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

[Ancient History]

Three dimensions are a difficult thing to map out effectively on a table, so a lot of games default to two-dimensional thinking, even when they shouldn't. The scale of space and bullshit fantasy physics are just accepted casualties in the fact that Spelljammer is essentially a metaphor taken too far. Space is not literally a sea, the ships do not have to look like nautical vessels, and a lot of the behaviors they're trying to map are supercomplicated and weird because they're trying to replicate in space some very specific mechanics that only apply on water for a given level of technology. Repelling boarders from an aircraft carrier is less about two aircraft carriers drawing alongside and pirates swinging from ropes.

The thing is, Spelljammer was trying mightily to be literal pirates in space - even if they didn't want to think through any of the rest of it, like shipments of small-volume, high-value goods from remote places which would attract pirates. If the richest source of adamantine was Planet X and the dwarfs had a mining colony there, you would bet their sweet ass there would be armed convoys ferrying that shit back to the High King's forges in Grudgeheim on Dwarf Prime, and Derro and Orc and Dark Elf raiders who would all be looking at their space maps and trying to figure out the best places to hit them.

The whole straight-line-sudden-slow-down thing comes, I suspect, from a careful misreading of the Man-Kzin wars books, where if you try to use hyperdrive too close to a gravity well you and your ship are reduced to a small string of highly energetic molecules spread over about half a light year. I use a very weak variant of the same basic concept in Space Madness! to prevent ships from just popping into orbit or trying to ram into thing at relativistic speeds for lols, and if used correctly it can be potentially interesting...

...except you gotta remember that space is three dimensional and vast and there's seldom an obstacle you can't just go around. If they had made spelljammers dependent on phlogiston flows for movement or unable to hold enough stores/fuels to take longer trips, forcing them on shorter and more dangerous direct routes that would be something, but that sort of thing just doesn't come into play much. Hell, if they had just thrown up their hands at physics and made crystal spheres arbitrarily small that would have helped restrict movement too...but when you're still talking light-second distances between planets, the whole thing is a bit of an exercise is annoyance.

[Thaluikhain]

It’s straight-line only travel; encountering anything in your path that’s 10 tons (as Spelljamer defines them) will drop you out of that speed. So, for example, debris or Elven flitters won’t, but larger craft (or planets) will.

What does 'encounter" mean? Does your atmosphere pocket need to touch theirs (in which case the giant ship full of pirates is something you either never see go by, or see just when they've reached boarding range)?

We’re treated to 4 different methods of calculating the distance between planets: assuming shortest possible distance, assuming longest possible distance, calculating both of those and taking the average, and then a method which involves actually charting the movement of the planets relative to each other. It does recommend using that last method only if the actual position of the planets is important to the campaign for some reason. I’d probably do it, actually, since as I hope I’ve demonstrated to everyone present’s satisfaction I’m tediously anal if not an outright lunatic, though I think that even I would probably use a spreadsheet with equations to do the math for me. (Is this the right place to talk about how the needs of navigation during the Age of Sail prompted the widespread study of trigonometry? LET ME EXPLAIN IT IN GREAT LENGTH!)

Eh, depending on how your planets are set out, you could do it by drawing circles to sale inside on another, moving markers around and measuring the distances.

Oh, and determining the average distance of two planets in circular orbits? It's always going to be the distance of the outermost one, no maths needed. (At least in this simplification, there are issues that should complicate this, like the longest distance involving travelling through the sun, which is more than 10 tons usually and will drop you to tactical speed and set you on fire)

Finally, we are told about movement in the Flow. Flow currents can propel ships even faster than he 100 million mile/day speed; but it still typically takes 10d10 days to travel from one sphere to the next, and typically rely on locators sold by the Arcane (or created via spells) to reach a particular sphere.

This always seemed a bit odd to me, spheres are on the large side, but you are in a giant opaque swirly mess, your visibility should be next to nothing, you could easily get lost and wander round forever.

...

Also, never rammed wooden ships together myself, but at 17 miles per hour x SR seems like you could easily write off both ships.

[Username17]

Spelljammer has an Encounter Distance. That is, if things get to the distance of the edge of tactical map, they both drop out of warp automatically.
As contrivances go, it could certainly be worse.

-Username17

[Woot]

Chapter 5: Celestial Mechanics


Not quite what we meant

The chapter begins by reminding us that spelljamming ships travel fast (100 million miles per day, roughly .006c) and the planets in typical systems travel very slowly by comparison, but Eppur si muove as some dude said. If you’re the sort of person who cares about that, this chapter is for you.

We start by being given an explanation of the planetary display chart, along with explanations of scale and why it’s divided into an inner and outer section (hint: space is big) along with reminders that even though the chart is circular, there’s no reason orbits have to be: orbits can be square, or random, or the position of everything can be fixed, as Mister Cavern pleases. It’s a little odd, having them provide resources for calculating orbits and then saying, “but, you can just do what you want!” but this is Spelljammer, so that’s par for the course.

Next up are rules for laying out planets via a bunch of rolls, and moving planets and ships around on the map. This is followed by rules for encounters; there’s a base chance of 1-in-20 every day, modified by where in the system you are, what’s nearby, etc. I actually think that’s wildly overoptimistic, actually. Very few ships are just going to be “hanging out” between points A and B; most ships are going to be going somewhere and since everyone travels at the same speed over long distances, you’re not likely to catch up to or be caught by anyone. (As an aside, I now wonder if the spelljamming helm mechanic rules that require 3 spell casters for continuous helm operation might not be an in-game reason why you might come across other ships more frequently: all their helmsmen are currently taking a nap and hence, they’re dead in space. The text never seems to hint at this, though, so I doubt it’s intentional.)

Finally we’re given some rules for creating your own crystal spheres via rolling dice. This is all very standard AD&D fare, with “oddball” results from rolling high. Congratulations, you’ve generated a system that has a cube-shaped fireworld populated by a world-spanning empire; enjoy your new campaign setting! I guess I wouldn’t call this part of the chapter unhelpful, precisely, so much as it gives you the barest skeleton and expects you to fill in the gaps. I find myself thinking about the random planet generation one finds in GURPS Space or Traveller; those systems tend to give you a few more hooks to hang things on: government systems, level of civilizational development, population, etc. Again, it’s left to Mister Cavern to flesh out those details, but it provides a bit more food for thought.

Appendix 1: Spell Effects

A useful if not spectacular section. Spells have effects in ways you’d expect them to: fire in the Flow is bad; extraplanar stuff doesn’t work in the Flow, sound doesn’t travel across airless voids, stinking cloud pollutes your air envelope, etc. There are also listings for spells that could be used to repair or damage a hull, which is nice to see that they thought about the issue. Magic items are discussed as well, and again, work in ways you’d guess at, i.e. no access to your bag of holding in the Flow.

Appendix 2: Travel Times

Travel times and distances are given for Realmspace, Greyspace, Krynnspace and our Solar System. 2 pages of numbers, arranged in tables. My heart sings.

Appendix 3: Planetary Display

Two pages to give you a planetary display map. ‘nuff said.

Appendix 4: The Rock of Bral

This section gives us three pages to discuss “The Rock of Bral” aka “The Rock,” an asteroid city (for which the boxed set has included a map) that can be dropped into any crystal sphere you wish, for use as a base of operations or hometown for your players. A brief history is given, along with descriptions of it’s gravity plane, docking facilities, etc. It’s fine for what it is - a worked example of what an asteroid city might look like. Like so much else in the setting, it would become the focus of it’s own 96 page book in 1992.

And.. that’s it. Next post will be my final thoughts.

[Woot]

@Thaluikhain

You're quite right in noticing the encounter distance being wonky. The rules as written state that ships drop out of "high speed" when the gravity planes intersect, however ships that "encounter" each other start 10+1d10 hexes apart, which is well outside a ship's gravity plane. Presumably this is so that you have some room to maneuver and use those long range weapons Spelljammer wants us to care about - otherwise that could all be skipped and everything would just end up being a boarding action. You also need to be 25 hexes away from other bodies to "warp away" which again, is well outside your gravity plane.

On the one hand, I get why they do that - it lets us have our space battles. But if they'd simply written the rules as something like, "A massive (10+ ton) object within roughly 12,500 yards will force a spelljamming vessel out of spelljamming speeds because of a safety feature built in by the arcane/the will of the gods/harmonic spelljamming resonance fields interfering each other/the Treaty of Organia/it's magic and we ain't gotta explain shit/etc." instead of stating the rule is "when gravity fields intersect" and then totally ignoring that rule, it would have been a lot better.

[Thaluikhain]

Next up are rules for laying out planets via a bunch of rolls, and moving planets and ships around on the map. This is followed by rules for encounters; there’s a base chance of 1-in-20 every day, modified by where in the system you are, what’s nearby, etc. I actually think that’s wildly overoptimistic, actually. Very few ships are just going to be “hanging out” between points A and B; most ships are going to be going somewhere and since everyone travels at the same speed over long distances, you’re not likely to catch up to or be caught by anyone.

Yeah, even if the other ship was faster, if it's traveling from a planet which is moving, it's starting point would have moved relative to you and the ending point (which is also moving) by the time it leaves, you'd not be on a parallel course. Even if you were on planet A going to planet B and a ship was doing the opposite, and you both leave at the same time, unless you both aim at where the planet is now, get more or less there, and then fix your aim, you're not on parallel reverse courses at any time.

EDIT: And if you have to be within 20 hexes to slow down to tactical speed (likely the only time you notice them at spelljamming speeds), and a hex is 500 yards, not very likely. Well, unless pirates have some magic way of finding your exact route and staging an ambush, which is plausible.

EDIT EDIT: A quibble, but the English didn't defeat the Spanish Armada per se, the results of the fighting were inconclusive, but the Spanish had to sail home and most of them got shipwrecked for unrelated reasons. The English just overlook a few bits.

[Woot]

@Thaluikhain You're quite right about the Spanish armada; it seems I was lied to in grade school!

[Woot]

Final Thoughts

Whew! When I first began this two months ago, I never suspected it would turn into the timesink it ended up becoming, or that I’d have quite so much going on that would interfere with getting it done. Hopefully, if or when I do another, I’ll be more timely about churning out the review.

Anyway, let’s recap. As I’ve hopefully made clear throughout this review, I have a lot of affection for Spelljammer, even accounting for all the bits of it that drive me bonkers. I’m also looking at it through 25+ years of nostalgia, so it’s hard to remain objective and see things as if through a fresh pair of eyes. Still, when I started this review, I resolved to try and evaluate it by the criteria it’s creators set for themselves, and evaluate whether it succeeded or failed on those merits. Reading Jeff Grubb’s introduction, I derived five goals from his foreward, so let’s take a look at each of those in turn and see how we stack up.

Create a setting that's AD&D... IN... SPAAAAAAAAACE!

At first glance, they seem to have succeeded. We have rules that describe space, rules that describe how that space may be traversed, and rules for arbitrating what may be found there. Easy, right?

At a deeper level, though, I’m less sure this product succeeds. It gives the rules I’ve described, but as it does so, it leaves out any but the very vaguest details. If I picked up a setting book in 1989 about Krynn or the Forgotten Realms, I’d be able to flip through it and learn something about those places. What are the largest powers? Who rules those places, and how do they rule? What are the major cities or points of interest? Has there been a war recently, or are we building up to one? Those books could answer many of those questions, but the Spelljammer boxed set really doesn’t answer any of them. At best, we know that the elves have a big armada, and they defeated the goblins, orcs, et al at sometime in the past. Now I understand the reason for this: they want to give you a blank canvas that you can color in however you wish, which is totally a valid thing to do, but I’m not sure you can call that a “setting” so much as “a collection of rules that you can fit a setting into.” And so we get… the Rock of Bral, and that’s pretty much it.

Now it’s worth pointing out that later books and boxed sets actually did flesh things out and create a proper setting for Spelljammer; I think both the Astromundi Cluster and Legend of Spelljammer boxed sets are outstanding and really help bring the setting alive. But, great as they are, they aren’t in this boxed set, which in and of itself is largely bereft of what I’d call a setting.

Tie existing campaign settings together without shitting on the core assumptions of any of them

I think the boxed set largely succeeds at this, but in many ways, it’s also one of the reasons we fail at the previous goal. By providing such a paucity of setting details, and directing you to go read the setting’s rulebooks if you want to learn more about Krynn or Toril or Oerth, it manages to sidestep having to say anything definite about those settings. Likewise, by positing that spacers and groundlings don’t have much interest in each other’s lives, and the mechanics of crystal spheres preventing gods from engaging in multi-sphere shenanigans, we have a plausible sounding set of reasons as to why spelljamming hasn’t had much material impact on the existing campaign settings.

Develop a coherent “fantasy physics”

*sigh* No. There are some not-terrible ideas at the bottom of it all, and I totally understand why gravity planes in some form pretty much need to be a thing, but I really think that whole idea needs to be reworked. There are simply too many inconsistencies in the rules for me to say they’ve got anything like a coherent fantasy physics here. Likewise, I think air envelopes should be reconsidered, and maybe ditched entirely. They bring nothing particularly useful to the table other than unnecessary complication.

Permit for a diversity of races and ships

This, I think they succeed at. The large, if not infinite, number of possible worlds give an excellent reason to justify any sort of beings that Mister Cavern wishes to introduce. On the other hand, this is due to the nature of the setting being set in the vast cosmos, rather than anything clever or noteworthy that the designers did.

Provide a ship to ship minigame

I think they succeed at this. I’m not sure the ship-to-ship minigame has amazing tactical depth or anything, but it’s fine for what it is: a way to break up the party member versus NPC encounters by adding party member ship versus NPC ship encounters into the mix. At it’s best, it can give the party one more choice in how to handle hostile NPCs: if the NPCs are individually dangerous (i.e. beholders) the party can choose to stay off and battle ship to ship. Likewise, if the enemy has some extraordinarily large or dangerous ship, they can choose to launch a boarding action and rely on the fact that the adventurers are typically going to superior to their foes in close combat.

So, what would I do, if I were to find myself in the Big Chair at Hasbro and was told to release a Spelljammer reboot product? Well, I’d definitely want to flesh out setting details - possibly I’d make the Astromundi Cluster the “default” Spelljammer setting, with of course caveats to the reader that Spelljammer can be set in any other sphere they wish. I’d rework gravity planes and air envelopes, as I’ve discussed. I’d want to rethink how spelljamming helms work, possibly making them less punishing for spellcasters to use, or perhaps letting anyone drive them - maybe all that’s needed is a focused will. I’d also try to beef up the lackluster (and perhaps beyond saving) 5e skillset to make sure that every character has some skills that could be useful in ship-to-ship combat. Working the rigging, crewing heavy weapons, managing the crew, navigating, and doing damage control are all tasks that the PCs not driving the ship could usefully perform. From a character perspective, making some of the more iconic races playable - gift and dracons come to mind - seems like an easy win, and adding some subclasses could be worthwhile as well, particularly if they could be made general enough to work in other settings beyond Spelljammer. For example, marines and heavy weapon specialists could be useful in a lot of different contexts. If I had more of a budget and some industry contacts, getting miniatures produced and providing or selling appropriately-scaled deck plans for common ships seems like an easy win. Providing a service where individuals can create and upload crystal spheres to share with others also seems like an excellent way to profit off the unpaid work of enthusiasts synergize consumer creativity with corporate financial goals encourage community participation and generate content inexpensively. But maybe I’m just a big cynic.

And with that, I’ll wrap this up. Smooth sailing, everyone!

[deaddmwalking]

I enjoyed it and hope you'll review the Astromundi Cluster sooner rather than later.