In September of 2023 I started running a new dnd campaign with a small group of friends. I had given the players the option of three different Spelljammer adventures I wanted to run, all homebrew. Many of the things in the current Spelljammer books were, to me, lack luster and disappointing so drastic modifications were done for our adventures.
Campaign options:
1: The group has known each other for a few years, sailing the stars and trying out mercenary work to keep the ship running and their mouths fed. Secrets of the past come to the surface and possibly the crew can do the right thing, regardless of price. (Firefly, Outlaw star, Cowboy Bebop)
2: An ancient foe of ages past has risen from death and returned, sending his armies to raid and destroy every planet in his way. This dread foe, a lich of great power has begun his revenge arc against the living! (Star Wars, Krull, Flash Gordon)
3: The Group wakes up in a frigid lab in space, brought back to life by an organization called Argentheart, their supposed employer. It seems the last job did not go well and the group had to be brought back. Memories gone, it is up to the group to figure out what took them out and what is this strange organization they are a part of. (it is also funny the next dnd adventure published had the did players waking up with no memories in Planescape)
My group chose option three. In secret I flipped a coin to check out if the organization was evil or not and was very pleased with the result.
Our players made their characters. We have an Astral Elf Battle Smith Artificer named Din, a Plasmoid hexblade Warlock named Brux, and a Autognome Stars druid named Quasar. Ithildin and Brux they had no memory of the last three months of time they had supposedly worked for the organization while Quasar had no memories at all. If someone is going to run this adventure, I would recommend giving them all the shared back story of meeting somewhere, such as an interstellar cocktail lounge on an asteroid somewhere as a last shared memory. I have hinted a similar thing for the group.
We had a brief session zero and went right into the first session. The group all woke up in a cold lab and realized there were some memory gaps. A Giff hippo man named Grant greeted them and with the help of a cloud giant bio engineer explained that they all suffered a terrible fate at the hands of some beast on a planet their organization, Argentheart, was exploring. No one knows what the creature was that but they were recovered and brought here for healing. It took a bit for the group to recover and some memory loss was not unexpected. They got to pick up their gear, reunite with a Din’s robotic space whale companion named Kin, and see magical recreations of animals they helped bring in before the accident.
They each found interesting items in their rooms. Din found odd experiments not recognized. Quasar found small plant buddies growing crops in the dorm along with a strange crayon drawing of a house in the woods. Brux found chunks of strange metals and a sword hilt that feels like it wants to grow and felt a slight hunger.
They met another team they would be working closely with that also recently lost a member, found out their own group originally had two other members that did not make it, a gnome psi warrior and the bug man cleric. They got a tour of many of the places around Argenthome, the massive city sized space object the organization called home. There is also a group of more experienced members of the organization that talked to the party as if they were old friends, saying they have been on many trips with them before the incident. Juniper, the fox person leader of the group was happy to see the group up and about again. They visited the engine areas and saw Norella the goblin that was also relieved to see the group again. Eventually they found themselves at the temple of Argentheart and listened to rumors, finding out there were terrible things happening across space that Argentheart was trying to fix.
They also found out that the dragon known as Argentheart was a red dragon that fought against a silver dragon and was terribly wounded. The silver dragon gave its heart to the red dragon so he could repent and make the worlds a better place, hence the name Argentheart. Also, Argentheart has not been around recently due to his planet hopping to solve larger problems. The group met up with the dwarven head master and were sent to get whatever other things they might need from their rooms and meet up at the shipyard for their first easy assignment back.
Session one ended there for the night. This was the first session I ran in a few months so there were many cobwebs to knock off.
Even as a game master of over 25 years I still am learning things from every session. there is no reason to introduce twenty non player characters in the first session of a game, if I cannot remember them all there might need to be some trimming. The players did not get to do much, everything for this first session was “on the rails” but will get better from there. The players already are questioning the organization’s goals, which makes me happy. We will see when things get revealed.
