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

[Username17]

The idea of things orbiting requires gravity to be attracted to a point rather than a plane. The idea of things bobbing to a near stop rather than penduluming for near eternity requires a medium with a quite significant amount of friction. Things can orbit because the vector of gravity's acceleration constantly changes as your position relative to the attracting mass changes. If gravity was a plane, it would never change vector and any horizontal velocity would also be escape velocity. If you don't lose significant energy in the medium you are falling through, the energy you have when you hit the gravity plane is precisely enough to have you pass through a distance equal to your original falling distance.

Which means that even while they were talking about how things were different in their bullshit fantasy space physics they never stopped thinking about things in terms of real gravity or ocean voyages. People bob at the gravity plane because that's how things would work if there was a water line - not because that is how things would work if there was a symmetrical gravity plane.

-Username17

[Woot]

I woke up around 3AM this morning from a really fascinating dream about sex and time travel, and before I could even get my bearings my brain immediately dumped 4 or so additional problems with gravity in Spelljammer into my consciousness. As ridiculous as I'm sure this seems, it really does bother me!

But before I raise those points, I'd like to delve further into the chapter, since there are more matters of gravity I should cover. The more I look at it, the more I think that this chapter is laid out in a completely asinine way. The layout is:

Unlabeled introductory section:Introduces idea of wildspace, phlogiston, crystal spheres
Celestial Bodies: Discusses planets, asteroids and suns
Wildspace: Mentions that celestial bodies float in wildspace, and spends rest of section discussing lack of air and air envelopes
Gravity: Introduces gravity plane concept, makes Woot ragequit
The Helm: Introduces helms
Crystal Shells: Introduces Crystal Shells or Crystal Spheres (synonyms) and their implications, particularly in regards to gods and extraplanar travel & beings
The Phlogiston: Discusses the phlogiston, or “flow” and how it will kill you
Breathing in Space: Largely restates what was stated about air envelopes in Wildspace, but ends up briefly discussing how such envelopes work in regards to ships
Air Quality: Air can be fresh, fouled, or deadly, which Woot Has Opinions about! Followed by a discussion of how to do simple math.
Matters of Gravity: More discussion of gravity, with subsections on Drifting, Overlapping Gravity, Falling, and Combat.
Temperature: What it says on the tin
Time: Also what it says on the tin.

There's also the ever-present black sidebar throughout the chapter, which discusses “Ships and Gravity Planes” to further confuse the issue, and talks a bit about the interaction of two ships' gravity planes and how you can use it to be a smartass – match gravity planes with the other ship but with opposite “up” sides.

Why they feel the need to break up the discussion of air into two different places and gravity into three different places is frankly beyond me. The whole chapter is basically a dump of setting details, which is necessary, since no one before this was published was really familiar with “ships in spaaaaaaaaaace!” as a concept, but it chaps my ass how poorly assembled it is.



But, let's get back to the second half of chapter 1. Between trying to write this and discussing wedding stuff with my fiance, I've poured myself some rum on the rocks. As someone who drinks a lot of rum, I have to say, Zaya is definitely my 2nd favorite of all the many rums I've tried. So, this portion of the review is brough to you by Zaya rum!

The Helm

Not too much to say here. The helm is simply a device that turns mystical energy into motive force. The most common ones (the major and minor helms) require a spellcaster, such as a cleric or mage, but other races have their own variants, such as the illithid's series helm that uses their psionic blast ability in lieu of levels in a spellcasting class.

In addition to motive force, it provides for “basic maneuvering” which isn't described further here, but elsewhere there are references for sails, rudders, oars etc. all being used for maneuvering purposes. The physics nerd in me wonders how vectoring the motive force works, i.e. if you're pushing the ship “forward” (in the direction the bow points) can you suddenly change vectors such that you're pushing the ship to starboard at the same speed? If you do this, is there any “inertia”? I'd assume not, since the ships are described as dropping out of spelljamming speed when they encounter an object with significant mass without there being any inertial effects. As is sadly so often in the case in this setting that purports to present a “'fantasy physics' true to it's own rules and laws” there is no answer provided by our authors.

This section rounds out by stating that many voyagers in space merely roam around, looking for ruins of lost civilizations, ghost ships, “treasure rocks” (I'd guess asteroids with a high precious metal or gemstone content?) or other objects one might find adventuring away from civilized lands. It also explains that pirates and monsters live out in the wilds of wildspace. This is all well and good, but why should this be in the helm section? Finally it ends with what appears to be leftover information from early in the design cycle:

Finally, there are a surprising number of monsters living in wildspace, surviving by being so large that they carry a significant air supply with them wherever they go (such as space dragons), by retaining air within their bodies (gas fish), or by not needing to breathe at all (the neogi).

Space Dragons as such are never defined anywhere, but charitably, it's a reference to the Celestial or Radiant Dragon. While it's true that such dragons carry air with them - 4-40 turns worth, if later text is to be believed (which maybe it shouldn't!) - that's still not really a useful amount of air for a creature that lives in space. Even at spelljamming speeds, 400 minutes of air doesn't get you that far. Inspired by this, I took a look at at the Radiant Dragon entry from the Lorebook and things get sillier yet!

As radiant dragons age, they gain a number of innate abilities. Juvenile dragons can restore or corrupt air as per the spell.

First off, there isn't a spell called either of those things. Being charitable, we can take that as a reference to the spell create air and it's reverse, destroy air from Chapter 2. This is a first level spell that can refresh an air envelope, though it's area of effect is 1 person, with more people affected at higher levels. Again applying a principle of charity, we'll assume that if it's cast by a dragon it refreshes a sufficient quantity as to cover the air envelope of the dragon. Still, younger dragons can only cast the spell twice per day, which wouldn't be enough to cover their air needs.

Now, it could very well be that as creatures that aren't merely large, like giants, but actually ship-sized, they carry ship-sized amounts of air. But I'm fairly sure that there's never an explicit difference made anywhere to differentiate where the dividing line is. It probably is reasonably to assume that space monsters are that big – they wouldn't be space monsters for very long, otherwise.

Moving further along, there's also no explanation anywhere as to what a “gas fish” is. Probably the closest we get to fishlike creatures is the scavver, which definitely breathes air, and survives long periods without air by putting itself into hibernation until it has access to air again, according to the monster entry.

Finally, there's no reference at all in their monster entry about the neogi not needing to breathe. None. However, the monster entry does go on at length about how the neogi have a great need for their umber hulk slaves, which, to quote Mitch Hedberg, are “damn sure used to air.”

It certainly occurs o me that maybe this is just me being nitpicky, and I've just found text that's a leftover from an earlier part of the design, but... come on, Grubb.

Crystal Shells

We are again told that crystal shells and crystal spheres are just synonyms. To the best of my recollection, crystal sphere becomes the dominant term and crystal shell is hardly ever seen in later works. Anyway, crystal spheres are truly gigantic – typically they have a diameter that is twice the furthest celestial body. They are made of some dark ceramic material that defies categorization and is basically impervious to everything; wish spells and the will of outer planar powers don't seem to harm it. They also have no gravity associated with them.

Five methods for passing through the crystal spheres are mentioned:
Teleport or dimension door allows you to bypass the shell
Phase door can make a portion of the shell immaterial long enough for a ship to pass through
Naturally occurring portals can be used; these occur randomly and finding them can be a time consuming task. Fortunately, magic can be used to generate artificial portals, or perhaps just trigger a natural one in a location of your choosing
In some spheres, the stars are portals
The legendary ship Spelljammer as well as creatures like radiant dragons and create portals, which can then be used by other creatures.

The text goes on to explain that the portals as described are merely doors; not gates and they do not allow transit to other dimensions.

Magic that relies on other planes or other dimensions is notoriously unreliable when cast in close proximity to the shell

But apparently dimension door is a-ok!



We then are told that the crystal sphere forms the outer limit of a god or other extra-dimensional being's power, as I've mentioned earlier. Magic that draws from such beings typically won't work outside of the crystal spheres, though priest spells of level 1 and 2 are specifically exempt – apparently no matter where you are in the universe, your god can give you a little juice.

Finally, we're told that the stars themselves can be all kinds of things: portholes to the phlogiston, painted lights, alien cities, bowls of fire, etc.

The Phlogiston

The Flow is a turbulent, extremely flammable ocean of glowing rainbow-colored ether. The crystal spheres float in this ocean, and it has regions of higher and lower density; this effect produces “rivers” in the flow which can aid or abet travel between crystal spheres.

A ship can speed up and slow down by penetrating deeper into or raising itself out of these phlogiston rivers. Stellar distances can be covered quickly in such areas. Further, the speed of the ship is at least partially dependent on the surface area it presents to the flow, so many ships carry sails to increase their speed in the interstellar ocean.

One of the things the book never makes clear is exactly how the flow interacts with the normal air envelope. Or perhaps more precisely, it just quietly assumes that the air envelope is permeable to the phlogiston, without having any effect on the oxygen content of the air envelope, without really ever stating that. Otherwise the remark above about sails would make exactly zero sense. The point is, I don't believe it's ever actually explicit about it. It is once again clear that the authors have a firm picture in their heads of how all this works, but they seem to have forgotten to inform us of some parts of that puzzle.

We're told that gravity works in the same way it does in wildspace (i.e. completely fucking illogically) and that phlogiston is not composed of any of the four recognized elemental matters. Further, any physical or magical means of containing the phlogiston and bringing it inside a crystal sphere will fail – it seems to disappear when it crosses the crystal sphere boundary. This is most likely to prevent enterprising PCs from using it as a weapon, because...

Phlogiston is extremely explosive. A lit candle in the phlogiston produces a 1d fireball, with larger fires producing greater magnitude effects. Fireball itself, the non plus ultra of 2nd Edition damage dealing spells, produces a blast centered on the caster of the spell, with damage tripled. I can't find the reference at the moment, but I know somewhere I've seen a reference to dwarven citadels using an airlock mechanism to keep the flow out of the forge rooms on their citadels, which otherwise would blow up.

The flow naturally glows; if further light is needed, glowing moss, jars of fireflies, or magical light is used. Dwarves (and presumably other races with infravision) just rely on that in their citadels.

The crystal spheres do move slowly in relation to each other. Landmarks can't always be relied upon to be stable. Also, if two spheres move towards each other, the flow between them thickens and tends to push them back apart. Finally, we're told that there are flow rivers connecting Krynnspace and Greyspace, and Greyspace and Realmspace, and that a traveller from Toril wishing to reach Krynn would be able to do so much more quickly by traveling through Greyspace along the way, rather than going straight from Realmspace to Krynnspace.

Breathing in Space

Again we're treated to an explanation that atmospheres thin as one ascends above the planet, until finally one reaches the vacuum of wildspace. We're told a human brings 2-20 turns worth of air, but if that human is standing on a rock 100 cubic yards in size (which they describe as being roughly 40 feet in diameter*) may provide enough air to survive for several months.

(* - This seems to be off by an order of magnitude; unless they're talking about some other property other than volume by describing “100 cubic yards in size,” assuming a spherical rock a radius of 40 feet would give us a volume of around 1240 cubic yards. But then, at this point, is anyone surprised at Grubb & co's inability to do fairly basic math?)

We are told that larger than man-sized creatures (like ogres and giants) bring enough air for 4-40 turns. Apparently the reference in the Lorebook to giants bringing only 2-20 rounds of air must have been a... clerical error.



Larger objects, such as ships, are rated for their tonnage. Each ton represents 100 cubic yards of space, which brings enough air for a human-sized crewmember for 4 to 8 months under normal conditions. Therefore a 30 ton ships can support 30 crew members for 4 to 8 months, yadda yadda. The minimum usable space is 1 ton (100 cubic yards) and the maximum size of a ship is limited by other factors, primarily what kind of spelljamming drive can power it.

As I'm working on this, it suddenly occurs to me I wonder if they weren't initially thinking about ships in terms of square feet or yards, and then didn't think about the ramifications of just switching to three dimensions instead of two. 10 yards by 10 yards is 100 square yards. If they just thought, “Oh, we'll just change that to cubic yards!” without thinking that adds another dimension... hm. It might explain why in the example they give above they're off by an order of magnitude. Just a random (quite possibly incorrect) thought.

This section is over, but there's still no explanation as to how all this affects radiant dragons or other space monsters, though. This doesn't make me buttmad, merely buttsad.



Air Quality

An air supply can be in one of three states: fresh, fouled, or deadly.


Clearly deadly

For an individual's air envelope, it's fresh for 2-20 turns, or 4 months if following the “one ton per person” rules. After that it's fouled; breathable but unpleasant. For the individual, it becomes fouled from whenever the 2-20 period ends and remains so until the end of the 30th turn since the air was last made fresh (or more mathematically, 30 - $turns_of_fresh_air = $turns_of_foul_air). For air measured in tons, the 5th-8th months are fouled air. After that, in both cases, air becomes deadly. Each turn, a saving throw versus poison must be made; the first failure causes the character to pass out and the second failure causes death.

Beyond that, we're given two methods to track this. The first is based on rough percentages, i.e. 25% more crew than standard takes one month off your fresh timer. The second is to do a bit more math and track things in terms of person-days of air available and consumed. (Naturally, I prefer the second method!)

We're told that when two bodies meet in space, their atmosphere envelopes are exchanged. The smaller body gets the larger bodies' air quality, and there's some juggling based on the ship's sizes relative to each other, all done in a rather handwavey way. Ok, whatevs.

Finally, instead of dying, when a being in a deadly air envelope in the phlogiston fails it's second save versus poison, a special property of the flow takes over. The persons flesh becomes gray and stonelike, and they enter a state of suspended animation until they're rescued. Apparently the neogi and mind flayers are known for robbing and then enslaving people they find in such a state.

Okay, I've been sitting on this rant for a while, and it's finally appropriate to bring it out: I think the entire set of rules regarding air is stupid and a waste of everyone's time. If they'd just gone with space being full of “a breathable ocean of air” like they mentioned in the foreward, they could have saved everyone a lot of time and effort, and nothing of value would have been lost. Wildspace being a vacuum is, I submit, something they felt they had to do, because “everyone knows” that space is a vacuum. Given that they're building their own fantasy physics here, however, they could have totally ignored that fact and no one would have said boo. Air in Spelljammer exists simply as one more consumable resource, but it's redundant: everybody is familiar with two other consumable resources that already exist in sailing stories – food and water. Adding a third gains us nothing but more bookkeeping. And to those who would object that things like the Decanter of Endless Water and Murlynd's Spoon or various spells allow the PCs to sidestep those things, I'd point out that magic exists that lets clever and diligent PCs refresh their air envelope as well, and later Spelljammer works introduced other ways (items, plants, an entire race, etc.) that add new ways to sidestep the problem. Even adding the occasional airless planet or asteroid would have been OK as an environmental challenge, but making air be One More Goddamn Thing To Keep Track Of All The Time gains us nothing at all. Even the “asphixiated statues” effect of the phlogiston, which is a good way to introduce NPCs who were stranded without provisions, possibly hundreds or thousands of years ago, could have been introduced in some other way.

There. I said it and I'm not sorry. Moving on.

Matters of gravity

The last big section of the chapter, and on a topic I'm fired up about. Here we go!

We're told that gravity works the same way in wildspace or the flow. A plane of gravity exists through the long axis of any body with an axis at least 25 feet long. For example, a human could walk along the back of a 25 foot high giant. Gravity, whether on the back of the giant, a small asteroid, or a huge gas giant planet, always functions at 1 standard G. (Later works would tweak this rule a bit.) A body too small to have it's own gravity plane still holds on to an air envelope via gravity, but to attract solid objects, a gravity plane from a 25-foot or greater object is needed. The gravity plane exists only as far as the air envelope extends. (This begs the question of why celestial bodies travel in orbits around other objects!)

Drifting

Unrestrained objects resting in the plane of a ship's gravity experience a small force that push them towards the edge of the air envelope. This center plane, where objects are weightless except for a small push towards the edge of the envelope, is therefore often used to launch heavy missiles or prepare boarders to attack other ships. Aside from this slight push, there is no relative motion within the air envelope. An object floating overboard will remain in the same position relative to the ship (modulo the small push towards the edge) even if the ship turns and begins traveling along a different vector.

Overlapping Gravity

When the gravity planes of two ships intersect (i.e. they are within each other's atmosphere envelope) the gravities of both ships remain in effect, “up to the point where they physically intersect.” A floating object is under the influence of whatever gravity plane is closer. A character could leap between two passing ships, altering his down direction as he crosses the midpoint between the two.

When two ships come into direct contact (ramming or landing) the gravity plane of the ship with the higher tonnage wins. An elven flitter has it's own gravity field until it lands on an elven armada. A larger ship can rotate it's axis before ramming a smaller ship, causing everthing on the smaller ship to suddenly tumble around.

Falling

A weightless object which enters the air envelope of a larger body is immediately affected by it's gravity. Normal falling damage applies; a mile or more of uncontrolled descent will also cause the object or person to catch fire from air friction. Otherwise weightless people can throw objects in one direction to move in the opposite direction (hi, Newton!), up to a movement rate of 3.

Combat

Combat in weightlessness is a foreign environment for those not familiar to it; incurs a +6 initiative penalty and a -2 attack penalty. Characters native to space, or nonnatives who take the Weightless Combat proficiency are exempt. Missile fire works as normal in gravity fields; outside of them, there's nothing to stop a missile from traveling forever. All missile weapons in space therefor get an extreme range which extends from the edge of long range to the limit of the characters vision; this incurs a -10 to hit. Such a missile travels twice it's long range increment per round. This only applies to handheld weapons; catapults and other devices are designed with these ranges in mind.

Ok, that's the meat of the topics, but there are several points that aren't really well explained here. For starters:

How, exactly, to objects large enough to have point instead of plane gravity interact with plane-gravity objects? For example, is it that the moment the spelljamming ship stops touching the ground (or sea), is everything on board suddenly subject to the gravity plane of the ship instead of the planet's gravity?
The difference between “has a gravity plane” and doesn't is a totally arbitrary 25 feet. Ok, that is totally arbitrary, but I can live with it because at least it puts a definite number on where the boundary lies. Where's the boundary from “has a gravity plane” to “has a point-like center of gravity”? That question is never answered.
As I mentioned earlier... why do celestial bodies tend to travel in circular orbits? Granted that not all of them do – there are references to crystal spheres where the planets remain stationary relative to each other, or ones where they move chaotically, but circular orbits around a central mass seems to be typical. Why? It can't be gravity that does it, since a bodies gravity ends at the end of the air envelope.
Possibly a minor point, but how does docking work? At the Rock of Bral (an asteroid base with a gravity plane, described in more detail later) the docks are along the gravity plane, but given wide configuration of ships, there's no “standard” of “gangplank is x feet above ship's plane of gravity” which means that touching the docks is going to wreak havoc on ships that don't have gravity planes that line up perfectly.

Temperature

Generally, wildspace (and the flow) is room temperature or a bit warmer, though exceptions exist. Krynnspace averages 16 degrees Fahrenheit and has small, lethal clouds of ice. It also gets warm near fire bodies! Ok.

Time

Local time varies a good bit depending on what planet you're on, which should be unsurprising. Typically on spelljamming ships, a standard day is 24 hours, broken into 3 watches – first, second, and night (or graveyard.) A standard week is 7 standard days, and a standard month is 4 standard weeks i.e. 28 standard days. There is no larger standard unit of timekeeping, since years tend to be tied to the orbital characteristics of individual planets. Fair enough.

And... that's it. That's the end of this fever-swamp info-dump of a chapter. Whew! I'm going to bed.

[Thaluikhain]

Okay, I've been sitting on this rant for a while, and it's finally appropriate to bring it out: I think the entire set of rules regarding air is stupid and a waste of everyone's time. If they'd just gone with space being full of “a breathable ocean of air” like they mentioned in the foreward, they could have saved everyone a lot of time and effort, and nothing of value would have been lost. Wildspace being a vacuum is, I submit, something they felt they had to do, because “everyone knows” that space is a vacuum. Given that they're building their own fantasy physics here, however, they could have totally ignored that fact and no one would have said boo.

You've also given a reason as to why you might want to have sails.

We're told that gravity works the same way in wildspace or the flow. A plane of gravity exists through the long axis of any body with an axis at least 25 feet long.

...


When two ships come into direct contact (ramming or landing) the gravity plane of the ship with the higher tonnage wins. An elven flitter has it's own gravity field until it lands on an elven armada. A larger ship can rotate it's axis before ramming a smaller ship, causing everthing on the smaller ship to suddenly tumble around.

Wouldn't ramming a ship mean the combined thing at the end might have a new long axis, and thus a new gravity plane different to what either of them had before?

How, exactly, to objects large enough to have point instead of plane gravity interact with plane-gravity objects? For example, is it that the moment the spelljamming ship stops touching the ground (or sea), is everything on board suddenly subject to the gravity plane of the ship instead of the planet's gravity?

In the Cloakmaster Cycle set in Spelljammer, ships keep their own gravity until the helm is off.

[Josh_Kablack]

Matters of gravity

We're told that gravity works the same way in wildspace or the flow. A plane of gravity exists through the long axis of any body with an axis at least 25 feet long. For example, a human could walk along the back of a 25 foot high giant. Gravity, whether on the back of the giant, a small asteroid, or a huge gas giant planet, always functions at 1 standard G. (Later works would tweak this rule a bit.) A body too small to have it's own gravity plane still holds on to an air envelope via gravity, but to attract solid objects, a gravity plane from a 25-foot or greater object is needed.

So, if you have a 25' minimalist ship, you can deactivate gravity by cutting one inch off of the figurehead carved into the prow? That seems exploitable. Shouldn't somebody have designed a ship with one or more detachable 20' long modular sections that can be roped back to the main ship?

[tussock]

As I mentioned earlier... why do celestial bodies tend to travel in circular orbits? Granted that not all of them do – there are references to crystal spheres where the planets remain stationary relative to each other, or ones where they move chaotically, but circular orbits around a central mass seems to be typical. Why? It can't be gravity that does it, since a bodies gravity ends at the end of the air envelope.

You hopelessly modern person, you.

God did it. Why is there light? God did it. Why do the planets move? God did it. Why is winter cold? God did it. Why are we ruled by Kings? God did it. Why did God do it? It is a mystery, and not for us to know the ways of God.

And they just kept killing everyone who said otherwise. Fun times. Pay your tithes.

Like a lot of 90's D&D I'm recalling, the book obviously has a lot of rules and very few of them even work the way they say they work, let alone do anything useful for the game. I would posit a best use of the book such that orbits are fun and if you throw something light off a boat it will orbit the boat, "because of the gravity plane", and something heavy will bob and drift away from the boat "because of the push", and small PCs are about the right weight to start bobbing, leaving dropped equipment to conveniently orbit and catch again next round, but ropes needed to rescue someone pushed over.

And yeah, all that air stuff, really doesn't seem to be a good reason to have anything but air up there, could even add that if you stop somewhere off a windy world there's no wind so you can still foul the air. But I don't know, it's not like they cared about doing that in the dungeon.

[Woot]

We're told that gravity works the same way in wildspace or the flow. A plane of gravity exists through the long axis of any body with an axis at least 25 feet long.

...


When two ships come into direct contact (ramming or landing) the gravity plane of the ship with the higher tonnage wins. An elven flitter has it's own gravity field until it lands on an elven armada. A larger ship can rotate it's axis before ramming a smaller ship, causing everthing on the smaller ship to suddenly tumble around.

Wouldn't ramming a ship mean the combined thing at the end might have a new long axis, and thus a new gravity plane different to what either of them had before?

In somewhat unusual circumstances, I'd think so! The problem is, of course, that there's no consistent set of rules about how gravity planes work either in the text or that we can infer from the text, so it's all MC fiat.

How, exactly, to objects large enough to have point instead of plane gravity interact with plane-gravity objects? For example, is it that the moment the spelljamming ship stops touching the ground (or sea), is everything on board suddenly subject to the gravity plane of the ship instead of the planet's gravity?

In the Cloakmaster Cycle set in Spelljammer, ships keep their own gravity until the helm is off.

I don't think that's supported by the text as such, but I think that'd be a perfectly workable house rule.

[Woot]

Matters of gravity

We're told that gravity works the same way in wildspace or the flow. A plane of gravity exists through the long axis of any body with an axis at least 25 feet long. For example, a human could walk along the back of a 25 foot high giant. Gravity, whether on the back of the giant, a small asteroid, or a huge gas giant planet, always functions at 1 standard G. (Later works would tweak this rule a bit.) A body too small to have it's own gravity plane still holds on to an air envelope via gravity, but to attract solid objects, a gravity plane from a 25-foot or greater object is needed.

So, if you have a 25' minimalist ship, you can deactivate gravity by cutting one inch off of the figurehead carved into the prow? That seems exploitable. Shouldn't somebody have designed a ship with one or more detachable 20' long modular sections that can be roped back to the main ship?

Well, first off, weightless doesn't mean massless.

In Lost Ships there's a cargo barge that's essentially what you're asking about. The limiting factor becomes the helm; typically they're limited to being able to move 50 or 100 tons worth of ship, so if you have a 30 ton ship, you could haul a 20 ton cargo barge as well with a minor helm.

[Woot]

As I mentioned earlier... why do celestial bodies tend to travel in circular orbits? Granted that not all of them do – there are references to crystal spheres where the planets remain stationary relative to each other, or ones where they move chaotically, but circular orbits around a central mass seems to be typical. Why? It can't be gravity that does it, since a bodies gravity ends at the end of the air envelope.

You hopelessly modern person, you.

God did it. Why is there light? God did it. Why do the planets move? God did it. Why is winter cold? God did it. Why are we ruled by Kings? God did it. Why did God do it? It is a mystery, and not for us to know the ways of God.

And they just kept killing everyone who said otherwise. Fun times. Pay your tithes.

Like a lot of 90's D&D I'm recalling, the book obviously has a lot of rules and very few of them even work the way they say they work, let alone do anything useful for the game. I would posit a best use of the book such that orbits are fun and if you throw something light off a boat it will orbit the boat, "because of the gravity plane", and something heavy will bob and drift away from the boat "because of the push", and small PCs are about the right weight to start bobbing, leaving dropped equipment to conveniently orbit and catch again next round, but ropes needed to rescue someone pushed over.

And yeah, all that air stuff, really doesn't seem to be a good reason to have anything but air up there, could even add that if you stop somewhere off a windy world there's no wind so you can still foul the air. But I don't know, it's not like they cared about doing that in the dungeon.

Well, obviously, God likes circles because circles are perfect. Ellipical orbits would be all lopsided and stuff. Clearly that Kepler guy is a hack!

On the other hand, D&D allows you to stab whatever God you wish right in the fucking face if you think you've got big ones, so yeah, we're already stuck inside a pretty modern paradigm anyway from the very first die roll.

Yeah, and I get that it's only a game, and so on, but if they're going to spend the time to write pages and pages about how gravity and air and so forth work, I'd sort of hope they'd try to make it self-consistent. Hi, everyone. I'm Woot, and I post on the Den.

[tussock]

Oh, for sure. I did not mean to say it is not mechanically awful, as it clearly is. Just gave me flashbacks to running 2nd edition games back in the day, everything was a bit that way with the endless stories and so often mechanics that did the opposite, until the whole company fell in a hole in '96. Arbitrarily letting things work like the fluff said was about all you could hope to do.

It's part of that thing where the designers ... well, page 3, one guy writes, everything he finished five other people then add random ideas forcing constant partial re-writes, and at the end one other guy tries to make it vaguely consistent, and because it was early 90's there's no playtesting of anything allowed at all during the process, and obviously no changes allowed after it went for art and layout because technology.

At least in the Basic side of it in the 80's they had Mentzer to keep the rules sane. And, like, jeez 3e is good. What the fuck, Mike Mearls, none of that part of it was worth going back to.

[Woot]

Chapter 2: AD&D Rules In Space begins by helpfully informing us that ability scores work exactly the way they do in regular AD&D. How comforting! Next we’re treated to an explanation that races and classes work much the same as we’d expect, and that characters tend to obey the race & class laws of their home settings - if a setting allows elves to reach 15th level as clerics, that elven cleric takes that benefit with them, even if the campaign takes them to a work where elves are restricted from reaching that level in that class. This seems reasonable, though it occurs to me it probably also encourages a bit of dumpster diving on the part of players to minmax their characters.


You’ll never guess what I found in the Complete Book of Gnomes and Halflings!

Next up is a discussion of lizard men as a new race for characters. Since I’ve already discussed that, I’m not going to re-hash it here. This is followed by a mention that specialty characters from various settings (minotaurs, samurai, etc.) still function in space, except as permitted "by the void's physical limitations" but that they are "not normally used for player characters." I.E. you can be one depending on what the MC thinks of your skills at oral persuasion. Finally we're told that all the races & classes in the Players Handbook are fair game.

Magic Use in Space

We start off being told that a god's power extends throughout a crystal sphere, but not into the phlogiston. However, if a god has a continuous community of worshippers in a different sphere, that god's power extends to that sphere as well. Alternatively, a high-enough level cleric can cast gate in a foreign crystal sphere to establish a connection. Wherever the god's power does not extend (the Flow, foreign spheres) the cleric is limited to only regaining 1st & 2nd level spells, although their ability to operate a spelljamming helm is unaffected. We're also told that there are a number of faiths that are "native" to space and work almost anywhere: Polyglot churches (the Norse Gods, various racial pantheons, etc.), The Path & The Way (celestial bureaucracy, inspired by Shou Lung beliefs), the church of Ptah (god of travelers), and various planar churches (venerate all the powers of a particular inner or outer plane.)

Having “space faiths” always stuck me as a little contrived, but it makes sense mechanically - there needs to be some way for clerics to not be dead weight outside of their home spheres. That this is an issue in the first place is a result of an arbitrary design choice - there’s no a priori reason that a god couldn’t extend their power everywhere in the Universe. Of course, that raises the question that if they could, why haven’t they already - like, why isn’t Shar dicking around with post-Cataclysm Krynn, for example? Here the design goal of “Tie existing campaign settings together without shitting on the core assumptions of any of them” rears it’s head. So… we get limits on the gods to keep all the various campaign settings coherent. So… we’re going to need SPAAAAAAAAACE FAITHS! Ok, well played, Grubb. You met a design goal and thought through the ramifications! Kudos to the design team.

Next we have a reminder that there are limits on Conjuration & Summoning spells. Like, seriously, guys, seriously no shit, you like, can’t summon wolves in the middle of the void. (Perhaps) more helpfully, you are also reminded that contacting or summoning anything extra-planar is a no-go in the Flow, bro. We’re likewise advised that planar travel, or items that rely on extra-planar effects, won’t work in the Flow. Hope you don’t need those potions you stuck in the Bag of Holding! Finally, we’re told that magical fire can work across the airless void between ships (so fireballing enemy ships is fine, because where would we be without fireball?) and that using fire in the Flow will kill you and everyone you care about.

Spelljamming

Once again we get a description of spelljamming helms as essentially chairs that casters can sit in to turn magical power into motive force. We’re also informed that rangers and paladins can power helms once they gain the ability to cast spells, but this isn’t explored further. We’re then told about major & minor helms - major helms give a Ship’s Rating (combat speed, more or less) of 1/2 spell caster level; minor helms can generate 1/3 level. No explanation as to how this interfaces with rangers & paladins - once they can cast spells, do they drive helms as powerfully as an equivalent mage or cleric? Who knows!

We’re also told that casting spells reduces the spelljaming caster’s ability: for each spell they’ve cast from their maximum memorized list, the Ships Rating (SR) is reduced by 1, to a minimum of 1. Using a helm for even a short period removes a caster’s ability to cast any spells until they’ve rested long enough to regain their spells. Curiously, until recently I was under the impression that using the helm wiped those spells from the caster’s memory, but that doesn’t actually seem to be supported by the text here: they still know the spells (and so could perhaps scribe them) but simply need to rest as if they had to re-memorize them.

I’ve always wondered about this rule and why it exists and I’ve never come up with a good explanation as to why it is the way it is. Functionally, it seems to be a way of inconveniencing spellcasters. I’d guess that this might be to raise the stakes in ship-to-ship combat a bit more: by reducing the amount of spells the party can cast, you’re forcing them to be more reliant of shipboard weapons and/or boarding actions. The problem is that a smart party can just have a bunch of wands or scrolls that provide magic artillery, or simply refuse to let a certain key spellcaster sit on the spelljamming helm.

Finally, we come to some new spells, both wizard and cleric. They’re pretty much what you’d expect to find: mages can find & create portals to the flow, create temporary minor & major helms, and improve the ship’s handling characteristics. Clerics can create air, have several spells that allow them to contact their own home deity as well as contact a (hopefully sympathetic) local diety with a similar portfolio to their home diety, put people in suspended animation, and create minor helms. And that’s the chapter. If any of you have thoughts about why spelljamming helms work the way they do in regards to spellcasting, I’d love to hear them. Besides, it’s also a great excuse to have your fellow Denners call your ideas stupid and your mother a Nazi whore with AIDS,

Next chapter is Chapter 3: Ships of Wildspace. Until next time, smooth sailing, space pirates!

[Whipstitch]

Just going to throw out there that when I first read about a spelljammer helm while flipping through my cousin's D&D books I assumed they were talking headgear and you piloted these bad boys like Professor X using Cerebro. In my defense, I was maybe like 9 years old at the time.

[Username17]

Just going to throw out there that when I first read about a spelljammer helm while flipping through my cousin's D&D books I assumed they were talking headgear and you piloted these bad boys like Professor X using Cerebro. In my defense, I was maybe like 9 years old at the time.

I confess that this was also my reading of it when I was 10. AD&D had a lot of things like the Helm of Teleportation and Helm of Brilliance that are literally helmets with dumb powers, so it seemed totally reasonable that space ships would have helmets that you flew around with.

Anyway, the AD&D decision to have spells literally granted by gods was always a weird and bad one. Mechanically the spells are class features of the spellcaster, and dependent on the caster's level, abilities, and conditions - not those of the god. So there's no particular reason to consider the spells to have come from the god in any meaningful fashion. All it ever does, all it can do, is to start dumb arguments about whether the players are currently "too far away" from their nominal godly power source.

-Username17

[jadagul]

Once again we get a description of spelljamming helms as essentially chairs that casters can sit in to turn magical power into motive force. We’re also informed that rangers and paladins can power helms once they gain the ability to cast spells, but this isn’t explored further. We’re then told about major & minor helms - major helms give a Ship’s Rating (combat speed, more or less) of 1/2 spell caster level; minor helms can generate 1/3 level. No explanation as to how this interfaces with rangers & paladins - once they can cast spells, do they drive helms as powerfully as an equivalent mage or cleric? Who knows!

Unless I grossly misremember my 2e rules, this actually has a clear answer. There's a table in the PHB that gives the caster level a ranger or paladin has at each actual level.
(You can see a mangled version of the table here; look at Table 5: Spell Progression).

So like the table says that an 8th level ranger has a caster level of 1, and it seems to go up one for one afterwards.

[tussock]

It still took a long-ass time to memorise a full set of spells at high level, I think it was three days of uninterrupted rest and study to fully recover, and you needed that for dropping to 0 hp or less and a couple other effects.

So having a tweak for not being able to cast without wiping the memorised spells was nice past level 7 or so. Let you use the top level PC caster to drive the ship at a penalty against wandering space monsters without ruining them for the whole adventure.

I mean, long distance travel, usually the Wizard just destroyed everything, plenty of time to regain spells along the way, so taking that away was, like wands weren't like 3e, you had some but burning through them was not what you wanted to do as plan A.

[Woot]

Re: Helms, I think I avoided thinking that if only because I watched a lot of Star Trek: Next Gen as a kid, and had a passing familiarity with the nautical term.

That said, there's a Crown of Stars which acts like a minor helm that you can wear, so that's totally a thing as well. There's also a spidery race called the K'r'r'r who have pimp canes that work like minor helms.


Interstellar conquest ain't easy.

Re: Caster level, I looked up and found the table you're talking about. In fact, and much to my surprise, it exists in my 1989 Players Handbook and I’ve somehow overlooked it for almost 3 decades! I think it may be because “caster level” as a concept wasn’t often invoked in 2e, whereas in 3rd it became central to spell saves. I learned something today! Thanks, jadagul!



I’m not sure the idea spells coming from a god is a bad idea conceptually, though I’ll grant it’s mechanically one more way to remind clerics that they’re not as cool as wizards. “Magic granted by a god” is a perfectly viable fantasy/mythology/history trope; hell, the first part of the Malleus Maleficarum goes to some length to explain that witches are “given leave” to use their power through God’s grace, even though they use it for ungodly ends.

Incidentally, it will soon be my turn to MC for my friends (we swap MCs and games regularly) and they’ve been prodding me to run a Spelljammer campaign. I’ve been thinking a lot about adapting it to 5th edition rules. Given one’s interpretation of warlocks, they may or may not face the same sorts of restrictions clerics do. So, yeah, I get that everyone hates 5th almost as much as they hate 4th, and not to derail the thread, but what’s other people’s interpretation? Do warlock patrons actually supply power to their clients, or do they merely teach them secrets to wielding the natural magic of the world in ways the warlocks (or wizards, or anyone else) would have never figured out on their own?

[Username17]

5th Edition D&D has no flavor, and you can do whatever you want as long as you do all the work. That's... the whole thing.

4th Edition had Nentir Vale, which was just southern Washington State. But 5th edition doesn't even have that. The game does not help or hinder any setting declarations you choose to make.

-Username17

[maglag]

Do warlock patrons actually supply power to their clients, or do they merely teach them secrets to wielding the natural magic of the world in ways the warlocks (or wizards, or anyone else) would have never figured out on their own?

Knowledge is power.

A bit more seriously, the Fey and Great Old One descriptions strongly suggest they're mostly knowledge based, while the Fiend patron should be actually supplying power based because it explicitly says only really powerful fiends can form Warlock pacts.

[Woot]

"D&D Tofu Edition - takes on whatever flavor you season it with!"

oh shit they've stolen GURPS's shtick

[Username17]

Seriously,in 2nd edition AD&D I could tell you what planes of existence you weren't able to cast teleport on due to non-connectivity with the appropriate transitive plane. That information was stupid, but it existed. In 5th edition, teleportation isn't defined. That sounds like a joke, but it's not. Every instance of the word "teleport" in the 5e PHB just sort of assumes we are all on the same page.

Is teleportation instant? Does it make a noise? Does it make light? Does it make smoke? What mundane precautions can be taken against teleportation? Does the character vanish from the first location before they appear in the second? What happens when teleportation targets are occupied or modified by illusions? Can you "hitch a ride" with a teleporting character with a readied action and jumping on them?

Ultimately, I have no idea what the answer is to any of that. It just says things teleport. That's all the information you get. Maybe it's supposed to be Star Trek teleportation. Maybe it's supposed to be hyperspace jumps. Maybe it's supposed to be jumping through miniature planar gates. Maybe it's supposed to be X-Men bamfs. I don't know. Merles doesn't care.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Anyway, the AD&D decision to have spells literally granted by gods was always a weird and bad one. Mechanically the spells are class features of the spellcaster, and dependent on the caster's level, abilities, and conditions - not those of the god. So there's no particular reason to consider the spells to have come from the god in any meaningful fashion. All it ever does, all it can do, is to start dumb arguments about whether the players are currently "too far away" from their nominal godly power source.

-Username17

There's another, stupider factor: the level of spell and type of spells you can get depends on the god and their divine rank. So only priests of Greater Gods can cast the really high-level spells, while the priests of demigods and the like...can't.

Which was part of the thing in D&D and AD&D where there were hard, albeit arbitrary, level limits on various character races and class combinations. Something lampooned endlessly in Hackmaster!, but the fact that D&D3 decided that every race could take every basic class and that you could actually have an Ogre Bard or a Dwarf Paladin of Moradin or something was bizarrely freeing compared to how people had been playing all of their lives.

The thing is, level limits in D&D were super bizarre. There was never a good reason for them, they were just arbitrary efforts to shoehorn players into something resembling some idea that designers had in their heads about how "fantasy characters" should act. Which is why Elves could do the Fighter/Mage/Thief thing and humans couldn't. Earthdawn tried to it when they were writing up Disciplines, but even they allowed PCs to dip into different classes in a way D&D did not fairly early on, and D&D 3 still struggled with the idea of being powergaming by not following a rote progression of shitty abilities.

Indirectly, this is also why the default human ability in most RPGs that distinguish humans as a race is "adaptability" or "luck." Humans don't get bonuses for being the strongest, fastest, smartest, or biggest genitalia, but they get more skill points and ultimately more options in a lot of games, because D&D established that while humans might not be special, they do have potential - and that basically meant "no level cap" in AD&D and "bonus feat" in D&D 3 and the Journeyman class in Earthdawn and...well, fill in the rest yourself.

But that kind of thing is all tied together. One aspect of game design, however shitty, influences the rest.

[Woot]

Next up is Chapter 3: Ships of Wildspace. It’s 24 pages long, and is effectively the 2nd quarter of the book. Meaty, but I’ll see if I can’t make it in one go.

Spelljammer Architecture

We start by reviewing a few terms, which I’ll cover here, since we’ll likely discuss them at some later points of the review:

Tonnage or T, is arbitrarily set so that 1 ton equal to 100 cubic yards; tonnage is used to define the “size” of a ship in terms of what spelljamming helms can drive it and how much air it carries.

Ship’s Rating or SR, is a reflection of speed, and to a lesser extent, how well it can maneuver. Generally determined by type of helm + who (or what) is powering the helm. SR of 1 is equivalent to 17 mph.

Crew numbers are given as a pair of values, like 20/40. The first represents the minimum number needed to efficiently crew the vessel, the second is the maximum number “without endangering the air envelope” i.e. without giving you the 4 months to fouled / 8 months to depleted endurance that the game sets as a standard. Since it seems to be in every case precisely the same as the tonnage, why this is given as a separate value baffles me.

Maneuverability Class or MC, is a rating of the tactical maneuverability of the class. Factors affecting this are design of the craft, “sails, oars & fins.” Elven ships are graceful, groundling sea-vessels with spelljamming helms plunked on to them are sluggish. Uses the A-F (with A being the best) ratings found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Hull Points or HP, are just Hit Points for ships. They start out equal to the ships tonnage rating, and go down from there, either from ship-to-ship weapons, magic, collisions, or a 10-to-1 ratio of “regular character damage” to hull point damage. Worth pointing out that ships are also defined by the material they’re made out of - thick wood, stone, metal, etc. - which is used to determine the saving throws the hull uses against certain effects, such as fire or acid. This chapter provides a helpful material saving throw chart, which is roughly similar to one that exists in the DMG.

Power type is simply the type of motive force the ship uses: “major or minor helm” or “series helm” or whatever else. Note that only one helm can be active at once, but more than one can be carried.

Armament varies from ship to ship, but a Standard Armament or SA, is given in each ship entry. The SA is “normal” for the ship and costs no cargo space; additional weapons can be carried but consume 1 ton of cargo space per additional weapon. The weapons are: Catapult, Ballista, Jettison (small rock throwers), Rams (in blunt, piercing, or grappling flavors), Bombards (cannons are canon!), and Greek Fire Projectors.

Cargo Space which works out to 50 cubic yards of space per ton of ship that can be used to haul cargo; i.e. cargo space is half your tonnage. Unlike the 2nd crew number, this isn’t typically listed for ships.

Keel length or KL and Beam length or BL, are effectively the length and width of the ship.

Finally, the Armor Rating or AR, is effectively the ship’s armor class. Remember we’re playing 2nd edition here, so lower is better.

Outfitting

We’re told that most ships are captured, refitted or inherited by their owners. Typically, only large communities or organizations build ships, which are then copied, stolen or (gasp!) legally purchased by others, leading to a relatively fixed number of “standard” ship designs throughout space. Prices are quoted in the next section, but “whatever the market will bear” (i.e. how much gold does Mister Cavern want the players to give up) is often encountered. We’re told there are relatively few “used spaceship shops” available, and quoted some probabilities for being able to purchase one or get a lead on where one might be purchased.

Ship Hulls

Next we have several pages of ship listings. The information is mostly the same stuff we saw back in Lorebook of the Void albeit with a few more groundling ships added and prices listed. There seems to be a very rough correlation between tonnage a price; 1000GP per ton of hull seems to be the “standard” but we see that vary a good bit: A 45 ton squidship costs 45k; but the 60 ton hammership is only 50k. Meanwhile the 10 ton dragonfly (ideal for an adventurer’s ship) is 40k, with it’s up-armored cousin the damselfly being 50k. The workhorse 25 ton tradesman is only 15k, though.

Power sources

As mentioned before, helms are the primary power source, but others do exist. They can be found, stolen, purchased from the Arcane, or made by high-level wizards. Major helms cost 250k; minor helms cost 100k. The difference is that majors can power vessels up to 100 tons and operate at an SR of 1/2 the helmsman’s caster level (round down); minors are limited to 50 tons and have an SR of 1/3 the helmsman’s caster level.

These prices have always struck me as insane. In 2nd wealth-by-level isn’t a thing, but I can never recall ever having anything like that much money. Hmph.

Back to the text, we’re reminded that any use of the helms prohibits magic use for the next 24 hour. We can think of the helm of “draining” the caster of their spells, but the text parenthetically clarifies that draining spells is not precisely what happens - it siphons energy away from the caster as they try to use it, and this can happen at range, even though they can only drive the helm if they sit on it. A helmsman can drive the ship for 12 hours; past that they can continue driving with the ship’s SR reducing by 1 for every hour (min of SR 1) until they reach 24 hours, at which point they pass out and can no longer use the helm until they rest.

Presumably, this is to complicate the lives of casters - so far as I can tell, you’d need at least 3 casters to drive a ship near-continuously: A drives for 12 hours, then B takes over for the next 12 while A rests, then 12 hours later C takes over while A rests some more and B starts resting. At the end of C’s shift, A has had 24 hours break and can resume, and of course, all three are bereft of spellcasting abilities. Grim!

After this we get a list of helms you probably can’t get or don’t want: Series helms (powered by mind flayer psionic blasts), pool helms (powered by mind flayer brain pools), orbus (stunted mutant beholders), forges (used by dwarves citadels), Gnomish helms, the Crown of Stars I mentioned earlier, costing a kings ransom (or so claims the text) and acting like a mobile, wearable minor helm, furnaces - pay 100k for a power source that burns magic items and will blow up if you take into the Flow, artifurnaces, which are the same as the previous but are powered by artifacts which are indestructible and hence only need the one artifact to be used, although each artifurnace is tailored to a specific artifact (the Cock & Balls of Vecna!), Lifejammers which drains life from it’s unfortunate victim, typically used by Neogi, and finally nonmagical engines which for approx 10k will drive you at an SR 1 and won’t let you attain spelljamming speeds.

Essentially, the rest of the helms exist as ways to explain why and how various oddballs (literally in the case of beholders) can cruise around in space without traditional spelljamming helms, in a way that is generally hard or impossible for the players to replicate. Can’t let them have nice things, can we?

Armaments



More detailed explanation of weapons and their stats are here; the catapult, ballista and jettison are largely self explanatory and come in light, medium and heavy varieties. We’re also introduced to the Gnomish Sweeper, which is just a pair of ballistas that fire bolts connected via a chain for improved anti-personnel capabilities; the three types of ram; bombards, which are expensive to operate (and don’t work spheres where smoke powder doesn’t work) and are dangerous to use in the Flow; Greek Fire projectors, which spray streams of flammable liquid and are similarly dangerous. We’re also told that weapons can be mounted in rotating turrets, for a small additional upcharge, and said turrets provide some protection to the crew arming those weapons.

Next we’re given a few defensive measures, which are pretty much what you might guess: thickening the hull, plating it with armor, using a different material for the hull, or installing netting to protect the crew from missiles and boarders. Likewise, the hull can be stripped on nonessential mass, thereby making it lighter, or have extra rigging installed.

Essentially, all of these defensive measures allow you to optimize your ship in some way, often trading one thing for another (maneuverability versus armor, etc.) in small increments, which actually seems like a reasonable thing to allow the players to do, and is usually not hideously expensive, except for rebuilding the hull with different materials at 5k per hull point. Kudos to this.



Personal Weapons & Ammunition

OMG, it’s the WHEEL! LOCK! PISTOL!

No, wait.



Better.

Yippie. A weapon that does 1d4 damage (though it does have an additive reroll on a 4) that blows up 10% of the time (on an attack roll of 1 or 2) for 1d6 damage (plus more in the Flow), has a rate of fire of 1/3, and is at medium range at 6 yards and long at 9 yards. Oh, and it costs 700 gold upfront and (probably) 300 gold every time you fire it due to the cost of smoke powder. If you’re going to make using this such a negative experience, Grubb, why have it? Presumably so we could pretend like having pistols was totally a thing that could be done but without making it a thing you’d want to do. I mean, I don’t actually mind the slow rate of fire thing: my understanding is that Age of Sail boarding actions would typically involve people carrying one or more pre-loaded pistols, firing them each once, and then setting them aside for melee combat. So, fine, whatever.

Smoke power is next, with a listed cost of “whatever the market will bear” but at the end we’re grudgingly told that the Arcane typically sell it at 3k for 10 charges, which is enough for 10 shots from an arquebus or pistol, or one shot from a ship-mounted bombard.

Next we’ve got some other gear, ammunition for ship weapons, and then finally a few useful odds and ends: For 10k, a passage device that makes artificial crystal shell portals as per the wizard spell create portal, along with a portal locator for 5k and a planet locator for 2k, nonmagical star charts for 10k, anchors, and lifeboats, which can be used once to make a safe landing on a planet. This is all more or less sensible gear you’d want your ship to have, so good on them for thinking to include it.

Crews

Crews are divided into 4 types: green, average, trained and crack. Skilled crews cost more, but have higher morale and better initiative, and rules are provided to determine when and how crews change status and what happens when crews gain new members of differing experience levels. We’re also treated to a section about weapon teams and how weapon specialists can be hired to give weapons a +1 bonus to hit so long as they’re crewing a weapon they’re proficient with. Sensible stuff.

And that’s it for Chapter 3. Next time we’ll be diving into Chapter 4: Movement & Combat aka Everything You Wanted To Know About The Ship-To-Ship Minigame But Were Afraid To Ask.

[Thaluikhain]

Indirectly, this is also why the default human ability in most RPGs that distinguish humans as a race is "adaptability" or "luck." Humans don't get bonuses for being the strongest, fastest, smartest, or biggest genitalia, but they get more skill points and ultimately more options in a lot of games, because D&D established that while humans might not be special, they do have potential - and that basically meant "no level cap" in AD&D and "bonus feat" in D&D 3 and the Journeyman class in Earthdawn and...well, fill in the rest yourself.

Really? I'd always assumed that while there was only eleventy billion types of elves one type of dwarves you actually care about, the real world been full of humans means there's unlimited variations of cultures and heroes and so on that a player might want to play as. You can have a stereotypical dwarf, but not a stereotypical human. So you sorta have to give humans loads of options that you don't need to bother with for other races, or there will be sulking.

[maglag]

I mean, I don’t actually mind the slow rate of fire thing: my understanding is that Age of Sail boarding actions would typically involve people carrying one or more pre-loaded pistols, firing them each once, and then setting them aside for melee combat. So, fine, whatever.

No need to set aside for melee, you see that shiny reinforced metal pommel? It's meant so you could use the pistol as a club after firing.

[tussock]

Gygax said he used non-human level limits because he wanted humans logically ruling the game world, to avoid having to write more about how other races differed.

As more text got written about the other races over the years, their level limits got higher, game added how they could pass them when taking up regional rulership positions in BD&D, and then because that was eventually complete for all the PHB races in the 2e race splatbooks, removed completely in 3e.

Like, there was originally no PC Dwarf/Gnome/Elf/Fling clerics because Gygax didn't want to write Dwarf gods. PC Half Elf and Half Orc could be clerics because they could use the Human gods. Once the gods were written, the option opened up.

--

AD&D smokepowder weapons did ignore armour at close range, I recall. But yeah, 2nd edition, use composite longbow.

[Woot]

Chapter 4: Movement & Combat

And here we get into the nitty-gritty of how to make your ship go, (Oh crap, I’ve already included a Pakled image earlier. I am not smart, Geordi!) and perhaps even more importantly, how to make the other guy’s ship go… BOOM. I hope to give this chapter extra scrutiny for at least three reasons. First, one of the design goals for the product was to provide a ship to ship minigame, which is what a large part of this chapter is about - does this chapter succeed in achieving that goal? Second, as I’ve worked through the review I’ve increasingly had the nagging thought that for all of it’s pretensions about being a bold new setting for AD&D gaming, there’s really not all that much new under the sun(s) here: with existing AD&D products you could already tell stories about traveling to exotic places and making long naval voyages, and you could already be a band of merchants or pirates. What’s new here are rules for bringing ship to ship combat to life in your game, beyond just Mister Cavern handwaving. Third, I’ve been tapped to MC the next game my local group plays and they’re nudging me about running a 5e adaptation of Spelljammer, which I’m certainly willing to try, but since I’m also frightfully lazy and don’t really fancy myself a game designer, I’ll be keeping an eye towards whether or not I can lift the rules here and drop them in place in 5e, with perhaps some tweaks for the differences in ACer /THAC0 and the like, since it’s not like Hasbro’s 5e works provide any rules for this sort of thing. (It looks like third party sources are trying to fill that gap, however.)

The chapter starts by telling us that we can understand movement as falling under two broad categories: the long range travel, and “tactical” speed that occurs when other ships, asteroids, etc. are near.

For long range travel, it’s further broken down into atmospheric, wildpspace, and phlogiston travel. For atmospheric, it tells you that you travel 500 yards per round/17 miles per hour/400 miles per day per point of Ship’s Rating, or SR. It then gives more more information about taking off and landing, and gives a chart with the time it takes to get out of a planet’s gravity well. It doesn’t say so but I would hope those times are divided by ship’s SR, but I would’t have put it past them to insist those times are fixed. Weather can be a factor, and it does give modifiers for the time to escape the gravity well, so hopefully they thought about that.

In wildspace, all spelljaming craft travel at speeds of 100 million miles a day, regardless of SR. 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. This sudden deceleration happens with no ill effects on the ship or crew; I would surmise however that the extra linear momentum is converted into rotational momentum and applied to the bones of Issac Newton along his long axis. We’re then given a worked example of calculating travel times from Earth to Mars when the two planets are at closest approach; which works out to a little over 13 hours; it’s 2.6 days if they were furthest apart. 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!)

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. We’re reminded that spheres do move with respect to one another, and some spheres may only be reachable via traveling through another sphere. We’re told that a ship’s last port of call determines which spheres it can access, and that port of call is “the sighting or landing within a crystal sphere.” Which is a fun nautical term to know, I guess, but it’s not clear what game effect that might have or why they bring it up except as a vocabulary lesson.

And moving on we come to

Tactical Movement

And here’s where we get our ship-to-ship hex-based minigame. Like ordinary AD&D, rounds are 1 minute each; with each hex representing 500 yards, we get a convenient “1 SR = 1 hex” movement rate. Combat is assumed to happen in two dimensions, which is a reasonable simplification (and plays nice with the Age of Sail metaphor.) There are rules for how quickly a ship can turn based on it’s Maneuverability Class, and how quickly it can accelerate based on helm type. Initiative rolls determine who goes first (or last, if the winner wishes) and the basic pattern is “first ship can move, mover can shoot, anyone else can shoot, next ship to move gets to move, then shoot, then anyone can shoot, etc.” within the limits of weapons ranges, fields of fire, and rate of fire. Fire can be directed against the enemies hull, or against crew, in which case 1 point of hull damage can also be caused. Ships in the same hex can grapple or (facing permitting) ram other ships. Heavy weapons can cause critical hits, and a ship reduced to 50% hull points is automatically subject to a critical hit roll.

Rules are supplied for the effects of crew loss on weapon rate of fire and the ship’s Maneuverability Class, flying through debris, fighting shipboard fires, and there’s a long list of morale factors that can modify the reactions of your or enemy crews. There are some guidelines for adjudicating short range (within the same hex) missile and magic attacks against enemy ships. More detailed rules for ramming are provided; piercing rams can do (1/10 ramming ship’s tonnage * hexes moved in a straight line) while blunt rams do (1/10 ramming ship’s tonnage * ramming ship’s SR) which seems a little odd to me, but, OK. There’s rules for ramming space monsters, crashing ships into other ships, shearing attacks (trying to sideswipe and ruin the other ship’s rigging) and the rules for grappling and boarding; including rules on how many grappling lines are needed per ship tonnage. Next are rules for “Rapid Resolution of Small Scale Combat” to try and (roughly) simulate battles between NPC crews; you’re advised to use the regular AD&D rules in any fight the players take an active hand in, which is reasonable. Finally we have a brief section on towing: basically, the combined two-ship system is treated as a larger ship, which can be moved by whomever has the highest SR and sufficient towing capacity (so a 10 ton ship with a high SR and major helm could drag around a 90 ton ship with a lower SR.)

Encounters, Evasion & Running Away



This section has rules for starting distance & location in tactical encounters, fleeing distance, and pursuit. Since all spelljamming ships travel at the same 100 million miles per day speed, a ship with a lower SR can tail one with a higher SR. Rules are given for both trying to figure out the escaping ship’s vector as the would-be pursuer, and what the escapee might try to throw such a pursuer off the trail - course changes, or throwing 10 tons of mass off the stern, basically. Finally, we’re treated to rules for repairing damage. Damage can be repaired at shipyards, or for free by skilled carpenters (or stonemasons, etc. depending on ship material), assuming sufficient wood (or whatever) can be collected.

… and that’s it for chapter 4, the ship-to-ship minigame. Overall, I think it’s pretty decent, actually! It addresses most of the obvious things that might happen in a ship-to-ship battle, with rules that aren’t too alien to those of the standard AD&D game: initiative, THAC0, AC and hit points (in the form of hull points) are all there. More detailed ship-to-ship rules (including simulating 3-D combat) would be released in 1992 in the War Captain’s Companion but the rules given here are solid. The rules heavily favor ships with higher SRs; if you have long range weapons and a high SR, most battles can become snoozefests. Considering that’s pretty much how it played out with the English’s defeat of the Spanish Armada - faster ships with longer ranged weapons chewing up slower adversaries geared more for boarding actions - that seems reasonable. The design isn’t brilliant, but it does what it sets out to do.

Next up we have Chapter 5: Celestial Mechanics, which provides rules for creating crystal spheres and their planets & associated bodies, mapping them, and rules for moving around on the map. Following that are 4 brief appendices, and that’s it. We’re almost done!