How Much Flying Ship Combat System Is Enough?

This entire post got overtaken by events - it was written prior to the Spelljammer 5e review copies getting all over the internet, before we knew what the ship combat system was - I am going to keep it as my hopes preserved in amber from before we saw what we were actually going to get. The sentiment remains the same.

Looking at the latest info on Spelljammer coming out through an interview with Lead Designer Chris Perkins it appears that we will not be getting much, if any ship combat rules at all.

"For ship engagements in this setting, we're basically using the core rules of the game. [...] ship-to-ship engagements is, in Fifth Edition—which is more a theater of the mind — there aren't things like Facing or Turning or anything like that. We're not trying to create a game-within-a-game where suddenly you're no longer role-playing, you're engaged in some tactical, "Where's my ship exactly in space" kind of game.

It's kind of like two groups on two small islands, separated by shooting arrows at one another. A ship becomes a platform on which the encounter takes place, like a dungeon room a room in a castle. You can attack the ship, of course, and the ship can take damage, but for the most part, ship-to-ship engagements really have to do with the crews on board. And, despite the fact that your ship may have a catapult and ballistae and whatnot on board, it's still pretty hard to trump a Fireball spell or a Lightning Bolt spell. The characters have so many other options at their disposal for disposing of shipboard enemies. We stay very much in the theatre of the mind with this product for the sake of keeping encounters fluid and fast."

This puzzles me in two respects - first, what is the existing combat system except 'where is my PC exactly' and second, why on earth am I shelling out $65 a pop for the boxes of ship minis for if they don't do anything?

I think there is a core point I agree with in that people sat to the table to play D&D Spelljammer, not some tactical space combat game, sure. However, I think giving people a frame to understand how to stage awesome ship-on-ship combat, when that can be 3D, when it can be two ships flying upside-down over one-another, when it can include ramming from weird angles, all the wrinkles and weirdness - that would be fun.

Looking at the rules as much as has been deciphered from the images of the Spelljammer DM screen, we could read it as pointing to a 'range bands' approach to distance (ships can appear 250, 500 or 1000 ft away at the start of an encounter) or just thats how far out the foe appears, take it from there.

The stat-blocks as they appear in the Spelljammer Academy adventure on D&DBeyond strongly resemble what we have seen in Ghosts of Saltmarsh - AC, Hit points in the 100's (not hull points in the 10's), a damage threshold, speed in feet, cargo capacity, crew and keel/beam dimensions. Key is the fact that the siege weapons just need crew and can fire every round with them. From testing ship combat rules before, this was the major 'speed bump' in AD&D Spelljammer.

Ship schematics and stat blocks from Spelljammer Academy on D&DBeyond

Do these stats imply a really slow, boring combat? How long would it take these ships to fight one another to destruction?

Shiny TTRPG links #80

Welcome to this, the 80th weekly link set - find below the nuggets of TTRPG gold from about the net. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Blue Bard playtests AD&D Illusions in Sell Them a Bee, Deliver a Butterfly

Familiar Waves writes some useful thoughts in The Tyranny of Time

Throne of Salt writes meaty thoughts on getting hard-ish sci-fi right in Fixing Eclipse Phase

Axian Spice recommends some ZineQuest 4: The Old-School Essentials Projects!

D&D Historical Sales Data tabulated on The Mystical Trash Heap. Crunchy goodness.

Leicester's Ramble wraps up OPD 2022, Just a little randomness...

Alone in the Labyrinth is making Atop the Wailing Dunes: A PARIAH adventure for Zine Quest 4

Fireside Friday, August 5, 2022 by A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry ponders post-apocalyptic warfare and how it could play out.

Gygax 75: The Dungeon (Week 3)

For the challenge, the dungeon is supposed to be the place where real adventure begins. The prompts reflect a quite specific vision for setting things up but are helpful to get things started, then it runs itself.

For our dungeon, we delve into a Temple of the Boring Beetles - our dwarf analogue on this world. The whole dungeon is carved into the trunk of one of the giant trees. The entrance is carved elaborately, an optical illusion that distracts from the chute within. Going with archetypes for dwarves, this is both a functional place the beetles used and a death-trap for strangers. Their optical-illusion carvings will be a feature.

The guide instructs us to make some rolls to find the number of themes we are dealing with. There was a little discussion and iteration but the themes we finally settled on were:
Theme 1 - the abandoned outer halls (intruders, things that settled in a ruin)
Theme 2 - the last stand of the boring beetle cult (cultists)
Theme 3 - the corrupted sanctum (spiders, undead)

The treasure hoard at the bottom of this is mostly fine crafted wooden objet d'art and the library. The spider-vampire now in residence hoards knowledge, gathered some themselves and then invaded and took over the lower levels to secure the temples library.

Review: Brancalonia

tl:dr; a great fun, evocative sphaghetti fantasy D&D setting with some neat mechanics to capture the rollicking band of knaves style of play.

I picked up Brancalonia in another of my 'darn I missed this first time round' instances - backing the Empire Whacks Back kickstarter, I got the original books as an add-on. Brancalonia - "sphaghetti fantasy" - is a campaign setting for D&D 5e "based on Italian tradition, folklore, history, landscapes, literature and pop culture" - but more than a setting for the game, this is another mod. The classes and background mesh with a collection of new setting rules (and guidance to pick optional rules within the core set) that aims to deliver the experience of being a band of roistering Knaves and ne'er do wells out for their latest job.

The art throughout is great - the book looks like old paper with wine stains on it, stains explained in a chastising front note. Top marks for beautiful, consistent, evocative art - this is a really pretty book. The layout in general is top notch, a nice, clear, easy read with good boxes and sidebars and tables are where you would expect to find them from their mentions in the text.

Opening the book we get a nice Appendix N, and the intro 'this is a world of heroism and heroes - and you are not one of them. You are the ones who step in when things go wrong, dabblers, swindlers, scoundrels and greedy Knaves.' This is a game about being the scoundrels and chancers at the bottom of the heap, where the stakes are a purse full of coins, a good meal and another few days ahead of the law.

What is really interesting here is that this is an E6 game - you run up to 6th level, then whenever you would advance a level after that, instead you get a feat. It means both the rules, the world and the challenges in it are all tailored to a much tighter range than the usual 1-20 level spread which is something quite refreshing.

Shiny TTRPG links #79

Links from about the slow summer internet. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

Blog of Holding gives us Dungeon Delver’s Guide: The NODES System

Slight Adjustments gives us Nameless Legends of GLOG

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry writes on Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part II: Foraging - great stuff for a war-based campaign

Thompson Motif Index Generator on Whose Measure God Could Not Take

The Lizard Man Diaries write up of Empyrean Dynasty Game 1, Turn 6, 100 years of Post Earth History! Things going quite grimly...

Nothing and Happy by Weaver.skepti.ch

Grumpy Wizard gives us What Makes an OSR Game an OSR game?

Gygax 75: The Map Around the Dungeon (Week 2)

In principle, this is to set up the area around the dungeon that is to be the campaign start point. In our particular run through of the exercise, first we must choose a world. We decided to go with a site on world 3 - tropical air world and have it be part of the great tree bank. This is a huge, floating forest, canopy towards the sun, roots pointed outsystem in the air disc-world. We are running with an 'early phase sphere' theme so we are going to see how far we can get with just insects, plants and funghi on our starting world; no reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals yet. Insects dominate life here.

I searched up and printed off a hex-grid and together with the in-house testing team marked out where the elements identified in the challenge guide needed to be. This is the working version, the full-colour fancy version is below.

This is a place of difficult terrain - a labyrinth of broad tree branches that interconnect indirectly and lead to lots of switch-backing on a journey from place to place or courageous leaps or aerial steeds. The hex-scales are 1 mile but travel times will be longer but a given hex will also be 'deeper' with more stuff per hex being theoretically possible. Things could also be closer together than crow-flies distance might allow since direct paths may not be possible.

Actual Test: Dungeonfruit's "Making Good Factions" for a star system

Nothing like a good workflow to get the juices flowing and Dungeonfruit's "Making Good Factions (For Your Dungeon)" is a good one.

Dungeonfruit gives us 5 steps for setting up dungeon factions
1. Building the house - lay out the levels
2. Getting pets - assign factions to levels
3. Meeting the parents - create suitable leaders
4. Family meeting - set faction goals and environment interactions
5. Rats in the walls - add some short complicating factions

I thought to adapt it to figuring out what is about in the Spelljammer system I have been knocking together. This is Smoulderspace - after the gigantic out-system cool fire-world. Sol system planets and their distances from the sun provided for comparison.