I have an admission to make. When Spelljammer came out in the 80’s I thought the setting idea was the stupidest thing going. Not interested at all, completely dismissed it. Primarily that was because I wanted my escapism and fantasy to have a thread of realism, at least as much realism as could exist in a game with wizards and monsters. Spelljammer represented absurdity to me and was not what I was looking for in a game.
This edition of Spelljammer, after reading the books, actually I think there could be a lot of fun in the setting. Some of the ideas are very cool. I want to cover my thoughts on the new books first, then some commentary on the Spelljammer setting.
There is a fair bit of negative commentary around the Spelljammer books online. This is well-deserved. While I am pleased with the setting and the books, the criticisms they have drawn are well warranted. All the books are light-weight and slim. The art is spectacular, but that doesn’t do much for game play.
The Adventurer’s Guide, already a slender volume, spends the bulk of it’s pages detailing ships that are used in the astral plane. It’s more a vehicle supplement than a rules guide. The addendum to that is the handful of additional playable races. The rules that it does present are lightweight, and, in at least one instance, poorly thought out and contradictory.
Boo’s Astral Menagerie is good. It skews to the higher power monsters, making it seem like the setting is more appropriate to mid to high level characters, which it may well be. It also leans a little into the absurdity of the setting with monsters like evil “Space Clowns”. Although, I admittedly have a greater liking for that sort of thing now. I also think the writers missed a fantastic opportunity to not have the Space Clown’s ships referred to as “Carnivals”. The word sounds close enough to caravel to easily pull it off and clowns travelling in Carnivals just seems apropos.
The Light of Xaryxis. It’s a module. It’s a module with an interesting structure, breaking the adventure into 4 parts. It didn’t deserve a hardcover treatment, but that seems to be the way most of the books are going.
The Good
The basics of the setting is pretty fun. I mean, it could be emulated in terrestrial sense with an archipelago world, where all the civilizations are separated onto small islands spaced out in large oceans. But the idea of flying ships is fun and imaginative and open to great ideas and games. the setting more easily lends itself to high magics and more imaginative elements.
The Bad
The amount of material provided for gameplay in this set is very light. The rules don’t answer a ton of questions that I would have liked them to such as encounter ranges, cannon balls in the astral void, ship to ship combat, etc. World and environment construction is left to “basically whatever you want”. The rules for things like air are a ridiculous hack to avoid having to think, with a minor nod to the idea that more people makes the air go bad more quickly, but zero guidelines on how that should work. Same with the gravity planes idea, no real guidelines on how that works except inconsistent rulings like “a person who falls overboard drifts away from the ship” along with “Something that enters the ships bubble is captured by it’s gravity and is pulled into the ship until it bumps against the hull”. My assumption, aside from the absurd inconsistency in the gravity, is that these ideas would involve math. Maybe a much simplified, rule of thumb, math, but math nonetheless. Which I think is something gaming has distanced itself from to allow greater access by a larger audience. While I criticize the lack of rules, I applaud the access, so I don’t really have a solution to this either. The “nuts and bolts” nerds like myself love the crunchy bits, the more player oriented people just get repelled by it.
I say that the lack of rules is bad from the standpoint of the books being a product, but honestly, that might also be put in the good category since D&D is essentially a game that you play however the GM and players decide to play it.
The UGLY
This is an expensive set for the quality of what’s presented. It’s not really worth the price. Buy the pdfs on DriveThru if they are cheaper, it would be a more satisfying investment.
My TAKE
The guidebook doesn’t have enough meat to make it valuable. Basically a short 10 page booklet would have covered everything it had to say. The ships were valuable as examples to work from, and it gives a lot of fantastic examples, which is great since the book is relatively devoid of other useful content.
The menagerie is the best book in the set, but some of them are easily extrapolated from sea monsters from other publications with light adaptation to the settings. Scavvers are small to large sharks, depending on the variety and they fly through the ‘air’. Also, since there is no aging or hunger in the Astral plane, why are there sharks, or more specifically, why do they *act* like sharks? The monsters, in many cases, don’t match the setting very well. I get that the intent is a very “vast ocean” setting experience, but this is where the inconsistencies are all over the place.
If I had to imagine a justification then I would think that sharks are some indication of an astral presence that is some life-hunger or negative material plane presence, and that they would have some differing abilities than sharks like life drain, or some such. The alternative I would be more likely to lean towards, is throwing out the “Astral Sea” rules as a place where there is no need for air or food, and nothing ages and no navigation is ever needed and treat it more like an actual sea, it needs to be navigated, bring enough food. Then scavvers are sharks because they have to find food. I think some changes like this will be necessary for anyone playing in this setting and wanting to give it any more thought than munchkin activities.
The adventure is weak and very railroaded, with GM interventions built into the module in many areas to save the PC’s or move them along the track. Encounters where the PCs might be taxed or overwhelmed have built in deus-ex-machina’s that come along to prevent or interrupt the encounter. While I love the structure of the module, the content is bad. The basis of the module is also weak, with no explanation of why there are no heroes on the home world that are stronger than the low mid-level party. It thrusts a relatively weak group of adventurers into a planet saving story line that, like the rest of the module, is just railroaded along. Most of the decision making is NPC’s dragging a confused group of players around to the important events.
All-in-All, I am very happy I bought it. Without investing in the hardcovers I would never have looked at the setting at all and I am very pleased that I did. If you are the type that found the setting interesting and would look to get the materials, maybe get the pdfs or whatever is cheaper.
