Cloud castles, airships, sky fortresses

[OgreBattle]

I love airships n' sky castles n' flying fortresses in 90's console RPG's, what tabletop games have a strong emphasis on them?

Or at least have a good module for it. I know D&D has a few but are they good? I'm going to assume any airship/sky battle rules in any edition are going to be lackluster.

I don't recall any sky islands in RIFTS oddly enough, though there are some sky fortresses with gigantic skulls for hulls.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

In 2E FR there was the adventure How the Mighty Are Fallen, to be used with the Netheril box set. I remember liking the box when I flipped through it 20 years ago, but that's neither here nor there. Dungeon #136 had the adventure Gates of Oblivion, which involves the Shadovar, being a remnant of Netheril in the current timeline.

Rifts had the four armed bird people that live in the Grand Canyon, in which they built cloud castles.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Lady Blackbird is a free indie dealie, but it does have a strong emphasis on airships.

[Krusk]

Clound giant castle in castles of the inner sea in pathfinder has one thats pretty cool. Its got a population and monster stats for the residents too which was handy. I was acually able to use it out of the box in a game im running.

[Blasted]

BECMI has "Top Ballista" a somewhat comic take on a cloud city, but it includes all the normal classes, setting and monster information that you'd expect. There are also rules for building and flying airships which I haven't looked at in detail. I expect they're the usual clown fiesta that D&D provides, looking ok at first glance and breaking down the moment you try to use them.

[Stahlseele]

define strong emphasis . .
define flying fortress . .
you can do it in both shadowrun and battletech, i think.
They will not be gigantic and they will be hillariously expensive and mostly useless, but you can do it.
Strangely enough, i'd kinda have expected the Mecha Version of DnD to have something like that. But somehow, it does not.
Is there a Tabletop set in the Disney TaleSpin universe?
They have air pirates with their iron vulture.
Otherwise, something Marvel Universe related probably. Helicarrier-Fleet says hello.

[Blicero]

This is a one-page dungeon that takes place in a castle in the clouds:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_4yfZ ... ef=2&pli=1

[RelentlessImp]

There is Aether & Flux, which is a d20 supplement that tries to Spelljammer without using Spelljammer, and the book is primarily focused on the Aetherships (airships/spelljammers by any other name). The rules seem... okay-ish, like a facelift of the Stormwrack rules, but like most third-party supplements, it is fucking terrible. Actually, it's 13 years old. Maybe I can OSSR this... or I can send the PDF to someone who would like to.

There was also this interesting setting for I think Savage Worlds that had the world explode and had civilization living on the remnants of the 'sploded world, still held in a gravitational orbit around where the planet used to be, and all the travel was done via airships. I think it was Sundered Skies?

Also, any D&D 3.5 game that includes Cloud Giants should, by rights, include cloud castles and cloud countries and all of that shit because that is what they do.

[Longes]

I love airships n' sky castles n' flying fortresses in 90's console RPG's, what tabletop games have a strong emphasis on them?

Or at least have a good module for it. I know D&D has a few but are they good? I'm going to assume any airship/sky battle rules in any edition are going to be lackluster.

I don't recall any sky islands in RIFTS oddly enough, though there are some sky fortresses with gigantic skulls for hulls.

Pirates of the 7 skies

[Miniature Colossus]

Pirates of the 7 skies

That should be Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies right? The PDQ-game from Evil Hat?

[Lich-Loved]

Sorry for the necro, somehow I missed this thread when it was posted.

There is a 175pg hardbound/PDF setting book called Sundered Skies for the Savage Worlds engine. Think steampunk Spelljammer meets islands in the sky with airships full of of Firefly reavers driven "glowmad" in between. About half of the book is a standard gazetteer and setting-specific rules (well SW rules, so very little in the way of crunch) and the second half is the story/plot hooks including an AP-lite series of connected adventures. It could work for SW as written or be adapted to 3.x/Tome if you just want the fluff.

The rules are indeed lite, covering only 6 pages, and rely upon the existing ship combat and chase rules in core SW ("but in 3 dimensions!!"), so you won't find a lot of innovation rules-wise. Spelljammer and/or a helping wad of mind caulk may be required if you were going to run 3.x. The art is full color but on the small side, murky with a muted patina. I see what they were going for but like the whole product, it is a bit out of focus. Noticeably missing are actual pictures of the, you know, actual sky ships listed in the Gear section for purchase, which is pretty inexcusable given the setting. There are other product offerings set in the same world, but I have no idea of their relative quality.

[Grek]

You could try Ships of Skybourne for Pathfinder.

[pragma]

Someone on this board has an flying castles themed fantasy setting in their sig. I thought it was Orion, but after searching it turns out it is not. It sounds like it's up your alley though.

[pragma]

I found it! And it was Orion!

http://a-broken-sky.obsidianportal.com/

[OgreBattle]

I found it! And it was Orion!

http://a-broken-sky.obsidianportal.com/

Thanks for digging that up, giving it a read. Also found this thread from 2011 about airships in D&D:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52741& ... sc&start=0

I also remember there was a thread on here a while ago on how to deal with damage done to airships and castles.

Maybe some kind of "The Den answer/raging argument wiki on various topics" would be good to put together.

[OgreBattle]

Dangit, I remember asking on here about how different RPG's handle "PC's are all part of a ship crew, are the skills used in operating the ship completely different or a part of the skills one uses for on-foot adventuring" but forgot the exact details of the answers I got from that.

Looking through FF's Rogue Trader for ideas as that's a game where PC's are big shots in a 20,000 strong ship crew and expected to blast things in person as well as lead the crew through space battles.


Found another old thread talking about airship games, Skies of Arcadia in particular. Goes into nice detail on the importance of crew members and minigames.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=396307

So. I've been playing Skies of Arcadia. Excellent game, that, one of the shining jewels of a console video game generation that's spoiled for choice on great games.

One of the highlights, nay, the money shot of the game is the airship system. It's simple, but it's also really fun. Specifically, I'm wondering about the ins and outs and pitfalls of this adapted approach. That said, here are the paradigms I'd like to push:

• Probably the most important assumption: the game has separate minigames for standard action-adventure protagonist activities that are not covered by the vehicle, vehicle combat, and crew system. You know, shit like delving in dungeons, running businesses, fighting monsters, all that. Think Shadowrun or D&D or, heck, Skies of Arcadia. Keep this in mind, because it influences the other assumption.
• The game heavily encourages a 3-7 PC party to pool their resources together for a crew. If people want to have their own individual vehicles then it works Voltron or Power Rangers style where while people can dick around in their Megazord component for any serious combat you need to, well, form Voltron.
• The game should be able to support this system and also have people with real and important superpowers. It's okay if the answer the system gives to 'what happens if a hundred 15th-level wizards spam fireballs from embattlements at the vehicle' is 'the vehicle gets slightly damaged, but it pretty much annihilates them in less than a minute'. It's also okay if it turns that vehicles have an upper ceiling on power and Superman or Szass Tam can contemptuously destroy any number of airships. But the game should be able to model what happens without Rule Zero.
• The individual badassedness of the officers and crewmembers matters a lot. A decent crew with a technologically superior ship should only be able to hold parity at best with a great crew with an inferior ship.
• The game doesn't enforce hard game balance caps for determining who will join your crew and what kind of vehicle you'll have. Oh, sure, there can (and should) be plenty of soft caps like Reputation and Leadership and maintenance costs and simply the kind of people you attract, but if you come across Dread Pirate Roberts with his sexy +14 to Navigation and Gunnery bonus and he agrees to serve on your ship, the game and the DM shouldn't implode in on itself. That said, some sort of CR system which compared the individual D&D-like badassery of PCs to their expected wealth and power and tried to match them with an average-case vehicle and crew would be helpful.
• The game has a logarithmic utility function for additional crewmembers. Since you can't enforce a video game-like hard cap on the number or ratio of gunners or medics in your crew, there needs to be a way I'm thinking of something like an Attention or Morale or Bureaucracy modifier where the competence of all NPC crewmembers drops off if you add too many people.
• The crew roster has a bunch of specialties and positions that need to be filled in such a way that you just can't mix-and-match a generic badass nor can you just load up on 20 Magic Engineers and call it a day. You need shit like a gunner, a cook, a delegate, a medic, soforth. And while in-universe a good helmsman might be more valued than a good marine or a good boatswain's mate, as far as the players are concerned it's like wondering whether the feet slot or neck slot for magical items is more valuable.
• The NPC members of your crew are individually important without hijacking the narrative unless the PCs and GM can think of a good reason for them to do so. Think Fire Emblem or Valkyria Chronicles or Mass Effect.
• With all of the above assumptions, it seems like the narrative limit for crewmembers is 25 NPCs or 6 NPCs per PC, whichever is larger.
• The vehicle regularly undergoes upgrades. This means that the game will have to provide a lot of different methods for doing upgrades, including but not limited to: commissions, off-the-shelf purchases, scavenging from defeated ships, scavenging from wrecked or abandoned ships, research, trading technologies from around the world, so-on.
• Very importantly, the crew that runs the vehicle is only really good for running the vehicle. They do not generically assist in personal melee combat, adventuring, politics, or anything. As is often the case, an analogy with Star Wars might be helpful here: C3P0 is your go-to guy for communication and delegate duties, but no one -- stupid prequel trilogy moments aside -- expects him to participate in even light adventuring.
• Because of the above caveat, there needs to be a way to enforce segregation between the skills needed to pilot the vehicle well and Other Wars of Adventuring. This means that while it's okay for a particular wizard to be a great engineer, wizards in general can't make great shipboard engineers. What's more, specialist skills and abilities of non-adventurers need to be better than adventurer dabblers. It's okay for a champion Waterbender who has never been aboard a ship before who uses her powers properly be a better helmsmen than 95% of the shlubs out of the academy, but this alone shouldn't make her the World's Best Helmsmen. This makes me think that not only should skills advance at a different track from traditional Adventurer powers, but they should also increase faster.

[phlapjackage]

I love airships n' sky castles n' flying fortresses in 90's console RPG's, what tabletop games have a strong emphasis on them?

Earthdawn has airships and even a character class for them: Sky Raider. There was a sourcebook all about airships and sky raiders (Crystal Raiders of Barsaive? ) too.

No idea if the rules were any good tho'

[OgreBattle]

Found a website with a nice overview on all the crew members to operate a B17 Flying Fortress. Can be a good reference for deciding what crew/skills to stick in a sky pirates game.

https://www.azcaf.org/aircraft/b-17g-cr ... -operator/