[OSSR] Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures In Space Boxed Set

[Woot]

Hello! I'm Woot, some random person of no account, who has wasted many hours over the last few decades sitting around tables playing pretend, engaging in other school or work activities while imagining playing pretend, or reading about people playing pretend and/or mechanics for playing pretend. With vague rumors swirling around the intertubes regarding a possible re-release of Spelljammer for D&D 5e, there's no better time (other than perhaps, never!) to take a look back at where it all began. In that spirit, I'd like to submit an Old School Sourcebook Review of the original Spelljammer boxed set for the Den's entertainment.

Some music!


The Pantless Shadow, Sir Steroid, and The Illestthid pose for the box cover. And Uncle Gary says no, you can't be a mind flayer, you powergaming munchkin twerp!


1989 was a busy year for TSR; in January the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook was released, followed shortly by the Dungeon Master Guide and the MUN-STUSS MAN-YULE. The Spelljammer boxed set was released in August, and that project was spearheaded by Jeff Grub, who seems to have nothing to do with the development of 2e core, though he'd done other work for TSR that makes Frank sad.

I mention this for two reasons: first, I'd like to point out that there are many baffling, arbitrary and at times downright bone-stupid aspects of 2e that Spelljammer is forced to follow, being as it is a 2e product. While there absolutely is a time and a place for taking the Chainsaw of Analysis +4 to 2e, and indeed that has happened in numerous threads here on the Den, I'd like to, as much as is practical, restrict my criticism to the boxed set itself – tracking down the madness of 2e is a far deeper rabbit hole, and some of those rabbits are fiendish dire rabbits and I bruise easily. Jeff Grub and Spelljammer should not be held accountable for the sins of 2e. As we'll see, they have their own sins to answer for anyway.

The second reason is that Spelljammer is a significant departure from previous TSR products in a lot of ways. Other widely-promulgated TSR settings of the time – Mystara, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance – were all fundamentally variations on a medieval fantasy theme, inspired by Tolkien and others. There had been some steps outside the trope – several Ravenloft standalone adventures, some sci-fi elements in Barrier Peaks – but Spelljammer is, so far as I know, the first time TSR tried to make a campaign setting that colored outside the lines. To what extent this was driven by some harebrained scheme by TSRs' senior management versus the wild-eyed idea of a writer is beyond me to say, and ultimately not important to our review. What's important is that Spelljammer lead the charge into the early 90s era of TSR trying to expand their game of medieval fantasy into new frontiers – horror in Ravenloft, ecologically-devastated apocalypse in Dark Sun, and so on.

But enough bullshit preamble!



Inside the box we have:
- 96 page “Lorebook of the Void”
- 96 page “Concordance of Arcane Space”
- a stary-black hex grid, for use with the ship-to-ship combat minigame
- a map of the Rock of Bral, an asteroid-based city suitable as a home base for a campaign
- a poster illustrating the legendary Spelljammer; a gigantic manta ray with towers on it's back
- a map designed to let you track the position of planets within a crystal sphere
- 20 cardstock pages (with some duplicates) of common ships and their deckplans, in color
- a cardstock page of ship silhouettes and plastic feet to go with them, for use with the hex grid
- a cardstock page of planet labels, for use with the planet tracking map
- the ever-present TSR product flyer


MSRP was $18 US, which seems like a shockingly good deal considering how much printed material is in the box, but OTOH that was almost 30 years ago. Times change!



There's no obvious place to begin with the boxed set. As was the style at the time, both books freely mix fluff and crunch, and have information distributed between them in no particular pattern that I can discern – Lorebook has a chapter with detailed descriptions of the various ships, along with pictures. Concordance has a chapter with much shorter blurbs,details on shipboard equipment, and the all-important price information. Really, TSR? I am forced to conclude that they either were trying to shuffle information around so that they could make each book the exact same number of pages, or else their typography staff had their brains sucked out by a mind flayer. However, Lorebook does have a forward, so we'll start there.

The product you are holding in your hands is the result of a brainstorming session held in a local Lake Geneva restaurant. The designers and editors had been cloistered there to come up with some new ideas and alternatives for the AD&D® game system. The general talk was pretty wild and the waitress asked if we were working for Steven Spielberg, who was rumored to be scouting locations in the area.

If this project is weird enough to be considered a potential movie idea, then we may have done our job here.

The design directive for the SPELLJAMMER supplement was simple: Take the AD&D game into outer space. Then we started adding stuff. It couldn't be like anything ever done before. It shouldn't overturn existing campaigns. Then, "Hey, we've got these 24 pieces of cardboard available, Jeff, how about designing some ships to put on them?" The setting should link together the Realms, Krynn, and Greyhawk without invalidating any of those worlds or the games already set there.

This was becoming a tall order: Maintain the spirit and play of the AD&D game and tie it in with years of previous work without invalidating anything. But if space functions normally, how (for example) do the constellations of Krynn move around without messing up other planets?

Zeb Cook pulled out some medieval woodcuts showing a traveler passing through the spheres of the world to discover the sun and planets on tracks, and with that the idea of crystal shells was born. Each fantasy solar system could have its own placement and rules, while being a part of a larger whole.

That larger whole created its own problems, because space is big. Really big. As I write this, Voyager 2 has just rounded Neptune after a 12-year voyage. Conventional movement
would result in long and empty voyages, which would make for poor role-playing. Yet, everything we see in most fantasy worlds posits an Earthlike world with Earthlike celestial effects.

The need to travel quickly across space brought about the spelljamming helm and with it we cut ourselves fully loose from real science and began creating a "fantasy physics" that was true to its own rules and laws. Dave LaForce (better known as Diesel) and I starting kicking ideas around for gravity planes and atmospheric envelopes, making it possible for the space pirate to stand on the deck of his ship beneath open space.

How does it all work? Well, the easy answer is "It's magic." The more involved answer is "It's magic and it knows it's magic." The rules are still there and must be obeyed, but it is a different set of rules from what we are used to in our world. As anyone here will tell you, a fire-breathing, 50-foot-long, flying reptile is impossible, but it can live in our imaginations. The same argument applies to spelijamming ships.

Jim Holloway started playing with ship types and Diesel began designing both the Spellammer itself and the asteroid base that became the Rock of Bral. Jim was surprised when he brought in five different beholder ship drawings and we accepted them all. Previously, one ship type or style would do for a space-based campaign, but here we had flying things that looked like half walnuts, modified galleons, and giant moths!

The reason for this diversity is to keep with the precepts of our fantasy universe - there are a lot of different races out there and all their ships should not look the same. "Real science" restrictions like aerodynamics are not a concern in worlds with flying carpets and mind flayers. The ships of wildspace reflect this diversity. In many cases, Jim came up with a drawing and then the rest of us showed how it could work.

You'll notice the editors are also listed as developers in the credits. In particular, Steve Winter (general co-ordinator and main editor) and James Ward (design manager and my boss) were responsible for multipie additions and revisions in the text. I would finish a particular section, James would review it and come up with five more neat things we could do with it, and I would scurry back to my computer, giggling and cackling over the new ideas.

Similarly, Steve Winter went over the rules with an eye toward consistency and fun, adding and refining the various pieces of the system into a complete whole. This was a Herculean task. Our main goal was to not to produce a miniature wargame that simplified AD&D game procedures but rather a supplementary system to help DMs and players enjoy ship-to-ship fighting in a most unusual setting.

And there you have it. I once described designing this product as the gaming equivalent of running through a mansion, flinging open the doors, and discovering what lies beyond them. In many ways the size of space itself, the unlimited number of possible encounters, ships, races, monsters, and other neat stuff to be found out there, has proved to be the greatest challenge. This box is the first giant step - not a furtive foothold but a full-tilt charge — into a new universe of gaming.

On behalf of the creators of the SPELLJAMMER supplement, I hope you enjoy the trip.

Jeff Grubb
August 1989

So there's our design goals, from The Man Himself. Reading it, I see the following goals:
- Create a setting that's AD&D... IN... SPAAAAAAAAACE!
- Tie existing campaign settings together without shitting on the core assumptions of any of them
- Develop a coherent “fantasy physics”
- Permit for a diversity of races and ships
- Provide a ship to ship minigame

With all that said, I'd like to take a moment and be explicit about what I'm planning on focusing my criticism in this OSSR on:

1) Do what extent are the concepts in the product coherent, with themselves and other concepts introduced in the product?
2) To what extent to the game mechanics support those concepts within the framework of AD&D 2e?

So, next post, I'll be looking at Lorebook of the Void, Chapter 1: Campaigns In Space. Excuse me, Campaigns... IN.... SPAAAAAAAAACE!

For those of you who want your Spelljammer fix RIGHT NOW GODDAMNIT please take a look at Frank & AncientHistory's excellent review of a later Spelljammer product, The Complete Spacefarer's Handbook

[Lokathor]

I'll just be That Guy and take a moment to mention that the BECMI based retro-clone Dark Dungeons actually bothered to put in a whole chapter on how to do spelljamming into the book, because DnD in space is cool no matter how stupid it is.

[Ancient History]

Spelljammer got overshadowed by Planescape, because they both handle the similar premise of world-hopping and Stargate is just a lot more convenient for most folks than Star Trek, but there's some real love for the setting with all of its admitted flaws and goofiness. Hell, Hackjammer was a thing for Hackmaster, and that was six jokes too far...

[Thaluikhain]

Some music!

Oh, right in the nostalgia. Could never get that game to work on a modern computer.

Spelljammer may or may not have worked terribly well, but the concept was made of awesome.

[Username17]

Major decisions from that era are almost all like that. Conversations in Wisconsin diners, or some guy's dorm room, or during a long car trip. There's no real internet, no market research, no formal presentations, no focus groups. It's just dudes riffing off each other in informal meetings taking place in whatever space they could grab.

Hiring decisions were mostly made the same way. People would send unsolicited manuscripts to TSR and some of them would get picked up (see: Greenwood, Ed), but a lot of these people were just random nerds that TSR employees met in comic book shops or at university gaming groups.

So the answer to "why did this happen?" is almost always "It was 2 in the morning and we were on our fifth coffee refill and it seemed like a fun idea."

-Username17

[Woot]

First off, I would like to apologize for an error I made in my first section. 1989 saw the release of the 3-ring binder MOBSTEROUS CUMPENTIUM; the MAN-YULE would not be released until '93. This is especially embarrassing, considering the damn thing was sitting right next to me when I wrote that first section. Moving on...

Make your Hide in Shadows check. Oh wait, this is 2e; you're fucked.

Chapter 1: Campaigns... IN... SPAAAAAAAAACE!

ADD game campaigns using the SPELLJAMMER fantasy setting pose some problems unlike those found in other fantasy worlds. The greatest problems are the open-ended nature of the campaign, and the space involved. A trip from Earth to Mars in our fantasy terms takes only a few days. Using 20th century technology, the same trip would take over a year and a half under optimum conditions.

The other challenge of fantasy space is diversity. We are talking about a campaign that includes Greyhawk, Kara-Tur, the Forgotten Realms, and Krynn, plus whatever campaigns the DM chooses to add. Keeping an eye on the diverse campaigns is a bit of a trick, not to mention making sure that new worlds appear truly fresh and different to the star voyager.

Much of space is empty, but encounters can happen anywhere on the trip, which may aid or hinder the traveler, The nature of the spelljammer helms makes it necessary to slow down for obstacles and intersecting ships, rendering encounters all the more likely.

This section is to aid the DM in getting a fantasy space campaign started and in running it over long periods of time.

I'm four sentences in and I'm already sitting upright in my chair, waving my arms and shouting.

If I had to guess, the single biggest shoal that Spelljammer campaigns come to grief on is the fantastically open-ended nature of the campaign setting. Spelljammer abandons the “Magical High Middle Ages In Stasis” milieu for a “Age Of Sail, In Space And With Fantastic Creatures” millieu. In more traditional games, adventurers at low-levels (and often still at high levels) are generally tied to some particular locale. Even if they choose the murderhobo lifestyle (or it chooses them) there are still serious limits on their mobility. Word of their deeds can and will get around. Reputations develop, and their choices affect the world around them. Impassible mountains, trackless deserts, monster-filled seas often surround the play area, as physical and psychological boundaries.

None of this has to be true in a Spelljammer campaign. This leads to two related problems. The first is that there's often very little tying the players to “here.” Flub an attempt at rescuing the Duke from the ogres, resulting in the Duke's death? Ah well, time to leave the planet. This market doesn't have the magic item we're looking for? Let's take a look at the market in the next crystal sphere. The second is that if you can go anywhere, it can be hard to decide where in particular to go, and one place can end up feeling pretty much like the next. Worse, if you have a particular railroad-y Mister Cavern, no matter where you chose to go, you're going to end up at the dome-city full of medusa on an airless asteroid. Players absolutely pick up on this, and can become very cynical very quickly if they feel that have limitless choices that can only produce a single outcome, because that means their choices are meaningless.

So to sum up, yes, I agree – emphatically – that the open-ended nature of Spelljammer creates a serious problem. Let's see if they address that problem.

They don't.

The other thing which stands out at me is the discussion of the space involved. As we saw in the last section, one of the design goals of Spelljammer was to create a coherent “fantasy physics.” Since they're building their physics from scratch, there's no necessary reason that planets need to be all that far from each other in the first place. That's just a “fact” of their fantasy physics. Whether or not it was a conscious choice or not is hard to say. I frequently get the feeling that they never spent much time reflecting on how their own views about astronomy were smuggled into their assumptions. For what it's worth, I don't necessarily think it's a bad choice, particularly – in fact, it would be within the capabilities of a High Medieval/Age of Sail society to figure out the distances to their moons and planets and indeed, if there weren't large distances involved, someone with observational skills and a mathematics background probably would have noticed. I suspect I'll keep coming back to this point, further in the review. There's an old joke that mathematics (at least at the higher levels, anyway) is the study of the necessary consequences of arbitrary assumptions, and I think pretty much the same principle applies to the fantasy physics of Spelljammer.

So, now that I've calmed down, I can go to the next paragraph, which to me mostly reads as, “HEY GUYS! MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE GREYHAWK, KARA-TUR, FORGOTTEN REALMS AND DRAGONLANCE SETTINGS!” As an aside, I find the use of the word “diversity” to be downright peculiar, but that's just an artifact of a person in 2018 watching the never-ending American culture war seeing a word having a very different set of connotations then it had at the time it was written. 1989 was a more innocent, or perhaps ignorant, time.

Further down, ok, encounters happen (you don't say!) and running into stuff in deep space drops us out of warp, good to know.

This section is to aid the DM in getting a fantasy space campaign started and in running it over long periods of time.

Let's see if they do that.

I give them half credit.

Getting Started: The Type of Campaign

Ok, three ways to use this product: take a grounding campaign to space, run an spaced based campaign, or use this as background in your existing campaign. Fair enough. It then lays out some advice about doing your homework to lay out your cosmology, or at the very least, the local crystal sphere (aka star system). It helpfully gives you that as Mister Cavern you can populate space as you see fit (Thanks, Rule 0!) and advises you to plan for the characters to have a home base, and they suggest the Rock of Bral. Which is a reasonable suggestion, insofar as home bases go, but as I've mentioned above, they haven't yet provided a motivation as to why the players would want a home base in the first place. Hmm.

Getting There: Going Into Space

Next up we have a bunch of suggestions on how to get ground-based adventures into space. The suggestions are fine for what they are, and range from “giving the players an equipped ship” to “have them get a single use scroll of create minor helm so they can strand themselves in space while you laugh and jerk yourself off under the table because Uncle Gary would be so proud of you” and likewise range from “help offworlders out and be invited to go with them” to “get enslaved by offworlders” depending on how much of a cock Mister Cavern wishes to be. Ok, fine.

Space Adventures

Did you know that you can have space adventuring involving Adventuring (defined as “cruising around and seeing what attacks us”), Trading, Piracy, Naval or Military missions, Exploration or Intrigue? Oddly enough, that's the same list I came up with when this guy put a gun to my head, ordered Halle Berry to blow me, and gave me 60 seconds to come up with campaign ideas. None of the ideas are bad, really, but none of them are particularly innovative or fleshed out, either.

Life on Other Planets

An overview of different sorts of worlds, along with an invitation to populate alien worlds with creatures you don't normally use! You can even change their abilities and appearance! Not a bad idea,, actually, and they give an example of a beholder who's death-ray eye instead functions as a detect lie spell, which makes it somehow a bit more socially appropriate.

Landfall! Arriving at Planets

And here we finally get an attempt to address some of the concerns I had at the beginning of the chapter. They recognize that the player's greatly increased mobility does complicate matters for Mister Cavern, and they recognize that pre-populating entire worlds isn't practical. Their solution is, “They land where Mister Cavern says,” which coincidentally solves the problem, since they can therefore end up landing conveniently close to whatever MC has planned. Which works, of course, but we're back to railroading as our suggested answer. To be fair, it's a hard problem.

When Space Meets Ground

Finally, a reminder that Spelljammer and established fantasy campaigns are very much separate worlds and one “should not outweigh or overwhelm the other.” It goes on to explain that spacefarers and groundlings are both very, very busy and wrapped up in their own affairs, and (aside from a few wizards and sages) simply not terribly interested in the affairs of people who lead lives very different from their own. Which is an honest enough answer and seems to jive well enough with human nature. The problem is that this seems like a sidestep answer to one of the questions posed at the beginning of the chapter regarding integrating Spelljammer campaigns with existing campaigns. “Just don't worry about it!” is an answer, and maybe even a reasonable one, but it seems far less ambitious than one might have hoped.

There's also the first mention here about smoke power not working if taken to Greyhawk. There's a running theme in 2e where it's absolutely terrified by gunpower weapons. I'll talk more about this later, but for now I merely wanted to mention it – it comes up again and again.

So to sum up, our authors recognized the challenges posed by open ended campaigns and integrating Spelljaming campaigns with more traditional campaigns, but their answers to those challenges seem to be, “Just railroad it, bro!” and “Yeah, they really don't interact all that much.” There's also the side issue of them being oddly unaware of the the extent to which the fact that they're developing their own fantasy physics means that they can... develop their own fantasy physics.

In TSR's partial defense, they provide at least somewhat more satisfying answers in The Legend of Spelljammer and The Astromundi Cluster boxed sets. In both cases, the answers were pretty much “You can't leave, but here's all the stuff you can do!” and “Newcomers usually get integrated in the following ways...” answers. Neither answer is mind-blowing, but is a leg up on what we get here.

Next up is Chapter 2: Spelljammers, which consists of 33 pages of fish & ships. It may be a few days before I get to it. Bring vinegar.

[Thaluikhain]

When Space Meets Ground

Finally, a reminder that Spelljammer and established fantasy campaigns are very much separate worlds and one “should not outweigh or overwhelm the other.” It goes on to explain that spacefarers and groundlings are both very, very busy and wrapped up in their own affairs, and (aside from a few wizards and sages) simply not terribly interested in the affairs of people who lead lives very different from their own. Which is an honest enough answer and seems to jive well enough with human nature. The problem is that this seems like a sidestep answer to one of the questions posed at the beginning of the chapter regarding integrating Spelljammer campaigns with existing campaigns. “Just don't worry about it!” is an answer, and maybe even a reasonable one, but it seems far less ambitious than one might have hoped.

Never really bought that. In the Aerial Adventure Guide they (correctly) point out how fast magic skyships would radically change a setting, giving easy intercontinental travel. And a Spelljammer is that, but moreso.

But, you probably don't want Spelljammer mucking up your established settings by radically changing the power structures and trade routes, so have to fudge it somehow.

[Username17]

You could have gotten a fair approximation of "very little effect from space travel on the planetary economies" if the ships had been very small. After all, Greyhawk definitely has at least one space ship in the Barrier Peaks, and mostly this has very little impact on Oerthian peasants or even Oerthian manticores. Powerful sorcerers and ancient dragons and shit command the land for as far as the eye can see. But the horizon is only 3 miles away when you're standing on the ground and there aren't really any political systems for those creatures to extend their dominance farther than that.

If the local rich and powerful people come from space, that's not really different from them coming from Hell or from the Underdark, or any of the other foreign lands and seas and worlds that powerful people and beings come from to take over dungeons or oppress some villagers or whatever.

And let's make no mistake: the value of some foods and goods and technologies that are available on another world but virtually unknown on the one you happen to be on is very high. It's trivial to imagine a very small cargo being transferred from Kara-Tur to Oerth being traded for amounts of gold that are measured in tons. Any space merchant should be able to make a few dry runs with sampler platters to a few worlds to get an idea of what things are worth in different star systems and then make a few more trips to make so much material wealth that they can retire to a pleasure palace the envy of any wizard's tower. And they can do this whether the cargo holds are large or small.

And D&D worlds already have weird and powerful artifacts. As previously mentioned, Greyhawk factually does have some laser pistols in it, and it doesn't really matter because there aren't very many of them and also some people have wands of fireballs and shit. Small amounts of luxury goods from other planets isn't going to change that dynamic very much.

Where the worlds become unrecognizable is when the cargo holds get large enough to carry colonists, slaves, and livestock. At that point you really do have full scale disruption of cultures and biomes.

And Spelljammer doesn't actually consider that. Like, at all. For all its change of focus to the Age of Sail scenarios, it really feels like not one person on the project actually read any books about the social effects of the Age of Sail. Research is pretty much entirely limited to NASA escapades, which is so thoroughly beside the point that I have difficulty even critiquing it.

-Username17

[Woot]

Yes, it's definitely one of the more incoherent parts of the setting - on one hand, Spelljammer is very much supposed to feel like a new frontier, with lots of unexplored areas. This fact neatly explains why there's so many pristine ruins and untapped mercantile opportunities for you exploit, and why so few people in groundling campaigns know anything about spelljamming, and why it's had no prior impact (or even mention) in existing campaign settings.

At the same time, it also wants it to be the case that there are well-established faiths, factions and space-borne nations. The Unhuman wars between the Imperial Elven Navy and Orcs, Goblins et al supposedly happened centuries ago. Many spaceship designs have become completely standardized over centuries of being built, and this fact is used to justify why you can find Tradesmen and Hammerships in pretty much any crystal sphere you visit.

Now, either of those things is perfectly fine, but it's very hard for both of them to be true at once. In Spelljammer's (partial) defense, this same issue also applies to lots of regular campaigns as well - why has no one already looted Castle Foozle, or mapped the Trackless Wastes of Dingleberry, or sailed across the Really Big Ocean of Bigness before? If the Baron is willing to hire some adventurers (population: the PCs) to clear out the Orcs threatening the Hamlet of Vollage, why hasn't he already done so?

[Zaranthan]

why has no one already looted Castle Foozle, or mapped the Trackless Wastes of Dingleberry, or sailed across the Really Big Ocean of Bigness before? If the Baron is willing to hire some adventurers (population: the PCs) to clear out the Orcs threatening the Hamlet of Vollage, why hasn't he already done so?

With traditional games, you can hand wave this with temporal proximity. Castle Foozle has been looted and reoccupied a dozen times, Foozle is just the last lord who lived there. Dingleberry used to be a thriving trade route, but the civilization on the other end fell and took its patrols with it. The orcs of Vollage are a recurring problem, like locusts, and you just have to hire a fresh band of expendable foreigners murder hobos to go take care of it every couple generations.

One of the biggest clashes of Spelljammer is that it disregards the cycle of golden and dark ages that most campaign settings use to explain their ruins and dungeons.

[RelentlessImp]

I always loved Spelljammer from the first time I read about it - in a Dragonlance anthology book, in which a gnome spelljammer crash-lands on Krynn and the spacefaring gnome hangs out with a dragon until he's healed and repaired his spelljammer. (I think that was also the anthology in which a gnome basically creates atom bombs and tries to sell them to Takhisis' forces like they're the fucking Soviets, including meeting in a seedy, out of the way bar. Krynn anthologies were fucking weird.)

Looking forward to the rest of this, I could never get my hands on a copy of this book.

[Iduno]

As an aside, I find the use of the word “diversity” to be downright peculiar, but that's just an artifact of a person in 2018 watching the never-ending American culture war seeing a word having a very different set of connotations then it had at the time it was written. 1989 was a more innocent, or perhaps ignorant, time.

I wasn't old enough to remember, but were there common complaints that the Jeffersons, Webster, Fresh Prince, Family Matters, etc. had primarily black casts?

Because people shit themselves when a Lando Calrissian movie was suggested in 2018.

[RelentlessImp]

As an aside, I find the use of the word “diversity” to be downright peculiar, but that's just an artifact of a person in 2018 watching the never-ending American culture war seeing a word having a very different set of connotations then it had at the time it was written. 1989 was a more innocent, or perhaps ignorant, time.

I wasn't old enough to remember, but were there common complaints that the Jeffersons, Webster, Fresh Prince, Family Matters, etc. had primarily black casts?

Because people shit themselves when a Lando Calrissian movie was suggested in 2018.

Yes, but it was from the networks. The Jeffersons, for example, changed timeslots 11 times during its run - and that one was a spin-off of another popular sitcom, All in the Family. Family Matters was primarily marketed to white audiences as a 'safe' black show.[/i]

[Username17]

Oh yes. Black sitcoms got an enormous amount of hate poured on them back in their day. Fresh Prince got horrible things said about that probably wouldn't have been said about Blossom. Recall that racism is so big in the United States that like a third of the people in the United States think Obama was a below average intellect. It's really hard to wrap your mind around how deep and how senseless the white supremacy runs.

Anyway, D&D works best when there's a newly opened frontier. Sauron has been defeated, now there's all the lands ravaged by Mordor to explore and reconquer. A map to the Vault of the Drow has been discovered and you can mount an Expedition to the Depths of the Earth. Water breathing pearls have been invented, so now you can visit the undersea realm of the Sahuagin. And so on and so forth.

Age of Sail is a really easy sell for a D&D campaign because it holds the promise of exactly that sort of dynamic. You have a relatively new form of transportation that allows adventurers to go adventure in places they couldn't before. Explore, trade, woo foreign princesses, and so on. And then Spelljammer had to ruin it all by insisting that the age of sail had been in continuous operation for like three thousand years and wasn't actually exciting or new.

-Username17

[Woot]

Chapter 2: Spelljammers

Some more music

If you ask a random group of gamers what comes to mind when you say the word “Spelljammer” you'll probably get a lot of blank looks. After all, we're talking about a product that debuted almost 30 years ago. Gamers who cut their teeth on 3e/3.5 were probably in diapers by the time the product line came to an end in '93. Still, for older gamers, or those who have looked into the history of D&D, will probably say, “Oh yeah. Ships in space, right? With those crazy ships that looked like bugs and sea creatures?”

Jim Holloway's ship designs in Spelljammer are perhaps the most visually iconic aspect of the campaign setting, much in the same way that Brom and DiTerlizzi visually defined the Dark Sun and Planescape product lines. Space travel is the setting's core conceit, after all, so establishing the look of the ships themselves was absolutely paramount. I'm not sure they all work, exactly – the beholder ships stick out in my mind as being just butt-ugly looking, for instance, and I always have trouble with the big wings of the elven designs – but others, like the tradesman, hammership or nautiloid look surprisingly good even after all these years.

I'd ship it


Stop... hammertime!


My God... it's full of illithids!

Of course, being as central as they are to the product, the ships therefore touch on a lot of other aspects of the setting. Still, I'm going to try to restrict my ranting to things that are in this chapter – I'll get my chance to rant about some of the fantasy physics when we hit Chapter 1 of the Concordance of Arcane Space.

In both the books included in the boxed set, there are long black sidebars that have short, mostly-flavor sections that serve as background, fill page space, and annoy the reader by forcing them to flip back and forth through the text. Later Spelljamer products switched to having black sections with shorter footnotes instead, often self contained, which was much less irritating. I'd like to quote the sidebar that starts this chapter:

Why Ships in Space?

The basic hulls of the spacefaring humanoid nations reveal their aquatic origins. The first human ships in space were modified seacraft, just as the first ships that most groundling adventurers take into space for the first time are galleons and caravels fitted with spelljammirig helms. Such vessels are both easy to acquire and familiar to their crews.

But the nature of the helm does not limit sailing ships as the only types of ships to be found in space, as the dwarves flying mountain citadels and elven butterflies clearly show. Why then do men take ships into space?

The basic seafaring ship's shape and organization is ideal for spelljamming activities. The plane of gravity lies very low in the ship, in some cases almost on line with the keel itself. The ship is portable and made to stand up under pressures from several directions. Its layout, with a limited crew under the command of a captain and his officers, makes it easy to handle in space. Even the rigging, oars, and other deck furniture onboard aids in maneuvering the ship. Finally, the standard sizes of ships fits with the tonnage requirements of the spelljamming helms.

Other objects can and have been taken into space, including monuments, boulders, several pyramids, and a few large creatures such as dragons, Living creatures seem to be upset by being used as ships and they often try to return to their homes as soon as possible, going out of control if not. Castles and other buildings secured to the ground will not move unless released from their moorings, and then they experience severe problems as the plane of gravity moves through the building. Walls that carry forces in one direction now must carry them in opposite directions, which in turn causes some to crumble, which in turn shifts the plane of gravity further upward until eventually the entire structure collapses.

The dwarves rely on the solidity of their mountain ships, but even they do not land with them. The elves use a living plantlike creature as the base of their ships, but it is unknown if this plant was grown by one race of elves, or discovered on an air world where the butterfly-shaped creatures would evolve along ship lines. As for humans and a number of other races, ships have provided the easiest methods into space, and so are the most commonly used.

“Why ships?” is certainly a fair question to ask. As I mentioned previously, given that one of their design goals was to generate their own “fantasy physics” there's no necessary reason that sailing ships had to be the dominant metaphor for spelljamming travel. It could have just as easily been magic wagons (a “wagon train to the stars, if you will!) or hot air ballons or magic flying camels. We get ships presumably because Grubb and co. wanted to evoke the Age of Sail in the minds of players – telling someone “sailing ships, but in space” immediately calls to mind stories about long voyages, hidden treasures, pirates, etc. because many people are familiar with those sorts of stories, so the players will have some frame of reference and an idea what kind of stories to expect. Hot air balloons don't have nearly so many books written about them.

We also have here the first reference to gravity planes, an idea that has always driven me bonkers in it's implementation. The idea, in and of itself, is fine – gravity is an all-or-nothing, 1G or freefall, proposition, and works as a flat, 2-dimensional plane that runs through the long axis of the ship. The idea being, of course, that this lets you walk along the deck of the ship in the manner one would normally be accustomed to. Ok, fine, this is a playable set of rules that saves everyone having to faff about calculating weapon ranges and falling damage in 1.75G, and lets ships having multiple flat decks (such as one might find on sailing ships) be viable. The problem is that the location of this plane seems to have no particularly defined location. On some ships, it seems to run along the keel. In others, it seems to run closer to amidships. In the two Neogi designs we see in this chapter, the gravity plane is discontinuous along the length of the ship! (Confidential to TSR:

that's not how planes work!

) And perhaps most infuratingly, we have a reference to castles.

I agree that unmooring a castle would be a difficult prospect, and later on we see that spelljamming helms are generally limited to the tonnage they can move. Now, tonnage is a fairly inconsistent topic in Spelljanmer, but for the purpose of this conversation I'm willing to accept the reading of “mass” for tonnage and I'd agree with the premise that stone is generally too massive to be a good material for building spelljamming vessels, given that spelljamming helms are limited in the mass they can move. Besides, flying fortresses isn't the metaphor we're going for here.

Not what Grubb had in mind...

But even laying all that aside, their description of why flying castles don't work doesn't make any goddamn sense, even within the confines of the fantasy physics they're proposing. Now, I'm not a structural engineer, so there may well be subtleties that I'm missing, but there are at least two problems I can see:
1) Walls are already experiencing forces in opposite directions
2) They mention to the plane of gravity shifting upward, but there's no fantasy physics that actually explain why that would be so. Implicit in their statement is an assumption that the gravity plane would seek the middle of the structure, but again, nothing in their rules justify that. Also implicit in their statement is the assumption that all the crumbling would happen at the bottom, which makes no sense.

To explain further, let's consider stone blocks at various positions in a castle wall. There are at least three blocks we might want to look at: one at the top of the wall, one at the bottom, and one at the middle of the wall.

Now, the top block seems like a simple case. On a planet it's at the top of the wall; gravity pulls it down with a force proportional to it's mass. In space, it is once again pulled down in the same way, with the same force (since it's always 1G or nothing.) So, no difference there. Moving on...

“WAIT!” some of you will cry out. “If the block is being pulled down with a force, why isn't it moving?!” Congratulations, you paid attention in physics class. There is an equal and opposite force, the normal force, which is the ground “pushing” back up against the wall. The rest of the wall beneath the top block is pushing back on it with exactly the same force that gravity is pulling the block down.

So we see that for the top block, nothing changes for it in either frame, and we're also reminded that the block already has forces acting on it in opposite directions. Let's next consider the bottom block. On a planet, the entire mass of the wall above it is pushing down on the block, and the normal force of the ground is pushing back just as much. In space, however, if the gravity plane cuts through the middle of our castle, our bottom block is now essentially a mirrored version of our top block! There's nothing below it pushing “up” towards the gravity plane, so it only has it's own weight pushing “up”, and the normal force of the blocks at the midline, equal and opposite, pushing “down” back at it. So in space, there's actually less force acting on the block!

Finally, consider the middle block. On a planet, it has the weight of half the wall pushing it down, and an equivalent force pushing back up as the normal force from the ground. In space, since it's the midline, we have both the wall above it and the wall below it pushing on it. However, if we assume the mass of the wall above the block is the same as the mass of the wall below it (which seems like a reasonable assumption; a solid stone wall that has it's stone all sourced from the same location should have stones of equivalent density making it up) we see that the resulting forces on the block end up being precisely the same. So a block in the middle of the wall sees no difference on the ground or in space.

Since the blocks at the bottom seem to come out “ahead” in the space frame, it's hard to understand why they'd start crumbling there. If I had to guess, I'd imagine that if any stones would crumble, stones along the midline gravity plane would be the ones that would do so. If they did crumble, that still wouldn't change the gravity plane upwards, though it could cause the upper part of the wall to fall “down” and the the lower part of the wall to fall “up”!

And of course, all of this seems to be predicated on an (unstated) assumption that the gravity plane will run along the long axis of the item, but also center itself along the center of mass. The problem is that they never actually say that anywhere, and also that assumption is clearly contradicted by the gravity planes we see on many of the ships.







So, yes, I am Officially Buttmad about this issue. And for those of you in the cheap seats, let me reiterate: my objection is not the idea that gravity is 1G or 0G, or that it acts as a mostly-convenient plane; my objection is that after going to the trouble to create a fantasy physics gravity, they don't actually consider how it actually works and write those rules down and apply them consistently. It's just poorly made mindcaulk papering over half-remembered high-school physics. If you're going to set out to make a workable fantasy physics, do that. If I were to reboot Spelljammer and wanted to keep the gravity rules, I can think of a simple amendment that would fix a lot of this. “Gravity works in a plane that is along the edge of the contiguous hull furthest from the spelljamming helm” and just make sure the helm is above the midline of the ship. There's probably edge cases I'm not thinking about, and it could certainly be further refined, but hey, I'm not putting the idea in a book and charging you money for it, either.

There's also the separate issue of why the “rigging, oars, and other deck furniture onboard aids in maneuvering the ship.” This is just... what. Why rigging, oars, etc would have any bearing at all on maneuvering the ship is beyond me. What are those things acting on, such that turning the ship becomes an equal and opposite reaction? I don't know, and you don't know, and neither did the developers.

Well, I've spent four pages here and I haven't even addressed the actual chapter itself; I've just been ranting about sidebar material. I'm going to call it here for now, but in my next post I'll actually dig into the text proper and review the actual spelljamming ships.

[Thaluikhain]

But even laying all that aside, their description of why flying castles don't work doesn't make any goddamn sense, even within the confines of the fantasy physics they're proposing.

Especially as pyramids work as spelljammers. Difficult to land, I'd have thought, though, need a big flat surface.

[RelentlessImp]

I always thought the rudders and oars were for steering in the phlogiston.

[Username17]

There are definitely pieces of architecture that would not survive directional gravity changes. Arches, for example, crucially depend on the direction of gravity. If gravity pulled 90 or 180 degrees from where it pulls now, arches would stop being self reinforcing because the capstone would no longer distribute weight. But yeah, that physics rant is pretty bad.

Fundamentally, the fantasy physics of Spelljammer weren't that well thought out. Which is an odd thing to complain about, because they are fantasy physics. Like, if shit just looked like it came off a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper and there were space dolphins and rainbows and shit, that would be fine. It's fantasy. You can do whatever you want, and declare whatever setting elements you want.

But for some reason the Spelljammer people decided that they were going to be gritty and serious. People were going to get scurvy and we'd worry about water provisions and physical limitations of building materials and shit. And that's OK as far as fantasy goes as well. Some people want to play MechWarrior or Traveler and calculate tonnage of their made-up space duke's space cargo. If you want your fantasy to do volume calculations, be my fucking guest. But that declaration that we're going to do real talk and have grime and bad teeth and weight calculations in our fantasy, you have to fucking commit to that. And when you make bullshit statements like "a ship's ton can have 1000 gallons of water" it just makes me want to stab you in the fucking eye. At least look up what these fucking definitions are and get the conversions right!

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

I always thought the rudders and oars were for steering in the phlogiston.

It get touched on in one of the Cloakmaster Cycle books, number 2, IIRC, the helm gives gross control but the oars and rigging give fine control. But the hero acknowledges that he doesn't know what they push against, and he never finds out, IIRC.

The other thing that seems odd is that conventional (or conventionalish) ships, pyramids, and things shaped big insects all work. A normal ship is the exact shape to be right for space, and so is a dragonfly, and they work much the same.

[Woot]

@RelentlessImp - I’m pretty sure the rudders & oars are to assist maneuvering at “tactical speeds” i.e. during ship-to-ship encounters. Flow or regular wildspace doesn’t matter. I think I understand the reasoning: if you’re having a naval battle, attacking the enemy’s ability to maneuver by wrecking their rigging is a worthwhile thing to do. Since they wanted to keep that as an option, they had to make rigging a “thing” that could be destroyed so as to have that as a possibility supported by the rules.

@Frank - I’d hesitantly agree. An arch at ground level under a 180 degree rotation actually wouldn’t be a problem: since there’s nothing but maybe a flagstone floor underneath it, there’s little weight for the columns to support. An arch that’s a quarter-way up the wall could possibly be at risk, though. Likewise, anything rotated at 90 degrees. Although thinking about it, the only case that immediately comes to mind for a 90 degree rotation would be something tall and thin, perhaps a wizard’s tower, and at that point, the orientation of the building would be so skewed with respect to the gravity plane that crumbling arches would probably be the least of your worries!

It’s not so much that they’re doing what they want that I object to; it’s that the rules aren’t consistent with themselves. Much the way people here at the Den get spun up about skill rules or vision rules in D&D not being consistent with themselves, I’m a bit spun up about the fantasy physics. I wouldn’t even care that much, except for the fact that they’ve SPECIFICALLY SET OUT to make a “coherent fantasy physics” a goal of theirs. I mean, OK, I’m the kind of person who totally loves Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets, a site about the actual scientific details of science fiction stories. I’m a huge dork. But on top of being a dork, they’ve made a promise that they’re failing to deliver on. So that’s why I care.

Why should you care? Well, maybe you don’t and shouldn’t, but I defy anyone who ever wants to create their own ship or floating space base to explain where the gravity plane is, and point to a justification in the rules for that location. I mean, yes, you can DM fiat hand wave the answer and come up with something, but I’d ask you to consider that spacefaring societies are going to have an understanding of how gravity planes work, even if it’s crude and rule of thumb, the way a lot of medieval architecture happened, and that their ship designs are going to reflect that understanding, and possibly take advantage of it. There’s also the issue that enterprising players are going to ask the DM, “How can we screw with our adversaries’ gravity plane?” and expect the DM has an answer. The details don’t need to mathematically precise, but the DM and players should be able to conceptually model what’s happening. Fair?

[Grek]

Why isn't the gravity plane at the bottom of the ship, so that everything onboard falls the same direction and all you have to worry about is whether it would work on the ground at 1G? Isn't that the obvious answer to go with, if you were wanting to have a gravity 'plane' for some reason? Or hell, make down be forward. Ender's Game had been out for 4 years by then, they had no excuse for not being aware that the enemy's gate is down.

[tussock]

Gravity plane is at the water line for the human ships, so the original idea was to have them be forced into correct orientation next to each other, and people float at a convenient level if they fall off.

4e D&D makes it the Astral Sea, and the whole thing comes together much better, because they are just floating in space, which turns out to be a 2D star map where the stars are all astral gates, and when you look up at night that's the Astral Sea up there, and people go spelljamming on it.

[Thaluikhain]

There is mention of how you can align you gravity planes to another ship, but upside down to them, which is considered an insulting gesture.

Gravity plane is at the water line for the human ships, so the original idea was to have them be forced into correct orientation next to each other, and people float at a convenient level if they fall off.

If you have the gravity plane at the waterline, then going below decks would get weird. Though, I guess you could save on hammocks, just float in empty space inside the hold.

[Zaranthan]

You'd drift around and bump into walls and other sleeping crew. You need at least belt clips, if not the full ISS sleep rig.

[Ancient History]

It's worth mentioning that once you're in space, the only reason to have a spelljammer be boat-shaped is cultural impetus, or maybe to facilitate water landings/blending in with the local trade. You could totally have some elves that set down in an ocean beyond the horizon, sail up to a human city and pretend to just be elves from far-away-but-on-the-planet, the better so as not to spook the locals. But that's not normally a consideration, spelljammer ships are boat-shaped so that you can get your piracy on in space, and because not many people thought of spelljammers as being floating castles and shit.