First recapping 'why bother at all' - what is a Spelljamming campaign supposed to be like?
- people like how it snaps onto any setting.
- weird aliens, vast, strange space and cool ships are important.
- the 'space swash-buckling' atmosphere was mentioned a lot (in posts pre-5e).
- a solid minority liked the odd celestial mechanics, space travel rules and the tool kit to allow exploration.
Overall this reads as a mandate to turn up the dial on what makes Spelljammer unique. Then collecting feedback points from people that have written about running Spelljammer campaigns there are a couple of points to keep in mind:
- 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.
So together I read all this as a charter for 'getting the big, weird setting right' - making it feel huge and strange without the scale making it a boring grind. We have swept up existing content on encounters but need a way to make it specific to your system, so here we will talk about how to create the 'flavour' filters to allow you to rapidly adapt to the party rocking up in a different sphere. This is also my general 'quick and dirty' world building process.
I build out my star system as part of any campaign world I do - roll it up from the Concordance of Arcane Space (pp74-77) - because the weird stuff that might turn up will be visible to the party more likely than not. Planar hijinks can be accessed through the back of your wardrobe but the party was always able to look up. For Spelljammer, I think you need a little of this specific kind of prep-work that sets you to improv whatever you may subsequently need.
The core questions are - what is out there and who is travelling between it. Once you know those two, you can hang whatever you need off those. The broad analogy is - should the players come to a coastal town, then it will help if you have an idea of what sea faring nations and peoples are on this body of water, and thus what travellers and traders they may run into. Of course, you can let all this be narratively driven if you have a table of gamers that really grok the tone you are going for with Spelljammer - but a lot of the love for the setting comes from exploration and discovery so having a handful of mysteries is going to be helpful.
My approach is:
- generate a system, see what types of worlds I have gotten my hands on. I will use an old example here to not spoil my current table.
- figure out what is present on each of the major habitable entities.
- give a quick think to which among these might be interacting with one another across Wildspace and by what means.
- collate a list of Wildspace factions to use as your flavour filter.
First on generating a system - an alternative is just to free-hand this if you have cool ideas - want to do a multi-moon gas giant set up? Stick one in. The 'super-habitable planets' article as one of my great inspirations for what could be life-sustaining and therefore entertaining systems. I find the random seeds of generators help push me to be more creative and add more depth to my systems. There is a random crystal sphere generator that replicates the tables in Concordance of Arcane Space or if you want more standard systems there are other decent random system generators out there. Old pulp novels are good as well for the core assumption that environments might be hostile but they will usually be liveable. The image below is a rolled up system with a two hot mercury-like inner planets, a barren rocky planet with 5 moons, the campaign homeworld (a Pangaea-era Earth), an air-world and a distant pluto-like small rocky planet.
Sketch of system from Hikuru campaign
For me, I usually choose some theme as the first thing I do; in this case this was a system where the elemental genies had carved up the available territory between them. The seed for this was the wish to set up an Al-Qadim inspired swash-buckling campaign in a homebrewed world and genie feature heavily in that. Next I usually assume the chosen theme smushed into the classic fantasy archetype world and triumphed - therefore bits of the fantasy archetypes have snapped off, spiraled away and survive elsewhere. This gives the method of populating your system - assign all the major pieces for your chosen theme so each has a home, then fill in any gaps that at the edges.
This method gives a 'trends towards archetypal fantasy' approach - you could decide other things - the main theme is collapsing and being encroached upon by resurgent nature, worlds are turning barren or entering volcanic activity so things are changing. Devils and demons have invaded or some critter swarm is creating a dyson-sphere mega-hive. In any case pick a theme or two and then distribute them about your generated planets.
For the example above, the two inner hot worlds are the realms of the efreeti. The dao rule the large, rocky third planet. The marids command the waters of the campaign homeworld and the djinni dominate the fifth frigid, ringed air world. For what else might be there, let us take the classic 'elder races' of elves and dwarves: the tiny outermost rocky world has been left to the dwarves, where they have been pushed after being driven off the 3rd and 4th planets. The elves survive on the 4th planet (as vassals to the marids) and on moons throughout the system. Above the 3rd world they are free while above the 5th they are vassals to the djinni.
Next there is the question of who might be space-faring and what are they up to? Here the genie entirely use their planar powers so their Wildspace presence is only through proxies. The older powers that had been there before - dwarves and elves - occupy the edges of the system but rule Wildspace. The dwarves are set up on 6th distant outer rocky planet. The elves are set up on the moons of the frigid air world next in towards the sun and on some other moons throughout the system. The elves generally keep the dwarves bottled up in the outer system. Noone is friendly to one another - the elf factions fight one another on sight - free and vassals to the djinni and both will attack the dwarves if they find them. Interplanetary trade will be dominated by the genie-sworn elves, with anyone else being pirates or raiders.
So lastly we come to our 'flavour list' informed by what we have so far; relatively rare encounters with space-faring dwarves or free elves, more common with the djinni-sworn elves, normal amount of wild-space dwelling oddities, then appropriate near-planet encounters - for the 1st, 2nd and 5th worlds a good chance of flying efreeti or djinni or their servants. For the 3rd, free elves, for the 4th, the flyers of the land nations, including the realms where the party starts.
All this together I would use to create a pair of tables for Wildspace between planets. For inter-planetary Wildspace:
| 20% | Wildspace hazard |
| 20% | Wildspace fauna |
| 20% | Djinni-sworn elves |
| 20% | Wreck or site |
| 10% | Free-elves |
| 10% | Space-faring dwarves |
And for near-planet space:
| 20% | Local flyers - military |
| 20% | Local flyers - civilians |
| 20% | High-flying planetary fauna |
| 10% | Wildspace fauna |
| 10% | Djinni-sworn elves |
| 5% | Free-elves |
| 5% | Space-faring dwarves |
Once your group makes planetfall the the flavour list says who should be the major group on each planet - unless you have a good reason for otherwise, I would say they encounter the major power. My major push to suggest this is that it gets you to the juiciest bits of your setting quickly. Perhaps avoid having the party land directly on whatever the major plot hook / setting wrinkle for that planet is - but have them land somewhere that they can learn about it. While it might be statistically reasonable that a party could bounce from planet to planet mostly finding wilderness or scattered farming settlements this may well feel like a missed opportunity - especially if the party decides the planet is dull as mud and not worth ever returning to. In this case your cunning setting hooks will go to waste.
Using a generic hex-crawl generator - such as this handy one from Deeper Into The Dungeon - flavoured by the dominant spacefaring power of the planet should provide enough substance to manage the players randomly striking out for points unknown within your system.
But what, you ask, if the players get completely carried away and fly their 'jammer through a planar gate or out across the phlogiston or some other such long haul voyage into the unknown? What should you do assuming you want to avoid a stellar version of the Quantum Ogre and be able to whip up new crystal spheres and populate new worlds in a hurry?
Depending on how much you like to fly by the seat of your pants you can pregen a couple of systems to be pulled out at random or dice them up as needed at the table. While I might usually advise prepping big-picture things ahead of time, there is potentially an added player satisfaction for them to know they have gone off the map and hear the dice are falling to tell them what they find, even if they have to wait for it. This could well represent what they manage to ascertain as they arrive in a new sphere - first the major features can be observed, then they will have to scout to find out more. Maybe they leave the sphere and never look back in which case no effort has been wasted.
Should the party choose to push on then having an appropriate generator up your sleeve would be good. For wierd fantasy, a good example is the resources at Lizardman Diaries such as the Weird Fantasy Location Generator to create prompts for new worlds and the Weird Fantasy Player Class Generator to create factions and nations to populate them. Rolling up d6 of each and apply them to the existing content on encounters and that should be good enough if the players are just sprinting through or raiding a sphere.
Alternatively this 'how to generate a prime world' article will also serve for whipping up new planets or try creating a new culture first and then retro-fitting the planet that culture needs.
So to wrap up - to lean into the 'discovering the vast, strange depths of space' aspect of Spelljammer, I find a combination of random generation to give you odd pieces for what is out there and then thinking through the implications of those pieces to generate a flavour filter that lets you generate who is travelling about Wildspace. This lets you keep the core encounter tables while re-skinning them with the flavour filter and lets deep space discovery feel different and interesting.
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