I had this on order, got it as soon as it came out and have commented on some aspects already - particularly thoughts at the time of the Spelljammer announcement where I thought 'with all these ship minis, there must be some ship combat system, right?' and then as the first previews hit the web on How Much Flying Ship Combat System Is Enough? I also managed to table test the combat rules before I got to finalising this.
At this point I feel a bit monkeys-pawed. I said 'hey, for an RPG sourcebook, all you really need is evocative art and you can pretty much cook up everything else from there'. Yes. Well.
So what is all this stuff you get in the box?
First the Astral Adventurers Guide - the setting gazetteer 64 pages
Second Boos Astral Menagerie - a bestiary
Third Light of Xaryis - an adventure
Lastly a DM's screen.
So what are these like individually? Starting from the best stuff.
The DM screen is really nice with a bunch of useful tables on it including initial attitude - good addition - range bands for starting a wildspace encounter and a bunch of random ships to be encountered. The art across the front of a dead god in astral space is a great tone-setter for any Spelljamming table.
The Bestiary does what it says on the tin, monsters, a good range, some nice evocative ones, some big ship-scale ones, a good, inspirational read with lots to set the gears whirring. There is a decent range in here which is more important than usual because you need high-CR monsters not to threaten high level parties but to go head-to-head with ships and their ballistae and mangonels.
The Adventure is ok. There is good stuff in here, some nice set pieces but for my own table I have hacked it up entirely because the premise is shaky and then it drops into the unfortunate recent trend of NPC A points you to NPC B. NPC B points you onwards to the next location, etc, etc. with little space for the players to figure anything out on their own or get creative. A couple of giant rail-roady bits just would not fly with any players I would scrape together - take a fleet into a doomed engagement? Not likely. There are some weird assumptions in here like players will not take a ship they capture because it might be a focus for revenge - having just crushed a foe, why would they fear their vengeance? But there are good components in here - an infested wreck that serves as a good ship-dungeon, some engagements, both naval and on foot, there are things I can use.
Astral Adventurers Guide. To open, we get some good stuff - races that are interesting; revisiting some classics of the setting such as Giff, Hadozee and Plasmoids and bringing in some other favourites like the Thri-keen.
A strong point throughout the book, possibly its strongest, is the great, evocative art that sets the tone that Wildspace is not the howling black void of our own reality but a much more life-filled nebula-like zone. One particular piece that caught my eye was p17 - a hammership ramming a tyrant ship with 10 visible beholders bailing out - I hope the crew of that hammership has a great follow up plan because frankly that looks like an frying-pan-to-fire situation.
We see a lot of the old 2e illustrations return - the gravity plane diagram, the ship schematics - and I think it is a good, deep well of original aesthetic and vibe to draw from. Great atmospherics continues in a focus on sensations of flying a ship with a Spelljamming helm. There was an interesting change in describing the Rock of Bral compared to 2e; we start with the heights and the powers-that-be before working down to the docks, vs. working up from the docks where new arrivals would be likely to start. I am sure there is something in there about how adventurers are viewed between the editions - from roguish freebooters in 2e to big-damn-heroes in 5e.
Reading through the Astral section we get a brief, interesting implication in the Astral Plane diagram that crystal spheres orbitted dead gods. The idea of dead gods being the organising property of the astral is cool - we have long had 'the dreaming dead' as part of the lore, very interesting to think what if all of the material is just the dreamstuff of old dead gods.
Gravityless rules are reasonable; nice and simple, elegant even. Could have done with more like this.
A lot of the Adventurers Guide is ship schematics - two pages each for sixteen ships making up half the total book. There is some cool new things like the Scorpionship being able to traverse land, and fight with its claws - suddenly it is a really interesting siege machine. Of each two page spread we get a half-page art piece with the ship in action which is nice but we also get a half page of repeated statistics - every ship has the ballista and mangonel statistics printed on it. I guess the point was to have it be an open reference in front of the DM but it means we have 1/8 of the whole book is repeated siege weapon statistics.
This I have a problem with because the mechanics are so lacking elsewhere - time and again the offical rules in the book are 'DM should wing it'.
For the Spelljamming Helms themselves, everything has been flattened - no ship rating, no differences in speed - any helm driven by any magic user is equal. We retain our punch 100 million miles a day Spelljamming speed but our non jamming speed is now ships speed, no differences if in water or air or subaquatic (movement in SJ helm description - move up to ship speed.) Thus a Shrike or Damselfly with 70' movement get to set terms of engagement - either nothing can catch them or nothing can escape. Similarly a squidship, despite being the lighter ship (35ft fly speed, 300hp) can never escape a hammership (40ft fly speed, 400hp) which seems odd - there seems to be a light/quick vs heavy/slow trade off that is broken.
"The DM must decide how long it takes a spelljamming ship to travel from one world to another" using sphere diagrams. These are mostly fine, it is a slightly weird expression of the same system diagrams we have always had but fine. Realmspace in the Spelljammer Academy appendix is exactly as it always was, Xaryxispace is tiny - with planet closer to the astral border than the sun!
Traversing the astral - it has gravity and air, PCs can propel by thought alone, everything has directional awareness. DM decides the distance; this is the 'plot speed' that reduces the flight times we might have expected. Interesting that if the astral as a whole has gravity then it is all a sea? There can be no 3D space combat on the astral as a spelljammer cannot climb off the gravity plane? Also a creature is going to outpace a spelljammer under almost all circumstances.
Another bit of hand-wavy load thrown at the DM is how long does it take air to get stale or toxic. No matter the size of the ship, it is always 120 days, no matter what. Crew size is of no account up to the standard crew size then above that "A ship that has more than a standard crew complement will degrade the quality of its air supply more quickly." That is it, that is all the topic is mentioned. I guess I do the math myself? Do plants help? Everything again just dumped off on me.
Picture below is essentially all the combat rules and they hardly mention ship to ship combat.
Practically we get no ship-to-ship rules; what we get is:
- decide encounter start distance
- roll side initiative
- in the ship weapons sidebar the advice is "PCs are better to act alone" and not use ship weapons
- ships can move up to speed per round, helmsman decides approach or move away
- no ship orientation, reorientation at will, all weapons can be fired regardless of facing
- within 5' ship to ship movement is safe, can be done with 'readied' action
- crashes, cool implications of making gravity planes change... but reorientation is automatic so how would it ever occur?
- repairs in dock - 1hp a day, with no way to influence? More dock workers? Mending nice but again, multiple mending people working on it?
The Nightspider is the perfect illustration of how things are weird - weapons are declared to have facings, but the spelljammer can reorient at will even though the Spelljamming helm description says "You can steer the vessel, albeit in a somewhat clumsy fashion, in much the way that a rudder or oars can be used to maneuver a seafaring ship." So does the ship swing wildly every round to bring everything to bear? RAW, yes. All the Nightspiders weapons are pointed out the back but that is apparently irrelvant. It was a fun thing to manage in other combat systems, a light, fast ship with a rear-facing arsenal but now it effectively behaves like an attack helicopter?
This dumps the whole thing onto the DM's lap - they have to decide whether ships are ponderous or turn on a dime - with no way to say some ships are agile, other are less so - everything is the same - this is worse than no support, the DM's are going to have to rule against RAW one way or another - either have a rule or don't.
Even if you want to go for swashbuckling Flash Gordon 'space travel makes no sense' style - all this stuff could be optional rules for people who want to do something a bit more tense and long haul voyage style where the ship and its condition actually matters.
From the point of view of a DM the most irritating thing was the lack of guidance on how to create wildspace systems - 'just use these two samples' from the adventure - one of which is for an anomalously tiny system, one of which is for a system half-way to being destroyed by a black-hole. Comparing those to Realmspace, Greyspace or our own system shows they are much, much smaller than anything we had before. There is very little support here for DM's on making weird planets, strange wildspace anomalies, anything like that - just instructions to wing it. What the hell am I buying this for? I could have looked at the art in the ads and launch articles and winged it.
Wrap up
The thing that grinds my gears is that for the money, the size of this set on my shelf, for all the obvious care and attention that has gone into it through the art-work and the fairly clear vision that the creators had it leaves me stranded as a DM.
Comparing this to Brancalonia or Ruins of Symbaroum, two comparable 5e settings I have looked at recently; all share evocative art, all share character specific stuff (subclasses, backgrounds) but both of the 3rd party books give the DM a hand in how to create a game in the setting both through specific rules mods (brawling mechanics, junk gear in Brancalonia, magic corruption points in Symbaroum to pick two of many) but Spelljammer just drops it all on the DM with 'DM to make up.' We do not get any mechanics on how to run ship combat when such a system is referenced throughout the book (pp32 "Miss: the attack deals no damage, the target moves into the nearest unoccupied space that isn't in the hammerhead ships path and the hammerhead ship can continue moving if it has any movement left") and we get nothing on how to create Spelljammer adventures. I would criticize this as amateur hour nonsense from a far smaller outfit but sitting atop the Commanding Heights of 5e this is a deliberate decision to just ship unfinished stuff.
I could be forgiving if ship rules had been dropped on D&D Beyond or even through one of the official DMs, but the best we get is poor Jasmine “ThatBronzeGirll” Bhullar having to defend 'just get straight to boarding actions' on youtube. Watch that and see host Amy Dallen ask the obvious softball question and watch her face change at the answer. She is all of us. But fine, the official line is no one needs spelljammer specific mechanics beyond zero-g combat and running out of air. Fine, lets say I am totally on board with this style of running and I want to run my campaign - what do they suggest?
Sweet all. We get a random ship encounters table with a bunch of ships, fine, this gives us a range of foes that could be encountered, we get our d10 first adventure seeds on p5, we get a very high level sketch of the Rock of Bral (but a gorgeous map) - but we could have done with one less ship and those two pages given over to 'running adventures in Wildspace'. A random planet generator, seasoned with some single paragraph sites would have been a good start - we get nearly 30 pages of quality hooks in Ghosts of Saltmarsh (pp199-228 'Encouters at Sea') and that is starting from the familiar terrain of the sea. What about Astral, fire world, plant world, etc. hooks? Drop one each of the following pairs Wasp/Shrike and Squidship/Lamprey, take those 4 pages and give adventure hooks and system generators then we would truly have had an infinite adventure engine. I'll forgive the fifteen repetitions of the ballista stat-block and ten repititions of the mangonel stat-block because sure, having everything about a ship on a single spread is useful while running it. But we got a whole quarter page on astral fishing and nothing on why to be out on the Astral at all. A quarter page of 'great treasures of wildspace' could have seeded a bunch of adventure.
Instead, everything gets tipped onto the DM to 'just decide'. The artwork does a ton of work setting the scene, the ships are evocative, great to see the old designs back again, we just have a big gap in 'helping a DM to actually play in your setting.' I could live without the ship combat systems, the internet has produced forth many of those, but I would have liked an update of the old system generator, something to support the huge exploration pillar possibilities implied in a space setting.
For some other reviews see Throat Punch Games, Old Game Hermit, Rogue Watson, Gaming Trend or SkullSplitter Dice.
No comments:
Post a Comment