“Dungeons & Dragons in space” is a weird idea, and there’s no way to approach it without embracing that craziness. When the Spelljammer setting was originally written in the late 1980s, it brought together fire-loving hippos, space hamsters, and a range of interplanetary physics based on 18th-century pseudoscience. The end result is sort of Jules Verne fantasy sci-fi where ships from the Age of Sail take forays outside the atmosphere of their homes and find stranger ports of call.
Is it going crazy? If you’re riding a giant space hamster while hopping on the deck of a nautiloid, I guess you do. But it’s the good kind of crazy, somewhere between The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Guardians of the Galaxy. Plus, space pirates are just inherently cool.
The updated version of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition (opens in new tab) comes as three thin hardcovers, 64 pages each, in a slipcase with a DM screen. There’s a bestiary called Boo’s Astral Menagerie, with statistics for everything from barnacles that feed on ship’s magic and then shoot it back out, to hyper-fashionable humanoids that have evolved from cephalopods that believe war is artistic expression. (A few creatures from another ancient environment also creep in, the three-kreen bug humans and surran lizard folk from the extreme 90s world of Dark Sun.) There’s also an adventure book, Light of Xaryxis, which contains a pulp. mini-campaign designed to run in 12 short sessions, complete with cliffhanger endings. It is explicitly inspired by the 1980 Flash Gordon movie, which is even suggested in the intro.
Then there is the rule book. The Astral Adventurer’s Guide starts off strong with player-character options such as mechanical autognomes, the aforementioned three-creen, and stretchy ooze humans called plasmoids. It sums up the differences between Wildspace (the gap between worlds, like space only warms and you automatically bring a bubble of oxygen and gravity with you when you go in) and the Astral Sea (the space between systems, a celestial realm of pure thought) , and then goes into ship-to-ship combat in about half a page.
In certain corners of the internet, this is seen as an oversight of cruel proportions, a scam that is the death knell for D&D. Right now someone is probably burning their rulebooks on YouTube. But here’s the thing: I’ve never seen an RPG with ship combat rules that people really liked. They’re either a minigame that requires figurines and an empty table to play (perhaps an empty floor, depending on how they handle weapon ranges), or an abstraction that’s hard to relate to what the PCs actually do. I guarantee that if Spelljammer came up with some in-depth game rules for ship combat, maybe one or two of my players would dig with it, and the rest would be split between not being involved or just hating it.
While there are rules for what happens when ships crash, as well as advice on takeoff distance and initiative, the point is that you only have time to take a shot with the ballista or mangonel to soften your opponent, and then you close – either swinging over ropes or preparing to repel boarders. Spelljammer assumes that player characters are about level 5 before they are ready to travel between worlds, and that means they probably have a sheet full of skills, achievements, spells, and at least one unusual magical item. Make the fun things you can already do the focus of your space battles, it says.
The absence that hits me harder is the lack of setup information. After a section on ship statistics, the most detailed part of the book with full deck plans for 16 vessels to swashbuckle over, comes a chapter on the Rock of Bral. This pirate haven for your adventures gets a nice expandable map, but the locations are succinctly summarized, and the characters who live there come with short lines.
There’s a great illustration of a friendly bar-owning spectator named Large Luigi, just the kind of larger-than-life NPC you’d want Spelljammer to be full of, but this section feels abbreviated, crammed into a tight number of pages. And if you want a broader history of the setting or its factions, you won’t find that here either.
Those gaps can be filled with information from the original version of Spelljammer, whether from the Forgotten Realms wiki (one of the better fan-run collections of geek knowledge, here’s the section on Realmspace (opens in new tab) for example), while PDFs of the old books from AD&D 2e such as Rock or Bral (opens in new tab) are also available. You have to sort out things that reference the more problematic aspects of your old D&D, most of which have been quietly ignored in the new books (although there was an unfortunate flaw with the hadozee, which the publisher apologized for and removed).
It does feel like Spelljammer 5e was written with the assumption that people just google it if they want to know what an astral dominion is for example (opens in new tab) is like. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Something Spelljammer definitely does well is the artwork, and that’s vital. I remember being intrigued by the original books and then opening them up to find pages and pages of dry text only occasionally broken by art that was just as likely a depiction of some rocks in space as something exciting. Instead, I fell for the more lavish-looking Planescape books because I’m shallow.
Even if you’re not as superficial as I am, art is important when trying to convey outré concepts such as “space is a psychedelic vortex in which fish swim and sometimes asteroids live,” and these three books are full of vibrant imagery for you to enjoy. want to show to players. I wish there were more pictures of NPCs. If there’s a character named I want to see a headshot of them, darn it!
But the lack of ship-to-ship combat subsystems doesn’t bother me at all. Minimizing the amount of new things everyone has to learn is best, and I’m glad to see they’ve dropped the rules for wizards who lose spells when controlling spelljammers, and clerics are restricted based on whether their god enough influence in a certain area of Wildspace. The absence of complex options encourages a riotous approach more in line with how 5e works best – and encourages you to strategically ignore the rules when someone has a cool idea.
When I recently played a Spelljammer game, the first two things I did when our ship was ambushed from behind was convince the pilot to do a “Waterdeep drift” to line up the forward-mounted ballista. and then use one of my mysterious archer’s skills on said ballist. The first act was pointless because by the rules a wizard ship can reorient itself in turn to face any direction – they are magical after all – and the second was technically illegal because arcane shot should only work with short arcs or long arcs. But the DM, bless him, said “yes, and” to both, so I had to do something cool. About 90% of D&D lets players do cool, ridiculous things.
I hope that when the Planescape setting gets a similar treatment next year, it will be treated a little differently. Like Spelljammer, Planescape has a default hub to serve as a base for players, the interdimensional city of Sigil, and I’d love to get a comprehensive overview of that, complete with full descriptions of colorful NPCs, even if it’s a shorter adventure and fewer monsters.
However, the old rules for magical items that gradually weaken when taken from their original level can definitely end up in the trash.
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