Friday, August 13, 2010

"The Star Heart Saga"

When Farscape was on TV, I watched a lot of it.  Not necessarily every episode, but I tried to keep up with what was happening to the best of my pre-DVR ability.  And so when I sat down to think about planning a new D&D campaign set in the Astral Plane, Farscape jumped to my mind.

The campaign would revolve around the same thing the show did; a living ship.  In Farscape, human astronaut John Crichton and his ragtag band of alien outlaws banded together to free a living ship named Moya, and then traveled throughout the Uncharted Territories battling evil forces and exploring that region of the galaxy.  So, the players needed a reason to wind up stuck in the Astral, a living ship they could use to sail it, and an enemy to eventually battle with it.

The Heroic Tier


Because the Astral is intended for paragon-tier characters, I decided to slow-play the introduction of the living ship by letting the players do some tomb raiding while I feed them info about the setting's history and their eventual foes.  They get a patron that has them find and assemble an artifact, the Star Heart, which he then uses inside a dungeon at the end of the tier to reveal that the entire place is one big, big ship.  The whole thing lifts into the sky and shifts to another plane, bringing the players along for the ride.




The Paragon Tier


The players wake up in the Plane Above, but they're not alone once.  Githyanki begin attacking their ship and their patron does a heel-turn, using the artifact to power down the ship's defenses.  Just to let the players know for sure that he's a black hat, he also turns them over to the githyanki commander so he won't have to split the impossibly-large bounty the gith have promised him for finding this ship.

The players are forced to flee on a much smaller "lifeboat" they find in another part of the ship, and wander the Astral while they are hounded by both the gith and a band of maruts that have placed a bounty on their heads for their actions. Eventually the PCs learn that the ship they are on and the ship the gith captured are a breed of living ships created by mind flayers to subjugate entire worlds that later rebelled when the gith destroyed the illithid empire.  By rebuilding the Star Heart and letting it fall into the gith's hands, the players have doomed both their world and the other living ships hiding out in the multiverse to be conquered and enslaved once more.

After arguing their case, the players are deputized by the maruts to free the ship being held by the gith, stop their invasion, and destroy the Star Heart.  The players return home to find the invasion of their plane underway, led by the living ship they had unearthed.  They confront the commander leading the invasion forces, who happens to be their former patron, then free the ship so it can destroy the other githyanki invaders.

The Epic Tier


But the players still don't have the Star Heart, and learn from the maruts that the githyanki lich queen, Vlaakith, is using it to find where the last remaining living ships have hidden.  The maruts give the players those locations so they can reach them ahead of the githyanki, a journey which takes them to the farthest-flung corners of the Astral, the Elemental Chaos, and beyond as they try to awaken their ships' few remaining brethren.

At the end of the tier the players lead the living ships and an army of marut on an assault on Tu'narath, the githyanki capital.  There the marut hand out their final punishment for the crimes of war and genocide committed by all githyanki, and the players square off against Vlaakith to destroy her and the Star Heart.  Once the githyanki have been defeated and the artifact destroyed, the living ships are safe again to roam the galaxy without fear of being used against their will ever again, and the players move on to their epic destinies.

Conclusion


So there it is; an epic story, a war that spans worlds, and I get to create some great villains and design living ships for the Astral Plane.  Now all I need are some simple rules for ship-to-ship combat, and some players to sic this campaign on...

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