Review: Starlight Arcana

tl:dr; chunky, gorgeous book - great ideas, somewhat heavy to prep but has made it to my table where lots of other stuff has not

I spotted this on Kickstarter and tagged it as a kind of Spelljammer substitute - it was marketed as Voyage Across the Astral, Adventures Across the Starlight Arcana Astral Plane - I read that as something in the "Planejammer" space and was definitely on board for what I didn't get from Spelljammer - ship combat and actual planets to go to. With this coming out of Krakow, Poland I was also happy to support my local game developers.

Art by Joanna 'Dusky Cat' Trzesniewska

First impression of Starlight Arcana is that it is a huge chonky book. About an eighth is the setting crunch, another eighth are the campaign mechanics, a third is the three acts of the campaign and then the back half-ish is the bestiary. It should probably be best conceptualised as a campaign book that comes with its own setting, bespoke mechanics and companion bestiary.

It is a gorgeous book, the artwork and production values throughout are very very nice. This is a beautiful piece of kit with some great work in here. There is a tarot-themed sorcerer and there was a whole tarot deck with campaign appropriate art as part of the kickstarter. The tarot is also used for a tarot-driven divining of the fates and implementation of game effects while adventuring across planets in the sandbox part of the campaign. I like the idea but my shelves groan with tarot decks so I could not justify getting this one, even if beautiful.

Reference d20 for scale

There is a lot of content in here, that maybe could have benefited from a grizzled editor snarling 'kill your darlings' at the writers. The layout is two columns per page for most of the first half of the book, the bestiary varies from two column/two monster to single monster/stat block per page. Comparing it to something else recent - 5e Spelljammer - you get more for your page count - smaller margins, smaller font, more words on a two page spread. I spotted a couple of typos but overall for a first publication out of a new outfit, pretty damn good. I might have liked things boiled down more in OSR style but stylistically it cleaves to 5e house style.

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
2 pages of Intro/contents
14 pages of Player Ancestry Options
20 pages of Subclasses
15 pages of Destined Artifacts
16 pages of Spells
6 pages of Intro to the Starlight Chronicles Setting & the campaign
1 page of Prologue
15 pages of Act 1
24 pages of Act 2
4 pages of Crew
2 pages of Map
12 pages of Sea of Stars Mechanics
135 pages of Act 3
4 pages of Epilogue
7 pages of Extra Content
229 pages of Menagerie
1 pages of Credits

So what is in here chunk by chunk?
About 1/8th of the book is the setting 'crunch' - species, players options, subclasses, spells and artifacts. This is not the content I am here for but you get thematic options for all classes and species. The stand-out probably being the tarot-using Fate-Weaver sorcerer which could potentially be a lot of fun.

Another 1/8th is the campaign mechanics - intro, running guidance, details on the crew and setting map and mechanics for navigating the Sea of Stars. Here we get a bunch of neat detail and a fairly significant omission. The good stuff includes the previously mentioned tarot-driven effects that kick in before you venture down onto a planet, potentially making revisits to the same place much more interesting. Once you manage to get spaceborne you have a nice bit of voyage architecture, not the actual mechanics of tactical ship movement but the strategic voyage stuff, random encounters on the way, dealing with crew, dealing with various things you come across, neat stuff with a lot of reuseability which keeps movement around a known system interesting.

My one major gripe - no ships. Nowhere. Even the ship you reconstruct, you can only get a sense of it through one particular side quest that your table may never stumble upon, which has a map of a derelict ship (Even you the book owner might miss this map). There will apparently be a supplement at some point in the future with all the ships and ship combat stuff.

A third of the book is the three acts of the campaign - finding your flying ship, getting it operational, then a meaty act three saving the local universe. This is pretty old school in the sense of first you get a lead on a mystery, gather a cast of NPCs who have leads on what is going on, find this wreck and eventually through a bunch of quests, get the wreck back airborne.

Initially there is a somewhat heavy style that assumes things play out in a certain way. I found this tricky in places to parse what the writer wants me to do and then prep for my chaotic tables. Reading through it, it reminds me of a heavily branched railroad. There are lots of options and the author has tried to cater for lots of outcomes and how those consequences could play out down range. There are quite a few cutscene boxes where things happen - some of them are fine descriptive text, but others are lengthy NPC exposition. In play I never get to the end of that purple box without somebody saying, wait, wait, I interrupt, I do this, I would have done that, etc, etc. Maybe a function of I should be more 'shut up and let me read the thing' as a DM but there you go. I find myself running through it ahead of sessions to pick out the key threads to describe the situation and acknowledging the players are going to do whatever the random heck they want and surprise me and the writer both.

After a chunky bit of adventures in Act I to find the wreck and then Act II is trying to fix it where you get a whole bunch of side quests and little bits and pieces. I liked the huge range of things within Act II - you could piece together tons of game time and expand or contract that as you like. We get tons and tons of stuff, which is cool - no shortage of gameable material.

Once you get to space, Act III things kick over into a sandbox mode. Sixteen major locations with a range of stuff to do on them. While Act I was very linear, Act II more quest-list, Act III kicks into mission-driven sandbox. There's tons of stuff in here and some of the locations are bigger, some smaller and not repeated cookie cutter missions with different backdrops. Even though each landing will be driven by the quest to find the mcguffins, what needs to happen varies. Some of them are more linear, some of them are more exploration-based, some are high combat, some are negotiations. Lots of scope for players to pick their battles and go around to different places in the order they prefer. I like this openness and it is a massive strength compared to what we saw in 5e Spelljammer.

What remains, just under half of the book, is the bestiary - all the adversaries and NPCs encountered through the campaign. With 229 pages of monsters - say 250 monsters all told - you get an awful lot of beasties; mostly bespoke menageries for each of the planets - getting a dozen monsters per location. These guys are tough as all hell, mostly by being giant bags of hit points. A bandit from Act I has 32 hitpoints - which means he can tank a max damage standard ballista shot to the chest (3d10) and not die. ACs and damage dealt is not ramped up, it just means the bad guys have more sticking power - combats lasting ~ 6+ rounds instead of the usual three at most. This is a design choice I am finding makes the major change in how these sessions turn out at my tables compared to games run with classic 5e monsters. Recognising power-creep throughout 5e and now moreso with 5.5e this choice makes sense and it is very tangible on the table.

Wrap Up

While some of the adventure elements are pretty heavy and required me to work through it, making my own notes to figure out the flow, this book is one I have brought to table where dozens of other books that I would on first pass say they might be "better" books have not. The art makes it a beautiful read and while the layout of the adventures is not to my preference it has repeatedly made it to my Friday night open tables because there is a good kernel in here.

If you set out to use this, recognise you are in for a long-ramp up of a campaign. Compared to the 5e Spelljammer adventure which has "act one, scene one, city is under space bombardment, get in the flying boat", this campaign has a longer lead-in of finding and then making spaceworthy your vessel. That could work well but recognise you are setting out for a lot of gaming before you're going anywhere near space.

Of my two reasons for grabbing this - ship combat and actual planets to go to - I am disappointed with the absence of ships in this book about sailing the astral sea. No ship combat system, which was a thing I was hoping for - anything greater than the near nothing that came in 5e Spelljammer. The omission of ship deck maps is a particular gap as 5e Spelljammer turns out mostly to be ship boarding actions - with a ship map you can replicate that and be at least at the same level as WotC. Alas they have been entirely omitted - so here we are, once again, with a supplement about sailing around on the astral that is not giving us the vessels to do so. Bolt on Calidar, Tales from the Glass Guided World or your own preferred flying ship system and you are ready to rock.

However, for my second reason - actual planets to go to - this comes across aces. You get a whole bunch of different planets and a metric ton of detail on any of them and then an overarching campaign reason to visit them all. The legwork about dealing with 'what if the players turn up in a flying ship' has been dealt with and the challenges are oriented to account for that which is one of the main nuisances prepping for flying ship campaigns - often obstacles and puzzles are rendered trivial if you have a flying ship, here all the planets account for that. You get a great range of places to either use by the book in the Starlight Arcana campaign or lift and drop into equivalent places wherever you want - aquatic planet, desert planet, forest moon, etc.

At time of writing we are four sessions / 20 hours in and have (inefficiently) cleared Act I. Altogether this is a big, solid block of a book with a ton of stuff in here. I have my gripes about the way it is presented but this is the space-fantasy flying-ship planet-hopping campaign I was looking for and it has gotten to table where a ton of other stuff that I backed has not.