The Yathea Wildspace System

I made this totally sick high-level spelljammer space adventure as the last detour before The World Rune’s finale. It ripped off drew inspiration from Halo, Outer Wilds, immersive simulators¹, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Solaris. It would’ve been glorious. However, the group was falling apart and I had to shorten it significantly. Still, it was pretty cool!

The Premise

Alright, so spelljammer is a D&D setting for space fantasy. It involves the titular spelljammers—magic-powered ship helms to bring your sailing vessels into outer space—or wildspace as it’s called in the setting—for all kinds of cool adventures. While The World Rune started off as a regular fantasy adventure with steampunk and industrial elements, it took off into space for the final act when the players discovered an ancient, alien spelljamming ship deep underground.

On their way to the planet where the final dungeon lay waiting for them, they stopped at another wildspace system to refill their air. It was a solar system with six planets of varying colors and sizes. One of them was green and blue, full of water and plant life. A good sign that there might be air. But when they approached the outer edges of the system, they felt a strange pull on their ship. There was an unknown force, much stronger than gravity, pulling them in toward the sun.

The wizard, piloting the ship with his magnificent, magical mind, concentrated as hard as he could to break free of the force’s grasp, but it was no use. They were gaining speed at an alarming rate, the ship creaking and shaking in the struggle. Then, as suddenly it had begun, the pull stopped. They were free to move the ship around as they pleased once more. But when they tried to fly back, away from the sun and its orbiting planets, the adventurers discovered that they could not. The strange force was keeping them inside the wildspace system.

The next couple of sessions was spent searching the planets for clues about the strange force, and unraveling the events that led to an ancient civilization’s demise.

Planet Eibos

The party first approached an Earth-like planet called Eibos, not that they knew its name. Flying down over a vast green continent, they were attacked by massive darts of magical energy, seemingly some kind of beefed up version of the Magic Missile spell, or rather Magic Surface-to-Air Missile. This made them turn back and explore a small asteroid before coming back. Once they did, they were able to dodge the missiles and follow the trail of a crashed spelljammer ship. The ship belonged to an adventurer who was relevant to a previous adventure. I can’t remember if she was still alive or not, but the group found a tree house she’d built and lived in, which let them wrap up some loose ends from earlier. Whatever.

The planet was much like the overgrown wilds of their home planet, with one key difference: it was quiet. Sure, the leaves of the vast forests rustled in the wind, the rivers crashed deafeningly when they approached, but that was about it. There was no droning of insects, no chirping of birds. No animals whatsoever. Wandering through the woods gave them an eerie feeling that they were the only living creatures on the planet, as if they were in some kind of massive graveyard.

But they weren’t alone. The uncanny silence was interrupted by the sound of something running, and it was getting closer. Between the trees they saw a group of man-sized bipedal salamanders with wide, tooth-filled grins and fingers ending in long, curved claws². They hit fast and they hit hard, but the party had fought worse, and brought them down with a moderate amount of fireballs³. They realized that these fast and aggressive creatures were probably the reason the adventurer had built her home up in the trees.

Later, the party discovered a clearing with a circle of obsidian standing stones. Looking closely, they could see faint specks of light floating around inside them. Each stone had a plaque in front of with with writing in an unfamiliar script. With a few seconds of spellcasting, they determined that the plaques bore names of some kind. One of the stones, the one labeled Sivatov, had been smashed to pieces.

There were also a few small white crystals nearby, emitting a warm glow from within. When they touched one of the crystals, it showed them a brief scene from the past. Some sort of memory crystal, the party figured. As they explored more and more, the party would find crystals with events from two different groups of people. The first group was a colony of spacefaring dwarves called the Silverbeard clan. They had traveled to the wildspace system and made it their home, naming the Earth-like planet Eibos and building massive underground cities. They had explored the wildspace system and used its resources to develop new technologies, and battled the salamander creatures the party had encountered before. The party would find the memory crystals about the Silverbeard clan in roughly chronological order, slowly revealing the rise and fall of the dwarves.

The second group was called the Farspace Expedition. They were explorers in search of the adventure’s titular plot device: the World Rune. They’d crashed their ship on Eibos hundreds of years after the Silverbeard clan died out. After viewing some of the memory crystals from the final days of the Silverbeards, they believed that the dwarves had discovered the location of the World Rune and used its powers to ascend to godhood. The Farspace Expedition was determined to follow in their footsteps. Their story was revealed in reverse chronological order, with the first memory crystal showing them fighting each other, the winners sailing off toward a space station near the sun.

The Background

All of this was terribly confusing to the players at first, but it made more and more sense as the adventure went on. The Silverbeards had ventured to the jungle planet they’d named Zal-Neomia, where they discovered the salamanders, a type of intelligent monster that feasts on all living creatures and can lie dormant for centuries if they run out of food. When someone gets clawed or bitten by a slaad, they risk getting infected and turning into a salamander themselves. One of the dwarves had been clawed by one, and brought the infection back to the dwarven cities on Eibos. This had led to a huge outbreak of salamander infection.

The surviving dwarves realized what a disaster it would be if those nasty salamanders got their hands on a spelljamming ship, and searched for a way to wipe them out for good. First, they used some of the gravity magic they’d discovered on one of the planets to effectively quarantine the wildspace system with gravity. This was why the party had been dragged into the wildspace system and couldn’t fly out of it. The dwarves had accomplished this with a device that they hid in a secret lab on one of the planets. Once the players discovered this, their main priority became tracking down the lab and turning off the device in order to escape. But the dwarves also created a second magical device, a last resort in case they were completely overrun by the salamanders. It was a solar cannon that could create a gravitational field at the center of the sun that was so strong that the sun would collapse upon itself and explode into a supernova, destroying the entire wildspace system.

This was a massively complicated device, and it took the form of a space station orbiting close to the sun. Unfortunately for the dwarves, they realized that their device wouldn’t be powerful enough. They’d have to fire it at least three times to actually collapse the sun. But every time they fired it, it would create a massive solar eruption that would likely destroy all life in the wildspace system. But that was good enough. In the end, they had to fire it. It killed all the dwarves, but many of the salamanders actually survived. They lay dormant until the Farspace Expedition arrived.

The Farspace Expedition had been looking for the World Rune, which the party knew was hidden in a nearby wildspace system. But they had been caught in a cosmic storm and mistakenly ended up in Yathea instead. With nobody in the expedition knowing dwarvish, and without access to translation magic, they misinterpreted the dwarves’ actions that they saw in the memory crystals. Half the group wanted to activate the solar cannon, thinking it would take them to the World Rune, and the other half refused. They fought over it, and the winners activated the device and fried themselves. The solar cannon had been fired twice. Once more and the entire wildspace system would be wiped out.

Eibos Again

The background details slowly unraveled themselves, mainly through memory crystals, as the party explored. They found their way into the underground of Eibos, where the dwarves had lived in tall, vertical cities. Memory crystals showed large-scale battles against the salamanders. They discovered more standing stones, and also their purpose: teleportation. By striking smaller stones with the right attunement against the larger stones, they could open portals, transporting them between stones. The dwarves had worn the smaller stones, called keystones, as amulets around their necks. The attunement of the keystones functioned like an access control system. There was only one teleportation stone the party was interested in: the one that led to the secret gravity lab with the device that kept them stuck in the wildspace system. But there was also only one keystone that would work on it, and that one had been thrown into the oceans of the planet Sivatov, the one with the destroyed teleportation stone. But the party didn’t know this at the time.

One interesting location they explored was the weapons lab. There they found large tanks of a glowing turquoise liquid the dwarves had named perflentine. It functioned as a raw magical fuel, and it was used to power the magical SAM-turrets that had been shooting at them when they arrived. Fortunately, wearing a keystone stopped the turrets from targeting them. The party’s wizard decided to drink some perflentine. He regained all his spell slots in exchange for a hearty dose of acid damage. A watered-down version could effectively be used a sort of mana potion, but the wizard had already had enough.

Making their way back through the city, the group stopped to investigate a large, vertical space, looking like the inside of a silo. Spaces had been dug out of its sides to form living quarters for the dwarves, and a broken, spiral walkway led all the way up past the homes and to the surface. As the party searched some of the homes, they found dormant salamanders occupying them. Though the party took precautions to avoid making any sound, they did manage to wake up on of the salamanders. It chased after them, and it wasn’t quiet. Soon, ten more followed. Before long, the floor of the area was overrun with the creatures. With the spiral pathway being broken all over, they had to climb up the walls and hang on to the balconies, windows and doorways of the homes. Falling would mean getting devoured by the pile of hundreds of salamanders. To make matters worse, more of them were coming out from the houses above and jumping down to the group. The wizard was grazed by one creature’s claws and got infected, but the group didn’t know it. Eventually, they were able to climb their way to the top and make a run for the exit, reaching their airship before the monsters could get to them.

Brief Interlude at The Wormhole Station

As previously mentioned, when the party first arrived at Eibos, they had gotten scared away by giant magic missiles and went to explore a small asteroid instead. Its only notable features were a small stone bunker of sorts, and the fact that it was floating near some kind of white, glowing orb, slightly larger than their ship. When attempting to fly into the orb, they were briefly able to pass through it and glimpse its inside, which seemed to them much larger than the outside. They saw what they believed to be a city hanging from the ceiling of a massive cave, with tall, towers, connected by bridges and crumbling stone platforms. But there was barely any time to look, as a strong force pushed them back out into space. Then they landed on the asteroid instead.

The bunker they’d spotted was actually a small research lab. Notes on the tables spoke of a wormhole at a place called Rubion, apparently a planet. Entering the wormhole would cause one to exit through the white orb just by the asteroid. The dwarves had discovered this after one of them jumped right into the wormhole out of scientific curiosity. They built the lab on the asteroid to study this phenomenon further. According to their notes, they had been successful in using the so-called gravity stones from the planet Rubion to create small-scale temporary wormholes of their own⁴. The notes further explained the teleportation standing stones and how to use them with the keystones.

After some thorough investigation, the group found a hidden hatch in the floor leading to an even smaller, hastily constructed research lab. This is where the dwarves had been creating the plans for the solar cannon. Here, the party learned about its function and location. But we covered that already, didn’t we? Moving along, then!

Rubion

After investigating the weapons lab on Eibos, the party returned to the forest clearing with the circle of standing stones. Equipped with a keystone, they struck it against the stone labeled Rubion, and were swiftly whisked as they stone swirled and turned into a wormhole.

The group found themselves on a barren rock planet covered in black teleportation stones. There were holes in the surface of the planet, revealing it to be nothing but a thin shell. Peering inside, the group spotted the hanging city they’d seen inside the white orb, only now they were viewing it from above. Below the city, at the shell-planet’s core, was a swirling wormhole, a warped view of countless stars inside it, along with the asteroid they’d investigated earlier.

One notable thing about this planet was that transmutation magic didn’t work on it. This meant no flying spells. This didn’t end up mattering since the group managed to avoid collapsing any part of the hanging city’s floor. But if they had, they’d have fallen straight into the wormhole, which would’ve been rather amusing.

A stone path led down to the city. The stone bridges and platforms were crumbling, but the group was able to carefully navigate their way to the biggest point of interest they could see: the city’s tallest tower, hanging about halfway down to the wormhole. When entering the tower, the party discovered that despite its height, the tower only had one floor. The floor was located all the way down, at the bottom of a massive spiraling staircase. The staircase just happened to be trapped, as when they were about halfway down, an Indiana Jones-style boulder magically appeared at the top of the staircase. Once it rolled to the bottom, it teleported back up again. The poor party got rolled over several times before they made it down⁵.

To make a long story short, it was a wizard tower. The most interesting thing about it was that it housed a teleportation stone to the solar cannon.

The Solar Cannon

Using the teleportation stone, the party arrived in a small, square, dark stone room. It’s always stone with dwarves, isn’t it? There was no gravity inside, as far as they could tell. At the far wall was a pedestal with a stone button on it. The party members with darkvision could see that the wall behind the pedestal was covered in written warnings that this place was serious business and very dangerous, and that everyone would have to wear the supplied sunglasses before pressing the button to open the door. On the ground next to the button lay a few pitch-black goggles scattered, which everyone put on.

Then the wizard pushed the button, and the wall slid back to reveal a broken bridge leading to a larger stone building. Both the building and the one they were in floated in space, orbiting dangerously close to the sun. The heat was blistering, and even with with the goggles they had to squint to see anything in the brightness. They hurried to jump—or rather float across—the gap in the bridge, and entered the other building.

The walls and ceiling were covered in magical, glowing runes. In the center of the ceiling was some kind of mechanical device with a pointed tip that had the same light-sprinkled black color as the teleportation stones. It was connected by tubes to several tanks of perflentine, and was pointed at the floor, which was made of glass. Stairs led down to a floor below, where an orb of darkness floated in the center of the room. Looking up through the lower floor’s glass ceiling, they could see that the orb was positioned just below the mechanical device. There was also a big, red metal switch surrounded by warning symbols that the party decided not to touch. Then they headed back the way they came to follow up on another lead.

Sivatov

The party flew to Sivatov, the ice planet at the far rim of the wildspace system. Touching down, they discovered that the surface wasn’t ice at all, but rather crystal, with the same appearance as the white memory crystals they’d found scattered across the system. At this point, they’d found clues about how a dwarf threw the keystone for the secret gravity lab into the ocean of this planet, and that the lab was located on another planet called Pacror Thala. They’d also heard rumors about Sivatov being somehow alive.

They made their way across the treacherous terrain of the planet, climbing peaks and valleys of crystal. They didn’t realize it was going to be hard, and couldn’t bother going back to get their ship. They saw a vision, much clearer than any of those in the memory crystals, of two dwarves talking. They were sitting on the edge of a crystal cliff, having lunch. One asked the other what the scariest thing he could think of was. The other dwarf through for a moment, and then they heard a terrifying roar in the distance. Nobody in the party knew what this meant, but they would find out soon.

Eventually they made it to the ocean, which was dark blue and jelly-like. At first, nobody wanted to touch it.The wizard eventually decided to try, and when he did, he saw a vision, lasting only an instant yet feeling like an eternity, of the planet and the wildspace system’s formation and history. Then, still touching the ocean, he thought of the keystone amulet, and it appeared on the surface of the ocean before him. Then they had to run, because a tarrasque showed up⁶.

With the keystone acquired, along with some weird doppelgangers of NPCs that had appeared randomly, (which we promptly forgot about) they got back in the ship and flew to the next planet.

Pacror Thala

Pacror Thala and Pacror Gronzal were two planets that orbited the sun as a pair, spinning around one another as they hurled through space. Due to totally legitimate scientific reasons, tidal forces moved water between the planets back and forth every couple of hours, like a sort of planetary hourglass. While Pacror Gronzal was covered with sand and amphibious plant life, Pacror Thala was all rocks. Through some forgotten method⁷, the found the right cave, which was blocked by a huge boulder. Instead of waiting for the tide to lift it away, the wizard cast a levitation spell on it, and they found the teleportation stone leading to the gravity lab inside the cave.

Once in the lab, which was a small cave deep underground with no way to the surface, they found the gravity device. It was a whirring metal contraption connected to tanks of perflentine. They disconnected it, and the whirring stopped. After some discussion, they decided to finish what the dwarves had started and blow up the wildspace system. They flew away a bit in their spelljammer to test that the device was no longer working. After all, it would be pretty bad if they activated the solar cannon and then realized that they still can’t leave. But leave they could, so they headed back to the solar cannon and pulled the switch, casting the supernova spell. Then they rushed back to their ship and left the wildspace system, making sure not to look back, because cool adventurers don’t look at supernovas.

Closing Thoughts

And that was all, pretty much! I think it could’ve been a really cool adventure if I hadn’t had to cut it down to two sessions. But oh well. Since we were pressed for time, I ended up cutting two planets, the previously mentioned Pacror Gronzal, and Zal-Neomia; a jungle planet with some kind of boss salamander inspired by the Gravemind from Halo.

I think I’ll reuse a lot of this for a future campaign. Doesn’t have to be a space adventure. I really like running a small sandbox with a few distinct locations that the players will need to revisit a few times, slowly getting more and more context about the place’s past and unraveling its history. Fun stuff!