Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Spelljammer: Adventures in Space

 I got my hands on my copy of the Spelljammer box set, and I have spent the past couple hours devouring it.

The set includes a DM screen and three books.

The Astral Adventuring Guide is the main introduction to the setting and contains the six new playable races, as well as a couple (and really only just a couple) of spells and magic items, as well as the deck plans for the various ships you'll find, and some lore info on the Rock of Bral, a flat asteroid-city that can serve as a major adventure hub.

What you will not find here is a ton of lore info outside of the Rock of Bral. True to 5E's stripped-down sourcebooks (rather than releasing several hundred+ page books for each campaign setting as they did in editions past) the focus here is on how Spelljammer is meant to work, rather than giving you every celestial body in Realmspace.

Indeed, the approach here is fairly minimalistic - rather than adding complex rules for ship-to-ship combat, it more or less encourages you to treat ships as mobile platforms on which to use your own character abilities - though ships do have weapons and attacks (and an Ilithid's Nautiloid can also teleport).

I think the philosophy here is to not overcomplicate things.

Some lore has been expanded upon - Wildspace and the Astral Sea are actually both considered part of the Astral Plane, but Wildspace is also within the Prime Material Plane, serving as the region where the planes overlap. Thus, you still need to eat and breathe in Wildspace, and you'll still age there, even if it's technically also part of the Astral Plane.

Boo's Astral Menagerie might be the most welcome volume for campaign homebrewers given that it's a huge selection of monsters, from the whimsical like Vampirates and Space Clowns (still terrifying, but whimsical) to cosmic horror monsters like the Neh-thalggu and the... er... Cosmic Horror.

Also, I'll point out that Druids can become Giant Space Hamsters (though not miniature giant space hamsters, which count as monstrosities).

Light of Xaryxis, the adventure, is the one I haven't finished - I'm about a quarter of the way through it. The adventure is designed to be broken into 12 single-session episodes that will get you from level 5 through 8 (hitting 9 after the adventure is completed). So far it seems fun, with disasters and a very Alien-like exploration of a derelict ship.

The adventure I think goes a long way to giving you a sense of the tones you can strike with the setting, from space opera to sci-fi horror, etc.

All this being said, I think we're likely to hear some complaints about the set's relative sveltness - perhaps we could have stood to have more info on the various Wildspace regions. And given that this is 20 bucks more expensive than a typical release, it feels a little frustrating that we're basically paying that extra for a different format. I might have preferred paying 50 bucks for a single volume that combined these three books into a single 192 page book. Honestly, I also might have liked to see more fleshing out of "known Wildspace regions" to get a better sense of what's in Realmspace and Greyspace and such. Essentially, I could imagine a version of this that is closer to 300 pages with more in-depth detail about specific lore and perhaps expanding out magic items. This is also I believe the first setting book (other than Strixhaven, if you count that) without a subclass.

But I'm also hesitant to criticize the set for what it's not rather than what it is. The new playable races are very cool, and the potential for really fun adventures is definitely in here. I'll admit I haven't gone super-deep on the monsters to figure out how fun they would be to run (which is also something you sometimes just have to do for real to get that sense) but the variety and number is quite good.

Ultimately I think the odd thing about Spelljammer is that it's less about new "content" but more about approaching D&D with a different attitude and perspective, showing you new ways to use what is already available. I think it's open for debate how appropriate that is to package in a 70-dollar box set, but I'm sure I'll be able to use a lot of the elements here even in a campaign that isn't strictly Spelljammer-set in nature. Again, folks who like to use cosmic horror and aberrations are going to find a lot of really cool monsters to use.

And when I read through the rest of Light of Xaryxis, I'll try to give a more thorough review of it as an adventure.

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