03 September 2022

Capsule Reviews #4: Flying Ship Combat Rules

Since the new Spelljammer dropped there has been an explosion of new rulesets or new spotlight cast on existing ones. Below are the ones I have found worthy of the name:

1. Tales from the Glass Guarded World, a spelljamming podcast has had their own narrative flying ship combat rules available for a while. Runs with distance bands and a focus on actions available to PC's playing officers - bosun, helmsman, weapon crew, etc. 20 pages.

2. Old Dungeon Master updated a set of OD&D skyship combat rules to 5e - the provenance can be seen in they are called Skyships not Spelljammers. This is their set of house rules which I find reassuring - other peoples table-tested stuff is always good. There is old-school crunch in here, with base stats and condition multipliers. Interesting in that it is gridless but still crunchy with pursuit and evasion rules and things like crew archery as well as PC officer actions. 22 pages.

3. Seafaring in Fifth Edition by u/RocksInMyDryer are ship rules that include up and down within them, not specifically flying ship rules but they can work. Draws on lots of 3.5e resources for structures then updates them to get a comprehensive 5e ruleset. Aimed at seafaring but the combat system could be used for flying ships. Based off which of the ships is "favoured" by conditions in a given round. 30 pages, includes ships, encounters & monsters.

4. Wildjammer (v0.97.2) adapts a bunch of ideas from DarkMatter. Comprehensive ~100 page supplement with species, subclasses, spells, locations, factions etc. Introduces 'mega scale' for handling ship scale ~ 100:1 to normal. Comprehensive, somewhat dense, everything is in here but it requires some careful reading.

5. Spelljammer Combat Expanded (v1.4) is a straight up reaction to the new 5e Spelljammer and patches in missing things. 20 pages with actions for officer positions, takes a 'skill check' driven approach, has solid guidance on how to set up for grids which is good.

6. Snoop's Superb Spelljammer Supplement v7 on GM Binder is one of the more complex set-ups with movement points, some good old-school crunch like minor and major helms but also a handy flowchart at the back to help guide you through the detail.

7. I am also going to check out the old 3e Ship Construction and Combat Rules on Spelljammer.org as one of the projects that progressed during the long twilight between official Spelljammers. Has all the expected 3e crunch including how to handle ships larger than a single hex which is good practical guidance to have.

I hope to get these properly table-tested in the coming months. Others that we tested previously:

8. Shadow of the Spider Moon (3.5e, published in Polygon #151 / Dungeon #92) - our playtest

9. Aces High published in Arcadia issue #3 - our playtest

10. AD&D Spelljammer (AD&D, available as print on demand from DriveThruRPG) - our playtest

11. Calidar skyship combat rules (OD&D, by Bruce Heard who did the original D&D skyship in Voyages of the Princess Ark) - our playtest

Finally this thread on Reddit is a round up of systems - Collection of 5e ship vs. ship combat rules for spelljammers - with a lot of overlap with here but also a few seeds of cool ideas like spell-slots-for-movement-boosts.

Consensus appears to be that PC's should have ship-combat specific actions, there should be some ranged combat system but otherwise there are a lot of variations on the theme here to try out.

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