Review: Spelljammer: Adventures in Space (and D&D 5e)

I wasn't going to write this review.

Despite recently running a lot of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, I don't have an overwhelming urge to talk about it much here on the ol' hobby blog. I may publish the occasional piece of 5e content here, but the actual rules and the culture around the game has been analyzed to death elsewhere. The scene certainly doesn't need another voice muddying the waters and Wizards of the Coast has no need to benefit from either my praise or scorn, so I keep doing the stuff I like with or without them.

However, two things spurred me to write this review:

1. I love the Spelljammer setting, as the tags Spelljammer and SPELLS WILL BE JAMMED might suggest.
2. Most of The Dreaded Discourse™ surrounding the new Spelljammer release has been of even worse quality than usual.

So, this is perhaps less a review than a rebuttal. If you happen upon this review, consider this a message in a bottle: if someone on social media told you how horrible the new Spelljammer box set was and how you need a bunch of third-party content to make it playable, I'm here to more appropriately calibrate your expectations. (In short: the rules are perfectly acceptable, being neither excellent nor terrible, and you don't need anybody's homebrew to "fix" the new rules.)

However, this review will be a bit long, because it is (in my mind) impossible to discuss an official fifth edition D&D release without talking about WotC's design goals in making D&D 5e. (And you can't talk about those design goals without discussing what came before.) As such, this is a partial review of fifth edition itself. These reviews won't be especially in-depth, but they will hopefully be helpful.

If you're only here for a specific section, refer to the table of contents below.

Table of Contents

I. The History of D&D (and Table-Top RPGs)
II. Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition
III. Spelljammer: Adventures in Space

I. The History of D&D (and Table-Top RPGs)

If you remember your history pretty well, you can safely skip down to section II. Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Conversely, if you really want to delve into the thick of RPG history, authors like James Maliszewski, Ben Riggs, Jon Peterson, and Shannon Appelcline do great work in this sphere. (Although as with so many things in the hobby, their focus is often on Dungeons & Dragons specifically, leaving some of the less-renowned-but-still-influential aspects of the hobby unexamined.)

But the short version is that D&D starts in 1974 as a game exploring site-based and event-based adventures — pulp heroes wandering into the wilderness, facing danger in dungeons, and gathering the treasures therein (typically to fund their own personal projects).

Within a decade, more narrative structure emerges in game scenarios, exemplified by the investigation- and skill-heavy Call of Cthulhu in 1981 and the Hickman revolution starting with 1982's I3: Pharaoh. Money stops becoming a vital resource and starts becoming a supplement: 1989's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2e does away with XP-for-gold (although it remains as an optional rule), instead focusing primarily on fighting monsters, while 1991's Vampire: The Masquerade completely abstracts character wealth as part of the Backgrounds system and assumes it is not a primary goal.

By the end of the 1990s, the transition from site-based or event-based adventures into plot-based ones culminates in the ascendance of the metaplot: an overarching story that runs in the background of published game materials, such that collectors can read the books to put together the puzzle and players can interact with big events in the background of the setting. Many of the big games of the era have a metaplot revealed during the line's development (Cyberpunk, Deadlands, Delta Green, Unknown Armies, and World of Darkness all come to mind), and while D&D as a whole avoids a metaplot, most of its campaign settings have them. (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Planescape, and Ravenloft certainly all had metaplots.) The metaplot is simultaneously remembered fondly by fans as an interesting serialized story in its own right, while also being reviled as a bloated gimmick to sell books.

When TSR collapses and Wizards of the Coast takes over the game, they put their own stamp on the game by combining the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line with the BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia era-D&D line into simply Dungeons & Dragons. A few of the popular games at the time followed suit, relaunching in the early 2000s with slick new editions and largely abandoning the metaplot structure in favor of increased accessibility. However, this is an era in which a lot of games design more explicit rulesets (relying less on GM rulings), and also replace the metaplot subscription structure with a emphasis on "character builds" — the game line is now a vehicle by which to build an optimized character. While D&D 3e exemplifies this with its so-called ivory tower design, you see it in lines like Exalted and new World of Darkness.

While game lines become more bloated, desktop publishing and forums like The Forge and RPG.net allow for the creation and proliferation of smaller, more focused indie RPGs. While some of these games are short-lived, as befits a smaller and more narrow play experience, a lot of them are read by other game designers and introduce more mechanical concepts into the RPG ideaspace.

After an eight-year development cycle, Wizards of the Coast finally takes what it learned and rebrands D&D again into the wildly-polarizing fourth edition. This continues a lot of the game design trends of third edition, taking them to their logical conclusion by further emphasizing combat as the focus of the game. Combat procedures are explicit, repeatable, and largely in the players' hands. (Instead of GMs making rulings on things the players want to try, most of what a character can do is located on the character sheet.) The game's encounter design also lends itself to largely linear adventure paths of straightforward plots broken only by the game's setpiece battles.

While the game still sold well, the backlash online was fairly intense, taking two interesting forms:

1. The grognard bloggers who stuck with BECMI or AD&D during the third edition era start swapping design notes with the arthaus punk bloggers, forming the OSR largely by accident.
2. WotC ends their contract with Paizo Publishing, the contractor who published Dragon and Dungeon during the third-edition era. Since they now have a lot of experience writing third-edition content, they make their own third-edition retroclone called Pathfinder.

The backlash and increased competition for dungeon-y, dragon-y adventure game design space results in fourth edition D&D having one of the shortest development cycles of any D&D edition. After only four to six years depending on how you count it, WotC takes these disparate pieces of information — the stuff happening in the storygames sphere, the stuff happening in the OSR sphere, and the fan response to Pathfinder — and returns to the drawing board to release "D&D Next" for the game's fortieth anniversary.

II. Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition

While I read some D&D books and played a single, hazily-recalled game around 2006, fourth edition was my first edition of the game I ran and played beyond one session, starting in 2011. (As noted elsewhere, I mostly ran World of Darkness before coming to D&D.) As such, fifth edition is the first version of the game that I have followed largely as it released, instead of piecing it together in hindsight. I don't know if that makes me especially qualified to write what follows, but now you understand my background on the subject.

Forty years of game design brings us to this. During the mid-2010s, I recall someone calling fifth edition, "everyone's second-favorite edition of D&D," and that sounds about right. I recently described most of the fifth edition releases as "a C+ essay." (As with most things in the universe, I often describe it as, "Not as good as the fans say it is, but better than the haters say it is.")

If you play Super Smash Bros., D&D 5e is Mario, excelling in no particular area but robust in all of them. In the immortal words of George Costanza, 5e is "right in that meaty part of the curve: not showing off, not falling behind."

In short: it's good. (But not great.)

A lot of the things that drive its popularity include its prevalence (as it acts as a sort of lingua franca in the RPG hobby), its thriving play culture, its dominance on livestreaming RPG shows, and the fact that it more-or-less does what it advertises. If you want an adventure game that lets you go on adventures about exploring strange locations, interacting with interesting NPCs, fighting monsters, recovering treasure, and becoming more powerful while doing so, it handles all these things.

If you want a flatter power curve; a less number-heavy experience; something that focuses less on resource management; an experience that more consistently reflects a specific genre rather than "whatever breed of fantasy happens at the table tonight;" something that takes place in a more modern setting; an experience that actively dissuades combat; or a setting with no magic or different magic other than the pseudo-Vancian model, you probably want to look elsewhere.

As noted on this blog, I operate in a lot of indie spaces, and they tend to complain about Dungeons & Dragons at length. (So much so that allegedly anti-D&D places are where I sometimes get significant news about official D&D releases.) But those complaints are often incoherent, and clearly represent some personal issue with the game. In my mind, there are only three legitimate complaints about fifth edition D&D, and they're unlikely to change any time soon:

1. It's corporate art. And like a lot of corporate art, it's designed to be as inoffensive as possible. It's bland and it doesn't really do anything innovative.
2. The rules are complicated. It's very number-heavy and worries about fine details like positioning and resource management. If you have difficulty tracking a lot of variables, if you have a disability that makes it difficult to keep numbers in your head, or if tedious note-taking doesn't sound like your idea of fun, this might not be the game for you.
3. The culture overshadows the game at the table. Strictly speaking, this isn't the fault of the rules, but it does lead to a lot of trouble online. D&D is incredibly widespread, and people are overwhelmingly likely to learn the game from a mentor. As such, everyone thinks they know what the rules are, but almost no one actually reads the books cover-to-cover. (And even if you do, the rules are complicated. Nobody can keep all of the rules in their head at once.)
4. A phantom fourth argument that is partially true is that the game is pretty expensive. That isn't totally true: while there might be marketing pressure and peer pressure to spend money on it, the basic game is technically free. You can download the Basic Rules for free (or use the Basic Rules on D&D Beyond), use an online dice roller, and find enough free content online to run the game for the rest of your life without doing any work. I suspect the thriving community around the game and the free rules are two of the many factors that maintain the game's popularity.

But to understand why WotC has made the design decisions it made, one must understand that this represents forty years of game design and fifteen years of Wizards of the Coast corporate analysis. Fifth edition is a fundamentally reactionary edition, responding to all that came before and combining aspects from the previous eight or so editions of the game into something that tries to please everyone. The overall trend is one of retaining some of the most popular rules and incorporating bits of design from other games while also simplifying concepts from previous editions: multiple spells are condensed into aspects of a single spell, floating modifiers are condensed into advantage/disadvantage, monster stats are simplified from their third edition counterparts and all relevant information is found reliably in the stat block. (Recall that, during the BECMI and AD&D era, valuable statistical information like special abilities and spells were often hidden in the monster descriptions, usually-but-not-always in the same place.)

Also recall that, while a lot of the design of previous editions has proven quite popular, analysis suggests it maybe wasn't sustainable. Ahead of his recent book, Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons, Ben Riggs made a handful of posts on Twitter and elsewhere about TSR sales figures, and they paint a bleak picture. The classic AD&D 2e box sets are fondly recalled but apparently didn't sell terribly well. Likewise, we know that third edition was popular and is well-regarded by the fans, but that edition had a punishing release schedule with an enormous game line. We don't know much about WotC sales figures, but it seems reasonable to surmise that they developed fourth edition because sales were flagging.

(I would also be remiss if I ignored the fact that fifth edition is also designed around the Adventurers League organized play program and the community content on DM's Guild, which is part of the complex mélange of factors that drives the game's popularity. The game can only be but so outlandish, otherwise it would interfere with the open table policy of the Adventurers League. Likewise, any content that fans really want to see can easily be made by the community and posted on DM's Guild for pay — which per DM's Guild policy, still monetarily benefits Wizards of the Coast. That's pure passive income for them.)

In short, the unified design and staggered release schedule for fifth edition indicate that Wizards of the Coast has learned from its business mistakes. They're not constantly churning out content every month, they're not establishing expansive metaplots, they're not trying to innovate while also risking failure. (The streaming space also provides a constant stream of free advertising for the game without WotC having to put out anything new. At this point, they don't need to churn out new content every month, and it's easier to catch press for the new release when it's a big one every quarter or so.) It's all very safe, focus-tested, and conservatively-designed. Whatever else someone's opinion of D&D 5e, these trends all suggest that this was a very conscientiously-designed edition of the game. (The feedback from the ongoing open playtest of the game no doubt guides some of its development and contributes to the smooth, inoffensive nature of it.)

III. Spelljammer: Adventures in Space

Which brings us to the actual point of this post.

You have a new edition of the game that also tries to be a legacy edition, supported by a continuous open playtest of the rules and a burgeoning fan community. While the original fifth edition release in 2014 focused on the popular Forgotten Realms as the game's implied setting, fans have been clamoring for old content like adventures and campaign settings to be re-released under fifth edition. Wizards of the Coast started releasing legacy content fairly quickly, beginning with an Eberron playtest in 2015 and an official release of an expanded version of I6: Ravenloft (entitled Curse of Strahd) in 2016. Fan requests for additional updates continue across social media, and WotC continues to publish it.

Hearkening back to the Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space box set, Wizards of the Coast releases Spelljammer: Adventures in Space in 2022. As with most of their other products, the production values are decent, the art is lovely, and the organization is as expected. It's a C+ essay — it promises rules for spelljammers, space-themed monsters, and an adventure, and it delivers exactly what it promised.

Interesting tidbits from the new setting include:

• In contrast to the original 2e setting, there is only one kind of spelljammer helm, and it no longer requires your spell power to use it. (This last fact is even a change from the helm of the scavenger published in 2018's Dungeon of the Mad Mage.) Every spelljammer is roughly as maneuverable as any other, and there is no longer an upper limit to the tonnage of a ship.
• Spelljammer helms can still only be used by spellcasters, though. You just don't have to turn spell energy into motive force anymore.
• They don't include all the ships from the old material, but again, it's pretty easy to convert old material to the new system. As it stands, the new set includes a lot of old designs and adds a few new ones.
• Spelljammers are very accessible in this edition. You can probably get one, helm and all, for about 25,000gp or so. (In 2e, spelljammers were expensive, especially the helms. While a spelljammer is a good place to invest one's loot after many expeditions, it's also fun for players to be able to buy one relatively early in the game.)
• The phlogiston from 2e is gone, replaced with the Astral Plane. I actually like this change, as it means that even low-level characters might have the resources to voyage into other worlds: journeys are now unlikely to take more than two months' worth of supplies, as the Astral Plane doesn't require rations or air. Of course, the trade-off is that the Astral Plane is way more dangerous than the phlogiston. (Not counting the inherent risk of setting your whole ship on fire in the phlogiston, of course.)
• Also in keeping with the Astral Plane, there are no space lanes, star systems have a tendency to move like bubbles in a sea, and you automatically orienteer in the direction of something by thinking about it. In short, they've made it easy to get around by leaving those details up to the Game Master — you don't need a map to get from Krynnspace to Realmspace, and the trip is as long or short as the GM decides it is.
• You can never go wrong with more monsters, and the included Boo's Astral Menagerie has plenty:
• A lot of Dark Sun monsters appear in this version, such as braxat, b'rohg, gaj, psurlons, and ssurrans. (The thri-kreen also appear as a playable race in the Astral Adventurer's Guide.) A leaked map even indicates that "Doomspace" in the included adventure Light of Xaryxis was originally going to be called "Athasspace." As it stands, Fyreen in Doomspace certainly sounds like a post-post-apocalyptic Athas. WotC also has a habit of teasing future products in current ones, although such references are just as likely to be fanservice. (But they've previously suggested that they'll do Dark Sun... sooner or later. Maybe.)
• A couple of BECMI-era monsters from Mystara also appear, like the brain collector/neh-thalggu and the feyr.
• In addition to some classic Spelljammer setting monsters, like arcane/mercane, dohwar, space swine, and zodar, there are also a handful of unique monsters in this edition, like space clowns and vampirates.
• The included adventure, Light of Xaryxis, is typical Wizards of the Coast fare: a linear plot crystallized around a couple of good ideas. It's looks fun to play and easy to run, but there isn't much in it that makes me excited to run it.
• Compare and contrast: John Battle's recent offering The Sun King's Palace is a little messier than Light of Xaryxis and looks like it might take a not-insignificant amount of preparation to run without messing up the presentation, but The Sun King's Palace is so much more evocative than Light of Xaryxis that I'm way more excited at the prospect of preparing it and running it.
• However, in the defense of Light of Xaryxis, I thought the hook was clever: it is a deliberate homage to the Flash Gordon serials of the late 1930s as well as the 1980 movie. It even has genre-appropriate cliffhangers between chapters!

Apart from the proliferation of Dark Sun monsters and the clever design to the included adventure, there aren't any surprises here. What you see is what you get.

However, as noted at the start of this review, the impetus for this review is to clarify some of the criticism online. Most of it is misleading and represents a different product from the one I read. We'll go through a few of the recurring criticisms I have seen:

1. "They didn't include [insert my favorite spelljammer monster or ship type here]!" This one's easy: if you're an old fan, you probably still have your books, or you bought pdfs from DM's Guild. Adapting old material is easy; Wizards of the Coast even gives you conversion guidelines. Specifically in the case of monsters, D&D 5e doesn't often publish fifteen variations of a single monster anymore. The guidelines in the Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual, and Boo's Astral Menagerie are pretty clear: if you want a weird version of a monster, take an existing one and give it different traits. Boo's Astral Menagerie gives guidelines for this process to make wildspace-dwelling versions of normal creatures.
2. "They didn't include the tables for making solar systems, or the subsystems for determining orbits!" They weren't going to. Remember, a major idea behind 5e is simplification. For determining orbits, they just tell you to calculate the distance between planets mathematically. They assume that you're going to use the included adventure as inspiration for other star systems you make, rather than relying on random tables. If you want the old subsystems, they're still in the 2e books, waiting to be used. (Also, those subsystems were all optional rules anyway.)
3. "They didn't tell you how to determine how far away you have to get from a planet to reach spelljamming speed!" In keeping with the (comparatively) more narrative focus of fifth edtion, they probably figure that's "however long the GM wants it to take." According to the old box set, on average it takes forty minutes to an hour to escape a planet's gravity well, more if it's windy, so I would use that as a guideline. I usually go with an hour; an hour is enough time for a single random encounter check, so that sounds good to me.
• If you want a more official ruling on this, the Astral Adventurer's Guide defines the air envelope of a planet extending out to a distance the same as the planet's diameter. That's... actually about right for Earth, but that distance describes the outer edge of the exosphere, which is too thin and too exposed to space to support actual life. Chapter five of the Dungeon Master's Guide describes terrestrial life typically ending above 20,000 which is also reasonably accurate; Earth's troposphere ends at about 40,000 feet, beyond which the atmospheric density is only one-thousandth of its value at sea level. While the gravitational pull at that altitude is about the same as at sea level, "the place where breathable air ends" is probably good enough for RPG games and occult symbolism. Twenty thousand feet is just under four miles, which most spelljammers can reach in a half-hour to an hour.
4. "The Astral Plane makes travel between systems too easy! Characters can't get lost in the Astral Sea!" I suspect that's part of the point. (But as noted above, the Astral Plane is often scarier than the phlogiston. I don't think there were astral dreadnoughts in the phlogiston...) Once you get to the Astral Plane, the GM decides how long the journey takes and what you encounter along the way, and all of this is in keeping with the procedures for GMing a game these days. If you want to make it more complicated and less certain, then do so.
• I would also remind anyone who thinks that you can't discover something by accident that the star systems move. You can take a five-month-long return journey to Realmspace only to find that another star system has bobbed into your path along the way. Likewise, since you can only travel to places that you know exist, learning that a specific star system exists so you can fly to it sounds like a pretty good adventure hook to me.
5. "They left out the rules for ship combat!" This is actually the critique that spurred me to write this review. Whenever I see this complaint, I re-read the "Ship-to-Ship Combat" section in the Astral Adventurer's Guide to make sure I didn't imagine it, and every time the rules are still there. They give guidelines for ship-to-ship combat, but they assume that you will remember the rules for combat, objects, and vehicles from chapters eight and nine of the Player's Handbook, and chapters five and eight of the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• A much more valid critique is that they ought to have provided a reference reminding you of where to find the relevant rules, or have provided a summary. For example, I had forgotten the rules for object saving throws until I went looking for them. (In D&D 5e, objects automatically fail all Strength and Dexterity saving throws, but succeed on all other saves.) That's why you need to read chapter eight of the Player's Handbook for spelljammer purposes; heaven forbid they would be in the "Object" section of chapter eight of the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• "Why are the rules for ship combat spread across five chapters in three books?" is an exceedingly valid critique. Does your game need hundreds of rules spread across several rulebooks in 2022? (Into the Odd, Mothership, and World of Dungeons all come to mind as short RPGs that could support years of play, not to mention the hundreds of one-page RPGs floating in the digital aethers.)
• "You need to get this fan supplement to make the rules playable!" is not a valid critique in this case (and really just sounds like someone's gimmick to sell more DM's Guild content or to bring you to their blog).
• As always, I would recommend using the procedures as defined in the core books before deciding it doesn't work for your group and adding third-party rules into the mix.
6. "They didn't use the expanded vehicle rules from Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus!" Remember, those are optional rules, and the developers have a lot of ground to cover in this book. (And again, the keyword of this edition is simplification. I suspect that they're moving away from optional vehicle rules because they weren't as popular as people on the internet suggested, or they're trying to streamline things for One D&D in 2024.) The basic vehicle and object rules are in the Dungeon Master's Guide, and they're perfectly serviceable.
• If you want to use the more detailed vehicle statistics from Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus, nothing is stopping you from doing a conversion, although converting sixteen ships to the more complex Ghosts of Saltmarsh system and running spaceship combat in it with multiple ships sounds like a nightmare.
7. "The adventure sucks!" As noted above, Light of Xaryxis has problems, but they're pretty consistent with the problems of other fifth edition adventures. (Too plot-focused, too linear, stakes are so high as to be totally abstract.) I suspect, however, that most people are reacting to the structure of the adventure, and they completely ignored the part where the authors say that it's a love letter to pulp adventure movie serials of the early 20th century. If you've seen the hokey plots and shocking swerves of a Flash Gordon or Commando Cody serial, you'll understand what the authors were trying to accomplish. (And despite the adventure's flaws, I feel like they succeeded.)

So, if you happened to find this after hearing that the new rules are unplayable, I'm here to tell you that they're perfectly serviceable. They may lack a lot of the flavor that made Spelljammer so beloved in the 2e era, but they're a good starting point. If you're looking for a rehash of the Unhuman Wars; the complicated subsystems for celestial mechanics; the granular ship mechanics; and a setting line comprising over two dozen products spread across box sets, books, Monstrous Compendium binder pages, and magazine articles, you won't find it here. (And Wizards of the Coast didn't take your old books away. Use them!)

However, if you want a stripped-down, back-to-basics version of the setting for fifth edition, you get exactly what you are expecting here and not a jot more. Honestly, if you read what they did with Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, you shouldn't be surprised here: in that book, they reset the metaplot such that you don't have to follow the old books to use the Domains of Dread in fifth edition, but you can absolutely include stuff from the old books if you like. It may not be innovative game design or provocative art, but it makes good business sense: include something interesting enough to draw in new fans while leaving enough gaps and references to legacy materials to avoid alienating old fans.

Edit (September 3, 2022):

After all that talk of Wizards of the Coast attempting to make their new edition as inoffensive as possible, The Dreaded Discourse™ continues apace. In the fifth edition Spelljammer adaptation, the hadozee were given a backstory wherein they were small, lemur-like creatures who were uplifted by a wizard to be used as workers and slaves before the wizard's apprentices helped liberate them.

If you know anything about Western history in the past five hundred years or so, you probably already see the problem. (A relatively comprehensive account of the scandal appears on this TechRaptor post.) For the record, I thought the backstory was a little weird, especially given how much of The Dreaded Discourse™ revolves around the long arm of the transatlantic slave trade, but I casually assume every big company hires a sensitivity reader these days and so promptly forgot about it.

After this fact was discovered and discussed on Twitter, Wizards of the Coast has issued a statement and errata and has already altered the race's description on D&D Beyond, removing the offending sections and slightly altering the hadozee's gliding ability. (However, some users have taken umbrage with the "Hadozee Resilience" trait, suggesting that it also reflects negative stereotypes against real-world ethnicities. As of yet, WotC has not issued a change for that.)

Edit (September 4, 2022):

Current WotC drama validates my boring opinion that mythological fantasy is simply too foundationed on ancient regressive philosophy (things like inherent evildom, platonic purity vs corruption, cruelty manifesting as physicality) to satisfy modern moralities. 1/4

— kirin (@koboldstyle) September 3, 2022

Edit (December 12, 2022):

After grousing about how players can't read, it is with a heavy heart that I must admit that I can't read, either.

In my refutation of point #3, "They didn't tell you how to determine how far away you have to get from a planet to reach spelljamming speed!" I made an error. A recent re-read of the Astral Adventurer's Guide reveals, "A spelljamming ship automatically slows to its flying speed (discussed later in this chapter) when it comes within 1 mile of something weighing 1 ton or more, such as another ship, a kindori (see Boo's Astral Menagerie), an asteroid, or a planet."

For some reason, I (like every other loudmouth on the internet, apparently) thought the "1 mile" rule didn't cover planets for some reason.

So by that math, escape velocity is much easier in 5e than it was in the 2e days; rather than an average of 40 minutes, most ships reach spelljamming altitude in 15-20 minutes. (The fastest ships like damselflies and shrikes reach spelljamming speed after a seven-and-a-half minute ascent.)

Remember, kids: reading is fundamental.

The Crystal Sphere That Wasn't

Overheard at the Smoldering Corpse Bar in the Hive in Sigil:

I heard a tale from some right barmy berk one time, some spacefaring sailor — you know, those weirdoes who take sailing ships, bolt a magic chair into 'em, and set them off toward the sun or whatever — who claimed he'd been somewhere no one else had ever been.

Yeah, they all say that.

I was intrigued by this Prime's premise, though.  Every planewalker with a bit of age on him knows the Domains of Dread, but this addle-cove claimed that he'd sailed there in one of his rickety space boats.  He said that the Mist was still a problem, but a little easier to navigate than you always hear.

More to the point, he was talking about some world I'd never heard of.  I can't tell if it was supposed to be the world on which the Domains of Dread lay, or another system, but he said this world is called Aryth or Eredane.  I think Eredane is a large continent, the rough equivalent of calling Toril by the name Faerûn instead.  Anyway, he said this whole land labored under the direction of the evil god named Izrador — again, never heard of him — the god of corruption whom the gods cast out for generally being a bad blood.

The thrust of his tale, though, was that the gods made this Crystal Sphere — that's a world and its nearby planets, what some astrologers call a "solar system" — and used it to imprison anyone who seems like they deserve it.  Or maybe the Dark Powers did it.  Or maybe they're one in the same.

And what's more, he says it's in the middle of Known Space, just cut off from all the routes through the Flow — that's the phlogiston, the substance outside the Crystal Spheres — and practically unreachable unless you're willing to go off the path and you have a spell like Phase Door or some such.

Of course, I'm no spacefarer, but I think I heard that most folks suspect the gods can't affect the crystal shell of a world.  Although I've also heard that the Immortals of Mystara might be able to do it, leastwise according to certain tomes.

But if that's true, that suggests the first Darklord of the Domains of Dread isn't a person, but some entity too unwholesome for the rest of the Powers.  Of course, then you'd figure deities like the Chained God would be cast out, but then again who claims to understand the Powers anyway?

Of course, who knows if that sailor berk knows a damn thing.  Seemed like the unhendest leatherheaded sod in all the Planes, that's for sure.

DragonStrike and Wildspace

So on Wednesday I got to watch the "instructional" video for TSR's 1993 D&D-themed board game DragonStrike.  Despite being the tutorial, it really just shows a dramatization of a DragonStrike adventure.

You can blame OUT OF CONTEXT D&D QUOTES for this.

More interestingly, I learned that the actors (as the same characters) were going to return for a Spelljammer-themed television program called Wildspace.  It was never produced, although there was a trailer:

Jamming Spells in the Nine Hells

Another random update lacking in substance.  This time, I happened to find a couple of fourth edition treatments of the much beloved/reviled Giant Space Hamster from Spelljammer.

Here's one from d20 Monkey as part of an article on people playing D&D BadWrongFun:

And here's another from David Flor (this time in pdf).

On the Subject of Rockulon Prime

So, roughly a minute ago, I posted a thing about Rockulon Prime.  What is Rockulon Prime?

Well, Rockulon Prime comes from a couple of sources.  First, E. M. Lamb from Malleus Blogstrorum wanted to cameo as a ridiculous rockin' wizard with a Spelljammer van in my ongoing 4e game.  We had something between Heavy Metal and this picture in mind when we contemplated this arrangement.

Second, my friend Tini loves AD&D 2e.  I've had this idea of running something for a while for this very reason.  She has a particular soft spot for Spelljammer.

Third, I started several of my friends on playing Planescape: Torment.  One of them was unfamiliar with the Planescape setting and expressed an interest in it.

While playing The Giovanni Chronicles, the topic of Spelljammer came up and people expressed an interest.  So I've been quietly assembling campaign notes for a starting point that can then be turned into a Spelljammer sandbox kind of thing.

That starting point is Rockulon Prime.

The current idea is that characters can be native, or from another campaign setting.  You got to Rockulon by portal, spelljammer, or Ravenloft mist.  I honestly don't care how you got there.  What matters is that you're there, and might be interested in leaving.  So, when you get your hands on a Spelljammer, you're prepared to go out and about with it.

But until then, you're on Rockulon Prime.

What I wanted from Rockulon Prime was an internally consistent and logical world that heavily relies on the tropes of '80s fantasy and heavy metal — something that you would doodle in a notebook that you'd have to hide before your mom got you for supper.  However, I also wanted it to make some degree of sense so that it would make sense in a greater setting.

Anyway, the main thrust of this article is that there are some rules.  Despite using 2e, I'd probably just crib rules for weird future weapons and vehicles from Mutant Future.  Mutants will also be playable as a race/class, using the appropriate information from AD&D, Mutant Future, and Labyrinth Lord.

I'm also planning on instituting a rule to support the genre.  Since the reality inside different crystal spheres can be different than other realities, there is a strange quirk in the Rockulon system: strong, attractive warriors have less need of armor.  (Think of every metal album cover or fantasy comic book you've ever seen.  The overwhelming message is that badasses and hotties don't need to wear armor.)

In rules terms, any character in the warrior group (fighter, paladin, ranger, etc.) benefits from an additional AC bonus from exceptional Strength or Charisma.  This bonus duplicates the Defensive Adj. column on Table 2: Dexterity on page 20 of the AD&D 2e revised Player's Handbook except that characters never take penalties for low Strength or Charisma, and this armor acts as natural armor as described on page 102 of PHB 2e revised.

Relevant information is repeated below.

So You're Hot Shit on Rockulon Prime

Warriors with a Strength and/or Charisma of 15 or higher benefit from a natural AC bonus.  As with any natural AC, the character may still benefit from armor that improves his or her armor class.  As such, a character with a natural AC of 7 doesn't receive any benefit from wearing leather armor (AC 8), but does benefit from wearing scale mail (AC 6) or splint mail (AC 4), for example.

Characters improve their natural AC according to the following chart:

Rockulon Prime

Excerpts from the lecture "The Straight Shit on Rockulon Prime" delivered by Dr. Karl Satan, natural philosopher and space-wizard holding dual Ph.D.s in metalphysics and wizardology, as delivered before the Arcane Brotherhood, Guildhall Ward, Sigil.  As the name suggests, Dr. Satan's penchant for profanity occasionally becomes apparent; most attendees are fairly certain he was in some state of inebriation throughout his presentation.

The esteemed Karl Satan, Ph.D.

People who talk a lot of science shit say there's a multitude of crystal spheres in the universe — I've heard a septillion.  Of course, dudes with the kind of time to count a septillion stars don't get laid often, do they?

Those in the know would know that most of those spheres and the planets around them are boring as hell.

Rockulon Prime was probably fated to be the same.  Maybe the gods would intervene and seed the planet with life, maybe an advanced race would do the same thing.  Hell, maybe the whole shebang would self-organize into living systems.

The intervention of the Space-God!

Instead, we received the Space-God.

Some claim to see the Space-God in their dreams.

The nearby Blood Nebula — possibly an incursion of the Galaxies of Blood in our crystal sphere — probably vomited forth the Space-God's Corpse.  The Corpse crash-landed on Rockulon Prime.  Maybe the native microflora overtook it, maybe the God's own parasites started to feast upon it.  Who the fuck knows?

We do know that the little beasts began to grow.

The residual magical energies from the Corpse of the Space-God mutated life to fit new forms; we're all descended from the soulstuff of the Space-God.

Plants and dumb beasts evolved first, most notably the Hell-Maggots that are thought to be some of the most ancient life on the planet.

A small Hell-Maggot

Hell-Maggots can be found everywhere on Rockulon Prime, typically underground, but are most heavily concentrated in the Sea of Maggots, feasting on the Corpse of the Space-God.

The truly big monstrosities lurk in the vicinity of the Corpse of Space-God.

The first sapient race to evolve from these monstrosities was probably the drider.  As the adult form of one of the varieties of Hell-Maggot, the driders began to form their own civilization.  So suffused were they with the Space-God's cosmic energies that their mutations continued.  A subrace of driders appeared, known as the drow.

The drow are better than you

These aren't the pussy, angsty, emo drow of some worlds.  These drow are fucking metal.

I should probably explain that term, shouldn't I?  We understand life and much of our material resources to come from the bounty of the earth, from the Underdark.  The most abundant substance in the planet is iron; as a metal, it is one of the most stable and least reactive, and pretty damn important to our industries.  Metal is our lifeblood.  So, when something is a great goodness, we define it as metal.  We recall the strength and utility of metal, as well as its sublime beauty.  It's hard to describe the concept of metal to one who is not from Rockulon Prime, but understand that metal is quintessential.

So, our drow developed grand civilizations and advanced technologies.  Most importantly, they developed magic, including the Maglaban Chambers which wizards still use for wizard's duels today.  As one of the first races, there were few other sapients to subjugate, so they made their own.  Drow are probably responsible for most sapient life on the planet, most likely beginning with the bullywugs or troglodytes.  Their experiments on frogs and lizards yielded the creatures, eventually spawning lizardmen and yes, even dragons — for some reason, the ancient drow experimented on drakes and uplifted them as mounts and slaves.

A drow sorceress with her mutant experiments.

The drow created a vast empire that conquered the entire world, making use of magically-created slave races to cater to their every whim.  Their experiments continued as they began to uplift the primitive apes of the savage jungles.

Of course, with nothing left to conquer, they turned on each other.

The drow go to war.

One faction tried to grab territory, the other resisted, and war was upon the land.

It was brutal.  It was bloody.

The drow are believed to have created some of their mutant ape races, such as the savage white apes, as well as hybrids such as the dragonborn and the vat-bred orcs and their goblin, hobgoblin, and bugbear kin.  The trolls were almost assuredly bred as an engine of war, as were various other creatures too numerous to mention.

Drow society was so advanced by this time that their magic and tech was devastating.  Other worlds have things such as blood rock or godsblood or bloodstone (or even the gemstone known as "bloodstone"); our Bloodstone is cast-off detritus of the Space-God, and the crystallized crimson rocks have magic powers.  The drow used them and their magics to make very effective weapons.  Whole portions of the world were turned into blasted, wasted hellholes.  Many of these are still dangerously toxic, spawning mutants and all manner of abomination into the world.

And you still get douchenozzles like this questing in the Wastes.

Records from this time are still spotty, so we don't quite know the order of things.  We know the schism among the drow led them to acquire various territories.  The classic drow were forced underground, and their various descendants would eventually evolve into the elven subraces of today.

Elves are still among the most ruthless predators of Rockulon Prime.

Around the same time as the conclusion of the Drow War came the first threat from Outside; the aboleths.  We're not entirely sure if the aberrations came by some manner of spelljammer, or if the magical energies of the Drow War opened gates to Outside, but the aboleths arrived to take Rockulon Prime for themselves.

Many of the sapients of the sea, such as kuo-toa and sahuagin, were likely created by the aboleths as part of their bid for takeover.

Much as the drow, the aboleths gladly used slaves to aid them in their goals.

Of course, the aboleths didn't win, probably because giant fucking fish suck at fighting on land.  Weakened and in decline, the elves still managed to fight off the aquatic creatures and force them to back the fuck up.  Of course, whatever channel to Outside had been opened would never close.  It wasn't long before illithids, beholders, and other aberrations appeared in the Rockulon Underdark.

As many slave species revolted during the Drow Wars, the elves continued their experiments with apes, crafting such kin to them as the dwarves, halflings, gnomes, and yes, the humans.  Weakened and fractured by centuries of warfare, however, the elves could hardly maintain their new slaves, and after a scant generation or two, the new creatures revolted and found themselves out in the world.

And what a beautiful world it was.

The land was sick, warped by magic and irradiated by blasphemous technologies.  Using secrets plundered from the vaults of the elves, the new races banded together to survive.  Survival was pretty tenuous in those days; the world was still full of arrogant elves, mutants, aberrations, and monsters of all types.  Still, within several generations, the dwarves had built a stable civilization that would grow into the grand Wraithsmasher Empire.

The dwarves are a most capable race.

The dwarves never hit the grand expanse of power the ancient Wormwarper Empire of the drow achieved, the Wraithsmasher Empire succeeded in unifying several races without enslaving them, and bringing civilization to lands untamed for centuries.

Of course, the secret to the Wraithsmashers' downfall lies in the name; the Wraithsmasher family of dwarves specialized in fighting undead and planar outsiders.

He who fights monsters and all that.

The Wraithsmashers became an infernal bloodline.

The Wraithsmasher Empire didn't truly collapse — not right away, anyway — but they did become corrupt bureaucrats and demon-worshipping shitheels.  Deals with infernal creatures were established, and pretty soon, the ruling dynasty was replete with maeluths, dwarves with infernal blood.  Tieflings and wisplings — fiend-touched humans and halflings — also appeared among their retainers.  Just when it appeared that the whole of Rockulon Prime would go tumbling into the Nine Hells or the Abyss (thought by scholars to be the ultimate goal of the corrupted Wraithsmashers), internal conflicts wracked the world with war again.

Although these conflicts were not as destructive as the Drow Wars of antiquity, war was total.  Any race that wished to grab for glory or settle an old conflict leaped into the fray.

After nearly a century of war, all was finally silent.  Most races on the surface were in decline, their numbers low, and they teetered on the brink of extinction.  Most of the infernal lineages were pushed elsewhere, into dark corners or their home realms.  The world was silent for a time, and sapient life was again a precarious thing.

Some artfag probably captured this shortly before being devoured by cannibal mutant halflings.

Of course, with their short lifespans and compressed reproduction time, this allowed humanity to take control through sheer numbers.

The teeming throng of humanity, brought to you by copious fucking.

It's the same sort of boom-and-bust cycle we've grown accustomed to on Rockulon Prime.  The historians keep track, but otherwise, the human dynasties tend to change hands way faster than those of the demi-humans.  There's more variety now — the dwarves and elves have their own homelands, the few remaining dragonborn lord over their degenerate kobold kin while ultimately owing fealty to the dragons, the mutants claim territory in the Wastelands, and the various other subraces hold sway in their own spheres of influence.  Presently, the grand empires of yore are gone, but humanity is definitely the most notable force on Rockulon Prime, and the time is ripe for another ruling power to rise.

But if the yuan-ti hybrids take over, seriously, fuck those guys.

The landscape of Rockulon Prime is currently dotted by a loose confederation of city-states joined by the old highway system.  Despite the lack of large-scale organization, much of the infrastructure of the old empires remain; as best as we can tell, we're more technologically advanced than other worlds we have encountered.  We've got gunpowder, steam, and internal combustion, but they have yet to match the efficiency of magic.

Exactly.

Magic is still more versatile, and more intuitive to those who understand it, although tech tends to be more intuitive if you don't know magic.  Why use a gun which requires constant maintenance when you can launch a magic missile or a fireball that replenishes as you study and rest?  Why use a gas-guzzling van when you can ride a nightmare that only needs a small amount of feed?

Although it's harder to listen to your 8-track on a nightmare.

Of course, us magic-using types combine magic and tech.  Enchanted guns are pretty scarce, though they tend to be popular with adventurers if they can be found.

 Kickin' rad.

Some wizards have also combined the ancient magic of the spelljammer helm with the more recent automobile.

Seriously?  Wizards fucking rule.

Rockulon Prime still contains many of the dangers and features we have encountered on other worlds.  Outside civilization, roving bands of monsters threaten travelers.  Ancient ruins of fallen civilizations hold danger and treasure for those with the balls to face them.  Civilization ebbs and flows, but maintains a sort of dynamic equilibrium with the wild places.

And now, we close this transcript with images of Rockulon Prime:

We all start as apprentices.

But some wizards may progress to higher accomplishments of magic.

When the student is ready, the master will appear.

Evil wizards lord over petty fiefdoms.

Barbarians stalk the Wastes.

Although some evidence of civilization may exist in those borderlands.

Although not all settlements on the frontier are friendly.

Beastmen may be a danger in the wilds.

Some have even learned the metal mysteries of arcane music.

Of course, you should probably be a bit more worried about the mutants.

Fortunately, there are always those willing to defend the borderlands.

Especially since vast rewards lie beyond civilization.

Interested parties are directed to the subsequent post, On the Subject of Rockulon Prime.