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dailyadventureprompts · 2 years

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Spelljammer is coming out soon, do you have any adventure ideas for Spelljammer? Or at least some open sea adventures you have that we could reflavor appropriately ?

Drafting the Adventure: Spelljamming

It’s been a while since I penned my initial thoughts on sailing the astral sea, and since that time, a few things have changed:

WoTC revived the setting with kickass art and not much else, disappointing just about the entire fandom and yet again requiring us the players to do the design work for them.

I binged all of @dimension20official‘s “A Starstruck Odyssey”, which not only got me really hype to run a space game but showed me a mechanical basis on which it could function ( seriously friends, go watch Starstruck)

My Friend group decided to rewatch Treasure Planet, one of the formative pillars of my love of fantasy, and it got me thinking about how amazing the concept of space-pirate-fantasy is. I am and always will be a slut for cosmic wonder and there’s just something about the combination of these concepts that makes my brain come alive.

And so, I’ve decided to take a crack at overhauling Spelljammer, partially to bring it in line with my own version of the d&d cosmos and partially because as a game designer I can’t help but stare at all the negative space WotC gave us and imagine various possibilities. Mine’s not going to be a be all end all, and just like every homebrew fix I encourage you to look at different options until you find one that feels right to you and your table.

Now, below the cut I’m going to go into things about the spelljammer setting and specific mechanics I think will be useful, but before I do I’m going to give you folks a little preview of my opinions by going off on a meaningless tangent:

WHY THE HELL ARE SPELLJAMMING HELMS CHAIRS? No really, think about it. Apart from the fact that “Helm” specifically refers to the wheel and steering apparatus of a ship, the fantasy that spelljammer is supposed to be pulling from is nautical adventure; steely eyed captains masterfully piloting their vessels along the edge of a storm, the ship and their body pulling as one against the elements. The decision to make the helms chairs that channel magic rather than a wheel that requires sill turns the act of cruising through the cosmos into a mostly passive act, which I suppose mirrors the design decision to not actually require any input on the part of the jammer’s crew in order to sail it. It’s not even that the designers were trying to emulate other popular sci-fi properties like starwars/trek, because despite the fact that people sit down while piloting in those settings, ships have an entire crew manning different stations and doing things. It’s almost like in trying to simplify a complicated game system, WotC decided that it would be better to remove ANY chance at interesting gameplay rather than put out a rules system that wouldn’t please everyone.

First off, I have to plug SW5E, The Dimension 20 crew used it as the architecture for their space game and after multiple hours of stress testing I couldn’t be more impressed. All the info is available for free online, and the more I dig into it, the more genius I find it:

Characters are given a second “deployment” class, which represents their position on the ship and the actions they can take in ship to ship combat. This not only means that ship to ship combat can actually happen ( unlike the limp pre-boarding actions of default spelljammer), but they get a chance to grow and customize their character. These deployments are synergistic with how their mechanics work, facilitating a feeling that the crew is actually working together.

Lost of gear and upgrades for ships, which make a great resource sync for a mid to high level party that’s sorely lacking in default d&d.

A well fleshed out “power” system for the engineer to tinker with. I’ve had lots of players who’ve wanted to fulfill this role before but I’ve never seen a better version of it in numerous other space games.

Actual timeframes for how long it takes to get places at both impulse and warp speed to provide a guideline for narration and adventure building

An actual navigation system for ships that’s so good I’m considering backwards engineering it into regular exploration rules. Simple enough to breeze over in non-hostile situations but perfectly tuned to be a centerpoint of mid combat drama for those characters who want to do more than shoot things.

A mechanical tug of war: Apart from other controversies with Spelljammer’s release ( which I’m not going to get into here), the main problem is that the audience for d&d has grown so large that they’re never going to be happy with one level of complexity. On one hand you have a casual audience who’s entertained with doing the yearly cinematic adventure module, and standing on the exact opposite side of the room from them are the people who are furious they didn’t get an update to the super clunky rules from 2nd edition. Between them are the ACTUAL core d&d audience, people who are into the game enough to want some mechanical complexity but not so much that they want their enjoyment of things choked out by having to refer to a chart every 10 minutes.

In my personal opinion, we are best served by remembering that 5e was built on the idea of having a streamlined core system into which rules modules ( which would hopefully be equally streamlined) could be slotted, dialing up focus and complexity as needed depending on the different campaigns you ran. 5e was never meant to be a comprehensive ruleset, and even if WotC has forgotten to do the actual work, we the audience can kitbash something together to get the game the way we want it.... not that we should actually have to.

It’s not space, and that’s the point: what makes the spelljammer setting so interesting is that it’s a radical departure from most other “realistic” scifi settings out there. It harkens back to Flash Gordon, Jules Verne, and Edger Rice Boroughs, the things that inspired starwars and the original d&d. Planets that are the forgotten colonies of long vanished empires, mad tyrants ruling haunted moons, smuggler ports built into asteroid fields, all these things are shlocky, pulpy, and/or campy as hell and we should lean into that when we’re considering spelljammer adventures in the future. Personally I can’t even think about the name without imagining vast reaches of stars and nebula matter resounding with the sounds of a sickass 80s inspired guitar solo. Where I think the reboot fails conceptually is that it’s ossified: the same weird but not too weird iconography and alien species from the original publishing without daring to make it any more wild. I’ve been hearing about the gun hippos since I got into the hobby 20 years ago, they’ve surely had more interesting ideas since then, right?

Here’s some kitchen sink ideas to help make your wildspace a little more wild:

It’s not a lack of air that’ll kill you in the astral sea, it’s a lack of coherence. If the astral sea is the realm of dreams and thought from which gods and worlds are born, it’s safe to say that the major threat to travellers isn’t the cold vacuum we’d expect from our own off-planet adventures. Instead, prolonged exposure to the astral risks a character becoming less and less real, slowly hollowed out into a barely-there concept of their former self. Ships, celestial bodies, and void suits assert a degree of reality in the space around them, not just providing an environment where characters CAN breathe, but an environment in which they MUST, in order to prevent their respiratory system from being forgotten. Similarly this is why you need to pack food and other supplies from a physical world (narratively encouraging trade and battles over resources), because eating nothing but imagined delicacies or simply ignoring your body’s need to eat is liable to make your digestive system imaginary as well

When I read the entry on astral elves, I couldn’t help but be horrified: entire empires of immortals who never slept, ate, or aged, existing in a perpetual state of emotional and chronological detachment. While the packed in adventure did paint some of these elves as the villains, I feel as if they didn’t do enough to follow through on the concept. Knowing how badly sensory deprivation fucks with the human mind, I couldn’t help but imagine the astral elves as twitchy, impulse driven wrecks existing only in the moment and carrying around tens of millennia of unresolved trauma. We’ve seen space empires before, but what we haven’t seen are derelict warships of maddened immortals hurdling towards conflict with eons of combat experience and an unquenchable desire to feel something, ANYTHING, even if it means ramming your ship along with theirs into an asteroid to ensure a confrontation. Elves as warboys, tell me that doesn’t rule.

If you want the age of sail/pulp scifi themes of spelljammer to be anything more than a surface level aesthetic, consider reading up on some of the underlying economics that fuelled it, namely colonialism, slavery, and the exploitation of the frontier. While it’s perfeclty fine to have a rose-tinted cosmos where people adventure for adventures sake, WotC’s own missteps with the hadozee show that its all too easy to step into fucked up territory if we’re not mindful. Suffice to say, if you’re going to have space pirates in the space caribbean, figure out who’s growing the space spices they’re raiding from the space merchants.

Also, for those who might want direct access to my catalogue of adventures:

Astral

Sailing

Spelljammer