[OSSR] Spelljammer: The Astromundi Cluster Boxed Set

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[OSSR] Spelljammer: The Astromundi Cluster Boxed Set

Post by Woot »

Hello, and welcome to another Old School Sourcebook Review! In an entirely irresponsible effort to put off doing prep work for my next Spelljammer campaign session, I’m going to instead hide myself in the pages of one of my favorite AD&D products: The Astromundi Cluster!

If you’re new to Spelljammer, you may want to take a look at the excellent review Ancient History and Frank Trollman did of The Complete Spacefarer’s Handbook: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=475807 or possibly my review of the Spelljammer boxed set: https://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57118

There were four Spelljammer boxed sets released: the primary boxed set which introduced the concepts and basic mechanics, the War Captain’s Companion which included many more ships and more detailed space battle rules, and then two boxed sets that strongly focused on setting details: The Astromundi Cluster and The Legend of Spelljammer. These two boxed sets served to flesh out the details of the Spelljammer setting, albeit in very different ways. Astromundi provides you a “Spelljammer-native” crystal sphere, where everyone spelljams and spelljamming is central to the culture and politics of every group that lives there, whereas Legend takes you onboard the great big flying McGuffin that is the Good Ship Spelljammer. Astromundi takes place in an entire crystal sphere and contains billions of inhabitants; Legend focuses on a few thousand individuals in an area that is, at best, the size of a large town.

For this review, we’ll be looking at The Astromundi Cluster. The meat of the boxed set is three books: the 32-page Astrogator’s Guide for PCs and DMs to familiarize themselves with the basic facts of the setting, the 64-page Adventures in the Shattered Sphere which is a DM-only book that contains adventure ideas, including the two big overarching metaplots and smaller side plots, and the 96-page Celestial Almanac full of places to go and people to kill. There’s a poster that shows you a map of one of the major trading posts in the sphere, along with a map of one of the crystal citadels so you can get a grasp on just how FUCKHUEG the damn things are, and 24 8x11 cardstock sheets showing you images of inhabitants, ships, planets and their moons, and some quick references to imports & exports, encounter tables, etc.

I’m going to (try to) be more relaxed in this review than I was in my prior one. There’s no stated goal for the product in the introduction we find in The Astrogator’s Guide but I’m still going to try to keep two key questions in mind:

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

We’ll start with The Astrogator’s Guide since it’s both the shortest of the three and also pretty obviously where they intend for you to start.
The Introduction wrote: You hold in your hands the keys to some of spell­jamming's greatest mysteries. Are all neogi nec­essarily evil? What do the Arcane really want? Do the illithids have a home world?
The answers to all of these questions and many more lie within the bounds of the secluded Astro­mundi Cluster. Long-sought answers lie here to be uncovered by brave explorers, as well as treasures no groundling could imagine. But be forewarned: the Cluster is not a forgiving place. Ships that enter Clus­terspace sometimes never leave, unable to escape from a crystal sphere that was more than willing to let them in. Travelers whisper tales of numerous undead and ever-present slave ships. Some speak of golden hell-Barges, great ships manned by tanar'ri warriors.
In this box you'll find the following books: The Astrogator's Guide (which you have in your hands), Adventures in the Shattered Sphere, and The Celes­tial Almanac. In addition to these books there are two posters: a Planetary Display of the Cluster, and a cut­away display of a crystal citadel and Highport. You'll also find 24 cards with pictures and descriptions of new ships, Lunar Displays, pictures of important races and other useful information. Some of the cards are intended to be used as visual aids for the players, so feel free to flash these around.
The Astrogator's Guide is the only part of this set that should be used by the players directly. Chapter One covers the basics of the Astromundi Cluster and its various races. A basic history of the sphere, and its politics, major powers, and overall physical char­acteristics are provided. All of this information is known to Clusterborn characters, but PCs from other spheres will have to learn it through experience. Information in this chapter is very broad and vague, allowing players to draw their own conclusions.
Chapter Two of The Astrogator's Guide details the special rules that will be needed for play in the Astro­mundi. You'll find information on the different char­acter races within the Cluster, and how their isolation from outside influences has made them different from "typical" individuals of their kind. This chapter also contains guidelines for generating Clusterborn PCs and covers the deities worshiped in the Astro­mundi Cluster. This section details the basics of life in the Shattered Sphere, and should be read thoroughly to avoid confusion later on.
In Chapter Three, new equipment and ship types are presented. This section contains important new tools for the wandering adventurer, from line-casters to crystal ships.
The second book, Adventures in the Shattered Sphere, describes how to set up and maintain a cam­paign based in Clusterspace. Book Two covers all the details on integrating outside characters into the Astromundi Cluster. You'll also find interesting adventure themes and locales, and ideas for long­and short-term goals for your campaign. Most importantly, the secret goals of the many factions in the Shattered Sphere will be revealed.
The third book, The Celestial Almanac, examines the physical characteristics of the Astromundi Clus­ter, including the secrets of successful trade and piracy and an overview of the Cluster's economy. The heart of the Almanac is devoted to detailed descriptions of the many ports, cities, and asteroids that make up the Cluster.
Now, read the books, study the maps a bit and prepare to 'jam into adventures the likes of which you've never seen. For the intrepid explorer, the greatest adventures await!
The bottom of this page starts a series of black boxes that are snippets of conversation with a merchant captain who is introducing you to the sphere. They’re flavorful and fine for what they are. The next few pages finish up the introduction and reveal the following basic facts:
  • - The Astromundi Cluster is very old (Why is it called a cluster? That’s never really explained.)
  • - It used to have inhabited planets, much like other spheres
  • - Two of them smacked into each other, causing predictable chaos and a huge number of asteroids scattered everywhere, while the cores of the two planets merged and formed a second sun that orbits the primary sun
  • - Running low on space on the single remaining planet, called Astromundi, horrible wars began, with humans often purging nonhumans
  • - Nonhumans unleashed a magical curse on humans in retaliation, which lead to a sudden rise in human birth defects. Said deformed children were treated with compassion and understanding healed with strong magic left to die; those that survived eventually fled underground and became their own civilization, focused on being butthurt about how humans had treated them
  • - To aid their war efforts, humans began experimenting with ancient forbidden magics best left shunned, because this could never under any forseeable circumstances backfire
  • - The dwarves said “fuck this” (presumably in dwarven) and migrated to the many asteroids which now filled the sphere, where they could be dwarfy in peace
  • - The elves, sick of human bullshit and dwarven self-absorption, said, “fuck it, I’m out!” (presumably in elvish) and by and large left the sphere altogether
  • - The underground mutants plotted and schemed, increased their mystic powers, murmured darkly among themselves, found a mutant space Jesus to pray to, and (presumably) posted on Elliot Rodgers fandom forums
  • - The Unbidden, a fun-loving bunch of tanar’ri, were summoned by reckless human magics (bet you saw that coming!) and proceeded to burn cities, butcher populations, and recklessly litter
  • - The mutants, unaware of what was going on above them, decided to make their move against the surface dwelling humans. Imagine their surprise to find tanar’ri already busily shoving their former bullies into hell-lockers!
  • - The mutants, cheated of their chance to punch the guy who kicked sand in their face earlier revenge themselves on those who had driven them underground, cried out to their new mutant space Jesus friend, who promptly WHOOSHED his mutant worshippers to an uninhabited moon in the cluster, and then shattered the planet Astromundi “like bad crockery”
  • - Tanar’ri were put on DOUBLE SECRET PROBABTION and beaten with space Jesus’ banhammer, so that they’d never be able to access the crystal sphere again.
  • - Gradually, other races began re-entering the crystal sphere, and they noticed a new feature: entering was as easy as ever, but leaving the crystal sphere seemed to be impossible, except for the elves because they’re a bunch of goddamn skinny-assed mary-sue tree-fuckers
  • - As civilization began to re-assert itself, the neogi arrived and found that they couldn’t get away with nearly as many shenanigans as they were used to, since their “EEL-SPIDERS COMING FROM SPACE-SPIDERS COMING FROM SPACE!” shtick was far less novel in a sphere where people had been spellljamming for thousands of years. Ultimately, neogi weaseled themselves into the role of neutral traders, and managed to make other factions dependent, to various degrees, on the resources they provided
  • - The Arcane arrive, and choose one human faction, the Antilans, to turn into their sugar babies. They give the Antilans numerous secrets, including the power of Sun Magic, which allows the Antilans to spelljam with ships far larger than would normally be allowed by the magic of spelljamming. The Antilan Sun Mages become the dominant power of the sphere, rivaled only by the sneaky illithids, with whom they fight several wars before the neogi are able to “encourage” everyone to come to a truce via threats of trade sanctions and piracy
I think that’s it for now. Next time, I’ll pick up with the factions of the Astromundi cluster.
Last edited by Woot on Wed Jan 16, 2019 7:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by SeekritLurker »

I haven't read the Astromundi Cluster, but I just want to be the first to make an Astromundi Clusterfuck joke.

I'll keep reading, though, to see if and/or when the joke is actually applicable.
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Post by Foxwarrior »

Woot wrote:The Unbidden, a fun-loving bunch of tanar’ri, were summoned by reckless human magics
So, they were... bidden?
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Post by Woot »

@Foxwarrior

I suppose it depends on your perspective. I mean, imagine if you try to summon an imp, and something goes wrong and you've now got a living room full of balors. And then you're like, "Hey, guys, feet off the couch!" and they're like, "You summoned us, asshole!" and then rip you into small pieces and eat you.
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Post by Username17 »

The Astromundi Cluster was never a thing that I really understood. I mean, it wasn't that I didn't understand the language being used - obviously the box was written in English. I mean that I don't understand what the purpose of this particular sandbox was supposed to be.

It's a weird rambling rant about why there's a bunch of weird stuff on small islands (or the space equivalent) that you could go have adventures running into. But um... what? Like, what's the driving goal for why I'd want to be there at all?

It sort of seems like the predecessor to the Eberon fiasco. Someone mandated that all the things had to be in the setting, so there wasn't room for a plot or a reasonable selection of motivations for player characters to have.

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Post by Woot »

Well, from a player/DM perspective, the point was that it was A) not tied to any existing lore, and B) Spelljamming-native.

From a character perspective, it's a little trickier. Thanks to the mutant's god, it's as easy to enter Astromundi as anywhere else - easier, actually, since you can fly in right through the shell - a portal isn't even necessary - though that's less helpful than it sounds, since for most spheres you'd just wreck your ship if you flew into them. The nature of the sphere makes it hard to leave, however: most ships are magically blocked from leaving. Using various plane shift shennanigans also doesn't work: you end up "dropping out" back where you started, instead of where you should have ended up.

Later in these books, the designer, Sam Witt, actually hangs a lampshade on this pitcher plant nature:
Adventures in the Shattered Sphere wrote: Outlanders may be a bit more difficult to bring into the Shattered Sphere, but a single navigational mis­take or flux in the phlogiston can easily force a spelljammer into the Astromundi Cluster. And, of course, once outlanders get in, they'll have a very difficult time getting out again.
In an outlander campaign, characters may become so obsessed with escaping this strange crystal sphere that they don't take the time to investigate it. Remember, your players may not know that the Cluster is the setting for your new campaign, and may see it as a trap to be escaped.
The simplest solution is to thrust characters into the heart of the adventure from the start. Involve them in the ticklish business of neogi politics, or have them captured by illithid or Antilan slavers ( a simple but nasty trick that never loses its effectiveness). Most importantly, intrigue them. You can't force char­acters to stay in one area, but you can manipulate them into hanging around for a while.
And that goes right back to the mysterious atmos­phere inherent to the Cluster. As long as you don't give away too much, too quickly, your players will stay involved and interested in what's going on.
In addition, there are a few other hooks that come to mind:
  • - A desire to help the sphere's elven or lizardman populations, or being paid/coerced to do so
  • - A warning or prophecy that the Illithids, Arcane, or perhaps Neogi are up to Serious Bad Juju and someone needs to stop them
  • - Access to the technology of the sphere, particularly the Thoric Tradesman ship, which seems to be able to travel long distances faster than any other ship.
  • - A desire to explore/exploit a sphere that seems to be off the beaten path
  • - Hired by the Pragmatic Order of Thought to investigate a sphere rumored to be rife with slavery
But yes, it doesn't have quite the same built-in draw that visiting the Spelljammer does. The Spelljammer is introduced in the very first boxed set, and is presented as something that everyone has heard of but no one has any idea about, so naturally visiting it (if you can find it) is a thing that many adventuring parties would naturally want to do. Why your party should just up and visit Astromundi is altogether less clear.
Last edited by Woot on Sat Jan 19, 2019 12:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Harshax »

FrankTrollman wrote:Someone mandated that all the things had to be in the setting, so there wasn't room for a plot or a reasonable selection of motivations for player characters to have.
So many possibly good settings have been ruined by the mandate that it must have elves, halflings and dwarves. It's as if the suits at TSR/WotC still had rage boners from winning lawsuits against Tolkien Enterprises in the 80s that they ruined D&D's chance of ever branching out into something really fantastic. And while dark sun and gnomes in spaaaaace was probably their most far out attempts to do something really interesting, the latter still mostly comes off as just a reskin.

This use to bug me so much that I tried writing this. It's hardly professional, good or even complete, but at least it tried to set-up some meta plots and do something with spelljammer and D&D that wasn't, well, D&D in Space. The file in that link was rewritten for Savage Worlds, but at the time I probably had half a dozen different rulesets for it, to include Harnmaster and BESM.
Last edited by Harshax on Sat Jan 19, 2019 1:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Woot »

Okay, back to the grind! My companion through this post is a large glass filled with ice, grocery-store brand diet cola, and 5 (or so) ounces of Maggie’s Farm Spiced Rum, which tastes like halfway-decent rum that a Nutmeg Golem shat in. It has one redeeming feature: it was made here in Pennsylvania. Well, two: it’ll get ya drunk.

Picking up where I left off in The Astrogator’s Guide, we next have a listing of factions in descending order of power. Worth pointing out, as they do in the text: this information represents “conventional wisdom” among well-travelled Astromundi natives, and may be incomplete or inaccurate.

Factions:

Antilan Empire, aka the Sun Mages, aka the Evil Empire
Population: 3 billion humans. Turn ons: Making everyone else their slaves; being racist; getting extra-special-snowflake special treatment from the Arcane; gigantic rule-breaking crystal ships; wearing masks in public, the more elaborate the better; female priestesses called Judicants that serve as judge, jury, and executioner; only letting nobles be wizards. Turn offs: Illithids; not getting their way; having to put up with the neogi forcing a truce on them through the threat of trade sanctions; unsanctioned trade and travel in their space; Illithids.

Illithids, aka the Other Evil Empire
Population: 3 billion mind flayers. Turn ons: Showing up seemingly out of nowhere to contest the Antilans and very nearly beating them; earning grudging respect from the Cluster’s other inhabitants for doing so; having more psionicists than anyone else; hanging out with their Varan bros. Turn offs: Antilans; Antilan Sun Mages; having to put up with the neogi forcing a truce on them through the threat of trade sanctions

Varan
Population: 1 billion humans. Turn ons: Hanging with their total bros the Illithids; doing whatever the Illithids tell them to do; making others respect them if only because if the Varan get themselves in trouble the Illithids will have their back. Turn offs: The fact that they’ve got to do pretty much whatever the Illithids tell them to do; the Boyarny Varan, a group that work as traders and are independent of the Illithids, which is very un-bro like behavior

Calidians
Population: 1 billion humans. Turn ons: individual liberty, having self-ruling city states. Turn offs: The fact that having individualistic small city-states has lead to large numbers of Calidans being conquered by Antilans or Illithids who, distressingly, don’t share the same thirst for Calidians being free; Antilans & Illithids, for that very reason

Neogi
Population: 1 billion spider-eels. Turn ons: Being the primary traders in the sphere; being mostly neutral and only occasionally being shitty, but getting away with it due to the threat of trade embargoes; slavery. Turn offs: The fact that they’d get the unagi beaten out of them if they tried to compete with the Sun Mages or Illithids militarily

Thoric
Population: 1.5 billion humans. Turn ons: Being viking expys, albeit with less rape-and-pillage and more explore-and-colonize; living in the coldest and most inhospitable regions of the sphere; the highest level of technology in the sphere; fur trading; being the most widely-liked faction in the sphere largely due to their overall lack of interest in fucking others over. Turn offs: Always being cold

Dwarves
Population: 800 million dorfs. Turn ons: Asteroid mining everywhere; doing crafty dwarf stuff; hiring out their mercenaries to everyone; being too much trouble to conquer. Turn offs: Not being able to do their job and make a good living at it in peace

Elves
Population: 300,000 elf. Turn ons: Being the only people who can leave the sphere and charging large fees to anyone else who would like a ride out. Turn offs: being a dying race

Lizard Men
Population: 400,000 reptillian d00ds Turn ons: Being too out-of-the-way for more major powers to conquer them; being misunderestimated by the other inhabitants of the sphere; finding others of their kind and revitalizing their race. Turn offs: The fact they only have two major colonies, one of which has embraced isolationism and slow suicide

Beholders
Population: unknown (but the eyes have it! Hahaha, I slay me! And if I didn’t, their gaze attacks would!) Turn ons: Hating everyone. Turn offs: The fact that everyone else hates them, and will team up to wreck their shit if they get uppity

Other races
Population: 2.5 billion mystery meat sentient beings. Turn ons: Being various other races, including goblin-kin; not being regarded as a threat. Turn offs: The fact that they’re not taken seriously

Languages

Everyone has their own racial language, but due to the Neogi dominance of trade, the Neogi language serves as a lingua franca. The text is a little ambiguous as to whether there is a separate Common and most people speak Neogi as well, or if Neogi *is* Common here.

Religions

We’re told that there are 13 primary deities here and they’ll be described in Chapter 2. Oh-kay...

Switching to iced coffee and Svedka. Uppers and downers, together at last…

Celestial Features

We’re given a brief tour of important, or at least well-known, locations in Clusterspace, starting at the shell and moving inwards. I’m not going to cover it all, but here’s a few highlights:

The Constellations: 13 of them, made from intense magical flames at the tops of giant towers. One for each god, they are in a flat plane in line with the central sun, around which they move. They are described as getting brighter for 8 hours, then dimmer for 8 hours, which seems to suggest the Astromundi day is 16 hours long. There are 13 months, and each year is named for a constellation/god as well. 13 years make a Cycle. The campaign “begins” in Cycle 1300, the year of Hordent, month of Munigur.

The Fringe: Icy asteroids. Thoric live out here; no one else has established permanent colonies. The Thoric trade ice and other raw materials from The Fringe with people further inward.

Highport: One of the most important trading outposts. Owned by the Arcane, but run by the Neogi and Caliban. Caliban specialize in ship repair and outfitting; Neogi focus on trade.

The Great Belt: Smaller and thinner than the Fringe. Thoric predominate here, but the Calidians, elves, dwarves, and neogi also have colonies here. Most are small, and depend on each other for survival.

Ironport: Neogi-designed metal pyramid trading base. Miles of twisting corridors and open trading areas. Rumors that the neogi occasionally do bad things to people who get lost, but surely those are just rumors, right?

Giltiond: Earth and water/ice bodies connected by a huge vine. Elves who have become barbaric live here, abandoning such luxuries like homes and clothes. Also tend to kill outsiders.

Avarien: Home to elves who are not as savage and only somewhat less paranoid than the Giltiond elves. These are the folks to talk to if you want to buy a ride out of Astromundi.

Boyarny: Home of the free Varan traders, along with some Thoric who provide muscle.

Ushathrandra: A purple gas giant that has been frozen in place in it’s orbit, along with it’s three moons. The seat of Illithid power in Clusterspace.

Illiman: A world purchased from lizard men by the neogi, who have built settlements and temples here

The Inner Ring: Heavily populated and the heart of the Astromundi sphere. Pretty much every race other than beholders can be found here. By universal agreement, open warfare is banned here.

The Golden Girdle: Seat of Antilan power; with plenty of soil, water, and sunlight. Regarded as the nicest place in the Cluster to live. Well, if you’re an Antilan, anyway. Includes three flat constructed worlds that are equidistant from each other

The Shakalman Group: Almost uninhabitable due to the heat, are very mineral rich and therefore the Antilans have huge mining and shipbuilding facilities here

Denaeb: Brilliant blue secondary sun. Flickering has been noticed at it’s center, and some mages believe it is shrinking, somehow.

Firefall: The system’s primary is a cluster of fire bodies of various colors that rotate around each other, waxing and waning in a pattern that is extraordinary to behold.

Player Characters

Next we have some rules for Clusterborn characters. We’re reminded of the 3/18 min/max scores for characters (important because the humans here get racial modifiers, something of a rarity in 2e.)

Antilans: No racial modifiers. Always wear masks unless alone. Mages start with 1 extra spell in their spell books; 2 if they’ve got an Int of 17 and 3 if they have an Int of 18. Mages are also automatically minor nobles, but cannot be Sun Mages, because fuck you for wanting nice things. (Though to be fair, the Sun Mage goodies aren’t that great.) All character classes available, including psionicists, which are valued for their ability to face the illithid threat.

Calidians: +1 to Str & Con; -1 Dex & Wis. Clerics are rare, and can’t be thieves.

Thoric: Fighters & Clerics most common, bards becoming more common. Mages & Psionicists virtually unknown. +2 Str, -2 Dex.

Varan: Rogues well represented, along with mages and psions. Clerics are rare, as the illithids have been imposing their religion on the Varan. Fighters exist but are usually illithid bodyguards. +2 Dex, -1 Str and Chr.

Dorfs: Same as Dorfs elsewhere, albeit without beards - important items are woven into their hair. Less contemplative and grim than other dwarves, have more of a “let’s get it done” attitude.

Elfs: Tend towards paranoia when not around elves. Compared to elves from other spheres, are shorter and nearly hairless, but still “quite comely and exquisitely proportioned.” Apparently elven women are especially prized as harem members among the rulers of the cluster, because, really, what’s 2e without the menace of racist sexual slavery? No cluster born elves have any psionic potential.

Lizard Men: cf your Spelljammer boxed set.

Deities:

Only 13, which is downright terse for AD&D. Human ones are all deities from Earth pantheons with the serial numbers filed off. 2 for the Antilans, 1 for their slaves, 2 for the Calidians, 2 for the Thoric, 1 for the Varan, 1 for the Dwarves, a male & female deity that are also regarded as two haves of a whole by the elves, a “god of everything” the Lizardmen respect (but have no priests for) and finally Lugribossk, “Dread lord of the illithids, spoken only in whispers. No one has ever seen a priest of Lugribossk, but the grisly remains of their religious ceremonies occasionally float into port.”

Nonweapon Proficiencies

This being 2e, NWPs were a big way of differentiating your character. Rules for Clusterborn characters are per standard AD&D 2e, with the caveat that Thoric are the “highest technology” people in the cluster, and Antilians (due to their reliance on Sun Magic) are the lowest.

Ships & Equipment

Image

First we have the Doombat, which is a small ship the elves use as a fighter. Ok, fine, whatever.

Next we have the Antilan Crystal Ship. Don’t let the name fool you, this thing is apparently constructed out of magic cheese. 300 tons, yet 60% of the time powered by a minor helm (which should only be able to power a ship of up to 50 tons.) Naturally, it has 325 hull points, and is very often full of troops, almost 300 of them. “Sunsails” are used to provide extra motive power. Basically, if you want to fuck your PCs up the ass with a 15 foot long pole wrapped in rusted, barbed, electrified wire and absolutely no lubricants save their tears and in short order their blood, use this.

Finally, the Thoric Tradesman. Essentially 3 smaller boats arranged in a triangular frame so that a large cargo box that can be easily installed or removed is supported between them. This violates the “one active helm per ship” rule, which I’m willing to overlook - I’ll let slide that the Thoric have developed some kind of special sauce here. The rules allow one helm to be “primary” and the second and third helms add half their normal SR value to the primary helm. OK… that adds to the ship’s SR in tactical movement. Fine. The problem I have is that the rules from the boxed set that all ships have the same speed over long distances regardless of SR, and that various places in the Astromundi Cluster boxed set make much of the fact that the extra speed of the Thoric Tradesman is what makes long distance trade in the sphere viable. However, it’s never actually explained whether or not the extra helms provide extra speed over long distances! Other places in the text clearly assume that’s true, but the rules as written only give the tradesman a bonus to tactical speed, not long distance speed. This pissed me off when I was 15 years old, and it pisses me off now.

Equipment

Finally we have some mildly clever equipment, some of which is situationally useful. Did you know you can strap a blade to your arm and use it like a sword? Or have knives jut out of the bottom of your boots? Probably the most interesting here are “line casters,” small crossbows you can use to shoot adhesive darts at an enemy ship, which you then can use cable slides to zip-line over to. This is a fairly useful invention for boarding actions, so I can’t be too snarky about it.



And that’s the book. Next time I’ll pick up with the next book, Adventures in the Shattered Sphere. Until next time, space pirates!
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Post by Username17 »

Does it really say there are 3 billion Mind Flayers? That's... totally insane. Mind Flayers only eat once a month, but their food takes nearly twenty years to grow to maturity. An Ilithid inhabitation that has a ratio of Ilithid to slaves of one to two fucking hundred has severe food insecurity. 3 Billion Mind Flayers would need to have extremely brutal food rationing and constant war if they "only" had six hundred billion human slaves.

That's one of the things that really bothers me about Spelljammer. Why fucking bother using D&D stuff if you aren't going to use the D&D stuff? Mind Flayers are not a species where you have midshipmen and corporals in the Mind Flayer navy and army. That just isn't a thing they do. There are no Ilithid waiters or Ilithid chefs. No Ilithid construction workers or Ilithid nurses. The entire species of the Ilithid are the 0.1% of their own society. Every Mind Flayer is a military officer, a politician, or a member of the idle rich. Every other job in their society, and I do mean every other job is done by slaves or not at all.

That's the signature defining concept of Mind Flayers. And if you're not going to explore that, or even recognize that fact in your demographics and descriptions, there's no point in using them at all.

Which gets to another thing. The population of planet Earth in 1600 was about five hundred and eighty million. Why would you make a game based on the Age of Sail where populations were conspicuously an order of magnitude larger than that? Especially if you're trying to make things about Dungeons & Dragons characters, who necessarily travel in adventuring parties that are smaller than actual historical Age of Sail conquistador groups. Cortez invaded Aztlan with three thousand troops, which is very large for a D&D military force.

You could make a strong case for doing your Age of Sail D&D pastiche in a sandbox with a considerably smaller population than the historical 17th century Earth. Heck, I could see basing the entire sand box on just a single theater of exploration like "The Caribbean" or whatever and have only 10-30 million people in the whole sandbox. But what the ever loving point is there of having a sandbox that has more than ten billion people in it?

What Age of Sail shit can you do with Viking expies that you specifically need to have almost three times the entire population of Age of Sail planet Earth of just those fucking guys to do? Why does any group need to have more people than were in Aztlan or even the Ming Empire? What the fucking fuck?

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Post by maglag »

Clearly the Neogi have a very thriving business importing food slaves for the 3 billion Mind Flayers to nom on from other places and that's how the spider eels hold so much power. The Mind Flayers must make sure the Neogi fleets keep working at top condition or they'll face starvation pretty fast.
Last edited by maglag on Sat Jan 19, 2019 11:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Yeah, those demographics are a bit odd.

So there are 1.5 billion vikings, on scattered asteroids so they need spelljamming ships (that carry, what, 50 people?) to keep in contact with each other. Even assuming they come in territories of 15 million people each, that's 100 of them. Even leaving everyone else, that's about an order of magnitude too many to keep track of. Also, do they keep census records? How do people know how many they are?

If you enter the sphere with your ship with 50 crew, or, hell, a fleet of a thousand of such vessels, who would care? The current Australian military (which, ok, isn't medieval) has more people than that, from a population of <25M people.

You really need to be playing on god mode, or possibly going for a setting where the big stuff is way out of your league. Like you're a 1930's private detective dealing with missing persons and booze smuggling, only more spacefaring mind flayer than usual.
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Post by DrPraetor »

I'm pondering - why is WH40K cool, while Spelljammer is lame? Rogue Trader predates Spelljammer by two years; but they are very much products of the same era. I always assumed that Spelljammer was a response of some kind to 40K but maybe someone on the den has insider knowledge of this?

It certainly isn't because 40K makes any more sense. These are both settings where the space vikings might be the most technologically advanced humans in the sector, and use that advanced technology to trade... furs. But, you read the demographics in a spelljammer supplement, and you're like, "this doesn't make any sense!" If 40K had mindflayers in it, their troop structure and demographics wouldn't make sense either. But, criticizing 40K demographics is like criticizing the demographics of a heavy metal album cover - you sort of trail off mid-sentence because why are you even talking about this?
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Is it cost-effective to load purple six-eyed cat things onto a space ship in order to ride them into battle on an alien planet light years away? I hope it is, because we're doing it either way.
Both settings are heavily Tolkien-influenced and then clumsily translated into space. 40K has more engaging world-building, and pulls science fiction tropes from Moorcock and Herbert rather than from Flash Gordon; that certainly makes a difference.

Is it mainly art direction? The individual settings that generally contribute to meta-D&D - greyhawk, realms, dragonlance! (although I did like the books as a kid) - all lack panache, but then D&D has Beholders and Mind Flayers and other stars of their setting which are hella more interesting than Zoots. Space Marines are cool-looking miniatures, and yeah that makes a big difference.

Maybe the people at Games Workshop just loved their work more. For how amateurish it is, TSR products (including especially Spelljammer and much of Dragonlance) were simultaneously remarkably cynical, often written by people who clearly had no passion for what they were doing.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Personal power wish-fulfillment. If you're a Space Marine, you're Beowulf or Cú Chulainn. In fact, after you decide which real-world society (or color scheme, or monster, or animal) you like, you can create your own society entirely based around it and get to BE that.

Like, I don't know the Lore well enough to state certainty that there weren't Raptors in 1st edition and there were in 3rd edition (11 years later), but I'm pretty sure there were. When I played Tabletop and I just decided to create my own chapter it wasn't a problem.

Giving the players ownership of the fluff helps a lot. Giving players enough power to individually impact the setting goes further.
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Post by maglag »

Something like over half the 40k fanbase are there for space marines, and that's only taking in account loyalist scum spech merines, then you have glorious spikey kayos space marines and sisters of battle/silence and Tau crisis suits and the whole mechanicus and even the orks have Mega Armor.

Meanwhile spelljammer just doesn't have any power armor equivalent.

Plus 40k explicitly runs in rule of cool/grimdark and actively encourages the players to go over the top with everything, so "logistics" or even "logic" of any kind are just funny jokes at best as you use armored high-tech vehicles to drive closer so you can hit the enemy with your sword.
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Post by DrPraetor »

I would've *assumed* that Spelljammer would let you play some guy who was flung into space from (go ahead, design your homeworld setting however you want.) So you don't have your own chapter regalia to set up - and 40K Space Marine chapters may reside at a happy medium where you both have freedom to design your chapter and a template into which you slot your ideas - but Spelljammer PCs can be from anywhere, right?

Like, pick any planet from any Star Trek episode, and be a Magic User from there if that's what you want; or be a human from Earth...

Oy! I'd completely forgotten the whole Lorraine Williams / Buck Rogers... thing. (transparently biased but useful summary for those who don't know - https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Lorraine_Williams ).

Given the timing, that must've played some role in how Spelljammer was designed/conceived.
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Post by souran »

FrankTrollman wrote:
It sort of seems like the predecessor to the Eberon fiasco. Someone mandated that all the things had to be in the setting, so there wasn't room for a plot or a reasonable selection of motivations for player characters to have.

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This is off topic but, could you do an OSSR or some other discussion on this? I would love to hear about what you know about Eberon becoming a supported D&D setting.

I like Eberon but it certiantly always seemed to me that it would be better if it didn't have to have a bunch of "typical" D&D stuff.

Note that this requirement is new.

Dragonlance does not have:

Drow
Orcs
Lycanthropes
Beholders
Mind Flayers
Aboleths
Bugbears
Hobgoblins (kinda, Dragonlance has "bigger goblins" that historically used Hobgoblin stats but they still had goblin social structure. They were not the highly effective miliaristic hobgoblins of typical D&D)

Actually, this is the wrong way to do this Dragonlance has

Humans
Elves (Wood, High, Sea [2 types])
Dwarves (moutain, hill, gully)
Kinder
Gnomes
Half Elves
Minotaurs
Goblins
Ogres [includes some kinds of giants]
Birdpeople (2 races)

All other humanoids are excluded and most abberations exist only as sort of mythological monsters of which there is 1 in the whole world.

So there was a time when D&D was willing to write settings and say "it doesn't have everything"
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

DrPraetor wrote:I'm pondering - why is WH40K cool, while Spelljammer is lame?
WH40K aimed for the same thing its 2000 AD source material did: the sweet spot between earnest and parody. And it more or less hit, and worked for the same reason: multiple levels of accessibility.

Spelljammer wound up being distinguished mostly by its goofy humor elements. They leaned real hard into giant space hamsters. That badly missed where geek culture was at the end of the 1980s.
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Post by souran »

DrPraetor wrote:
Is it mainly art direction? The individual settings that generally contribute to meta-D&D - greyhawk, realms, dragonlance! (although I did like the books as a kid) - all lack panache, but then D&D has Beholders and Mind Flayers and other stars of their setting which are hella more interesting than Zoots. Space Marines are cool-looking miniatures, and yeah that makes a big difference.
Ok, largely some of this has to be the different types of games that were being made. A 40K needs to create a world where every army can fight every other army. D&D was historically sold with a "you make your own setting!"

That said, the D&D worlds were supposed to have a hook

Greyhawk -> this is mordenkain's world and all his bunk about balance and the tyranny of good being as bad as the domination of evil comes exclusively from this setting.

Realms -> Ed Greenwoods version of this setting was supposed to be a magical post appocolypse where society has rebuilt itself after wizards messed the whole world up. 2E added the time of troubles which is the only setting wide event that anybody knows or cares about.

Dragonlance -> was supposed to be the setting for tolkenesque story based setting.
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Post by Username17 »

souran wrote:This is off topic but, could you do an OSSR or some other discussion on this? I would love to hear about what you know about Eberon becoming a supported D&D setting.

I like Eberon but it certiantly always seemed to me that it would be better if it didn't have to have a bunch of "typical" D&D stuff.
There are three stages to Eberon. The first is that it was Keith Baker's personal D&D setting that he's been working on and fucking with since well before 3rd edition was a thing.

The second stage was that it was heavily modified to meet the requirements of a setting submission contest that WotC held. The requirements of the contest were that it had to have a place for everything in Core 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. So if a lot of stuff feels like it's weirdly shoved in sideways at the last moment - that's because it was.

The third stage is that once it had won that contest (itself a result I strongly suspect of the author's name starting with the letter B, because they admitted that they received over ten times as many submissions as they thought hey were going to and their readers were totally snowed under), they handed it over to some guys on the C team to work it over and conform it to house publishing guidelines and power formatting. And this is where the Shifters and Warforged really took form - in that they had some very timid hack writers turn those setting elements from whatever the fuck they used to be into crappy "It Breeds True!" races that internal WotC development guidelines would allow to be +0LA races.

Eberon never got rebooted so much as heavily edited. It wasn't written from the ground up incorporating ideas which were modern at the time - it was just as it had been and then had stuff shoved into it and then stuff nerfed to fuckistan on short deadlines because of implacable corporate edicts.

So basically what you're looking at is that the "Great War" period was actually probably some dude's AD&D campaign and the "Shifters" were originally an army that was deliberately infected with Lycanthropy because that is the kind of thing that AD&D campaigns always end up doing. The post-Great War stuff is when Keith Baker converted it to 3rd edition for his personal use and everything was a lot less gonzo because 3rd edition is a lot less gonzo. But the actual thing you have in your hand was heavily modified in a hurry by Keith Baker to include places for Yrthaks and Girallons and then heavily sanded down by timid corporate yes-men who wanted to make the player options conform to their in-house idea of game balance.

The larger question of course is why Eberon won the original contest, considering that the most interesting parts of it were things that the development team were obviously terrified by. And honestly I think the selection was pretty much random. There were simply a shit tonne of submissions and it's very doubtful that even a quarter of those submissions actually got a fair reading. I suspect Eberon was merely the first submission they read that clearly delineated how it met the arbitrary requirements of the context.

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Post by DrPraetor »

As compared to most D&D campaigns, the other notable thing about Eberron is that it is an explicitly agnostic setting. I don't think this held together very well with supplements, and although it appealed to me, it was also one of the weaker aspects of the setting - for Evil gods in particular, they'd be competing for worshipers with Demon Lords who demonstrably do exist, right?

Anyway, this might have appealed to reviewers, and would also have shaved off some development time since you don't need workups for yet another bundle of rebranded Olympians. So if there was a tie-breaker among some slice of settings that conformed to the requirements, I speculate it was that.
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Post by Orca »

The mismatch between what the readers and developers liked is easiest to explain if they just weren't the same people. Communication failure is common and different likes is normal, especially if the readers weren't going to have to develop it.

And if the writeup included some image - maybe the halflings on dinosaurs attacking a train on the lightning rail - that alone could be enough to make it stand out compared to knights and castles #3 or adventurers vs. goblins #4.
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Post by maglag »

Orca wrote: And if the writeup included some image - maybe the halflings on dinosaurs attacking a train on the lightning rail - that alone could be enough to make it stand out compared to knights and castles #3 or adventurers vs. goblins #4.
We still got plenty of pics of different warforged and assorted magitech in the setting, which is definitely a plus for Eberron. Along artificers and whatnot, no other D&D setting really dared to go so full magitech, and that's one of the main draws for Eberron's fans.

Plus the world leader NPCs are all around level 12, strong enough to stand out, but not so strong they're virtually gods the party can never realistically hope to beat. Only the smoll pope girl of the silver flame has 18th level spellcasting, and that only while at her main temple.

Also scorpion drow are pretty bitching.
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Post by Username17 »

Maglag wrote:long artificers and whatnot, no other D&D setting really dared to go so full magitech, and that's one of the main draws for Eberron's fans.
The point is that in the contest Eberon wasn't competing against Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, it was competing against other settings submitted in the contest. So actually lots of its competitors went full magitech. You had settings inspired more by Final Fantasy and Cronotrigger or Frank Herbert than by Tolkien and Poul Anderson. And more directly relevant to thing thread, you had people whose starting home campaign was inspired by Spell Jammer or Planescape rather than Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms.

If the magitech is what sold Eberon to the readers, it wasn't that it went "full magitech," but rather that it hit some sweet spot point of personal preference with the readers where they were happy to include lightning rails and sky ships but drew a line at including gun swords, asteroid mining, or space elevators. When you look at over a thousand homebrew D&D settings, Eberon just isn't special. There are settings with world trees, and cities built on the backs of giant turtles, and adventures in spaaaace, and robots, and furries, and guns, and laser beams, and what have you. Remember that RIFTS started as basically a homebrew D&D campaign, and that's just how gonzo these things get and are.

Now you might say that the people who selected Eberon for the win did so because it was exactly as gonzo as they wanted to go and not more than that - that settings with giant robots or time machines or whatever were a bridge too far and Eberon was as out-there as they were willing to go. But I find that unpersuasive, because they admitted that one of the very first things they did upon declaring this setting to be the winner is to go about with a power sander to grind down the more out-there elements. Whatever the fuck the Shifters and Warforged were like in the original draft, the C-Team people brought in to rewrite the setting to corporate specifications were apparently horrified and nerfed them into those... things.

Which is why I suggest that in fact less than 10% of the settings got read at all, much less fairly considered, and that Eberon was given the nod for some presentational reason rather than anything intrinsic about the setting itself. And most likely, the setting was helped immensely by being submitted early and having an author whose name comes at the beginning of the alphabet so that it was physically read before the readers started skipping or skimming the remaining settings in the pile.

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Post by maglag »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Maglag wrote:long artificers and whatnot, no other D&D setting really dared to go so full magitech, and that's one of the main draws for Eberron's fans.
The point is that in the contest Eberon wasn't competing against Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, it was competing against other settings submitted in the contest. So actually lots of its competitors went full magitech. You had settings inspired more by Final Fantasy and Cronotrigger or Frank Herbert than by Tolkien and Poul Anderson. And more directly relevant to thing thread, you had people whose starting home campaign was inspired by Spell Jammer or Planescape rather than Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms.

If the magitech is what sold Eberon to the readers, it wasn't that it went "full magitech," but rather that it hit some sweet spot point of personal preference with the readers where they were happy to include lightning rails and sky ships but drew a line at including gun swords, asteroid mining, or space elevators. When you look at over a thousand homebrew D&D settings, Eberon just isn't special. There are settings with world trees, and cities built on the backs of giant turtles, and adventures in spaaaace, and robots, and furries, and guns, and laser beams, and what have you. Remember that RIFTS started as basically a homebrew D&D campaign, and that's just how gonzo these things get and are.

Now you might say that the people who selected Eberon for the win did so because it was exactly as gonzo as they wanted to go and not more than that - that settings with giant robots or time machines or whatever were a bridge too far and Eberon was as out-there as they were willing to go. But I find that unpersuasive, because they admitted that one of the very first things they did upon declaring this setting to be the winner is to go about with a power sander to grind down the more out-there elements. Whatever the fuck the Shifters and Warforged were like in the original draft, the C-Team people brought in to rewrite the setting to corporate specifications were apparently horrified and nerfed them into those... things.
Shifters (not magitech) may've not turned out that famous, but Eberron warforged (yes magitech) were and still are quite popular.

So yeah I would say that the original Eberron submission was the closest to that sweet magitech point and even if it needed a lot of polishing to satisfy corporate specifications everything else was just even whackier and would've been harder to polish.
FrankTrollman wrote: Which is why I suggest that in fact less than 10% of the settings got read at all, much less fairly considered, and that Eberon was given the nod for some presentational reason rather than anything intrinsic about the setting itself.
Even if it was just 10% of the submissions that got read, that still was a lot of competition Eberron had to go through to win.
FrankTrollman wrote: And most likely, the setting was helped immensely by being submitted early and having an author whose name comes at the beginning of the alphabet so that it was physically read before the readers started skipping or skimming the remaining settings in the pile.

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Post by pragma »

maglag wrote:Amazon? Apple? Google starting to name themselves literally Alphabet? Those are not coincidences.
Xerox, Yelp and Zendesk beg to differ.
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