I’ve previously posted about Spelljammer and building up randomised plot hooks for it, but I didn’t have any ideas at the time.
After going for a walk the other day, I instead came up with the below ideas. Not enough for a random table, and too detailed, but some ideas I might take forwards.
A Dwarven Citadel drifts in aimlessly in wildspace, apparently abandoned. If the party investigates, there find it empty of inhabitants, it’s air envelope stale but not fouled. Embers remain in the hearths, some still warm.
Whilst nothing appears in disarray, food is half-eaten, and there are no valuables of any kind to be found, except for a few coins dropped haphazardly near the entrances.
Whatever happened remains a mystery.
(Alternatively, all is as above, however, an old and senile king has been left alone chained to his throne at the heart of the Citadel. He may be possessed.)
The party approaches a small ice planetoid inhabited entirely by trolls. They are friendly and aware of spelljamming and willing to trade, though extremely limited in resources so without much interesting.
Their chief shaman offers to read bones for the players (similar to a tarokka deck), but all of her readings are ominous or appear to be otherwise bad for the PCs.
The party encounter a Neogi Mindspider adrift in the phlogiston. All that remains of the crew – both neogi and slave – are three enraged and confused umber hulks and piles of various species’ bones picked clean.
A humanoid skeleton remains in the deathjammer helm, wearing a strange iron crown and emitting a piercing scream somehow.
Upon entering the ship, the PCs make a DC 5 Wisdom save vs confusion, on entering the same deck as the helm they roll again at DC 10 but take 1d8 psychic damage on a failed check in addition. On opening the door to the helm chamber they roll versus DC 15 and 2d8 psychic damage in addition to confusion.
The party might try to find a captain’s log to find the location of the iron crowned humanoid’s people and their effective anti-neogi weaponry.
A tribe of dragonborn and kobolds are living inside a hollow asteroid – the reamins of a celestial dragon nest. They appear very friendly as they don’t receive many visitors, though they have their own troubles – many of the tribe have begun to go missing in the deep caverns.
In reality, as small group of their leaders are planning to sacrifice the PCs to a young celestial dragon (or even a clutch of them) hidden in one of the deep caverns, where the group worships them as gods.
This is also the fate of the missing tribe memebers, though one may still survive.
A huge, petrified tree floats in the void (of either wildspace or the phlogiston).
It has no air envelope, and frozen leaves and clods of earth also float nearby. It appears to have been uprooted forcefully.
It means something or is recognisable to at least one of the PCs – and based on a handful of blooms in the boughs, it was uprooted recently.
An impossibly small crystal sphere looms out of the phlogiston, barely bigger than a large air planet.
If the PCs attempt to investigate, it begins to shrink and quickly collapses in on itself as they draw near, and their ship is momentarily caught in swirling, stormy currents as the Flow adjusts to the disappearance of this sphere.
Flying with the Flow, it is briefly interrupted by something huge swimming across it.
All the PCs see is a huge, kraken-like eye the size of a small moon glancing at them as it passes.
It definitely wasn’t a krajen.
Inside a newly-discovered crystal sphere, the PCs fail to find any sign of planetary bodies in expected orbits.
Close to where they expect to find a primary, they encounter another sphere – though this one appears to be made of stone or metal. Wrecks, debris and immature krajen litter the surface, as does strange plant-life. There is a tiny air envelope entirely covering the surface, barely taller than the tallest PC.
As they investigate, they spot what appears to be a ragged opening on the horizon.
The PCs enter a crystal sphere where the star is being consumed by… Something impossible to see that pulls their ship towards it even at a great distance.
Can they escape the sphere with a group of refugee NPCs before being pulled in? Will they have enough air or rations?
And what caused the ‘black hole’ to appear in the first place?
Slavers come in many shapes and sizes – neogi, rakshasa, illithid, drow, pirates.
Now, a terrifying fleet of an alliance of all of the above is spotted by the PCs amassing in the phlogiston, and they’re very close to Realmspace/Krynnspace/Greyspace/somewhere else very heavily populated.
jot jot ïota 