Stormheart: Between Air & Water

    This is post is for this month's RPG Blog Carnival topic: Other, Between, and Under hosted by vdoughnut.  Once again, the gods laughed at my plans, and the full work is beyond the scope of a single blog post, so I'll share a link to the GDocs draft, of course down below.

 

    First, let me say that for a setting I have never had a chance to play, I really love the concept of Spelljammer.  I like creating wild fantasy settings that go beyond another hex crawl on a world, to a world crawl.

    So along these lines, I decided to make a setting that takes place on a pocket plane between the elemental planes of air and water.  Here's the introduction which paints some broad brushstrokes of what's going on:

Stormheart is a small but cosmopolitan trading town that mostly exists in a
pocket on the border of the Planes of Air and Water, on a plane one hundred
miles in radius that separates the Sky from The Deep, looping back from any
one side to the other.

The Mother of Storms

The Mother of Storms, is the strongest storm on the border between the
elemental planes of air and water.  This swirling mass of a dozen toroidal
maelstroms, each increasingly bigger and thicker, containing the smaller
ones inside its orbit, so that the outer one is almost two hundred miles in
diameter, and the inner one is about twenty miles in diameter.  They each
rotate on a different axis piercing their diameter, blending air and water
almost evenly within their body.  Each of these axes moves over time,
suddenly changing direction or speed.  Their only common point of
reference is at their very center, through Mother’s Heart (see below).
More than 80 yards over The Deep, gravity shifts through this chaotic
mass, as though the entire volume was maliciously trying to push
intruders into the stormy volumes.  Some say she is the greatest storm
elemental.  Certainly, the movements of the maelstrom can seem malicious.

In other worlds, the fiercest of storms are linked to the Mother of
Storms, exchanging energy with her. Those in other worlds flying or
sailing through such storms or otherwise being out of contact with the
ground might end with one blown or pulled through these exchange
portals, leaving their own worlds and for this plane of airy and wet pocket
dimension.

There are some known, long standing portals, connected to very long
running or even permanent storms in other worlds.  These portals are
what are usually used to travel to Stormheart by knowledgeable
navigators eager to get aqua vitae or drownspray (more below).

At the center of the storm is a relatively calm area, in which down is
towards the Deeps, and winds are languid. Four “satellites” drift in a
generally squashed tetrahedral formation around the central mass of airy
water, a sphere of airy water only two miles in radius, known as The
Mother’s Heart, bisected by the plane formed by the Sky and the Deep.

Each satellite is a web work of linked structures with kites, sails, wings,
and nets, to catch salvage out of the sky, and to provide netting docks to
those ships which flew to Stormheart.

The Mother’s Heart is a bubbly sphere of water, glowing slightly while
shooting a special water called aqua vitae upwards in a geyser sixty miles,
while simultaneously shooting a forceful jet of air called drownspray
directly down into the water in a column that also goes at least fifty miles
deep. It has a miniature tornado, only 40 yards tall and across, which
always spins heartwise (counter-clockwise as seen from above), and also a
whirlpool on its surface, thirty yards across, which is generally considered
to be roughly stationary.  

A watch is completed after four hours, when the tornado crosses the
whirlpool in roughly four hours.  At this time, Mother’s Heart geyser and
jet pause, one of the three lower satellites usually replaces the upper
satellite, perching on top of Mother’s Heart, and aqua vitae jets up through
the center of the perched satellite.

The end of a watch is also when the maelstroms change their access of
rotation, completely changing their motion, and so the most dangerous time
to travel through them.

The draw of Stormheart, for those that come voluntarily, is to get the pure
elemental water called aqua vitae or the air from the jet out of bottom of
Mother’s Heart.

Here's what's in there right now:

• Seven neighborhoods for each of the four satellites of Mother's Heart, including prominent figures, landmarks, and random encounters for each area.
  
• A reasonable elementalist class for air and water elementalists, including spells and spell lists for both. 
• A list of possible uses for both aqua vitae and drownspray, the pure elemental forms of water and air forced out of the Mother's Heart. 
• 
  

    While the heart of the concept is here, there's more work to do to finish it off, but in the interest of the carnival, if you want a live link to this draft as a Google Doc, here it is!

     Please let me know in the comments what kind of wild pocket settings you've set up for your games, or what kind of campaigns you would consider using a setting like this in!