[OSSR]The Complete Spacefarer's Handbook

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Campaign Resource Book One
The Complete Spacefarer's Handbook


Dildos!

AncientH:

Planescape was built on the cosmology laid out by early D&D in works like the Deities & Demigods Cyclopedia, which was itself an effort to shoehorn as many real and fictional pantheons into the same fictional space as possible. It was quintessentially a D&D conceit: that you could theoretically walk from heaven to hell and back again.

Which makes its quirky older cousin all the more bizarre. Because Spelljammer was nothing less than "D&D...in space!"

I'm not sure what the literary precedents for this are. By the time Spelljammer had come out, we'd already been to the Moon. We knew how big space was, how difficult and costly it was to get up there, how easy it was to fuck up and die. Most of the science fiction from the Golden Age right up through the 80s emphasized some of the basic difficulties of space travel. Spelljammer treated it like playing pirates.

Talk about "phlogiston," "crystal spheres," and crap like that played lip service to some old "scientific" theories, but Spacejammer was a very high concept fantasy setting...and it got supremely, bizarrely weird. No, I take that back: it started out supremely weird, and then they broke the dial off, invented a new dial that went higher, and broke that one off too.

FrankT:

If you ask random or even especially knowledgeable people who played 2nd edition they would probably tell you that there was a thing called the “Complete Series” which was a series of expansion books on a variety of topics that were filled with oddball collections of essays, power creep options, optional rules, fanfiction, and whatever the fuck else fit the page count and the author's prejudices. That's certainly how it was experienced in real time. But TSR the company seems to have believed that there were a number of book series that were all “references” that were tied to various facets of the game. So there were players handbook references, and dungeon master's guide references, and historical references. And the Complete Spacefarer was supposed to be part of a brand new line called the Campaign Reference Series.

It is historical fact that they only ever made three of these books, and they are so obscure that as of this writing, none of them even appear in the fucking Wikipedia list for D&D rulebooks. That page lists Monstrous Compendium Ravenloft Appendix II: Children of the Night, but the fucking Complete Spacefarers Handbook is too dubious an event for Wikipedia to even record. The two subsequent books in the series (which, oddly, are both about being lost in the desert for some reason) are even more sketchy, to the point where even those websites that acknowledge that the series ever existed will often claim that there are only one or two books in it. It is factually true that there were two books after the Complete Spacefarers, which were the Complete Gladiators and the Complete Sha'ir. Also it's entirely possible that despite reading a history rant on a D&D forum that you do not know anyone who has ever
touched a physical copy of either of those books. The whole series is made of books that didn't make a big splash is what I'm saying.

No part of the Complete Series ever had a style guide or a setting bible or a rules guru. They didn't have the same editors or developers. Even accounting for the fact that some people inside the company thought that they were making several distinct book series, there is no consistency or common vision to be had. There are books like the Complete Priest which are basically tirades about various nerfs that the author thinks you should use, and books like the Complete Elves that were wall to wall power creep options, and everything in between.

AncientH:

Part of this is, I think, because TSR was looking at ways to tie its settings together and/or cross-market them by publishing "generic" setting-specific products - or at least, I can't think of another reason for Demihumans of the Realms coming out in a brown cover. Spelljammer pretty much from its inception was designed as a relatively low-cost way for adventurers to slip into (or out of) established campaign settings without mucking around with Stargates gates and portals and plane shift. Which is really weird if you stop to think about it for even half a second, because plane shift suggests that different campaign settings are essentially parallel universes, and Spelljammer suggests that you can basically physically fly between them if you can hold your breath long enough.

And a lot of these books were essentially for flipping through to see what material you could steal to twink-out your own character. New spells, new proficiencies, new weapons, etc. It didn't always work - because settings like Dark Sun operated on slightly different operating principles than Dragonlance...


There is a more appropriate panel in this comic, where the Wizard has been shifted to another plane and finds out half of his spells don't work because of errata, but I'd like to take this moment to remind everyone that Kender are a hate crime and Dragonlance was a shit setting.

FrankT:

Spelljammer is in many ways the quintessential 2nd edition setting. It was never the most popular 2nd edition setting (that was always Forgotten Realms, but rivaled at various points by various flavor of the week settings), but it's the setting that came out contemporaneously with 2nd Edition's release. It was completely gonzo in all the ways 2nd Edition wanted to be gonzo. Remember that this is an edition where the World Builder's Guidebook gave a chart for what shape the planet was and most of the time gave you something other than a sphere. I don't know why, but 2nd Edition AD&D really expected you to have adventures on flat worlds and inside hollow words and on worlds that were dodecahedrons and cubes and shit. I don't know why. No one knows why. But that's the kind of out-there fantasy 2nd edition wanted to promote, and Spelljammer was all up in that shit.


Ramming Speed!

This stands in stark contrast to the staid conservatism of pretty much every other part of the game. AD&D2
(and Spelljammer) came out in 1989 – the same year as Shadowrun – and yet the game was still using up-is-down Armor Class, unique mechanics for every skill use, the basic assumption that the DM was going to have to write much of the game mechanics on the fly, and in every other way still very much looking like a basement produced RPG from the 1970s. You saw that all the way through 2nd Edition, like how the Complete Book of Elves suggests that you start planning your campaign by writing up the creation of the planet and yet still can't bring itself to dump Gygaxian bullshit like racial level limits. So that's Spelljammer. It's the end of the eighties, and we trot out our new edition of the game and our new setting and TSR has the opportunity to make a streamlined game and a popular setting and basically unify gaming for a decade or more, but instead they choose to faff about with books that look like they could have been written before I was born.

Mullets. Also that guy is holding his treasure chest like a boom box. Because of course he is.

Spelljammer probably doesn't get looked at as closely as it should, because it was such a massive disappointment. People were basically looking for a new D&D that cleaned shit up, and there's pretty much no part of 2nd edition that you could even generously accuse of cleaning up anything. 2nd Edition was considered a base betrayal by much of the fanbase, and honestly so was Spelljammer. We were asking for a unified field theory of D&D. Instead we got literal epicycles and crystal spheres.

But that doesn't mean there aren't good ideas in Spelljammer. Spelljammer is a setting where the authors appear to have been your 12 year old gaming buddies who wanted their fighter to kill dragons with guitars that shot demon bees.



OK, fine. You have to sift through a lot of “are you fucking kidding me?!” pieces of just regular stupid to get to the “are you fucking kidding me?!” pieces of awesome stupid. Sometimes I don't even know where the line is. It doesn't help that a lot of the art in this edition looks like it was drawn in pen by one of my classmates who wasn't paying attention in English class.

Is this Dwarven asteroid spaceship castle so stupid it's awesome or so awesome it's stupid? I don't even know anymore!

AncientH:

I want to say Spelljammer was a small game line - but it wasn't (and this list isn't even complete!). At least, not by modern standards. Back in the 90s, books would sell for numbers that would make contemporary RPG producers green with envy. You can't say that the TSR folks didn't try to make it work - but it was still a half-assed, uncoordinated effort. Spelljammer was the quintessential optional campaign, the one that the other settings could - and did - ignore when they felt like it.

Why? Because spacefaring culture changes the dynamics of a world - or at least it should. Imagine if, in 1492, instead of finding a new continent (or, really, a group of islands off of a pair of major continents) Christopher Colombus had sailed to Midgard, and came back with the secrets of rune-magic and as much mead as he could carry. It should be a game-changer...and Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk and Dragonlance et al. liked their games very much as they were, thankyewverymuch.

FrankT:

So this book in particular came out in 1992, which was 2 years before Planescape came on the scene, but long enough after Spelljamer's disappointing launch that it was obvious this was a niche setting. I don't know if this was intended as a hail mary to try to save the setting or just a fill in the blanks book to keep the writing gnomes busy. Could have gone either way, TSR's management in the 90s was so legendarily bad that I would have no trouble accepting the claim that they had no idea which products or settings were popular or not and pretty much greenlighted projects with a dart board. Indeed, I have heard pretty much exactly that claim from more than one person who worked for the company during the period.

There is no way to get any information from the writers. For one thing, there's actually only one writer. For another thing, the writer Curtis M. Scott died in a car accident on the way to Gencon to promote this book. Really. This book had only one writer (credited as a “project designer”) and he died in traffic shortly before giving any public statements about what the fuck this book was supposed to accomplish.

Introduction

AncientH:

Introductions in old TSR products were a real crapshoot. It would be fair to say that the whole purpose an introduction in an RPG product has been in flux for a long time. Mostly you get some high-handed, optimistic sunshine-blowing-up-your-ass about how great the book is, sometimes you get an apology or explanation of what the book is meant to be, or old gaming stories...a lot of times, it's pretty much the only place where the author can directly address the reader, since the rest of the book is "in character" voice. Basically, any intro that isn't Gary Gygax telling you "The Gamemaster is always right" is...uh...y'know what, fuck it. Fuck introductions. All of them, forever.

FrankT:

The introduction is one page long and it's unsigned. Much of it is given over to advertising other TSR products and what is relevant to the book you're reading is pretty much just a dry recounting of what lies ahead in the nine chapters. But it's all in first person plural past, so it's talking about what “we” were trying to do with this book. Normally I wouldn't twig on that stylistic choice, but since I happen to know this book has one author and that he died shortly before the book released, it really stands out. It's not at all clear who was writing this intro, possibly the editor? Maybe an unnamed staffer who had been tasked with cobbling together the draft and trying to decipher a dead man's project notes? I dunno.

AncientH:

They couldn't even fill a page with this. There's a one-inch black bar at the bottom which contains, and I quote:

Why do I like wildspace? It's so BIIIIIIIG! Plus, I like the shopping.
Gaeadrelle Goldring, kender adventurer

FrankT:

Fuck the Kender. They were so very bad in Krynn, and I don't understand why they were allowed to infect other settings.



Anyway. The simple assumption that you were playing with the “optional” NWP rules was pretty typical for 2nd edition AD&D. Characters didn't have a lot of toggles for customization, and those that did exist were all optional rules. AD&D expansion rules quickly and decisively embraced the Non Weapon Proficiencies because they were things that expansion material could plausibly sink their teeth into. Like, and for the same reason that 3rd edition expansion materials went nuts with Feats.

But 2nd Edition AD&D never revisited its core book's assumptions, so reading the original PHB and then reading expansion materials from 3 years later is a pretty jarring experience. We're basically talking about a game that grew with the accumulation of precedent like Common Law. But we're also talking about this happening before web forums, so you're reading things that are based on DM rulings from two years ago that happened in an in-house game in Milwaukee and as a reader you have probably never heard from or of any of the people who were at the table where the ruling got made. But the book just carries on as if that ruling was just part of the core rules that everyone knew. It was fucking maddening.

The fact that the introduction even calls this out as a thing is probably another giveaway that we're reading a posthumous introduction. TSR's house-style was just to blunder on about how Halflings had forest stealth powers or some shit because that's how it was at your personal table, and who has time to check what the “written down” version of the rules have to say? So to have the introduction actually call attention to the cognitive dissonance of the rest of the book being written with the assumption that you're using rules that not everyone used sort of implies that this was being written by someone who had read the rest of the manuscript and was trying to make sense of it.

AncientH:

You have to remember, this was back in the day when your Monstrous Manual could well be a three-ring binder. It was the only way to keep the fuckers in alphabetical order.

D&D was a system first and a game second - more like GURPS than World of Darkness. As such, the rules did not always work nice together. In some places, they outright contradicted. This was another technical hurdle with Spelljammer in particular: what do you do when you travel from one Crystal Sphere to the next, and suddenly magic missile is a 2nd-level spell? Do energy weapons from Oerth work on Krynn? Such-and-such god is dead on Toril, but can I still worship them over here? &c, &c.

Mostly, these questions went unanswered. Hell, there's a famous anecdote about the origins of dual-classing where a player's mage character was stuck on another world, away from their spellbooks, picked up a club
and everyone just ran with it. That's the magic of imagination! Or, mindcaulk. Lots and lots of mindcaulk.

FrankT:

There are nine chapters and 128 pages. We'll try to do it in about four or five more posts.

[virgil]

I'm looking behind me, at my copy of the Complete Sha'ir that's on the shelf. I've seen/touched a copy of the Complete Gladiator, and never heard of the Spacefarer's Handbook.

[rasmuswagner]

FrankT:

And the Complete Spacefarer was supposed to be part of a brand new line called the Campaign Reference Series.

It is historical fact that they only ever made three of these books, and they are so obscure that as of this writing, none of them even appear in the fucking Wikipedia list for D&D rulebooks. That page lists Monstrous Compendium Ravenloft Appendix II: Children of the Night, but the fucking Complete Spacefarers Handbook is too dubious an event for Wikipedia to even record. The two subsequent books in the series (which, oddly, are both about being lost in the desert for some reason) are even more sketchy, to the point where even those websites that acknowledge that the series ever existed will often claim that there are only one or two books in it. It is factually true that there were two books after the Complete Spacefarers, which were the Complete Gladiators and the Complete Sha'ir. Also it's entirely possible that despite reading a history rant on a D&D forum that you do not know anyone who has ever
touched a physical copy of either of those books. The whole series is made of books that didn't make a big splash is what I'm saying.

I have owned every single one of those. The Gladiator was FighterPlus, but the Sha'ir book was crazy. There's a kit that makes your magic react explosivly with standard magic, and it's exactly as "fuck you, no save" rocket tag as you think it is.

[Mechalich]

Spelljammer has so much 'are you fucking kidding me?' infecting it that it makes the batshit-insanity of Planescape look positively restrained by comparison. I have vague memories of reading this book for some reason (something about new races?) so I look forward to this review.

[Prak]

FrankT:

It is historical fact that they only ever made three of these books, and they are so obscure that as of this writing, none of them even appear in the fucking Wikipedia list for D&D rulebooks. That page lists Monstrous Compendium Ravenloft Appendix II: Children of the Night, but the fucking Complete Spacefarers Handbook is too dubious an event for Wikipedia to even record. The two subsequent books in the series (which, oddly, are both about being lost in the desert for some reason) are even more sketchy, to the point where even those websites that acknowledge that the series ever existed will often claim that there are only one or two books in it. It is factually true that there were two books after the Complete Spacefarers, which were the Complete Gladiators and the Complete Sha'ir. Also it's entirely possible that despite reading a history rant on a D&D forum that you do not know anyone who has ever touched a physical copy of either of those books. The whole series is made of books that didn't make a big splash is what I'm saying.

FrankT:

So this book in particular came out in 1992, which was 2 years before Planescape came on the scene, but long enough after Spelljamer's disappointing launch that it was obvious this was a niche setting. I don't know if this was intended as a hail mary to try to save the setting or just a fill in the blanks book to keep the writing gnomes busy. Could have gone either way, TSR's management in the 90s was so legendarily bad that I would have no trouble accepting the claim that they had no idea which products or settings were popular or not and pretty much greenlighted projects with a dart board. Indeed, I have heard pretty much exactly that claim from more than one person who worked for the company during the period.

There is no way to get any information from the writers. For one thing, there's actually only one writer. For another thing, the writer Curtis M. Scott died in a car accident on the way to Gencon to promote this book. Really. This book had only one writer (credited as a “project designer”) and he died in traffic shortly before giving any public statements about what the fuck this book was supposed to accomplish.

Also it's entirely possible that despite reading a history rant on a D&D forum that you do not know anyone who has ever touched a physical copy of either of those books.

For another thing, the writer Curtis M. Scott died in a car accident on the way to Gencon to promote this book. Really. This book had only one writer (credited as a “project designer”) and he died in traffic shortly before giving any public statements about what the fuck this book was supposed to accomplish.

Are you guys sure you're not reviewing some kind of Eldritch Tome, here? AH should know that the only books you can describe this way began as evil, sapient ideas that infect the mind of a young writer, and then discard the mortal shell once they have been written into physical form. Seriously, the resident Cthulhu scholar should know all about this kind of book.


if you find any latin in that book, this is all I'm saying. And maybe just donate it to a school in Massachusetts

[Ancient History]

I'm helping to do the annotations, yeah. But this isn't an eldritch sanity-bending tome. That would be something like Wraeththu: the RPG.

[deaddmwalking]

I also have the Complete Sha'ir's Handbook but didn't know about the Complete Gladiator or the Space Farer's Handbook. But I keep an eye out for these types of books at Used Bookstores and such. Looking forward to the review.

[OgreBattle]

Was this an influence on Warhammer 40k, or influenced by it, as that's the main setting I think of with Fantasy in spaaace

[Ancient History]

Warhammer 40k was 1987, Space: 1889 and GURPS Space was 1988, Spelljammer was 1989, and Space Jam was 1996.

[Prak]

I'm helping to do the annotations, yeah. But this isn't an eldritch sanity-bending tome. That would be something like Wraeththu: the RPG.

Well, I suppose I've never seen an actual copy of Wraethu, either...

[Ancient History]

Complete Spacefarers
Chapter One: Groundlings in Space


Pigs in Spaaaace!

Honestly, we're going to be making a lot of muppet references for these chapters.

AncientH:

Groundlings. That's two.

This books kicks off with a chapter about what landlubbers groundlings should know about space travel. As such, it doesn't actually apply to pretty much any established campaign setting, and insofar as it seems necessary at all, is kindof an afterthought to the Spelljammer Boxed Set. My guess is that this was designed as an appeal to players in ongoing campaigns that might want to get in on that hot, heavy spelljamming action.

The actual Spelljammer comic managed to suck and blow and the same time, so I'm filling this review with panels from the only awesome D&D comic in recent memory.

FrankT:

This chapter discusses knowledge that any Groundling from an AD&D® game world could have about space. It may be read by new SPELLJAMMER campaign players of groundling PCs, or as a guideline for interactions between SPELLJAMMER and groundling campaigns on any of the AD&D game worlds.

Yes, chapter one is cleared for starting players and people with Infra-Red clearance to read. Even in 1992, that kind of shit seemed super dickish, but of course companies kept writing RPG products with secret information that players weren't supposed to read for many years after. Fuck, there was Unknown Armies. But it was still annoying even in the early nineties and people should have fucking known better. The Groundlings in Space chapter is 11 pages long and while it begins with a crazy full-color thing that looks like a Heavy Metal Magazine era album cover, most of the pages have weird black and white pen doodles on them. The best of them is probably the Umber Hulks and Neogi yelling at a dude:


Umber Hulks were a lot less bug-like in the days before 3rd edition.

You'd think that this book would start off with a solid description of what the difference between space travel and plane shifting is, but it doesn't. It's laid out in rumor form, and purposefully leaves it confusing how characters from different planes are different from characters from different spheres. Fuck, I don't know if anyone ever had a solid plan as to what the fucking difference was supposed to be.

AncientH:

It is possible to visit the moons and planets that you see in the sky. Most of them have nothing to recommend them, however, being barren and lifeless.

This is a...bit of a niggle. Niglet? Nitplick? Whatever. A small lie. The thing with Spelljammer is that it proposes a cosmology which is more-or-less similar to what you might learn about in 4th-6th grade science class...for the immediate solar system...if you weren't paying attention. But it's still a fantasy cosmology, so not all of the crystal spheres have planets and moons and shit quite in the way you think of them; most of the "stars" are actually supposed to be gates to the Elemental Plane of Fire, Plane of Radiance, or a portal through the crystal sphere itself. Some of the fantasy cosmologies get really exotic, with flat earths and shit. So this isn't quite true.

Finally, some so-called spacefarers are very haughty, referring to you and your people as "Groundlings" with the same tone of voice you use to say "goblins." However, they don't seem to be better than you and the other adventurers of your land. You might like to prove this to them.

I wish that I could be like the cool kids / 'Cause all the cool kids, they seem to fit in / I wish that I could be like the cool kids / Like the cool kids…

After they get done insulting you/double-dog daring you to try your luck in the airless spaces between the stars...er...crystal spheres...whatever...they get down to the nitty-gritty of rules for groundlings in a Spelljammer setting. This seems pretty unnecessary to me, as Spelljammer characters already use regular AD&D rules for most shit, and whether they're a poor boy from a backwoods planet or not, the same shit should apply, right? Oh, wait, I forgot which edition I was talking about, silly me...

FrankT:

All weapons that work in a standard AD&D® game world also work in wildspace. Some of their effects are modified (particularly missile weapons, whose ranges are simplified in SPELLJAMMER campaign combat).

There's a lot to unpack there, but basically the book is assuming that you are using the optional proficiencies rules and then it's telling you how various proficiencies you are presumed to be familiar with are and are not different in spaaaaace! The answer is generally “not much.” And nowhere is this more apparent than in the weapon proficiencies, because in SPELLJAMMER you were expected to jump on board enemy space ships and fight with swords. This is like a step more retro-stupid than Flash Gordon.


You're in space, you use a sword. Fucking deal with it.

Non-weapon proficiencies get more space dedicated to them. In fact, they get three and a half fucking pages. That is not a joke. And that's just the AD&D2nd Edition® Player's Handbook® NWPs. And most of this is puzzlingly useless. There is a paragraph given over to how the rules for jumping are not different in Space. I mean, that would honestly be the one time I would really be totally OK with them calling time and just writing up some crazy rules. It's jumping in fucking space for fuck's sake. But they don't. In SPELLJAMMER, the gravity is essentially normal everywhere, whether you are on a ship or a planet – like you were in Star Trek TOS. It's a roleplaying game and imaginations have no budget limitations, so I don't know why we aren't doing crazy gravity effects like we were in Star Trek: Beyond.


Budget limited live action TV shows need elaborate mind caulk reasons why they can't do gravity special effects. SPELLJAMMER did it just because.

But most of this shit is just space filling. It reminds you over and over again that there are no fires allowed on SPELLJAMMER ships because fires cause explosions when in deep space in this game (something something explosive phlogiston gas), so that makes cooking and blacksmithing difficult. But firstly: why the fuck is this in an obscure expansion product? This seems like the completely basic setting information that you absolutely would have to understand after reading the core box set alone. Also, it's not a good use of space.

AncientH:

Blacksmithing gets a lot of verbiage devoted to it which is very weird. For example, setting up a forge in space costs 1,000 gp, engages the services of a stone mason for two weeks, and takes up the equivalent of three tons of cargo space. I'm pretty sure if you get a group of dwarfs drunk, they'll start building a forge just for the fun of it.

AD&D also had a tendency to stick random rules in random places, so the description of the Healing proficiency, for example, talks about how spacefaring priests are limited in what level of spells they can pray for because they're dialing long distance or something.

I'm also just going to throw out there that there was really zero effort at historical verisimilitude as far as historical tech goes in AD&D; it's not just "rule of cool" all the way down, but it's as anachronistic and bizarre. D&D attracts plenty of nerdy types that really want to go all Ash in Army of Darkness with primitive gunpowder, and at the same time you've got SCA types that want a sort of idealized medieval setting - never mind that in the real medieval world, they'd generally take whatever advantage they could get. Spelljammer takes this to extremes, where you'd think they'd go all Thor shot or something (hell, make a wall of iron a mile up and let it drop; see what that does to the bastard's castle)...but they don't.


"This chapter be full of casual racism and bad mechanics. Goblin work."

FrankT:

The following sections discuss the standard AD&D campaign worlds, their interactions with spacefarers, and how members of the PC races might come in contact with spacefarers.

The campaign worlds discussed are: Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms. It was 1992, and those were the “standard” campaign worlds. Which pretty much means that it was all various flavors of fucking Tolkien's corpse. Before 1989, that's pretty much all D&D had to offer: various LotR riffs with more or less low comedy and science fantasy mixed in around the edges. The weird settings where things are notably not Tolkienian don't really happen until 2nd edition, with SPELLJAMMER. But this book says you can't really go to any of those non-Tolkienian settings (except, obviously, SPELLJAMMER). The book admits that DARK SUN™ is a thing that exists, but flatly tells you that Athas can't be reached by SPELLJAMMER ships. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the maps of Arcane Space were drawn up in 1989 and Dark Sun was produced in 1991. So maybe this book is simply declining to retcon the space map. Also you can't fly to Ravenloft, because the Realms of Terror are all about telling you how you can't have nice things. But it's equally plausible that it's just that Ravenloft came out in 1990 and wasn't on the space map either. I guess Mystara wasn't on the list of places you could go because those fuckers on the OD&D development team ain't never done shit for us and we ain't throwing them no bones for free.



Now here's the thing that really bothers me about this whole project: Greyspace. Greyhawk is in Greyspace. I understand why the book about spelljamming in Greyhawk is called “Greyspace,” but why is that area called that in character? The planet is called “Oerth” and Greyhawk is just the name of a ruined castle and a nearby city in the Flanaess on the continent of Oerik on that planet. You might as well name the Earth's solar system “Vegas Space” or “Euro Disney Space” or something. The fact that the space around Toril is called “Realms Space” is actually even weirder, because the “Forgotten Realms” isn't an in-character title at all. That was just a weird 1970s tagline about how the campaign world was actually a place you could visit from our world through portals like in the Dungeons & Dragons Cartoon, but that the connections had been lost and forgotten. “Krynnspace” is a name I could get behind as an actual in-character thing, if hypothetically Krynn wasn't a flaming piece of bullshit in the history of RPGs that I desperately wanted to forget about. Drink!

AncientH:

Mostly, this is an excuse to pimp other AD&D products, and to encourage players with characters from those games to play spelljammer, by retconning it into the setting. Something similar happened with the Forgotten Realms and psionics in 3rd edition, and Magic of Blue in the Forgotten Realms and Eberron. This is a pretty classic example of "Splatbook Introduction Problem." Splatbooks (or, in this case, new tie-in settings like Spelljammer) present some new element to the setting, but this is an element that should have been pervasive much earlier on in the setting material but hasn't even been hinted at yet. So how do you work it into the setting logically? Well, you can say fuck logic and just pretend it always existed. That's happened. You can reveal it as a "new" discovery - Shadowrun and Battletech tended to do that with SOTA books and whatnot that provided advanced gear and options as the game timeline advanced - or as something that was previously hidden, like blood magic or some other NPC nastiness that as been built up as a Big Deal.

Spelljamming is like that. If spelljamming is openly known about, that's huge. It opens up vast new travel possibilities, migration and colonization, traffic in small but extremely valuable goods, cultural exchange, syphilis, you name it.


Look, I know it's your cultural heritage, but the guys from the next Crystal Sphere over are selling muskets with magic bullets. Let's just get the dwarfs to reverse-engineer a couple and we can exterminate every gobbo on the continent!

You generally see absolutely none of that in any of the campaign settings. The Rock of Bral mostly only exists when people writing Forgotten Realms books wanted it to. They didn't want assholes from Krynn coming through with dragonlances and having a go at the local draconic population, and Margaret Weiss wouldn't know what to do with a paladin that didn't worship Paladine.

FrankT:

Each of the sections tries to get you to buy other books. If you want to learn more about Krynn (which you do not), you could go buy Tales of the Lance. More information can be found in Lorebook of the Void, if hypothetically you were to go buy it at your local game and hobby shop.

Much space is dedicated to ranting about how spaceships visit the different races on these campaign worlds. Most of this is about how there is a secret network of Elvish spaceships that visit all the secretive Elvish Kingdoms in the different campaign settings. But the whole thing is just really weird all around. Like, Space Dwarves don't trade with the Dwarves in Greyhawk because the Dwarves in Greyhawk have little political power. What the actual fuck is that about? Greyhawk spices are presumably just as valuable to Krynnians or whatever for being from an area where the Dwarves live in close proximity to humans as it would be if the Dwarves lived in segregated cities. Like, the whole concept of breaking down spelljamming contact by race is so deeply wrong that it's a kaleidoscope of despair. And it's more than half of each of these sections.

Chapter Two: New Spacefaring Races


This is the picture from the start of the chapter. It doesn't really get any better later on.


This is what a SPELLJAMMER party probably should have been like. But we never really got there.

AncientH:

AD&D was the first edition that really embraced the idea that you would play something other than human. I mean sure, you could be an elf, dwarf, or hobbit halfling in oD&D, but that was back when "elf" was a character class. AD&D experienced the first real race bloat - in part, because they felt the need to give every goddamn setting like half a dozen different varieties of elf and dwarf they could be. It got so god damn bad that not only did they hint that you could be a dwelf, but it made a difference if you were a half-Sun/shield dwelf, or a half-aquatic/actic dwelf. Steve Jackson would have solved that shit in half an hour with a couple of lenses, but in AD&D every goddamn setting had its own dozen or so special fucking snowflakes that could fuck anything.

FrankT:

Clocking in at 13 pages, this chapter covers 9 races. In most cases these are not by any stretch of the imagination new. There are fucking Lizardmen, and they have been in AD&D for as long as there has been AD&D (literally, since the first AD&D book was the Monster Manual back in 1977). The concept here is that they are newly playable if you are starting a SPELLJAMMER campaign and were previously only given access to the basic races from the previously mentioned LotR-based settings and your DM was letting you play one of the spacefaring races from the SPELLJAMMER setting. Which is a very very specific definition of the term “new spacefaring races” that probably wouldn't have been your first or seventeenth guess as to what that term was supposed to mean.


Really we just want to have humans and aliens in a mixed crew. Like Star Trek or Star Wars or Pigs in Space or some fanfic hybrid thereof.

The first page and a half is dedicated to 2nd edition mechanics like racial stat minimums and level limits. Unusual for a book of this edition, they acknowledge that you might not use Level Limits.

The DM can change or eliminate these limits as necessary. Before doing so, however, read the discussion on “Racial Level Restrictions” in Chapter 2 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.

So that's progress. The rules presented here are in fact a tire fire, but they are also short. Possibly because the author knew he had to pay lip service to this crap and also knew you weren't playing with it anyway.

AncientH:

I've lost count of how many Dragon-people there are in D&D, but the Dracon I had managed to forget about. I also forgot that the Grommams have extreme sexual dimorphism, so that females and males get complete different stat bonuses. Reptile men don't get shit.



Most of the non-human races are very restricted in what character class they can be. No specialty priests, no specialty wizards, no paladins or druids. Most of them can't be bards. I don't know what they have against nonhuman bards.



Honestly, shit like this is why d20 was such a breath of fresh fucking air when it came out. It was just...so refreshing to dump all the needless bullshit restrictions, y'know?

FrankT:

The nine races are the Dracon, the Giff, the Grommam, the Hadozee, the Hurwaet, the Lizard Man, the Rastipede, the Scro, and the Xixchil. With few exceptions, these races are moderate to difficult answers to D&D trivia questions rather than races you will ever see in your game. Without reading ahead, I was able to remember what five of those races were about. And I fucking wrote essays about some of these fuckers. For those of you who can't remember all of them (which is most people), here's the gist:

• Dracon the Dracon are Dracotaurs. In 3rd edition there were other Dracotaurs called “Dracotaurs” but they were completely unrelated.
• Giff, the Giff are hippo people. They were almost certainly created as a pun because someone misheard or mispronounced “Hippogryph.”
• Grommam The Grommam are Gorilla people. That's seriously about as far as it goes.
• Hadozee The Hadozee are “deck apes” and that is totally different from being Gorilla People in that they are more like Orangutans.
• Hurwaet The Hurwaeti are also called “Wiggles” and they are reptiles that look like frogs and gnomes. That doesn't make any sense to me and the drawings of Wiggles have been so universally horrible that it apparently didn't make any sense to anyone else either.
• Lizard Man There is literally no new information about Lizard Men in this section. Despite describing them as both stupid and boorish, they get no stat mods at all. The rules for using their scales as armor are unchanged from the previous AD&D writeups going back to 1977.
• Rastipede The Rastipedes are tauroid insect people who like to trade.
• Scro The Scro are like Orcs. I would say that they are “like Orcs but...” except that I literally cannot think of a single thing about them that is better, worse, or even different from an Orc. This is the writeup from the Monstrous Compendium. In this edition, they are just a slightly higher level version of an Orc, but since there were already slightly higher levels of Orc available (remember, in this edition, Orcs were Goblinoids, so the Hobgoblin and Bugbear already fit the bill – and there were already even advanced Orcs that specialized in punching people called Ogrillons.
• Xixchil The Xixchil are mantis shaped bug people that are different from Thri-Kreen in that they have an alien and utilitarian aesthetic and a mercenary indifference to emotion and have little loyalty outside their own families. No wait, that is how they are not different from the Thri-Kreen. The difference is that they have a special body modification proficiency they can invest in that's basically the precursor to the Graft feats from 3rd edition.

So obviously, there's a lot of redundancy in all this. Do we need two flavors of space apes? Do we need two different reptilian races? Do we need two races of morally indifferent bug people? Did we need another flavor of Orc?


This guy looks a lot like the last guy.

AncientH:

""Oh, that's right. You're the ones who live in caves and hoard gold. I remember. Did you shave your beard?"
Dracon diplomat to elvent diplomat, just before the fighting started

That's honestly the closest thing to a funny line in the book so far, and mainly because it truthfully pokes fun at the bizarre way D&D stereotypes entire species with bullshit cultural behaviors. This book is no exception, of course.

See, when Hackjammer made fun of this kind of shit, they did it because people would get the joke. These guys make fun of it but then they go and do it anyway, completely oblivious to why Grommon sign language is stupid when they can speak Common and Elvish, or that a 2d6 headbutt from a Giff isn't a love tap to another Giff.

Sorry, I should have written 2-12. For reasons I cannot recall, AD&D was against telling you what dice to actually roll, and figured that you yourself would figure out what it meant to roll for 2-12 damage or 4-40 damage or whatever. I'm not saying they overestimated everyone's intelligence, but there comes a point where I think 2d6 or 4d10 is much more sensible notation. Especially when you get shit like 5-13.

FrankT:

When going through these guys, there isn't a lot of information on any of these races. The rules prattle on a bit, and the average text space for a race is about a page for everything rules for their bites and level limits as a fighter (oddly repeated in the main text from the table at the front of the chapter) to all of the fluff. Very little concern is given to how the fuck many of these guys could be a playable character in a mixed race party.

But if you go back and look at the older materials they are referencing, it gets even sadder. A lot of this text is literally copy pasta from the monstrous compendium or the Adventures in Space box set. So not only
are you getting very little information total, but the amount of new information is precious close to zero.

The text for the Hurwaeti is almost word for word exactly the text from the Monstrous Compendium. It mostly just crops off some of the really WTF?! Statements like how apparently the Hurwaet are supposed to be closely related to the Lizard Men and the Sahuagin! Despite the fact that Lizard Men are reptiles and Sahuagin are Fish. Also it doesn't mention how Wiggles apparently bungee jump at Murderoids to harvest wreckage and try to avoid the giant mouths. Because that is a thing in Spelljammer. A thing you would not know if you only read this condensed writeup of the Hurwaeti rather than the slightly less abridged version in the Monstrous Compendium Appendix.

AncientH:

"You wished us to give you the vision of an eagle, and so we did. The beak and feathers are free."
- Xixchil surgeon

The Xixichil are an old favorite of mine, because they were one of the few ways to get effective surgical augmentations in AD&D. I mean, mostly you'd read in some old entry about beholders that says "Rumors tell of a little-known mage in Marsember who uses the eye of the death kiss to cure blindness, although the process grants only infravision." You have to really fellate Mr. Cavern hard to get an arm replaced with one from a magic golem or something. But the Xixichill got a little love (at least in one Dragon Magazine article) about the surgeries they could do - not necessarily exactly what you were thinking, since they stressed functionality over form, but hey, that's your problem.

Most of the rest of these? Lost and forgotten. Like the setting.

FrankT:

The final part of the chapter is a table depicting the modifiers to your thieving skills if you are various races. In a gross betrayal of all that is right and good, the various Ape Men are actually pretty shitty thieves. They make lots of hay about the large bonus to “climb walls” and try to make you think it's OK for your Gorilla Man to have a penalty to Open Locks and Find/Remove Traps. Fuck. This.

AncientH:

Granted, this was back in the day where if you kijiggered the Thief Skill rules enough, you could See Illusion and Read Scrolls and so pass yourself off as an Ape-Person Wizard...which is pretty impressive considering none of them can learn magic.


Oook.

[Maxus]

So when are you guys going to review some Dragonlance? Do some big mega-review about How Much Krynn and Dragonlance Sucked.

[momothefiddler]

I'm not saying they overestimated everyone's intelligence, but there comes a point where I think 2d6 or 4d10 is much more sensible notation.

It technically gives you more info, too.

Especially when you get shit like 5-13.

4d3+1, probably! But you could also have 1d9+4, or 2d5+3, or 8d2-3, or....

The shape of the intervening curve is at least as important as its endpoints.

[Mechalich]

Rastipede The Rastipedes are tauroid insect people who like to trade.

Pedantic entomologist notes that the Rastipedes are technically tauric Myriapods, not insects. Or possibly, based on their art, actually some kind of proto-arthropod that straddles the myriapod/chelicerate evolutionary divergence.

[Orca]

Since "Scro" is "Orcs" spelt backwards I suspect their existence to be an in-joke somewhere.

The number ranges were usually easy enough to figure out ... but then there were the inevitable typos and it could be difficult to guess what was meant with that format.

[Hadanelith]

'We need a new kind of Orc for this Spelljammer thing. A Space Orc.'
'Why?'
'Because we do! Look, just help me come up with a name.'
'Just call them Orcs backwards or something, making up a new race of space orcs is stupid.'
'That's a great idea!'

EDIT: bah, ninja'd. This is what happens when you open a tab and then get distracted for most of a day.

[GreatGreyShrike]

I remember reading the licensed Spelljammer fiction as a kid, and it was sort of fascinatingly bad. There were 6 books of it, by 5 different authors, and it was bad even by the standards of D&D tie-in fiction. Like, really, really bad. Nigel Findley wrote two entire books of it, and in spite of that guy writing decent Shadowrun and related stuff elsewhere (e.g. 2XS), he couldn't make his Spelljammer books come close to not sucking. And everyone else who also tried was no better.

I think the funniest thing about the Spelljammer tie-in fiction was that the group of authors were all supposedly following the same character's story, but each author made a bunch of other characters to tag along... and every single author seemed to loathe the other authors' previous contributions to the story so they all started with extensive "put on a bus" segments to write those characters out of the story so they could give the main character new companions.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 3: Spacefarer Kits


True story: Frank used to draw interdimensional bar scenes with mind flayers in them in 1992. They looked about this good. Frank's excuse is that he was in junior high. No idea what this book's excuse is.

True story: Bobby used to draw interstellar space battles on long reams of used printer-paper, using a simplistic format based on 8-bit video games. Bobby didn't actually get a chance to read a roleplaying book until he was in 5th grade, and the first one he actually owned was a copy of Citadel of Chaos, which he traded his lunch for. This has nothing to do with anything, but he wanted to share.

AncientH:

Chapter 3 is about kits. D&D had been grappling for years with the fact that Fighter-guy, Thief, Elf, Cleric, and Mage weren't the full spectrum of characters that all players wanted to play. Like, it's not like monopoly where fist fights break out over who gets to be the dog or battleship vs. the shoe (what, that didn't happen in your house?) D&D was agglutinative rather than revolutionary, so it tends to just add on to things that are already there rather than change the paradigm to be better. So Fighter, Thief, Cleric, and Mage became the base classes, and they added on sub-classes, and things sort of devolved from there.

Kits were basically the finally evolution of AD&D character classes, the immediate precursor to the class-sploison that occurred in D&D3. They were unbalanced, they were often difficult to plug in, many of them were completely shit...and of course, they were entirely fucking "optional."

FrankT:

So Kits. I've ranted about these fucking things before, indeed we kind of have to rant about them in every 2nd edition Complete book we do, because they are in every fucking book. Characters in 2nd edition simply didn't have a lot of toggles to personalize with and if you wanted to be anything except a “bow fighter” versus a “longsword fighter” versus a “dart throwing fighter” (this was a real thing), then you needed to step outside the class altogether. And in 2nd edition, that meant getting yourself a Kit. And so it's not really surprising that this chapter is 31 pages long and considerably longer than any other chapter in the book.

The fundamental problems with this are, well, fundamental. You are supposed to select your kit (singular) during character generation, but characters in D&D are supposed to advance a lot. A character begins life as an armed swineherd or some fucking thing, and when they get to 9th level they are a legit space lord. Fuck, the entire first chapter was about characters who started off as non spacefarers, so what space in their character sheet could there possibly be for a spacefarer kit? Your character's heroic journey starts before they step onto a flying ship or set foot upon a star, continues through where they become a pirate queen and ends after they erect a fortress upon an asteroid that was once one of the countless shining lights in your night sky. What kit could plausibly or even possibly define such a character arc when selected at level 1? Level 1 is no time to declare what kind of hero your are going to be after you have assembled a crew of aliens and outfitted your own space battleship.


Kits really don't let you be either of these things.

This problem was with how 2nd edition AD&D had essentially no decision points during character advancement. With the exception of Proficiencies [AH's note: Which, remember, were optional!], the entire edition had no way for a player to influence the direction of their character's growth. Yes, you could choose to spend your Thief Skill Percentages differently, and you could order your spell learning rolls as a Mage, but you know what I mean. This is why, when 3rd edition introduced Prestige Classes, pretty much everyone was on board immediately. Finally you could take your kit in the middle of your character's progression, where it might actually make some sense.

But this was second edition, and making sense wasn't high on the list of priorities.

So the very first kit in this book is “Corsair” which is apparently for a character who commits space piracy upon other space pirates or hostile space empires under a letter of marque from one of the space empires. That's problematic on a bunch of levels. First of all, corsairing might be one adventure, where the rest of the time you're exploring space hulks or rescuing kidnapped space princesses or something. Secondly, how is
that a thing for one character? If you are storming a space pirate ship, what the fuck are the rest of the party doing? Are they chilling like villains on the far side of the galaxy? No! Those fuckers are by definition also fighting space pirates because they are part of the same crew. How are they not Corsairs if you are one?

AncientH:

It's the Conan problem in a nutshell, basically.

The thing is, Conan was a barbarian - but he was also a thief, a pirate, a mercenary, a scout, a warlord, a gladiator, a blacksmith, and eventually a king. He was all of these things. Try multiclassing that shit. The problem is that these are careers - occupations - and your job isn't necessarily going to reflect your skills. But in D&D, it does. Which means they should have figured a way to switch careers - and they didn't. In point of fact, even in D&D3 you could play pirates one adventure and nobody would have "Pirate" written on their character sheet. At least when Earthdawn did classes, they had an excuse for this: Disciplines were bundles of talents organized into Circles, and you could do whatever the fuck you want, but you were following the way of the Sky Raider or Elementalist or whatever while you were doing it. You could have a Troll Sky Raider who baked pies. They didn't need to take levels in Baker. There wasn't a Baker Discipline. There were no mystic secrets of baking. D&D never quite got to that level.

Anyway, back to chapter 3: what the hell do you use as the basis for Spelljammer kits? You can't write "Astronaut" on your character sheet in a fantasy space game - well, not unless you're twelve. So a lot of these are generic fantasy tropes loosely applied to a space fantasy setting, and some of them (Corsair) are based off of the closest tropes we got:


This is Corsair. Father of Cyclops and Havoc of the X-Men. He's a space pirate! His wife is dead. He's been banging hot alien chicks for the last couple decades.

FrankT:

The plus and minus signs should not be interpreted as arithmetic instructions, however. When rolling 2d10 for encounter reactions (see Table 59 in the Dungeon Master's Guide), add penalties and subtract bonuses from the die roll. If the character has a Charisma of 16, thus receiving a +5 reaction adjustment, subtract that number from the die roll; do not add it. Otherwise, a character with high Charisma would get a worse reaction from the NPCs than would a character of low Charisma.

OK, there's a lot to unpack there. First of all, +5 from 16 follows no fucking pattern and isn't the same as the bonuses you get to other Charisma related things nor is it related to the bonuses you get from having other stats at the same value. Then, 2d10, low is good, is not really a normal part of the system and other subsystems of the game don't work like that. Then, the whole thing of reporting -2 penalties which are then subtracted negatives is clunky as fuck. But the real WTF at the bottom of all of this is that the author felt the need to clarify a table in the Dungeon Master's Guide in a setting expansion book from 3 years later. Seriously, what the fuck?

What the fuck? What the fuck!?

How anyone was ever supposed to find that information is anyone's guess. It's not even in a chapter you would normally expect to be about basic rules or NPC interactions. It's a floating subheader in a chapter that is nominally about alternate character class options for space based player characters.

AncientH:

Other kits include the Crusader, the Frontiersman (think Dan'l Boone, complete with coonskin hat), Marine, Merchant, Arcanist, Astronomer, Geomancer, Imposter, War Mage, Astrologer, Diplomat, Evangelist, Medicus, Missionary, Aperusa, Courier, Harlequin, Privateer, and Salvager. Some of these make at least a modicum of sense as far as the "sailing the seas of space" milieu - or even the much broader "let's go explore some shit" tropes. A few are even vaguely space-themed, like the Astrologer and Astronomer. Mostly, though, it's a grab-bag of random shit. I mean, the dude tried his best, but there's no fundamental logic for why "Merchant" is a Fighter kit instead of a Thief or Wizard kit. If somebody told you they were a Crusader, would you automatically think Fighter kit or Priest kit? What the fuck is a Harlequin doing in space? Or the difference between a Missionary and an Evangelist? Although all bonus points for whatever poor bastard gets to preach the word of Bast to the assholes in the next Crystal Sphere over.

"Did you wish to hear what St. Luveh-Keraph said about devouring the unbelievers?"

But to be fair, adventuring in space has very poor expectations attached to it. Honestly, I'm amazed there isn't a Shipwright or Engineer kit. I mean, I wasn't expecting "Space Marine" to be an option, but you'd think priests tied to certain celestial bodies - Sun and Moon types - might have some specialty priest shit to go on about. If you're going to emphasize trade with Merchant, why not Smuggler? Or Kender Exterminator? Illithid Hunter? Giant Space Hamster Wrangler? You think I'm lying about that last one?

This. Is. SPELLJAMMMMAAAAA!

FrankT:

There are a total of twenty kits in this chapter, which puts it at about a page and a half per kit. Which is pretty poor information density considering how little some of these things actually do. For example, “Privateer” is a Rogue Kit that gives you a job (committing piracy on smugglers and pirates) and you gain a bonus Non Weapon Proficiency in Space Heraldry. The kit is pretty much the same thing as the Corsair kit I discussed previously (and even has a copypasta error in it where it refers to itself as the Corsair kit rather than the Privateer kit because lol editing), and other than the aforementioned conceptual problem with it being a 1st level option that you can't take with other things, there isn't much to talk about. Putting Privateer on your character sheet is a raw powerup, but it's so bullshit minor that no one gives a shit. It's a terrible use of space.

Now there are a couple of things that I alluded to in that last paragraph that need a little clarification. First of all, 2nd edition tried to make us divide classes into four categories (five if you count Psionic classes, which this book emphatically did not), which were Warriors, Priests, Mages, and Rogues. And there were a lot of problems with those categories, such as the fact that Mages was literally just Wizards, while Rogues was Thieves and Bards. But the Bard's best shtick wasn't his access to Thief skills, it was the fact that he threw big fireballs like a Wizard. So the thing where this book presents five Rogue kits and five Mage kits is fundamentally a shit idea even before it manages to fuck all this shit up.

AncientH:

"Arcanist" (mage-merchants that specialize in magic items) was a weird kit because it was already a generic term for arcane magic wielders in the Forgotten Realms, the specific name for some Netherese kit (if my dilapidated memory serves me right), and of course there were these mercantile space dudes that traded in magical shit and they were called...the Arcane.


D&D3 changed their name to the Mercane.

The Astronomer (Wizard) and Astrologer (Priest) are the kits specifically for characters that specialize in space-type stuff. This isn't bad. They get to make a check to know important shit like which Sphere you're in. That's...kind of useful. I mean, it's the sort of thing you'd hope anyone could do just by putting a proficiency into the right skill. Which is one of the drawbacks with Kits: a lot of the shit they do is stuff you would kind of hope anyone could do, if they had the right skill; most of the time it isn't special. Which is good, because when it is special it sucks extra hard. The Imposter kit (for Illusionists only) gives you certain benefits with the change self spell, provided you use a "stock persona" you'd developed - basically one-part quick change artist. For these (minor) benefits, they give up all extra spells from high ability scores. Fuck that.


Also, there is technically no kit to play this giff, and that is a crime.

FrankT:

One of the Rogue kits makes you a Gypsy. It's called “Aperusa.”


Aperusa. Available in the Monstrous Compendium and also as a kit for Thieves.

Why is there a kit to be a racist stereotype of a Gypsy in this book? It literally tells you that the Aperusa are Gypsies, so it's not like one of those things where you only get offended if you think about it too hard. These are specifically space Gypsies and the fact that this description is super racist is just a bonus.

The Aperusa were and are offensive, and featured quite prominently in SPELLJAMMER. Negative stereotypes of Gypsies aren't really a thing that Americans much think about. It's something that you can still probably get away with in places other than a Trump rally, because neither Gypsies nor hate crimes against them are a regular part of American life. But the fact that TSR manifestly could publish racist stereotypes of Gypsies straight through the 90s doesn't mean it wasn't bad for them to do it. Hate crimes against Gypsies are very much a real thing, though mostly in Europe. And TSR did this shit over and over again. It wasn't just a once off deal, or even just a single setting that was stuck with racist Gypsy stereotypes and just kept doubling down on it for book after book. Antiziganist tirades were a constant refrain in AD&D.


The Vistani were also racist Gypsy stereotypes, but from Ravenloft.

Every setting had their own racist stereotypes of Gypsies. In Greyhawk the racist stereotypes of Gypsies were called Rhennee. In the Forgotten Realms, the racist stereotypes of Gypsies were called the Gur. For some reason, the people of TSR thought it was acceptable to write racist stereotypes of Gypsies. Not just acceptable, but like a thing you were supposed to do. Like, it's 4 o'clock and it's almost quitting time but we haven't said anything racist about the Gypsies yet and we'd better say something that sounds like it came out of the mouth of a Hungarian Neo-Nazi.

AncientH:

Things were different in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. We as a society have come a long way from the way things used to be.


Like naked elves! They're all out of the sourcebooks and onto the internet now.

Thieves in general get a bad set of options. The benefit of being a Harlequin, for example, is that twice per day you can spend 1-4 hours performing on the street, bringing in 3d6 sp per performance. That's not fucking exactly adventuring, is it?


Some of you might have been expecting a Shadowrun reference here, but I've moved on.

The Thief kits in this book are relatively shit (and, for the apeusa, offensive), but that's because there's always the possibility of a thief becoming too good; thief skills were a major advantage for the character that knew how to game the system correctly, and some of the kits made the mistake of introducing new thief skills...not always good ones, but whatever. No, the problem is: what the fuck is a thief supposed to do in Spelljammer? Well, that depends on what adventures you get up to, of course - but being a pickpocket specialist isn't going to be of the greatest use when the Illithids have you in their sights.


Oh dark gods, they've got a bard. Now our Bard is going to jam with him. We're so fucked.

FrankT:

Some of these kits involve setting you up for actual things to happen at later levels, which is pretty much just you being an Elothar Warrior of Bladereach. So as an Imposter you get a second stock persona when you hit fifth level. Whatever the fuck you'd been doing before, at fifth level bam! you suddenly have a third identity. But a lot of them give you an immediate tradeoff that is like a one time thing that maybe you care about for the first few levels but won't mean shit to anyone once you get your first vorpal sword. Some of these fucking things you can leave later on, and for some of them that's an advantage because you essentially keep the benefits and ditch the costs, and for others it's a kick in the teeth because it goes the other way.

None of these kits are remotely balanced against each other conceptually or mechanically. But the really damning thing is that no-one seems to know what any of this shit is supposed to be doing. The Evangelist and the Missionary are both flavors of Priest that give you completely arbitrary mechanics for shifting people from team monster to your team. The mechanics are not really the same, and both of them variously break the game (but obviously in different ways).

And there's no underlying theory or even continuous memory to these fucking things. The War Mage kit has suspiciously exactly the same name as the War Mage kit in the Complete Book of Elves, but it's a totally unrelated kit. For one thing, it's for Wizards rather than for Fighter/Wizards. I mean seriously, what the actual fuck?



And the kits aren't even good at doing their jobs. The Merchant kit gives you a reaction penalty in commercial settings because people don't trust shopkeepers while they are looking to buy things. Seriously. That is the actual reasoning. I don't even understand the NPC reaction penalty for being a diplomat. I know personally that when I write “diplomat” on my character sheet, it's because I want randomly hostile reactions from strangers. I mean, obviously.

AncientH:

This kind of thing happened a lot in AD&D. It was, if anything, worse than classbloat in D&D3, because they generally managed to avoid giving prestige classes the exact same fucking name in different products, but that was par for the course with kits. Hell, there was a Gladiator Fighter class and a Gladiator kit for the Fighter class, and those were two entirely different things. The Merchant kit in this book is nothing like the Merchant kit in The Complete Thief's Handbook - because OF COURSE not.



I'm not up enough on AD&D kits to comment much on their suggestions for using other kits in this game. I mean, I can see how you might get limited play out of some of the Dragon Magazine kits like Mech Hunter.


Riiiight before D&D3 came out, Dragon Magazine was basically at the top of their game putting out really brilliant game material combined with funny articles, awesome comics, and terrific art, all on slick paper. It was really the best gaming magazine in existence.

Even beyond the general shittiness of kits, the problem Spelljammer had is that as a sort of metasetting, you kind of opened yourself up to kits and options from different settings...and the rules for those different settings were not at all balanced and didn't always interact well. There was a kit in Forgotten Realms that let you quite literally double-specialize as an elementaist in Fire and Earth. There was a bunch of geomancy-specific spells in Greyhawk. Could you put those together? Would that be a destabilizing combination? Who the fuck knows? There were quite literally too many options and no common reference except for a couple of core books, and lots of broken shit hiding out in obscure adventures and magazine supplements. It was Mister Cavern's job to adjudicate all of that shit.

It was a pain in the ass.

Granted, Spelljammer was not quite alone in this; GURPS has had to deal with that sort of issue from day one - and GURPS, of course, tackled that by rigorous patrolling of the rules, by and large. D&D never tried to make their system that coherent. It was all fiddly bits, all the time.

FrankT:

Using the kits above as guidelines, many new kits can be created.

No. No so hard I need an image macro.



We just got done talking about all the many levels there just are not any possible guidelines to derive from these fucking kits. There just aren't. They might as well be twenty rubber ducks in the fucking river for all the good that's gonna do you to do a linear regression. This book's smug assertion that you could follow their example and do anything that was in any way consistent with anything is offensive on a deep structural level.

One or more special hindrances should be imposed that limit the character as much as his special benefit helps him.

Examples include getting reaction penalties from certain classes of people. Let me state for the record that provoking hostile reactions from enemies you intended to stab in the face doesn't really hinder you at all, so the idea that these hindrances and benefits were in any way balanced is fucking laughable. Others include being banned from learning weapons that you weren't going to spend weapon proficiencies on in any case and not being allowed to own land in a country you will never see again because you are a fucking space pirate. Of course, it also suggests various possible completely crippling hindrances like penalties on die rolls you make to not die. These are presented in bullet point list form like they were in the same room as each other or even on the same footing overall. It's insanity.

AncientH:

D&D took a certain brand of insanity just to play. The ruleset was positively medieval by contemporary standards, trying to squeeze players into certain rigidly defined character types - with random attribute rolls! - with enough options creating a character was a bit like putting a puzzle together.

There was a time when I quite liked that. Just building characters, fiddling with options. I wasn't a particularly good min-maxxer, but there was an interesting possibility space with the game that appealed to me. It remains to be emphasized how few options there were per character level, and maybe how constrained play could get. A lot of players really didn't think outside the box - it was more like a board game than what we think of today as an RPG. Imagine a game of Monopoly where the board has been replaced with a labyrinth.


"Do not pass go, the minotaur rumbles. Roll for initiative."

But of course, D&D did come out of the dungeon once in a while, and Spelljammer in particular was a setting based on motion and movement, visiting strange new worlds and civilizations. We should have seen kits like Elfriend, where you make a point about connecting with the local Elves and telling them what Cousin Elrond is doing; or Survivalist rogues who can withstand extreme conditions, or Brainthieves that can make themselves invisible to Illithids for a while by mental camouflage...but those kind of concepts are really more suited to the prestige classes of the next edition. AD&D really just wasn't set up for that, even with their own bizarre character abilities in place. And that's kind of a shame, because Spelljammer is a crazy setting that calls for a broader range of character concepts.

FrankT:

I kinda thought we'd hit two chapters with this one, but it's the longest chapter and fuck it. Next up: Role Playing

[Ancient History]

Complete Spacefarers Handbook
Chapter 4: Role Playing


We're at where the start should be, so we're showing the front cover.

AncientH:

Ideally, the "pitch" of a game should always include, explicitly or implicitly, the reasons why it would be fun or interesting to play. With Spelljammer, this is pretty simple, since the tagline is "Adventures in Space." You are adventurers, having adventures, in space. Space adventures, even. It doesn't have to be complicated is what I'm getting at, and while character motivations are important, you kind of need them to bend to the pitch. Whatever your character's motivation is, it needs to relate to adventures in space in some fashion. Otherwise, why the fuck are you there?

This section tries to address this, however obliquely. It does it badly.

FrankT:

At only 3 pages, this “chapter” is basically like the “what is role playing?” foreword at the beginning of many role playing games. Except it's on page 59 because reasons. Then it goes on to explain how the right way to play D&D is to get repeatedly disappointed in your character's abilities like Lago did. It lists out a bunch of stock D&D character personalities like “vigilante” and “carefree wanderer” and then tells you things that are not true.

Carefree Wanderers are often quite skilled in combat.

Thanks Morbo.

The most fundamental issue here is that role playing games aren't the same as movies. Role playing games have rules, and the capabilities of characters are objectively measured. So while in a movie, you establish that a character is a badass in a swordfight by having them be nonchalant when the goblins show up, in a role playing game you establish that a character is a badass by having numbers on the character sheet that are on the asskicking level of the scale. The player choice to have their character act nonchalant in the face of goblins is neither here nor there – just as plausible a choice for a character who is a deadly cuisinart of devastation as it is for a character whose mouth is writing checks that their sword arm cannot cash. Similarly, a character who is played hyper-cautiously could still have good numbers or bad numbers and represent a grizzled badass who takes no chances or a worried newb who knows he's in way over his head or something in between.

Telling players that they should think of their characters in a cinema narrative fashion such that their capabilities are implied by the way the player chooses to roleplay them is doing players a disservice. That is literally the opposite of how the game actually works. And the more you think of your character as a skilled swordsman on the grounds that you've been playing them with a personality you'd think a skilled swordsman ought to have, the more you are going to be deeply disappointed and confused when it comes time to make an attack roll and your character doesn't hit on a 13.


If he's so wise, what does he need fireballs for?

AncientH:

Perhaps worse, the adventurer personalities are in every case fucking generic. They are in no way unique to the Spelljammer setting. I mean, you go into some old 80s space novels like Larry Niven's Known Space, and you'll read up about Belters and space miners and shit. We could have used a few of those. Instead, we get the Xenophobe. Literally, your character is racist. For fuck's sake.

FrankT:

A perfectly good question you might want to ask is why there are these stupid personality templates at all. And the answer is that they were in the early Player's Handbook Reference series books like Complete Fighter and Complete Priest. And then your next question would be something along the lines of why they are templating off those books at all when this book is nominally a Campaign Reference book and thus supposedly a different series altogether. And the answer to that is of course that many people working for TSR did not in fact know that they were supposed to be making books for multiple different and distinct book lines.

It's shit like this that made people think there was a “Complete” series that had both the Complete Spacefarers and the Complete Rogue in it. Because fucking obviously, and also the actual writers wrote these books as if that was the case.

Chapter 5: Spacefaring Proficiencies


This is a Hadozee. You get a picture of one of these dudes at the start of this chapter. It's not this picture, but I don't care.

AncientH:

You might have thought we already covered proficiencies - and we did. Now, we get to do them again. They're supposed to be specific to Spelljamming, but as far as I can see the only ones that are unique are Heraldry (Space), Navigation (Wildspace), Navigation (Phlogiston), Planetology, Slow Respiration (I know why this is here, but its presence is still mystifying), Spacemanship, Spelljamming, and Zero-Gravity Combat.



Most of those are bullshit. I'd accept Spacemanship, Spelljamming, and maybe Planetology. I'd listen to the argument about Zero-Gravity Combat for about five minutes before remembering that AD&D combat was rubbish and I don't remember if there's an Underwater Combat proficiency.

FrankT:

Considering that we totally had three and a half pages of rants about how non-weapon proficiencies worked in space back in the Pigs in Spaaace chapter, I don't know why we should have a six page “chapter” about proficiencies. The only thing we get for having some of the proficiency rules in chapter 1 and some of them in chapter 5 is that rules are hard to look up. The information presentation of this book is a fucking war crime.


The fact that there are catapults on Spelljammer ships hurts my brain.

As explained in Chapter 3 of the Concordance of Arcane Space (see “Weapon Teams”), shipborne weapons can be used more effectively by weapon specialists. While the Concordance explains how to hire a large-weapon specialist, it does not explain how PCs can themselves become such specialists.

The reason your “what the fuck is that about?” question has a bit of an echo to it is that this particular justification of why they need to have some half assed rules for spending a couple weapon proficiency slots here and there to be able to man a ballista or whatever is atop a giant abyss of bad design. The reason this has to happen is precisely because the rules for PCs and the rules for NPCs don't really interact. So if they add a new specialist type you can hire the next time you do a minion shape up, there now exist new skills that obviously exist in the world but have no obvious means of being learned by player characters. Conversely, if they introduce a new skill for player characters to buy, there now exist new skills that obviously exist in the world but have no obvious means of showing up on Orcs and Demons you meet during your journeys. And so on and so forth. The whole PC/NPC rules divide was really bad, and the choice to bring it back for 4e and 5e was inexcusable and also retarded.

AncientH:

The sad thing about Zero-Gravity Combat is that you can see the innate gaming DNA that led to shit like the Blind-Fight feat. Having Zero-Gravity Combat doesn't remove all the penalties for fighting in zero gravity, it just halves them. Which means you could absolutely get two low-level characters in a zero-gravity tussle that can't hit or damage each other except on a crit. That's terrible.

FrankT:

Many of the new Proficiencies don't actually have rules. I genuinely do not know what the difference between having the Proficiency “Looting” and not having it is supposed to be. Characters of all classes are impelled to fill santa sacks full of swag and run off with it. Have been forever. There's a reason that taking everything valuable and running off with it is called “Greyhawking.”


As I recall from my time in Hurricane Katrina relief, “looting” means that you are black.

AncientH:

It's hard to find something to rant about. Proficiencies in AD&D were not really comparable to skills in D&D3, or Shadowrun, GURPS, or even World of Darkness. They're most similar to what you had in WFRP, which of course was a D&D clone (more or less), but even the folks at Games Workshop made skills make more sense. There are some proficiencies that are just "you have this or you don't," and others where you make rolls, and a rare few that have prerequisites or can be taken multiple times, and it's all a fucking mess.

At some point, this should lead into a full-on rant about what skills mean in roleplaying games, but I don't have the juice for it, not for this piddly ass product.

FrankT:

Apparently the DM “may” allow characters with the Observation Proficiency to increase their chance of finding a secret door by 1 in 6. Because having a separate proficiency for noticing things on a d20, a Thief Skill for noticing things rolled on d%, and a racial ability to notice things rolled on a d6 seemed like a crackerjack idea.


AD&D had too many cooks. Get it?

AncientH:

Why are there two different Spelljammer-based Navigation skills? Did they really expect to have two different Navigators, one for Wildspace and one for the Phlogiston? Why the fuck knows? Also, I cannot discern the major differences between the Geomancer kit and the Planetology proficiency. Both of them are about examining a world through a spyglass and identifying major features, like you were in ChronoTrigger world mode.

I mean, the Geomancer needs to make fewer checks than a run-of-the-mill wizard with Planetology, but not that many. So it seems...redundant. And bullshit. Like this chapter.

FrankT:

Next up: Spacefaring Logistics. Drink!

[Blicero]

So the book really just randomly includes reaction roll rules in the middle of a chapter? Do they contradict or supersede any existing rules to any extent?

[Username17]

So the book really just randomly includes reaction roll rules in the middle of a chapter? Do they contradict or supersede any existing rules to any extent?

I believe that the author took time out of the chapter to give their interpretation of how the PHB Charisma table was supposed to interact with the NPC reactions table in the DMG. The issue is that the PHB is written with the obvious implication that higher reaction modifiers are better, while the DMG reaction table states that lower numbers are better. This book suggests that you use both rules, but subtract the modifier from the roll. So if you have a negative modifier, you subtract a negative number and the result is higher, which is bad.

Basically all errata or explanations or FAQ answers or whatever would simply go into whatever book was being written at the time. So there's a bunch of errata to the Complete Psionics in the reprint of the Ravenloft Realms of Terror Box Set. And apparently the definitive answer as to how you're supposed to use the count up reaction modifiers with the count down reaction rolls is in the prelude to the kits chapter of the Complete Spacefarers Handbook.

It's shit like this that let known rules lawyers just make shit up like in Knights of the Dinner Table comics. Because DMs and players alike knew that there was absolutely no chance in hell of anyone being able to find an important rule in any vaguely useful timeframe. So if you simple said something about rules from some book that wasn't at the table at the time in a sufficiently authoritative voice, people would just believe you. It was turtles all the way down, so pretty much any claim you could imagine was inherently plausible.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Complete Spacefarers Handbook
Chapter 6: Spacefaring Logistics


There are times you should be playing Galaxy Trucker. And those times are all the time.

AncientH:

D&D had its origins in tabletop wargames. These varied from something like a more complicated version of chess, concerned solely with the tactical considerations of a given battle, to entire campaigns where the logistics of caring for troops and fueling and repairing equipment became major considerations. And there has always been a...recidivist element in AD&D when it came to these kinds of ideas. You can see it when subsystems crop up like BATTLESYSTEM in Dragon Kings.

Logistics for Spelljammers is a lot like that. It's the same mindset that gives you the Stronghold Builder's Guide: trying to work between abstracting the math and satisfying the fucking grognards who lived before spreadsheet software went mainstream.

FrankT:

This chapter gives itself 11 pages to rewrite, expand, and fill in the rules for logistics in space. Considering how much of a Spelljammer campaign could be expected to indulge in shipping literal tonnes of goods around like you were playing Puerto Rico or Traveler or Star Flight 2, that probably sounds like a woefully insufficient amount of space – and it is! There is in fact zero space given to discussing the ramifications of hauling cargo from place to place. As far as this book is concerned, the purpose of a spelljammer ship is to take the crew to exotic new locations. The idea that you might want to ship actual things to trade with foreign worlds where those things are literally unheard of seems to be a thoroughly foreign concept. This chapter is thus primarily concerned with the costs and difficulties of keeping the crew alive. The general assumption appears to be that your space sailors are getting by on 1700 calories a day by eating a pound of dry cereals each day. That sounds horrible, and I don't think that space pirate fighting marines should be doing that. They should be eating like three times that.

The really surreal part though is the fact that the author does not seem to know what a ton is. Now, I know that there are short tons (2000 pounds), long tons (2240 pounds), metric tons (2205 pounds), and measurement tons in Imperial (40 cubic feet) and Metric (1 cubic meter → 35.3 cubic feet). So being a but fuzzy on the details of what exactly a ton means is pretty much the default state for most of humanity. That said, this book goes above and beyond by claiming that you can fit 2400 pounds of dry cereals or 2500 gallons of fucking water. A gallon is in fact 8 pounds and 8 pints worth of water, so 2500 gallons is literally 10 short tons worth of water. This chapter is off by a fucking order of magnitude.



I would say that discussing the intricacies of crew feeding is totally legitimate. I can't even imagine playing a Spelljammer game without getting into a lively discussion about how much of the cargo hold we needed to fill with water and crackers versus how much we could fill with griffin eggs and abeil wax and other trade goods worth considerably more at our next projected port of call. But this chapter adds nothing to this. Not only does it fail to discuss the ins and outs of trade goods at all, but the numbers it does quote are so insane that they add nothing to the game. When it says that you can put more than two thousand gallons of water into a ton that is so fucking obviously wrong that reading that passage aloud is simply going to cause the table to degenerate into an argument about whether the ships are being quoted in weight tons or measurement tons and subsequently people busting out their early 90s solar powered calculators to figure out how much dry weight provisions their ship can actually fit.

AncientH:

Based on the forge rules earlier, Spelljammer seems to be using "tonnage" as you would on seagoing vessels, which was actually a unit of volume more than mass. This, of course, just makes things much more complicated for anyone not familiar with nautical measurements. It kinda makes sense insofar as the whole "sea of space" motif is going on, but if you actually try to figure out any of the physics of it, you're going to be like "wait, so how many fucking gold bricks can this ship actually carry?"...and there's no good answer to that.

Anyway, Frank is right that this is basically Star Trek Voyager, stuck in the Delta Quadrant and with no replicators. And that was the least fun of all Star Treks until Enterprise came along.


Dry cleaning? Not a problem. Alien cheese? Problem.

FrankT:

Much ado is made about Spelljammer's bizarre air bubble shit. See, in SPELLJAMMER, the void between the stars doesn't stop you breathing because everything carries a bubble of air with it, with bigger things having bigger bubbles. But since it's just a static bubble, you run out of oxygen in your bubble given time unless and until you replenish it by sticking your bubble into a planet's atmosphere or having green plants or some fucking thing.


In SPELLJAMMER you start gasping after floating in the void for a while being you have a personal air bubble to burn through.

This is of course all way more complicated and stupid than it needs to be. For fuck's sake you could have just given all the ships bottles of air that constantly pumped breathable air into the hold. That's a real magic item that D&D has had since forever.

AncientH:

It's basically One Piece-level bubble tech.

Actually, Spelljammer isn't the worst basis for a One Piece RPG.

D&D has this great resistance toward industrial magic. We've mentioned it before. You've literally got people that can bend the laws of physics and make items that bend the laws of physics, you'd think SOME enterprising motherlover would have worked out a system to use applied magic to make life easier...but of course, magic is supposed to be arbitrarily rare and mysterious in most settings.

Which is great. But this is literally a setting where wooden ships driven by magical engines are moving between planets. Every one of these goddamn things should have either started out as a medieval version of the Apollo Mission, or been some rich merchant's investment which he wants to see a return for. I mean for fuck's sake, the whole "discovery of the new world" thing happened because spices were worth more than their weight in gold. Can you imagine what happens if early Middle Ages Europe sends out a mission and discovers there's a salt planet six days away? Fuck, the ink wouldn't even be dry before everybody was building their own spelljammers.

So the distinctive lack of industrial magic solutions to common problems in Spelljammer is disappointing and bullshit.

FrankT:

I confess that my eyes glaze over while trying to read this chapter talking to me about hoists and shit. Like, every time I check this book's math or engineering assumptions they are wildly wrong. Like, to an absolutely amazing degree. So this book babbles on about hoists that take two people to operate and only move 500 pound weights and I'm like what the fuck? I am reduced to just pointing at this book and shouting incoherent questions at it.


The Leprechaun Drinking Game is simple: you watch the Leprechaun movies in order and every time you ask a question you drink. It is suggested that Leprechaun 4: Leprechaun in Space not be watched in the same sitting as movies before or after lest you die of alcohol poisoning.

AncientH:

I've never worked out how Greek Fire was supposed to work in Spelljammer. Or why anyone operating in a vacuum thought that ramming would be a good idea. I mean, a torpedo, I could see that. Some sort of a depth charge with its own oxygen supply, sure. Cannonballs, not a problem. Even ballista and catapults aren't too stupid. Really, the whole ship-to-ship combat issue is a bit of a mess, and that's supposed to be a major minigame.

All kender must be accompanied by at least two responsible nonkender guardians. Any legal penalties assessed against the kender as a result of his/her actions will also be visited upon those guardians.
Port Regulation 2784/C/22 Lirak's Cube

That's racist. And inadequate. Goddamnit, Spelljammer needs something the equivalent of Klingon tribble hunters.


Hell, I don't care if you eat the goddamn things.

Chapter 7: Spacefaring Organizations


I can't even tell if this is supposed to be serious.

FrankT:

This is 18 pages of ranting about space organizations, which makes it the second longest chapter in the book. The chapter sketches out some organizations. There are fifteen of them, split between religious organizations, military organizations, trading companies, and “other.” I'm not going to say that this isn't valid world building, because it totally is. But many of the design decisions remain completely insane. Also, a lot of these organizations aren't going to matter much to the players. But mostly my problem with the whole chapter is that it seems to neatly hit the sweet spot of being too much text to quickly absorb and too shallow a treatment to get much real world building. I read the whole thing on the Chainmen, and all I really got out of it was that they were space slavers and they were bad guys.

Fair enough. I understand that we're doing fantasy in space, so one of the enemies are space slavers. I mean, obviously. But I really didn't get the feeling that I was getting anything more than that. If the whole writeup had been “The Chainmen are a villain organization that captures, buys, and sells space slaves” I feel that I would be pretty much where I am having read a much longer article. The only really surprising thing is the left field statement that they don't traffice in super powered slaves or pleasure slaves. The explanation makes no sense, and seems to serve the purpose only to close off things you might want to do with an evil organization of space slavers.


The early nineties were a bizarrely prudish time. We get page after page ranting about racist Gypsy stereotypes, but no sex slaves.

AncientH:

Let's go through this quick:

The Temple of Ptah - Egyptian space Catholics. They claim Ptah created all the Crystal Spheres and that the supreme deity of the local pantheon is just an avatar of Ptah. There's no reason these guys don't get a lightning bolt up the ass wherever they visit.

The Path and the Way - Chinese expy space-religion which proposes space is run by a Celestial bureaucracy. This would be more fun in a medieval "each planet has its tutelary spirit and court" kind of aspect, but they went with a Forgotten Realms connection.

Celestians - Wandering worshipers of a lesser deity connected with Greyhawk. They have specialty priests that get some useful, almost level-appropriate abilities.

Religious organizations in Spelljammer face a lot of the same problems as in Planescape: when the thing you believe can be immediately disproved by moving to a different Crystal Sphere/plane, you'd hopefully re-examine said beliefs and modify them a bit. But that doesn't happen.

The Elven Imperial Fleet is the space navy of the united Elf Federation Imperium. The text says their main purpose is to allow elves on different worlds to communicate, because elves don't have planes-hopping magic. The first part seems reasonable, the second part sounds bullshit. Really? Nobody's worked out a crystal ball network that works between planes yet? Fuck off. I mean sure, if that sort of magic just didn't exist, then the EIF would basically be the only ones keeping the Empire together - basically the British Empire prior to its breakup, sans telegraph. But, y'know, it just seems weird nobody has worked out anything else, even on a small scale.

The Company of the Chalice - Space cops. They want to be Space Paladins, since they're all Good and Lawful and shit, but they work with what they're got. Join today and get...uh...secret handshake? I guess? Not even a decoder ring. You get training and to go adventure with a bunch of paladins. Fuck that.

The Pragmatic Order of Thought - Space abolitionists. This is the kind of thing that has a very simple selling point point: they want to end slavery everywhere. On every world. Okay! Sign me the fuck up! Of course, then they fuck it up by saying that they'd rather free the 10 slaves right here than bust the slave-trading network that enslaves thousands.

The Tenth Pit - Lawful Evil folks with a heavy emphasis on the "Lawful," they're basically the Alliance from Firefly, trying to extend control over more folks' lives under the guise of spreading order.

The Trading Company - Mercenaries and weapon wholesalers. I can actually get behind space mercs. They're the type of people that would land on a planet and ask for recruits.

The Smiths Coster - Trading guild specializing in metalwork armor and weapons, including smoke powder. Basically, they make coin off of introducing metal weapons and guns to Spheres that don't have them. It's one of the few logical organizations here, and probably the best start for getting people into Spelljammer. You end up on the receiving end of some alien weapons, trace the source, and find out the world is bigger (or smaller) than you thought.

Gaspar Reclamations - Fat mage hires people to recover magical items and artifacts. Okay. I mean, that's a thing. It doesn't need to be Spelljammer specific, but you could soak an adventure or three out of it.

Sindiath Line - Elf merchants that mostly provide shipping services - bit like the Spacing Guild in Dune, but with less drugs.

Chainmen - Space slavers. This is maybe hitting the nautical metaphor a bit too hard, since it's pretty explicitly based on African slavery. But it's not a bad overarching enemy to have. I mean, if you can't punch space nazis, punching space slavers is the next best thing, right?

The Seekers - Information brokers who otherwise operate as a cross between the Recorders from Marvel Comics and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The Xenos - Space Nazis. Humans that hate all non-human sapients. Fuck 'em.

The Shapers - Invokers...in Space! These guys sound like they should be a Kit, but they are not. The text claims that they have a monopoly on spellcasting in various ports, which sounds bullshit. How would you even enforce that? Is the invoker mafia going to break your hands? Fuck these guys.

And that's it.

FrankT:

The existence of explicitly racist organizations strikes me as excessively pointless.


The Xenos appear to be a parody of the 40K Imperium, but even within that context I do not care.

The Elven Fleet is not a thing the players are ever going to be able to join, because one of the players is going to be a Dwarf or something. The Xenos are not a group the players will ever not fight because someone is going to be a deck ape.

More generally, the D&D campaign worlds are not mono-racial. None of the D&D campaign worlds have only a single race on them. So why try to treat space as if it was racially segregated? There's no reason to be talking about Elf owned space and Dwarf owned space considering that there aren't any planets to recruit from that doesn't have multiple races on them.

The regions should be dominated by space empires with ideals and laws and cultures and shit. Dominion Space versus Federation Space, not Human Space versus Romulan Space. I know this book came three years after that space boat had already sailed, but it was still a fucking stupid idea.

AncientH:

The thing is, Elf Imperial Fleet aside, there aren't really any space empires worth talking about. None of the worlds the players and PCs are familiar with even has a one-world government. So we're looking at disparate empires where feudal lords plant barons on a couple different planets or something, at best. And that's another major problem with the setting. It doesn't handle trade realistically or well. It doesn't handle politics realistically or well. Or technology. Or getting the PCs into space (you would think the EIF would recruit nice elf boys and girls from backwoods planets to fill out the ranks. You'd think there'd be some sort of impact if Iuz was trading with the Red Wizards of Thay or some shit, but really, even the Big Bads of the local setting aren't working on that kind of coordinated level. Bad dudes usually barely have operations on multiple continents, much less multiple planes or planets. It's a notable deficiency in D&D as a whole.

FrankT:

Next up: Campaigns!

[Mechalich]

D&D has this great resistance toward industrial magic. We've mentioned it before. You've literally got people that can bend the laws of physics and make items that bend the laws of physics, you'd think SOME enterprising motherlover would have worked out a system to use applied magic to make life easier...but of course, magic is supposed to be arbitrarily rare and mysterious in most settings.

I think part of this occurred because in 1e and 2e, because of the inane class and level limit system, you had whole races that did not have magic. So if you wanted Dwarves, to pick probably the most important case, to have access to something, you needed a non-magical mechanism.

So instead of just saying 'you're going to need a ship's mage and you have to use a spelljamming helm' they created all sorts of really dumb ways to get from planet to planet.

The thing is, Elf Imperial Fleet aside, there aren't really any space empires worth talking about. None of the worlds the players and PCs are familiar with even has a one-world government. So we're looking at disparate empires where feudal lords plant barons on a couple different planets or something, at best. And that's another major problem with the setting. It doesn't handle trade realistically or well. It doesn't handle politics realistically or well. Or technology. Or getting the PCs into space (you would think the EIF would recruit nice elf boys and girls from backwoods planets to fill out the ranks. You'd think there'd be some sort of impact if Iuz was trading with the Red Wizards of Thay or some shit, but really, even the Big Bads of the local setting aren't working on that kind of coordinated level. Bad dudes usually barely have operations on multiple continents, much less multiple planes or planets. It's a notable deficiency in D&D as a whole.

Spelljammer as a whole is a setting that lacks territory. It has basically four crystal spheres: and three of them are the ones that contain Greyhawk, FR, and Dragonlance respectively, with the other planets in those spheres being lackluster at best. The only homegrown Crystal Sphere of any consequence is Astromundi (which was written after this book came out) and that one's just bizarre. The setting lacks places to go and things to do, even when it comes to simple things like 'beat up on the un-redeemably evil factions.' To my knowledge there were no worlds that were being systematically subjected to massive Neogi slave raids or landscaped into oblivion by Clockwork Horrors available.

Planescape at least managed to produce a whole bunch of planes with stuff in them and massive alignment oriented armies fighting each other over philosophical points. You might consider that stuff stupid or pointless, but it existed. Spelljammer is more of a toolkit for a GM to produce an interplanetary setting of their own, it doesn't really have one of its own.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The general assumption appears to be that your space sailors are getting by on 1700 calories a day by eating a pound of dry cereals each day. That sounds horrible, and I don't think that space pirate fighting marines should be doing that. They should be eating like three times that.

For reference, the British Royal Navy issued its sailors as daily fare:
14 oz bread (probably hardtack)
1/2 pint rum or 1 pint wine or 1 gallon beer
Either 28 oz meat (beef or pork) or 1/2 pint peas, 1 pint oatmeal, 2 oz butter, 4 oz cheese.

Which the internet tells me is ~3300 calories.

[Prak]

FrankT:

Many of the new Proficiencies don't actually have rules. I genuinely do not know what the difference between having the Proficiency “Looting” and not having it is supposed to be. Characters of all classes are impelled to fill santa sacks full of swag and run off with it. Have been forever. There's a reason that taking everything valuable and running off with it is called “Greyhawking.”


As I recall from my time in Hurricane Katrina relief, “looting” means that you are black.

Clearly, then, having the NWP Looting means your character has a gigantic dick. Maybe you're supposed to use your looting proficiency to use said dick as a weapon.

The general assumption appears to be that your space sailors are getting by on 1700 calories a day by eating a pound of dry cereals each day. That sounds horrible, and I don't think that space pirate fighting marines should be doing that. They should be eating like three times that.

This should get me through noon, right?