tl:dr; a sweep up of Spelljammer feedback and thoughts on how to avoid the possible pitfalls.
Inspired to kick out this long-simmering post based on this thread by DM Sarah on updating Spelljammer. As she says "It's weird, zany, D&D in space. It's an encapsulation of that sci-fi fantasy blend written by, among others, C.S. Lewis and Madeline L'Engle."
I have been thinking about the difference between Spelljammer and Planescape and to me Spelljammer is about having a mobile base for your road adventures while in Planescape you have a static one or none at all such as being a caravan. This is also noted in the thread so the real question is what is going to make a Spelljammer campaign more fun than just doing a standard nautical one?
To start I want to note there is a school of thought which sees no value in running fantasy space adventures - 'why not run sci-fi' and I do not think there is any mechanical or design action that can be taken to address this. This is a genre preference, if you do not like it, you are not the audience for this. On the other hand I think it is telling that the most popular sci-fi property out there is a laser-swords and space-wizards one who's most high-tech battles resemble war of the 1940s. The aspects that people seem to love are the sword-and-planet aspects which suggests there is definitely a home for Spelljammer.
Collecting feedback points from people that have written about running Spelljammer campaigns there are a couple of points to address:
- that ship combat can be a grind if ranged bombardment only is used
- that the vastness of space makes time between encounters dull
- running games with unrestricted long distance travel is a pain in the neck for DMs
An insight from 'space combat is a grind' suggests using ships more like Roman galleys - the important action being close, ram, board rather than stand off bombardment. I played a lot of ship-to-ship combat with my Spelljammer set and indeed, you could spend a very long time hammering on each other even with very light craft such as Dragonflies and Wasps (12-15 hull points) before knocking an opponent out. Even with medium ships like Squidships, Nautiloids and Hammerheads (35-50 hull points) it took a long, long time using just heavy ballista to win a fight. Definitely your mages or boarding parties need to get involved. With a few exceptions I think the black-powder broadside concept is not the way to get the most enjoyment out of ship-to-ship combat in Spelljammer.
A second take-away is to have a robust down-time system to make things happening in the vastness of space interesting. Perhaps searching the back catalog of Star Trek for their on-board adventure episodes might be helpful, or reading Aubrey & Maturin books. Bottling the party up can be fun and interesting as long as it is intercut with lighter episodes, otherwise it becomes Sunless Sea, a horrifying grind of watching your resources fritter away and praying you find landfall before you run out. Maybe Sunless Sea is a good model for your table but make sure that is the game they want to play.
Further on the time-between encounters - as mentioned in the thread it seems wise to have all of the party members assigned some sort of role on the ship as opposed to being passive passengers. If someone built an all melee barbarian - and they are essentially pacing the fore-deck staring at the stars while others are busy operating the ship - for days and days on end - then both the player and their character could become understandably frustrated. Definitely a topic to discuss in session zero for a dedicated campaign and a thing to be aware of if you plan to hand a Spelljammer as treasure to a group.
For standard encounters - things you run into in the Void of Wildspace - the standard Spelljammer encounter tables have a 5% per day chance of running into something. This means Wildspace is considerably more crowded than we would intuitively think. I think a good concept to have in mind for this is trade routes; the relative positions of planets and shortest routes between them are going to make the point to point routes much more highly travelled than others. Should a group wish to avoid detection then taking a day to put a dog-leg into their route off the direct line would make the trip much, much quieter. Many of the player comments from the era focus on letting go of the sense that the Void is as empty as interplanetary space in the real world - there is a lot more stuff floating about.
Next there is a whole other post worth of discussion to be had on 'what if your players just use their flying ship to aerially bombard their foes' while staying on planet. In short I think this should be manageable. Cloud giant flying castles and big dragons already exist and both are examples of significant aerial threats. This means anyone with a castle, city, lair, or whatever must have put some thought into 'what if something drops out of the sky on me'. Danger from the sky will be somewhere at the back of any fantasy-land dwellers mind. A realm will probably have sky-knights, flying wizards or other counter-measures for if a big dragon turned up - or a flock of winged demons - or any one of a wide vareity of aerial threats. I would certainly allow a party to get away with a creative first use of a Spelljammer to steam-roller a terrestrial opponent but after that the opposition is aware they have a flying ship and will react accordingly. Fool me once, shame on me, and so on.
As for the challenge for DMs of the players just punching up to 'ludicrous speed' and dissappearing off out of your planned sandbox, that it simply something you must be ready for. This is one of the intrinsic elements of a Spelljammer campaign, if you want to do Spelljammer, this is the level of freedom you are giving to the players. If ever there was a time to build your 'improv in a hurry' muscle this would be the circumstances. There are a bunch of useful encounter tables out there to be used. In extremis, if the players really are heading off your map and you really have no idea what is there, buy some time with an encounter or two on board, throw in some 'near orbit' encounters on arrival then tell your players you need a little more time and call the session early. As long as it doesn't happen every week, they are unlikely to rage-quit your campaign.
I intend to do a few more posts on this - first off on 'how to improv up a systems worth of stuff' and second on what the existing Spelljammer encounters look like. I may add more if inspiration strikes.
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