Space, the final frontier? Not in the Spelljammer setting. Beyond space there is the crystal shell surrounding the solar system, outside which is the swirling and glowing Phlogiston in which other Crystal Spheres containing suns and planets and weirder things float.
Going through my old RPG books I came across the AD&D Spelljammer stuff, a true fantasy space setting where anything resembling our laws of physics need not apply, thank you very much. I love the over the top weirdness of Spelljammer and the fact that it doesn't even try to be realistic in any sense. Anything big enough to fly at the speed of magic also generates an Earth-standard gravity field that brings along a bubble of air that lasts for months. That way your half-elf multi-class paladin-bard can walk on the deck of their pirate ship in space quite comfortably. Why? That's just the way the world is built. Just about any fantasy or sci-fi idea could be used in Spelljammer, with humans, elves, illithids, beholders and stranger things swashing their bucklers and flying around between planets in ships shaped like fish, octopuses (octopi?), butterflies or, well, ships.
Copyright TSR 1989, used without permission for educative purposes.
Among the spacefaring races there are the dohwar, a race of intelligence, telepathic penguin merchants. After seeing that Copplestone Castings provides penguins in their arctic adventures range, I just had to show the bird folk some love and start converting.
So, dear reader, if like me you have been saddened by the lack of trippy space penguin content in 28mm on the Blogosphere of today, you have surely come to the right place! For today I kick off the chronicles of:
(The penguin stands for "penguin".)
Antarctic avians after acquiring appropriate accoutrements.
Plutocratic penguin people painstakingly painted.
Scale shot of a synchronized sales speech.
Next up: Pigs will fly .. IN SPACE!
