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

[tussock]

There's just one problem: FOR FUCKS SAKE IT'S FULL OF ANGRY BEHOLDERS WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU GO THERE ARE YOU FUCKING OUT OF YOUR MIND!?!?!

Quite. As you say, there's playable stuff and then there's things that are different enough to bother going there, and the overlap is not obvious in Spelljammer. Especially when the default game includes, like a hundred or so other worlds to travel to already, assuming you still had your 1st edition MotP.

Then, they even stop you going to Dark Sun later on, doesn't connect, nor does Ravenloft because that's in the Etherial ... so more new and interesting worlds were specifically excluded. Planescape eventually replaced the whole concept (Sigil instead of the Rock of Braal) and added "you can adventure there now" tokens for everywhere you wanted to go plus gates to anywhere, plus philosophy cults, all much more weird and playable at once.

Good review, BTW Typical early 90s RPG really, D&D in space, so D&D, space, done!

[Woot]

Excluding Ravenloft makes perfect sense - part of the premise is that you're "locked-in" by the Dark Powers (i.e. Mister Cavern) for their amusement or whatever. It'd be like starting a horror movie where a bunch of teenagers have their vehicle break down in the middle of a terrible storm right in front of a creepy house... and then one of the kids pipes up, "Hey, I've got cell service out here.... OK, the Uber driver will be here in 5 minutes."

Dark Sun presents a different problem: since characters there are typically based on 3-20 instead of 3-18, in an edition where high scores really do matter, Dark Sun characters are just straight up more powerful than their counterparts from other worlds. Likewise, the monsters tend to be tougher, and are very frequently psionic. There are a few interesting stories that suggest themselves immediately if Athas was reachable via spelljamming:

- The ruthless and powerful Sorcerer-Kings, emboldened by the prospect of virgin, unspoiled worlds for them to pillage, and completely amoral in their quest for additional power, begin waging wars of conquest and genocide against the worlds of Krynn, Toril and Oerth

- Alternately, the gods of the other spheres, horrified at the devastation the Athasians have wrought in their own sphere without gods to restrain them, call upon their clerics to lead a crusade to wipe out the heathen Athasians, to prevent their godlessness, environmental recklessness, and mutant powers from ever threatening the god's home spheres

- In a well-meaning but soft-headed attempt at kindness, or perhaps through simple indifference, one or more outside nations begin accepting refugees from Athas. Unfortunately, the powerful and ruthless Athasian cultures and creatures begin overpowering the locals and their ecosystems, threatening the stability of their worlds

Any of these (or others) could be fun, but the culture clash between the savage Athasians and the more "civilized" natives of other spheres would probably become a dominant theme of the campaign. Which, given that Spelljammer itself relies on Age of Sail tropes, could be used as a metaphor for the contact between the Age of Sail Europeans and the indigenous people of the Americas, albeit with some elements switched around, depending on how political you like your elfgames to be.

I also find myself thinking about the oversight of Mystara, which is very much the forgotten child of D&D, so that's maybe not terribly surprising, even setting aside the whole "Purge the taint of Gygax!" that would have been happening at TSR at the time. On the other hand, Mystara is (for the most part) just another medieval stasis setting, with all the usual historical nation expies, so it's not immediately clear what it would have brought to the table when dropped alongside The Big Three. Although, I've always had a soft spot for the Shadow Elves, though... or as I think of them, Drow Done Better.

[Chamomile]

I'm sure a plot revolving around desert dwellers whose religious differences make them inherently amoral being accepted as refugees and causing conflict because of their amoral godlessness would go over very well in the current political climate.

[Woot]

You'll have to forgive me, Chamomile; I can't tell if you're trying to zing me or not.

[Username17]

What would I do differently, in regards to planets? Admittedly, it's a tough problem.

The fundamental issue with planets is that D&D is mostly a pretty small scale game. We already have various islands where the trees have human heads as fruit and regions dominated by frost giants and vampires who rule everything they can see from their decrepit towers. It's not actually very important how far away those things are from each other because the travel between them is mostly handled via time skip and everything is all medieval to the point that power goes "as far as you can reach" and knowledge goes "as far as you can see."

Basically all of the colorful locations visited by Sinbad in the Arabian Nights are explicitly in Al-Qadim, which means that they are all in the Forgotten Realms and you could get there by boat or fly there on the back of a giant eagle from Waterdeep. What do you actually gain by revealing planets to explore?

Spelljammer never really answered that question. Which is a shame, because it's rather fundamental to the whole enterprise. A new planet introduces forty thousand kilometers of new land and sea and whatever to explore. But the core conceit is that you can already have an environment pretty much as alien as you want with any island or valley or cavern in less than twenty kilometers. What could we possibly say or do to run out of space for fantasy bullshit on a single planet?

-Username17

[maglag]

What would I do differently, in regards to planets? Admittedly, it's a tough problem.

The fundamental issue with planets is that D&D is mostly a pretty small scale game. We already have various islands where the trees have human heads as fruit and regions dominated by frost giants and vampires who rule everything they can see from their decrepit towers. It's not actually very important how far away those things are from each other because the travel between them is mostly handled via time skip and everything is all medieval to the point that power goes "as far as you can reach" and knowledge goes "as far as you can see."

Basically all of the colorful locations visited by Sinbad in the Arabian Nights are explicitly in Al-Qadim, which means that they are all in the Forgotten Realms and you could get there by boat or fly there on the back of a giant eagle from Waterdeep. What do you actually gain by revealing planets to explore?

Spelljammer never really answered that question. Which is a shame, because it's rather fundamental to the whole enterprise. A new planet introduces forty thousand kilometers of new land and sea and whatever to explore. But the core conceit is that you can already have an environment pretty much as alien as you want with any island or valley or cavern in less than twenty kilometers. What could we possibly say or do to run out of space for fantasy bullshit on a single planet?

-Username17

Even sci-fi with common planetary travel suffers from that problem. Most of the time all the authors can come up with are planets that each have a specific kind of terrain and climate that doesn't change all over the same surface. So instead of fire dungeon and ice dungeon you have fire world and ice world, so yay?

Does anybody knows of any game or media where there's multiple planets and each actually has their own varied terrain and diverse biomes and climates?

[Thaluikhain]

Even sci-fi with common planetary travel suffers from that problem. Most of the time all the authors can come up with are planets that each have a specific kind of terrain and climate that doesn't change all over the same surface. So instead of fire dungeon and ice dungeon you have fire world and ice world, so yay?

Or worse, an alien planet that exactly Earth.

Does anybody knows of any game or media where there's multiple planets and each actually has their own varied terrain and diverse biomes and climates?

Hmmm...does it have to be each? Cause some 40k planets have more than one biome. Some of them have an entire two. Armageddon has at least 4 or 5.

[maglag]

Even sci-fi with common planetary travel suffers from that problem. Most of the time all the authors can come up with are planets that each have a specific kind of terrain and climate that doesn't change all over the same surface. So instead of fire dungeon and ice dungeon you have fire world and ice world, so yay?

Or worse, an alien planet that exactly Earth.

Heh, true. A lot of old sci-fi is indeed "oh look at this planet's that just like Earth except less people, guess we can now make our redneck fantasies of farms with free sex a reality."

Does anybody knows of any game or media where there's multiple planets and each actually has their own varied terrain and diverse biomes and climates?

Hmmm...does it have to be each? Cause some 40k planets have more than one biome. Some of them have an entire two. Armageddon has at least 4 or 5.

I'll give 40k that, even if they're few enough that they could easily count as exceptions. Armageddon's in particular got an exceptional bit of backstory since it saw three of the setting's major battles and it's got campaign books and side-games and everything.

But then you look at, say, IG and SM origin planets and everything's right back to ice world, jungle world, desert world, another ice world, another desert world.

Now that I think about it the Dark Crusade and Soulstorm planets did have some biome variety, but then by Dawn of War II we're right back to desert world, jungle world and city world, then Ice World for the expansion.

[deaddmwalking]

Planets as portrayed in popular media are tricky - if you're filming on Earth, it's hard to find a place that doesn't look like Earth. And if you're filming on Earth and you want to give a planet a different feel, instead of having a 'London' area and a 'Himalayas' area, you can assert it is different because 'the whole planet is like this'.

There's no reason that Luke couldn't have been just hiding on the same planet as the rebel Resistance in The Last Jedi - his island could have been isolated and there wouldn't have been any reason to look for him there. Creating a sense of distance can have some advantages - if only to explain why level 50 threats aren't destroying the Level 1 world every week. Whether you put major threats in other dimensions or other planets, you're giving a plausible reason why they don't ruin the entire setting just by existing.

[Grek]

Does anybody knows of any game or media where there's multiple planets and each actually has their own varied terrain and diverse biomes and climates?

Eclipse Phase?

[maglag]

Does anybody knows of any game or media where there's multiple planets and each actually has their own varied terrain and diverse biomes and climates?

Eclipse Phase?

Could you go in more detail about that? Because I remember that one being limited to the solar system and Earth itself doesn't really count. However if they have different rules for different biomes of Venus/Mars/Jupiter each, now that would be more interesting.

[Grek]

I mean, it turns out that there's a bunch of different planets in the solar system and even more moons and places for orbitals. Being in the solar system isn't a real limitation. And take Venus for example: There's the various aerostats (each of which has varying specialties and loyalties in the Morningstar/Consortium conflict and which is segregated into the organic and synthetic sections based on life support requirements), the surface crawlers, the tin cans in orbit, and the sub-surface caverns. Different morphs are required for each area and each has special environmental effects and resource availability to take into account. And then Mars, Luna and Titan are all like that too with their own special sub-settings and cultures. Jupiter doesn't, but only because there's one habitat per moon with a dozen moons to pick from.

[Mord]

Basically all of the colorful locations visited by Sinbad in the Arabian Nights are explicitly in Al-Qadim, which means that they are all in the Forgotten Realms and you could get there by boat or fly there on the back of a giant eagle from Waterdeep. What do you actually gain by revealing planets to explore?

Spelljammer never really answered that question. Which is a shame, because it's rather fundamental to the whole enterprise. A new planet introduces forty thousand kilometers of new land and sea and whatever to explore. But the core conceit is that you can already have an environment pretty much as alien as you want with any island or valley or cavern in less than twenty kilometers. What could we possibly say or do to run out of space for fantasy bullshit on a single planet?

The biggest addition you get from introducing multiple planets is that you now have space travel as a part of your campaign. This means you can do the scene where the Millennium Falcon races TIE Fighters through the asteroid field. That's awesome.

The next big thing you get from separate planets is that you can segregate things by a barrier more impassable than an ocean that is still permeable under the right conditions. As deaddm points out, putting your high-level threats on another planet makes it substantially more plausible that your dirt farmer civilization hasn't been wiped out by dracoliches or the Tarrasque or whatever. It also means that you can get your Edgar Rice Burroughs on and not have to worry about what trade relations exist between the Red Martians and the Dwarves of Hammer Mountain. You don't have Red Martians on Oerth, sure, but we're on Barsoom now! Adding new races and civilizations doesn't require some kind of contrived ass-pull when the new setting physically leaves the assumptions of your previous setting behind.

Space is naturally more amenable to Star Trek episode plots where the crew finds a weird alien species, exotic navigational hazard, or unique environmental condition, deals with it, and moves on. A planet is, after all, finite, and you can expect that any given thing on that planet will interact with the other things on it - which is a problem for a one-planet setting if you introduce something that, realistically, should have global consequences. Whereas the vastness of SPAAAAAAACE allows you to pull in a much broader range of ideas from science fiction and play out various scenarios to whatever degree of gonzo insanity suits you, without having to then explain how that asteroid impact affected the Dwarves of Hammerland. And you still have the option to bring back one of those weird alien species later if you feel like it.

Granted, these kinds of encounters are equally achievable with planar portals, but the manner in which planar travel is described is a lot less interesting/exciting than the various paraphernalia of space travel. Hopping into a portal a la Stargate gets you to Point B from Point A faster and probably more safely than a spelljammer, but "space opera" is a genre while "portal opera" is not for a very good reason: space opera gets to cheat by adapting the idiom of real-world sea voyages to fantastical sci-fi futures. Humanity has been having sea journeys and telling stories about them since the Bronze Age, and has been telling space-themed adaptations of those stories for centuries.


Not to mention film adaptations for the last 116 years.

As for portal travel, there is no analogous real-world literary tradition to pillage outside of the trippier works of Grant Morrison.

And, just a quibble: You can make each world as large or small as you want. Sure, it may not be plausible or necessary for an entire sphere of 40k km in circumference to be a swamp, but there's nothing stopping you from introducing a tiny asteroid that does just so happen to be covered entirely in a swamp. If you want to have a world populated entirely by Beholders, it can be the size of a postage stamp. Fuck it; it's magic.

In that vein, Populous: The Beginning is a late-90s RTS set in a system of 30ish planets. The premise is that you the Shaman lead your people in sequential conquest of each planet in the solar system on your quest to become a God. I always loved the fact that each mission's map was literally the entire planet.


See that horizon? That is the curvature of the earth you're looking at there. This planet is tiny.

I was first exposed to PTB via its demo included with SimCity 3000. The concept of using magic to hop between stone-age planets grabbed me immediately and has had my interest ever since.

It's really puzzling and disappointing to me that the Spelljammer team set their sights so low. They could have aimed for a sweeping space opera, drawing inspiration from the popularity of any of the sci-fi media franchises that rose at the same time as D&D, blended with the older sword-and-planet literature that had been around for decades. A Princess of Mars was published in 1912 and I would bet my life that at least one of the guys who wrote Spelljammer had read it. Instead of creating a new adaptation that tapped into an existing literary tradition and brought its essence to the game table - which is what Gygax did with D&D in the first place (see Appendix N) - it seems like TSR was myopically focused on delivering "D&D in space." Ugh.

[maglag]

I mean, it turns out that there's a bunch of different planets in the solar system and even more moons and places for orbitals. Being in the solar system isn't a real limitation.

Well it used to not be a limitation but nowadays we know they're all basically lifeless rocks, so no exotic alien monsters and civilizations to interact with.

And take Venus for example: There's the various aerostats (each of which has varying specialties and loyalties in the Morningstar/Consortium conflict and which is segregated into the organic and synthetic sections based on life support requirements), the surface crawlers, the tin cans in orbit, and the sub-surface caverns. Different morphs are required for each area and each has special environmental effects and resource availability to take into account. And then Mars, Luna and Titan are all like that too with their own special sub-settings and cultures. Jupiter doesn't, but only because there's one habitat per moon with a dozen moons to pick from.

Still that sounds like an interesting way to do it harder sci-fi style, have the solar system colonized by humies.

That reminds me of certain mecha series where humanity faces "aliens" from another planet that turn out to simply be humans from a colony in said planet that had been considered lost long ago.

As for portal travel, there is no analogous real-world literary tradition to pillage outside of the trippier works of Grant Morrison.

At the top of my head you've got Alice in Wonderland, Alice Beyond the Mirror, the Chronicles of Narnia and the Golden Compass, then super-hero stories use portals all the time, sometimes they're the main power of a hero/villain.

If you go to classic folklore there's plenty of stories to portals to fey realms and whatnot.

In gaming portals are extremely popular as they're pretty easy to add in-game storywise. Zelda alone has A Link to the Past, Link between Worlds, Twilight Princess and Majora's Mask. Super Robot Wars Z trilogy is all about portals to other dimensions, and that was in a setting where space travel exists.

Actually many times you'll see both combined since realistically speaking space is just too huge, but add a few ancient high-tech portals that allow you to "jump" between places and the story can run a lot smoother.

[tussock]

Granted, these kinds of encounters are equally achievable with planar portals, but the manner in which planar travel is described is a lot less interesting/exciting than the various paraphernalia of space travel. Hopping into a portal a la Stargate gets you to Point B from Point A faster and probably more safely than a spelljammer, but "space opera" is a genre while "portal opera" is not for a very good reason: space opera gets to cheat by adapting the idiom of real-world sea voyages to fantastical sci-fi futures. Humanity has been having sea journeys and telling stories about them since the Bronze Age, and has been telling space-themed adaptations of those stories for centuries.

I hate to tell you this, but space travel in fiction IS PORTAL TRAVEL. All of it. That thing with FTL communication, and no returning to earth having skipped thousands of years, obviously all those planets are very close together, yet still impossible to physically bridge the gap between without a "warp engine".

Shit, in Old Trek they're all 1g, have the same atmosphere as earth ....

Most of the ancient sea stories, they could also only get to mystery island in strange storms, and could sail endless miles of ocean hitting more undiscovered islands full of alien creatures until they finally found the macguffin or next strange storm to find themselves near a familiar coast once more. It's all portals, all the way down.

Getting lost stories are all portal stories. The Faerie Queen didn't live in the forest, as such. The Underworld was strangely disconnected from the tunnel you went in to get there, and Hell even more so. In D&D terms more true in 70's era than 90's of course.

4th edition had a lot of potential there, then they just had to throw out all the IP for no reason at all. Well, trying to kill the SRD, but yeah, no good reason. /grognard

It's really puzzling and disappointing to me that the Spelljammer team set their sights so low. They could have aimed for a sweeping space opera, drawing inspiration from the popularity of any of the sci-fi media franchises that rose at the same time as D&D, blended with the older sword-and-planet literature that had been around for decades.

They were shit scared of lawyers by then, and Lorraine Williams wouldn't have wanted them to do anything that took the spotlight off her Flash Gordon properties. I doubt anyone at the company really understood what they had, or what they could legally do with it.

[Thaluikhain]

I hate to tell you this, but space travel in fiction IS PORTAL TRAVEL. All of it.

That is quite a generalisation there.

Most of the ancient sea stories, they could also only get to mystery island in strange storms, and could sail endless miles of ocean hitting more undiscovered islands full of alien creatures until they finally found the macguffin or next strange storm to find themselves near a familiar coast once more. It's all portals, all the way down.

Getting lost stories are all portal stories. The Faerie Queen didn't live in the forest, as such. The Underworld was strangely disconnected from the tunnel you went in to get there, and Hell even more so. In D&D terms more true in 70's era than 90's of course.

Huh, not thought of it that way before.

[Woot]

Whenever I think of "portal" I think of, "BAMF! You're there!" which certainly holds for certain types of travel, but not all of them.

Now, walking from Baldur's Gate to Waterdeep is in one sense no different from sailing from Ansalon to Taladas or Spelljamming from Oerth to the Rock of Bral: all are basically "spend x time traveling, which means y rolls against the Random Encounters chart and/or the pre-arranged encounters generated by Mister Cavern."

I mean, I suppose you could think of those events as simply being "connected" to each other via portals in the sense that the time in-between is glossed over unless something interesting happens, but if you're that open in explaining everything as portal travel, you might as well say that the player characters walking half a block from their inn down to the weapon smith shop is "portal travel" since they don't have any encounters along the way, which I guess is not exactly wrong but seems an odd and unintuitive way of thinking about it.

The more time I spend killing my childhood idols thinking critically about Spelljammer, I'm starting to wonder if the 5th design goal I picked out from the Forward (providing a ship-to-ship mini game) might be the only really novel aspect of Spelljammer. Otherwise, there's nothing really mechanically "new" about the setting and there's nothing really unique about the stories you can tell with the setting compared to one of the already-extant settings. I'm still mulling that over and deciding if it's true. If it is, I'm going to want to put even more focus on those ship rules.[/i]

[Mord]

Travel by means of portal isn't about the journey, it's about the destination. Stories that take place in strange lands accessed through strange means (i.e. portal) are not about the process of passage through the portal; the portal is a convenient literary shorthand for "we are now in a new place, where your existing knowledge does not necessarily apply and you have no reasonable expectation that your dad or the police are coming to rescue you. Here be dragons."

Alice goes through the looking glass but it's not about her transit from one side of the looking glass to the other, it is about her subsequent adventures in Wonderland, on which the transit through the looking glass has effectively no bearing. She could have teleported, or been carried in the talons of a giant bird, or been carried with her whole house by a tornado. It doesn't matter to the story that ensues. The Pevensies go through the wardrobe to Narnia but the wardrobe doesn't matter to the adventure they have there. Link goes through a portal to Termina and constantly hops back and forth between the Light and Dark Worlds, but in all cases the manner of his passage has no relevance to the story that unfolds at his destination.

Compare to the Odyssey, which is very meaningfully about the voyage of a boat across the wine-dark sea and the hijinks that ensue as that boat goes from place to place at the whim of the gods. You could not retell the Odyssey if Odysseus leaves Troy via teleportation circle; you could have some of the stories happen with teleport errors causing him to get warped to Polyphemus' or Circe's islands instead of Ithaca, but you cannot meaningfully re-tell the treacherous passage past the islands of the Sirens or between Scylla and Charybdis without some kind of physical movement being involved. You could, however, do it with a car, which could make for a pretty rad Mad Max sequel.

The subtle knife in His Dark Materials is hella important in that world because of its ability to create portals, but the process of creating one, stepping through it, and closing it is really quite straightforward and basically instantaneous. In HDM, there are no adventures involved in travelling via a created portal once it exists; the adventure happens on the other side of the portal. Compare to, say, Around the World in 80 Days, where the events of the story are substantially informed by the means of travel.

Mass Effect is one of the few franchises that even come close to telling stories about the voyages that take place by means of portal-like constructs, though even then, the characters do so in a space ship and you could understand the the path between relays as being something akin to a powerful current sweeping a ship downstream. I haven't played Mass Effect so I can't say this for sure, but it's my understanding that not much really happens inside the "stream" through which they travel from one relay to the other, but something certainly could.

I can think of several examples of this manner of "portal-ish" transit. Cowboy Bebop has travel gates set up between Earth and the other planets of the solar system. WH40k has the Immaterium, where battles and stuff can happen while you're in transit. More importantly, the Marvel films have the Bifrost, which is actually pretty important to Thor: Ragnarok. When Thor and Loki get pushed out of the Bifrost beam and end up on the junkyard planet while fleeing Hela, that's very much an event informed by the means of transit.

That said, though, I think that it would be more fair to call the Bifrost and other such "portal-ish" methods latter-day evolutions of the same basic voyage/nautical metaphor, rather than being evolutions of the "portal" as represented by your looking glass, wardrobe, tornado, or what have you. The Bifrost, Immaterium, and Mass Relays still give you all the same options as a story involving slower means physical travel, because at the end of the day these methods are physical travel, just really really fast.

The story mileage you can get from a fictional means of transport is limited by the extent to which the described process of that transport resembles actual mundane travel between places, because fiction is ultimately a metaphor for reality. This is why the journey from Kansas to Oz takes 2 pages while the journey from Troy to Ithaca takes 600. The portal is the logical extreme of an author being more interested in getting their characters to the place where the story happens rather than telling the story of how they got to that place.

I hate to tell you this, but space travel in fiction IS PORTAL TRAVEL. All of it.

That is quite a generalisation there.

Here is a much more accurate generalization: everything tussock says is always wrong.

tussock is so stupid that he does not understand that the key distinction I made in my previous post is between stories where the means of travel drives events and stories where it is incidental to the events, nor does he understand why this difference matters. Helpfully, tussock is also Dunning-Kruger enough to make the kind of bold, sweeping declarations that notify the reader that he is exactly as stupid as he first appears and no subsequent statement he makes can possibly have any value. He is a self-cleaning oven of stupidity.

If tussock or anyone else can tell me how the "Out of Gas" episode of Firefly can be more plausibly interpreted as an instance of portal travel rather than as an analogue for being marooned at sea, I will cut off my own head and eat it.

[virgil]

How is Tussock always so wrong? As Woot says, when your definition of portals is that broad, it becomes a useless term.

If tussock or anyone else can tell me how the "Out of Gas" episode of Firefly can be more plausibly interpreted as an instance of portal travel rather than as an analogue for being marooned at sea, I will cut off my own head and eat it.

Simple. The crew takes a portal into a ship that needs supplies, and take their portal out until that's done.

Here's another portal commonly used in media, by Tussock standards

[hyzmarca]

FOR FUCKS SAKE IT'S FULL OF ANGRY BEHOLDERS WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU GO THERE ARE YOU FUCKING OUT OF YOUR MIND!?!?!

I have an eye fetish.

[Woot]

hyzmarca, I don't mean to kink-shame, but please don't turn this into a BDSM (Big Diameter Seeing Monster) thread. Thanks!

[tussock]

tussock is so stupid that he does not understand that the key distinction I made in my previous post is between stories where the means of travel drives events and stories where it is incidental to the events, nor does he understand why this difference matters. Helpfully, tussock is also Dunning-Kruger enough to make the kind of bold, sweeping declarations that notify the reader that he is exactly as stupid as he first appears and no subsequent statement he makes can possibly have any value. He is a self-cleaning oven of stupidity.

Real space travel, like ancient ship travel, is about the lack of trivial communication and rapid return options, there are explicit times and distances involved, and things predictably exist along that distance (even when exploring they do that on the return). Around the World in 80 days is an iconic example of a travel story, a large but fixed distance to cover, specific ports of call visited in order and counting down time. Apollo 13, fine travel story, broken ship, still has to go around the moon to get home, fixed time to solve problems, distance bringing a series of predictable problems along it, communication gaps, travel, home in 3, 2, 1, now, all key to the plot.

The odyssey is set on a ship, which moves on water, but the travel isn't there. They don't aim to go anywhere in particular, and there's no sense of distance or getting home, they're just lost in the woods and keep hitting random island encounters. If they were randomly porting between water worlds, the story doesn't change in the slightest. Like Star Trek.

Fogg and Apollo 13 don't work as portal stories, at all. There is a difference.

If tussock or anyone else can tell me how the "Out of Gas" episode of Firefly can be more plausibly interpreted as an instance of portal travel rather than as an analogue for being marooned at sea, I will cut off my own head and eat it.

Need McGuffin, split the party, McGuffin arrives, is secured, party re-unites. None of that involves travel. The bit where they sent up a flare and the McGuffin later warped directly to their explicitly immobile position is, uh, also not travel.

None of that is how space works. None of it is how the open ocean works. It makes far more sense as "we got a bit lost in the woods and a faerie nearly got one of us after we got split up, then we found ourselves home".

It's not just about scene changes, space stories routinely ignore distance and time and communication limits and the fucking map being a thing to traverse, which are the key elements of stories involving travel.

The Dying Earth books have both. There's travel sections with places to go and time and distance and intervening obstacles to pass, and also portal stories that are ironically placed to frustrate the protagonist's travel efforts. But Star Trek is not a travel story, nor is Voyager. Lord of the Rings, great travel story, travel being a very big deal, even has a map, and their travel across it is key to several plot elements that don't work as portals at all. Obvious differences.

[maglag]

Travel by means of portal isn't about the journey, it's about the destination. Stories that take place in strange lands accessed through strange means (i.e. portal) are not about the process of passage through the portal; the portal is a convenient literary shorthand for "we are now in a new place, where your existing knowledge does not necessarily apply and you have no reasonable expectation that your dad or the police are coming to rescue you. Here be dragons."

Alice goes through the looking glass but it's not about her transit from one side of the looking glass to the other, it is about her subsequent adventures in Wonderland, on which the transit through the looking glass has effectively no bearing. She could have teleported, or been carried in the talons of a giant bird, or been carried with her whole house by a tornado. It doesn't matter to the story that ensues. The Pevensies go through the wardrobe to Narnia but the wardrobe doesn't matter to the adventure they have there. Link goes through a portal to Termina and constantly hops back and forth between the Light and Dark Worlds, but in all cases the manner of his passage has no relevance to the story that unfolds at his destination.

Compare to the Odyssey, which is very meaningfully about the voyage of a boat across the wine-dark sea and the hijinks that ensue as that boat goes from place to place at the whim of the gods. You could not retell the Odyssey if Odysseus leaves Troy via teleportation circle; you could have some of the stories happen with teleport errors causing him to get warped to Polyphemus' or Circe's islands instead of Ithaca, but you cannot meaningfully re-tell the treacherous passage past the islands of the Sirens or between Scylla and Charybdis without some kind of physical movement being involved. You could, however, do it with a car, which could make for a pretty rad Mad Max sequel.

The subtle knife in His Dark Materials is hella important in that world because of its ability to create portals, but the process of creating one, stepping through it, and closing it is really quite straightforward and basically instantaneous. In HDM, there are no adventures involved in travelling via a created portal once it exists; the adventure happens on the other side of the portal. Compare to, say, Around the World in 80 Days, where the events of the story are substantially informed by the means of travel.

Mass Effect is one of the few franchises that even come close to telling stories about the voyages that take place by means of portal-like constructs, though even then, the characters do so in a space ship and you could understand the the path between relays as being something akin to a powerful current sweeping a ship downstream. I haven't played Mass Effect so I can't say this for sure, but it's my understanding that not much really happens inside the "stream" through which they travel from one relay to the other, but something certainly could.

I can think of several examples of this manner of "portal-ish" transit. Cowboy Bebop has travel gates set up between Earth and the other planets of the solar system. WH40k has the Immaterium, where battles and stuff can happen while you're in transit. More importantly, the Marvel films have the Bifrost, which is actually pretty important to Thor: Ragnarok. When Thor and Loki get pushed out of the Bifrost beam and end up on the junkyard planet while fleeing Hela, that's very much an event informed by the means of transit.

That said, though, I think that it would be more fair to call the Bifrost and other such "portal-ish" methods latter-day evolutions of the same basic voyage/nautical metaphor, rather than being evolutions of the "portal" as represented by your looking glass, wardrobe, tornado, or what have you. The Bifrost, Immaterium, and Mass Relays still give you all the same options as a story involving slower means physical travel, because at the end of the day these methods are physical travel, just really really fast.

The story mileage you can get from a fictional means of transport is limited by the extent to which the described process of that transport resembles actual mundane travel between places, because fiction is ultimately a metaphor for reality. This is why the journey from Kansas to Oz takes 2 pages while the journey from Troy to Ithaca takes 600. The portal is the logical extreme of an author being more interested in getting their characters to the place where the story happens rather than telling the story of how they got to that place.

But the portal also allows a degree of mystique in that it can be anywhere and can be activated by anything, no big expensive vehicles needed.

After all Alice and the Narnia's kids and HDM kids are, well, kids, it would be kinda absurd if the story went "and then they got a seaworthy vessel and managed to travel thousands of miles on their own to a place where nobody from their home country had been before". Well ok, one of the Narnia books has the protagonists do long sea travel after stepping in the portal, but the point stands that they only got the ship and supporting crew after the portal.

Then often portals are just one way. So after the protagonists find a way to get in they need to find another portal to get out. Sometimes that's their main motivation, just find a portal that'll take them back home, because no ship or walking will do it.

So no, portals are not physical travel because often they are the only way connecting two places. Like Gengyoko can only be entered or exited through portals, there's even a short story about Marisa trying to fly as away as possible in her broom and when she looks back she's still where she started because Gensyoko is sealed inside a mystic barrier. Sometimes someone wanders in by accident because the barrier is poorly maintained, but they won't be able to just walk out unless they get help from Reimu or Yukari or some other barrier-portal specialist.

[Woot]

And I'm back, to start the review of the other book in the Spelljammer boxed set, the Concordance of Arcane Space. I have to say, I like the cover a lot more than the Lorebook's cover. Here it is:



Pirate dude (and you know he's a pirate because of the eyepatch) has just ganked a mind flayer for a treasure chest. He's clearly going to board the tradesman in the background and sail off into the galaxy, which we probably shouldn't be able to see for several reasons, BUT WE'RE TOO BUSY ROCKING OUT TO A POWER BALLAD TO NOTICE! SPACE PIRACY WOOHOO!

Some music, if'n you'd like.

So yes, this is a very 1980s, very Spelljammer picture right here. If you want your nerd avatar to be the dude with the sword, congratulations, you're playing the right game.

Or, at least, this game aspires to be that game. To what extent it succeeds is perhaps the point of this whole Old School Source Review.

Let's open the book.

We get two quotes right away.

Ad astra per aspera
[“To the stars through hardships”]
Latin proverb

Ah, but a man's reach
should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning

Well, the ships in spelljammer are typically made out of wood, ceramic, stone, or metal, so I suppose they'd all be hardships!



Below that we get the credits & acknowledgements – Jeff Grubb and co. Next page is the Forward, which I'll quote in full:

Everything you know about space is wrong.

Infinite space; stars as flaming spheres of super-heated plasma; movement throughspace as a balance of scientific forces, thrust providing acceleration and maneuverability; scientific fact backing up natural phenomena; life on other planets built along blocks of carbon or silicon elements.

Forget all that. It's wrong.

You can get out of the atmosphere on the back of a roc; fly between the planets through a breathable ocean of air; sail between the crystal spheres that surround the inhabited worlds on a river of magical energy; encounter roving mind flayers and beholders. The stars are living things in some areas, great
bowls of fire in others, and pin-points of light painted inside a sphere in others.

Welcome to the SPELLJAMMER™ universe. It is a magical universe.

The SPELLJAMMER supplement treats the AD&D® game world, with its magic, myriad races, and dimensional gates as the "real" world, and builds outward from there. This is a universe postulated on magical, not scientific, laws. There are universal laws and they must be obeyed, but they are the laws
of magic, not physics—the laws of Mordenkainen, Elminster, and Fistandantilus rather than Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. They sometimes appear strange and random to us, who are accustomed to the workings of science. But to thecharacters who have lived their entire lives in this environment, nothing could be more familiar and logical.

This SPELLJAMMER supplement extends the AD&D® 2nd Edition game into space, and does so without violating existing campaign material. This includes Greyhawk, the original AD&D game setting; Krynn, land of the Dragonlances; Toril, home of the Forgotten Realms; and every individual campaign in existence. Introducing this material in your campaign will work some changes, certainly. It will produce an entertaining and far-ranging version of the AD&D game which can exist alongside the standing campaign, mixing with "earthbound" adventures without overshadowing them.

The text in this set is divided into two books: The Concordance of Arcane Space and The Lorebook of the Void. The Concordance (this book) should beread first. It lays out the rules for conducting AD&D games in space as well as the magical science behind space travel, the building and handling of space craft, new spells and items of equipment, and the "discovery" and creation of new worlds. The Lorebook of the Void discusses the races, monsters, and myriad other unusual things that can be encountered "out there."

Full-color heavy sheets give deck plans and other details on the most common space-going ships.

Finally, four maps are included in the SPELLJAMMER box. These include a full layout of the Spelljammer, a huge, powerful ship of legend. It is the Flying Dutchman of the space lanes, the ultimate goal and dream of many a space pirate and adventurer. Also included is a map of a typical space citadel, the sort used as a port and base by many different races; a hex grid and stand-up counters for playing tactical space battles; and an overview map of typical solar systems and planetary orbits for diagramming new systems and tracking the planets in a campaign.

“Fly between the planets on a breathable ocean of air”?



Uh, no you can't! But more on that later. Otherwise, this is all pretty unobjectionable stuff. Well, ok, pointing out that it's a “magical universe” is pretty No Shit, Sauruman, but whatevs. Turn the page and we have our Table of Contents, and then we're into Chapter 1.

It starts by explaining that space can be divided into two types, wildspace and phlogiston. Wildspace is pretty much what we'd generally think of as space: an empty vacuum. The phlogiston, on the other hand, is a “turbulent, unstable, multicolored flourescent gas (or gaslike medium) which fills regions between the crystal spheres.” Every planetary system is encased in a gigantic crystal sphere, which serves to keep the wildspace in and the phlogiston out.

Celestial Bodies

Basically, anything from an asteroid to a sun. Can be round, cubic, ring shaped, etc. Can have an atmosphere or no, which may or may not be breathable, etc. Basically, all the stuff we talked about in chapter 4 of the Lorebook but with the added note that flaming bodies are referred to as suns and they provide most of the “heat and warmth” for the celestial bodies within a crystal sphere. I suspect they provide light, too, and I suspect that's just an editing goof.

The nerd in me also notes that this proves that visible and infrared radation is A Thing and can traverse a vacuum in this setting, even if other forms of radiation aren't shown to exist. Of course, that makes a certain amount of sense: a really big fire still only radiates those, so a gigantic ball of elemental fire should still only output those things as well. I wonder if Grubb and co. were familiar with attempts by Newton and other, later scientists, who modeled the sun as a ball of white-hot iron or a burning coal, and used that information to deduce how long it had been burning. Could be an interesting quest for the PCs – get hired by a sage who wants them to study the sun so as to develop a better model of it's behavior, so he can predict when it's going to go out and hence, when the world will end. On the other hand, the sage probably might also know, or suspect, that the sun has connections to the apparently infinite Elemental Plane of Fire, in which case that's no longer a limit. Maybe the PCs are hired to shut down those connections, in order for the sage to be able to therefore make the end of the world happen... Such an idea pops up in other places; plotting to extinguish the sun has become part of D&D's lore about the illithids, and the 1993 Spelljammer boxed set The Astromundi Cluster has not one but two factions plotting to manipulate Astromundi's sun to further their own ends – in fact, it's possibly the genesis of the “illithids want to extinguish the sun” trope. But I'm going off-topic here.

Wildspace

As explained earlier, all celestial bodies in a given crystal shell float in an airless void, wildspace. Next it explains that as an adventurer moves “up” from a planet, the atmosphere becomes thinner and thinner air until it becomes vacuum. However, an envelope of air sticks with the adventurer, attached via his own gravity. This air envelope has an all-around depth equal to the cross sectional diameter of that body. It then gives two examples; a beholder with a 5 foot diameter having an air envelope 15 feet across in all directions, and a piece of wood that's 1 foot by 2 feet by 3 feet having an air envelope that's 3 feet by 6 feet by 9 feet. A breathing creature will exhaust it's air envelope in 2d10 turns.

Hmm. The giants mentioned in the Lorebook were mentioned as having 2d10 rounds of air...

Gravity

Every body in space has it's own gravity, which is described thus:

“Gravity is an accomodating force in that its direction seems to be “that which is most convenient.”

For planet-sized objects, gravity is directed towards a central point; for ship-sized objects it's instead a plane which cuts horizontally through the object. Sidebar text explains the gravity plane as running along the two horizontal axes of the ship. The plane is two directional; it's possble to walk along the bottom of the hull as if it were “right side up.” Objects tossed overboard fall towards the plane, then through it, then decelerate and reverse course, falling back towards the plane, essentially bobbing along the gravity plane.

Here's a picture:



According to the text, it's apparently possible to use the gravity plane in such a way as to make an object orbit the ship, or just hit someone on the other side of the deck by throwing the object so it goes down and around the ship.

Of course, I can't for the life of me figure out how the hell that would work. Even though the “vertical” component of motion would switch around when the gravity plane is crossed, the other components of the object's motion would remain the same; i.e. an object that was moving “away” from the center of the ship would continue to do so, and if you were somehow able to throw the object so it was moving towards the center if the ship, it would arc over the bottom of the ship, fair enough, but once it crossed back onto your side of the ship, it would continue moving in the same direction (i.e. towards the ship relative to the thrower, which, if it's on the other side of the ship, means essentially away from the ship!) Let me know if I should make some MS Paint diagrams illustrating all of this.

Now, I know I've been buttmad about this earlier, but again, let me just show a few pictures:

Ok, here's the Galleon. There's no gravity plane shown, so apparently the gravity plane runs along the bottom of the hull? Let's confuse the issue!

Apologies for the small image of the Wasp. But, as you can (hopefully) see, the gravity plane cuts through the “center” of the ship. Why? Here's another deckplan from a later Spelljammer product which illustrates the same concept:

I'd be willing to accept the horizontal gravity plan as being centered along the center of mass, except... clearly that can't be the rule, since the Galleon above violates it. So why's it centered for the Wasp and Whaleship? I don't know! I don't think anyone does! But it gets worse.

Here's where I shit my pants in rage:

WHY IS THE GRAVITY PLANE DISCONTINOUS WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY



Just... fuck all of this. Fucking fuck.

And I haven't even flown off the handle about how air works, yet!

I'm going to stop it here. Next time we'll continue and hopefully finish Chapter 1, unless I ragequit earlier.

[Zaranthan]

This is why OSSR authors often play a drinking game while they write their posts. Merely recalling these blunders of design that only those with a liberal arts degree could commit is indescribably infuriating. (Not that that stops us from trying to describe it for the entertainment of our readers, of course.)