online friends on Discord. We've been doing a lot of playtesting of subclasses I've written for it, and if you're interested in space settings that incorporate magic, this might be up your alley.
Today I'm just going to be talking about what it is and where it comes from though. No particular details just yet, though expect more about it going forward since I've hit the point where I'm ready to talk about it in public.
CWs: Swearing, irreverence, and me badmouthing Warhammer. (Kind of; it's not bad for what it's intended to be, it just wasn't what I wanted and I'm going to talk a little bit about that so if that's going to offend you terribly I'll see you in the next one.)
Alright, so long story short, I knew what I wanted and nothing I had in front of me was exactly it.
What I wanted was basically to play something that felt like Star Trek or Star Wars but with elves and dwarves and shit. Warhammer is just way too grimdark for something like that. There aren't really any good guys, everything is oppressive, a lot of the factions have sexism and racism baked in and it just doesn't spring me. Meanwhile, Spelljammer has the opposite problem. It's too squishy. It's not really space, is it? You're not going to blow someone out an airlock on a spelljammer, that's just not how the phlogiston works.
There's Starfinder, of course, but it runs on Pathfinder's engine and with all respect for Pathfinder it's just not my jam. There's a lot of rules, a lot of math, and I don't want to have to entirely jump systems to get the vibe that I want, so instead of picking it up, I decided to put together something of my own that would let me keep 5E's streamlined new player friendly system but also have space!
So most of the core races are present, but presented as aliens rather than what they are in most 5E settings. There are a few differences in how they run and present themselves, but largely the biggest differences between Astrallis and a standard game of D&D is that we're dealing with magitech and most of the game takes place in space.
I say most of because I didn't keep the dragonborn or orcs (I know, I love orcs, but there wasn't a place for them in the setting this time around), there are three different kinds of human, I did manage to work in trolls, there's a species called the ashek that I promise you are like nothing you've ever seen before aaand...there are playable AI.
And I'm not going to lie to you the AI are my favorite things in this setting.
I'm not going into detail about this now because I could do a separate blog on every one of the species in Astrallis and actually, I think I will. For right now, the point is more that I wanted the general adventure vibe of a Star Trek or Star Wars type setting, with fantasy stuff, and unlike Shadowrun (which is still one of my favorite things ever) I wanted the magic and technology to play nice with one another.
So halfway through playtest campaign 2, I'm finally ready to talk about this. And you can expect that's going to be The Thing for the next while unless something else to blog about really grabs me by the nose in between.
Fortune Favors,
Robin the Red
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