The destruction of the SS Stupid brought an end to one of the more bizarre chapters of my GMing experience. But great stories often get sequels, and it wasn’t long before the SS Stupid returned in a new, grander form.

Into the Astral Plane

After getting lost in Dungeonland for a while, the crew of the now-destroyed SS Stupid narrowly escaped getting crushed inside a house that shrank down to pocket size once they entered it. The impulsive gnome in the group picked up the now-reduced building and casually tossed it into a bag of holding for later.

“Oh,” I said, probably unable to conceal my impish glee, “You’ve put an extradimensional space into another extradimensional space.”

I know now that Pathfinder 2nd edition doesn’t actually specify that putting an extradimensional space into a bag of holding creates a dimensional rift, but that’s been part of fantasy RPG lore for so long that it’s ingrained into me. Thus, the game shifted to a new sort of planar travel.

Everyone made their saving throw as a rift to the Astral Plane opened up, except for the angazhani who had gained intelligence as a result of the trip into Dungeonland and now served as the group’s mascot. He went hurtling into the rift, seemingly gone forever. The rest of the group wasn’t about to give him up, though, and jumped in after him before the rift closed. Thus, everyone became trapped in the Astral Plane.

Claiming a New Ship

Statistically, the portal should have left the entire group drifting aimlessly about a vast void of nothingness for centuries before they met even one other living creature. But that would have been boring, so a githyanki ship just happened to be sailing by. The gith saw the adventurers as either threats or captives and attacked right off.

The group fared well in the resulting battle until the ship’s captain cast a fireball on the deck delivering an ominous speech about how the children of Vlaakith would conquer all. (As you can see, I mix D&D and Pathfinder lore with impunity in my games.)

Well…it would have been an ominous speech, had she been able to finish it. But gravity in the Astral Plane is subjective, and once a person has adapted to it they can move in any direction they want. During the speech, the angazhani (now named Allon, as in Allon the girallon) got used to these physics and came in hot. Beneath the furious tone of the githyanki, the adventurers heard a faint “aaaaaaAAAAAAA” which grew louder and louder until it ended in an abrupt splat.

Allon landed right on top of the captain, squashing her flat. And while it is absolutely not a rule that killing the captain makes you the new captain, the group decided it needed to happen anyway. Thus Allon became the captain of his own ship…a ship that the group immediately christened the SS 2 Stupid.

My Setting’s New Planar Lore

Now that the group was in the Astral Plane, I needed to give them something to do. And, to be honest, my knowledge of planar lore is iffy. So, in the true spirit of both adventure and RPGs, I made stuff up.

The biggest thing I knew about the Astral was that it provided a way to get from one plane to another. I also knew that the River Styx touched other planes, although I didn’t know at the time that in D&D‘s cosmology it is specific to Hell and in Pathfinder‘s cosmology it goes through the Outer Rifts but not the Astral. But I decided the Styx ran through all of creation, and that’s now canon to my setting.

So what did the group do? Immediately crash into it, of course.

See, they had all these swords left over from when I ran Seven Swords of Sin, and each one had an evil soul inside it. The one thing the adventurers knew was that the Styx erased memories, so they immediately piloted the ship toward the river winding through the silver void and tossed the swords in. Whether this simply erased the memories of the intelligent swords or released the souls trapped within to the afterlife is a matter of interpretation. But, since the crew didn’t yet know how to properly pilot the githyanki ship, they almost fell in, too.

Once again, Sailing Lore became an important skill. My plan was to use Pathfinder‘s degrees of success to determine where they landed on the scale of a perfect landing (a critical success) or crashing the ship into the Styx, being swept away, and landing in a random plane with no memories at all (a critical failure). The group got a success, which meant they splashed into the water a bit but didn’t lost any long-term memories.

A Trip Along the World Tree

The unexpected sojourn off the Material Plane led me to create a lot of new planar lore for my setting, mostly done on the fly. I borrowed from D&D‘s Planescape setting, creating a Sigil-like city full of planar portals and an Yggdrasil-like World Tree that connected all manner of other planes. However, all of these journeys kept the Astral Plane as a backdrop. The city called Infinity was within an enclosed sphere in the Astral, guarded by aeons and inexplicably subject to its own laws of reality. The World Tree rose through the silver void, with its roots drawing from the River Styx that I had previously dropped into the Astral. This made the ratatosk, squirrel-like guardians of the World Tree, into immortal scamps that could live for eternity as long as they never left the branches of their home.

Through a meeting with one of the ratatosk and the sharing of some size-changing mushrooms taken from Dungeonland, the group found themselves led to a mysterious knot on the World Tree which called to them. It beckoned them back to the pocket plane from which they came, and they thus wound up in Dungeonland once more, ready to finish that module.

And what of the SS 2 Stupid? The adventurers left that to Allon, who now travels as a four-armed Astral pirate, ready to answer the call of adventure wherever he may find it.

That particular campaign is now finished, but it left behind a lasting legacy. Once, and only once, when an adventure has totally hit the fan, the players can spend all their Hero Points and get a save in the form of the planar pirate Allon, whose Astral ship will crash into whatever scene they are in and save the day.

They haven’t used this precious gift…yet.