11 June 2022

Overloaded Wildspace Voyage Dice & Gravity Slingshots

tl;dr: since space is enormous, keep journeys interesting with overloaded travel encounter dice and a speed-boost from using planetary gravity wells.

One of the things with travel in space is that space is very large which can make travel somewhat dull. I could see the upcoming Spelljammer reboot hand-wave wildspace travel with a serious speed boost for Spelljammers. Currently at 100 million miles/day, I could see a factor of 5 or 10 increase to make interplanetary travel quicker. For comparison - the squares on the right hand inner system are 200 million miles across, those on the left hand outer system are 400 million miles across.

(Digitally) Modified Planetary Display Map from my Spelljammer box


What that means practically - if we take Smoulder-space that I rolled up recently - starting off at Planet 3, the outermost of the inner planets, and heading out to the crystal sphere takes 130 days of travel, never mind wherever you are going after that. Assuming a quick 30 day jaunt to the next system, a similar flight in-system, doing a thing for a fortnight and returning, we rapidly arrive at a two year journey. That is significant travel time and with the removal of crystal spheres and the fade of deep wildspace into the Astral sea, I can see those journey times getting cut down.
While that would be a potential fix, I feel it a bit too hard of a wrench so I would suggest the following alternative: - overload your wildspace encounter dice - give planets a gravity-slingshot speed boost effect

First - most recently inspired by Traverse Fantasy but building Prismatic Wasteland and Necropraxis.

The existing Spelljammer encounter tables - as described here - start with 1-in-20 per space moved, increasing +1 if on a planet or asteroid belts orbit, if the planet is present, if you are in the inner system or if this space is patrolled - so as high as 5-in-20 if you are in the same 200 million mile across 'square' as an inner system planet that patrols its space - so correctly captures that space is large and empty - you will usually be at most 2-in-20 as you travel between planets in the inner system.

Let us take an overloaded encounter dice and say you roll every day of travel instead - assuming our speed remains the classic 100 million miles a day, this makes it two rolls per in-system square, four rolls per outer-system square.

1. Hazard (active, must engage)
2. Site (passive, choice to engage)
3. Sightings/Spoor (roll up a hazard, hold that for the next roll of 'hazard' but give some clues as to what it is)
4. Boon - something goes right on board; repairs complete, research gets a breakthrough, injured recover, an overlooked cache of supplies is found.
5. Crew Issues (a leadership test for the party, at minimum succeed a charisma check or checks involving the crew are at disadvantage until after next encounter. Swap with more specific inter-crew strife if appropriate)
6. Material Issues (lines part, sails split: make craft skill checks or apply Mending to avoid penalty to ship performance until repaired)
7+. Consume supplies (reduce ships consumable supplies by a day)

So we are having a lot more stuff happen - but is this making things feel like they are too crowded? I want to tweak that a little so let us say that you roll a dice size equal to the number of days since you were last near a planet. Start with a d4 - mostly you are running into things; 25% are unavoidable encounters, the rest are engage-at-will.

5 days out, rolling a d6 you start to have risk of crew and material issues, less chance of running into things. 7 days out you are rolling a d8, half your problems are now crew, materials and supply consumption. 9 days, 11 days, 13 days out, assuming you have set straight off into the void, staying away from planets, the dice sizes are increasing and it becomes rare that you run into things and the ship becomes your world of concerns.

Note - if you go directly between two random points, you should essentially never encounter anything if you don't want to - go a little off the plane of the elliptic and you are golden. So how do we drive encounters and make travel more reasonably interesting?

Let us make it a parties choice and say slingshotting around planets adds a speed boost for Spelljamming speed - say 33% faster per day per planetary class size - A = 1 day, B = 2 days, etc up to J = 10 days. This is enough to be interesting - more so for short inner-system hops, less for the long haul out to the system edge.

If it makes sense to pass near planets where you can, then more ships will be in/around planets, increasing the likelyhood of encounters. This then gives the players an interesting choice - run silent away from planets or chance some encounters and sling-shot around what planets they can.

How does this work in practice? In the old system there are 35 squares from Planet 3 to the Crystal Sphere, with most of that out-system so we have 2-in-20 chance of encounters, for an estimate of 3-4 encounters on the way.

Taking this new idea, running out to the crystal sphere would take 130 days if you avoided everything, 116 days if you pass near planets to get the speed boost. (Most of that time-saving was in the inner system - 10 days).

Assuming you rolled average on your overloaded dice, using dice sizes that increase once you are that many days away from your last planet, you would have 6 unavoidable encounters going quickly, 4 if you went quietly. So broadly we get similar 'hostile encounter' frequencies so balance in maintained but we are not rolling encounter die for no reason.

Our crew on the quick voyage also got 6 avoidable encounters, 12 boons or sightings, 8 issues with crew or material to deal with and 84 'supply consumption' events. I like this, I think it gives a bit of Sunless Sea style tension to the burn-down of resources and succeeds in making every roll interesting. The long haul to the crystal sphere is still a long haul. If you want to make inter-system traffic common-place then tweaking the placement of the crystal sphere (from 2x the distances of the outermost planet from the sun to 1.5x) would cut off ~1/3 of the journey, making it 3 months to the sphere. You could also say that for someone running straight at the shell, the last 10 days you are also in a similar gravity-well effect as the largest of planets but whatever you save coming, you lose going as then departing the crystal sphere to head back in-system is going to be slower. Let us say the gravity of crystal spheres cancels out across the journey.

All together this would revise our trip times to ~ 90 days to the shell, 30 days to the next system, 90 days in-system at the destination , doing a thing for a fortnight and returning, we get a total trip time of a year and two months - still not trivial but then 'I will be back at the end of this season next year' sounds suitably epic for sailing to another system.

So - to round all this up, to try and make long-haul wildspace voyages more interesting I would suggest:
1. Move crystal spheres in-system to 1.5x distance of the outer-most planet from the sun.
2. Give ships a gravity speed boost from proximity to planets, it speeds trips and makes encounters more sensible.
3. Overload the encounter dice and switch up your dice size with time since last planet to make ship-board issues more prominent on long trips.

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