Saving Spelljammer

So in 1989 TSR – then-publisher of D&D – released their first “weird” setting for 2^nd Edition AD&D. It was a setting that linked their three existing “full” settings (Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms). It was a science fantasy setting – SET IN SPACE. It had some marvellous new monsters and concepts for settings. It was called Spelljammer.

It was kinda lame.

I should qualify that. Let's say you get the Spelljammer boxed set, the original release. There's loads of great stuff in it, and it looks very promising. Full-colour ship data cards! Paper miniatures with stands to allow you to simulate space combat on the board! Two books and two full-colour maps of a the iconic “Spelljammer” and a typical asteroid spaceport!

                                                             And cool art like this by Brom!

The writing by Jeff Grubb isn't bad, either, if a little hyper-technical in that 2^nd Edition house style. The ships and their datacards are great. There's some good but short adventure seeds to get your “groundlings” into space, and perfectly reasonable rules for travelling in both “Wildspace” (the solar system within a specific Crystal Sphere) and the “Phlogiston” (the Ptolemaic substance between the crystal spheres hanging in the heavens). They're maybe heavier than I go for, but that's fine. There's a few cool monsters/races in one of the books.

But that's kinda it. The setting information (beyond some overwritten high-angle stuff on the nature of civilization in space) is very sparse. There are minute gazeteers of the three main “systems” (Greyspace, Krynnspace, Realmspace), with each planet within each of those systems getting three or four generally bland paragraphs. The Rock of Bral, the asteroid which provides a perfect “starting” spaceport once your guys are in space, gets three pages. There's virtually nothing on the Spelljammer itself. There's similarly little on structuring and running a campaign in space.

The other three boxsets that came over the next few years were of mixed use – the one on the eponymous Spelljammer is considered pretty bland, there's a decent one on space combat, the campaign boxset gets startlingly mixed reviews. A few of the individual books were pretty good depending on what you wanted – SJR1 Lost Ships has been called “the third book that should have been in the first boxset”, based on its wealth of interesting encounters and locations, whilst SJA2 Skulls and Crossbows similarly gives a lot of adventure ideas. The three setting books for the three core systems, and the one for the Rock of Bral, are useful if you're running in those settings.

You probably get the idea. Missed opportunity writ large. It took til Planescape came out, 6 years later, for D&D to have its “iconic weird setting”.

But Spelljammer is worth saving. It's a setting about wizards using their brainmagicjuice to fly butterfly- & squid-shaped ships through spacelanes made of magical oil, inhabited by spider-people slavers and star dragons. I'm sure plenty of individual DMs have salvaged it for themselves before; this is the start of my attempt. It's an attempt which emphasizes the “OSR” elements of Spelljammer.

What is Spelljammer, fundamentally, about? Well it's partly about cool ships; certainly a lot of the published material emphasized galactic trade and high politics; but fundamentally, it's surely about exploration and discovery (in a cool magical ship!). I think it's like a lot of D&D in that way, especially OSR D&D. You fly around going to weird new places, which may well be full of traps and monsters and treasures. You find strange Ancestries with complex objectives, which you can help or hinder. In many ways, the key distinctives are that it's a 3-D Island Crawl, and that it's got Science Fantasy elements. That's what should make the setting feel different. I'll expand on those a little, and then add a few more key categories and concepts to my conception of the setting.

3-D Island Crawl

Think of Skerples' (http://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com) island crawl. There's cool locations spread across your hexcrawl, with seas and attendant dangers in-between. Think of Ben L's (http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com) Zyan Below Inverted Junglecrawl – you can move vertically as well as horizontally on this hexcrawl. I've done this 3-D hex-mapping myself a little, for my Out of the Abyss campaign. That's what the Spelljammer universe is – both within a crystal sphere, and between them, is a 3-D map your player travel around. In so much as the game is one about exploration, functional mapping (hexcrawl, big pointcrawl, whatever) is vital. Your players have to be able to make choices between different targets, and “travel costs” have to be paid to make that choice meaningful.

Another feature of this being an “Island Crawl” is that it's arguably more exploration-focussed than most other settings, or should be. Of course, any game can be exploration-focussed, but when you're on the high seas, the sense of adventurous discovery may well be the primary emotional resonance of the game. So travel between planets, or between spheres, should be hazardous, but rewarding – each location should be fresh, and distinct from other places the players have been. The nested argument should be that each location should be more distinct from each other than in a landcrawl. Dolmenwood or Slumbering Ursine Dunes are obviously very fresh and vibrant settings, without much sense of replication between hexes/points – but there's a thematic similarity between locations within them. That's a softer requirement in Spelljammer. It's legitimate for one world to be the high/epic-fantasy Forgotten Realms and another to be the picaresque, slightly grubby Hill Cantons.

Finally, consider the relationship between “Crystal Spheres” (semi-sealed solar systems) – think of them in terms of oceanology. The individual Crystal Sphere has many islands or continents dotted around an interior sea, like the Caribbean or Mediterranean. Between the Crystal Spheres is the Phlogiston – the dangerous high seas! This both gives a particular “feel” to each type of ocean-terrain, but also informs potential factional relationships. It should be complex for one sphere to major influence or dominate another sphere. The massive web of empires and wars presented in the books doesn't work for me; they clog up the “map”, and make space seem a lot smaller than it should.

Science Fantasy

One element that links subsidiary locations, and is the broader texture of the setting, is that it has pseudo-science at the core – magi-tech is basically how you get around. It's very much fantastic, though, rather than speculative – magically-talented characters give up their spells for a day to pilot the ship, the ships themselves are all sorts of implausible but cool designs, and so forth.

This should certainly influence many of the nodes or hexes the characters explore. One planet could be a giant air bubble with hundreds of floating asteroids within it, inhabited by “Polynesian” plant-men paddling flying canoes. Another could be a sentient, largely benign, incredibly complex bacteria that covers a core of solid adamant.

Similarly, this means the technology involved should be fun and a potential attraction for players. Put time into making running a ship simple but genuinely enjoyable (and sometimes challenging). 2^nd Edition will normally overload this; make this many percentile rolls, check this table and then this one. A small modular system for this, with a way of integrating NPC crew as hirelings, seems very doable and fun.

The Adventure

For me, a key concept in how I run D&D is emphasizing player agency over the direction of the game – which leads will they follow up on, which dungeons will they explore, and so forth. I don't need, then, to have a series of fully-developed, plot-heavy adventures on hand; but that doesn't mean the players aren't going to go on adventures, and that there isn't a functional mechanical concept of “The Adventure” in play. Once they go to a place, and as they go there, stuff is going to happen. How?

One, have weird locations to travel to that have volatile situations ready for the PCs to mess with – this is basic D&Dcraft, but if we bear in mind that this is a 3-D Island Crawl, the self-contained ready-to-blowness of a location becomes more clearly important.

Two, if you're running a crawly-style exploration game, there need to be random encounter tables to introduce unpredictable danger or opportunity.

Three, you need to be able (via random encounter or organic story development) to create “bottle episodes” - things that can happen just on the individual jamming ship. Some DMs may be happy to make this happen by fiat, though my own taste runs to random or organic. This sort of story adds a third string to the bow – there's the stuff that happens on nodal locations, the stuff that happens to the ship (Goblin pirates attack! The ship gets stuck in space sargasso!), and the stuff that happens on the ship. Crew morale is low because of recent casualties – there's risk of a mutiny. A random encounter they rolled on the Rock of Bral four sessions ago comes to fruit as the stowaway flower-person tries to release their seeds into the Phlogiston. You get the idea.

(Idea in respect of stocking encounter tables or worlds – rob Star Trek and the Star Wars Expanded Universe for ideas and then spin them as fantastically as possible.)

Factions

Even wilderness settings – and Spelljammer encompasses those – can benefit from “factions”, whether an individual wizard in an isolated tower or a city-state government. Factions can serve two purposes in Spelljammer games, I think.

One is political – some players love political games, so let them mess around with the factions you're using on that basis. The gigantic empires Spelljammer canonises aren't to my taste, but I can definitely see Neogi slavers and ancient dragons and planet-hopping archmages being major players.

The other purpose that comes to mind is as sources of regular interaction. It seems natural that Spelljamming parties may engage with the same NPCs less than some types of party – there's so much travel that you might only engage with a set of significant NPCs for a few sessions before leaving them for a year or two of real-time play. Having NPCs that the PCs regularly talk with can give a sense of setting density and investment. These NPCs have their own interests, naturally, and want the PCs to advance them. The elven Priest of the Observer God who travels with the PCs is both full of wisdom and secrets, but also is gathering information – perhaps quite sensitive stuff. The bartender at the place in the Rock of Bral the PCs always go is a loyal friend but also a nascent crimelord who's likely to clash with other local bosses.

What Next?

I think I need to develop a map of a starting sphere and stock it with cool stuff and then throw some players into it to see if the above principles create a more functional Spelljammer setting. That could, if successful, turn into some useful stuff to put up here (I guess either way there might be some cool locales or monsters that could end up here).

B/X(ish) Class - The Fungal Artisans, Part 1

A new race-class for my hack of B/X. For those unfamiliar, in “Basic/Expert” D&D and the other Starter Sets of the late 70s and early 80s, there was no distinction between race and class; Clerics and Thieves were humans, whilst Elves were...uh...Elves, and similarly for Dwarves and Halflings. The demihuman race-classes had a bunch of funky gimmicks that set them aside from the human adventuring classes. There are arguments for and against, for sure, but I like relative rules simplicity, love class specialization/character niches a lot, and also approve of customizability within classes, so race-classes fit well with me. 

The class description below includes a few rules mentions relevant to my B/X hack which you can, I'm sure, easily translate – for instance, Saves are modelled after Against The Wicked City/3^rd Edition, with Fortitude, Reflex, and Will Saving Throws, affected by Constitution, Dexterity, and Wisdom respectively. The number given in the table is what they must equal or beat on a d20 to pass the given Saving Throw. Similarly, Fungal Artisans are usually better at foraging than other characters, who generically have a 1 in 3 chance of finding food for the day if they travel at 2/3 speed.

The Fungal Artisans are an Ancestry in my nascent Borderlands setting – an in-between zone, between our world and the true Land of Faery. Think Stardust, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Elidor, Neverwhere, Narnia, and the two Labryinths – Jim Henson's and Pan's.

Here is their one-paragraph summary:

“The Artisans are in fact only one group within a wider race of technicoloured mushroom-people, but outsiders name the whole Ancestry for them. They are usually nomads, seeking sustenance from decay as they travel. Sometimes these bands go wild and seek to create new dead matter from whatever is nearby. The Artisans make startling art out of dead matter, transforming it into bizarre, innovative sculptures and paintings - their most skilled members can even create animate constructs.”

Myconids, by Hector Ortiz

A player choosing to play a Fungal Artisan may either choose to play as a member of the Artisan caste itself, or as one of the forager-warrior caste. Twoclass features are shared by both castes:

Fungal Feeding: Fungal Artisans consume decayed organic matter for sustenance – rotten wood and meat, for instance. Few other Ancestries have the tolerance or digestive tract to handle the ordinary food of these mushroom-men. Such matter can usually easily be bought as a Rations-equivalent in settlements at 50% of the ordinary price. Whilst foraging in any suitable environment, the Fungal Artisan increases their chance of finding sustenance for the day by 1 in 3 – so in a normal environment, they have a 2 in 3 chance of finding sustenance when travelling slowly enough to forage.

Telepathic Spores: Fungal Artisans cannot speak, but rather communicate via telepathy. Any Fungal Artisan can always communicate telepathically with any other Fungal Artisan within 100-feet. They may also use telepathic spores to allow them to communicate telepathically with up to 6 other individuals at any one time. This telepathy similarly has a 100-foot range. If they are connected to six non-Artisan people already and want to connect to a new person (via infecting them with benign spores!), they must drop their connection to one of the pre-existing telepathic partners. Any new telepathic partner must be within 30-feet for the spores to be effective. Anyone seeded with such spores is seeded permanently, or until the connection is dropped by the Artisan, or if Cure Disease is used upon them.

Artisan Caste

The Artisan-caste class table is as follows (they are capped at 10^th level):

Level	XP	HP	FORT Save	REF Save	WILL Save	Inspiration Points Per Day
1	0	1d6	12	16	13	2
2	1750	2d6	12	16	13	3
3	1500	3d6	12	16	13	4
4	7500	4d6	12	16	13	5
5	14000	5d6	10	14	11	6
6	28000	6d6	10	14	11	7
7	56000	7d6	10	14	11	8
8	112000	8d6	10	14	11	9
9	224000	9d6	8	12	9	10
10	336000	9d6+2	8	12	9	11

To Hit Bonus: +1 to Melee or Missile Attacks.

Mycological Artforms

Artisans utilise their Inspiration Points to convert dead matter into art – a form of material transmutation beyond the dreams of alchemists. They also complete these great works in speeds beyond even the most efficient human craftsmen.

At 1^st Level, choose an Artform from the list below at Tier 1. At each subsequent level, choose either to advance an existing Artform up one Tier, or, if there is a teacher available (either another Fungal Artisan, or a supremely skilled artist of another Ancestry), gain a new Artform.

The five Artforms are:

Sculpture: Beginning with the creation of lifelike statues and the like, this Artform can progress to the creation of semi-sentient constructs. It can also be used for the creation of relatively simple tools and weapons.

Painting: This Artform is used both for fine art painting, but also for disguises and armour.

Architecture: More than a form of Sculpture, this Artform enables – with time, effort, and materiel – the creation of buildings, with masters able to create natural features and even wonderworks such as floating palaces.

Moving Pictures: A relatively new Artform, this allows the Artisan to depict moving but insubstantial images – perhaps via some stylized form like sand painting, or perhaps in a very realistic fashion. Advancement in this allows the Artisan to make the pictures more complex and interactive.

Chemistry: With practice, this Artform progresses from relatively simple functions such as the purification of water or the slow change of a wooden door into sludge all the way up to the creation of healing reagents and dark poisons.

Each of these Artforms has multiple Tiers, which require the expenditure of different amounts of Inspiration Points (more IPs for higher tiers)

Forager-Warrior Caste

The Forager-Warrior is capped at 10^th Level.

Level	XP	HP	FORT Save	REF Save	WILL Save
1	0	1d8	14	15	14
2	2000	2d8	14	15	14
3	4000	3d8	14	15	14
4	8000	4d8	11	13	13
5	16000	5d8	11	13	13
6	32000	6d8	11	13	13
7	64000	7d8	9	9	11
8	128000	8d8	9	9	11
9	256000	9d8	9	9	11
10	384000	9d8+3	7	7	9

To Hit Bonus: +2 to Melee Attacks, +1 to Missile Attacks.

Psychotropic Spores: Once per day per level, the Forager-Warrior may target a non-fungal, non-undead creature within 20-feet. That target must make a Fortitude Save or be affected as per the spell Sleep (though strictly the target is conscious but catatonic). At 7^th Level, the Forager-Warrior may, once per day instead of using a Sleep spore, instead force its target to make a Will Save or be affected as per the spell Confusion.

Next Time: Detailed rules for Artforms.

On Character Backstory and Character Death

There's a contradiction at the heart of the implied “game” at the heart of Fifth Edition. This is an edition greatly influenced by the old school – two major OSR figures are consultants on it, after all. There's an adventure that's an arguably superior reboot of Tomb of Horrors. There's these three pillars of gameplay. Dungeon situations can be solved in many ways. Smart play is rewarded; without it, your character may die.

This is also the edition where the pretty good Starter Set immediately railroads the party into some bland roadside encounter, the edition that fastforwards the first two levels where characters are genuinely fragile, the edition where in the Tomb of Horrors III adventure you're told to give players a way out of hard random encounters right after being told that random encounters shouldn't be levelled for difficulty.

Not all of Fifth's weaknesses have to do with the tension I'm going to identify, just as not all of its strengths comes from Mike Mearls' OSR roots. But a lot of the problem comes down to this:

Your new character matters too much.

You've written a couple of pages of backstory. You've done a bunch of character-build nonsense, picked the right spells, the whole shebang. You've legitimately invested in the process of even getting to the table. Your character is awesome, and they have a great quest.

It would genuinely suck if they died during Session 3, when falling into a whirlpool trap activated by a Twig Blight.

On the other hand, if that happens to some guy you rolled up a couple sessions ago, maybe it's just funny, or a useful learning experience about the combat behaviour of these little plant dudes.

Fifth Edition nobly attempts to meet two assumptions of play here – the epic hero of storied past, and the nobody who rises to be somebody through their adventures. It fails in part. This is somewhat genetic – there's something bred in the bone as far back as First Edition, and certainly Vampire the Masquerade has had a significant impact. But the buck stops here. The implicit assumptions of Fifth, and even some of the mechanics, create an impossible tension. Characters dying is a waste.

But what if the real, active possibility of character death – round every corner, at every potentially trapped door – made everything else sweeter? Every victory, every escape from catastrophe, every friend made and enemy defeated, all made more ecstatic by the fact that even at 5^th Level, you can just straight up die from fighting the wrong monster at the wrong time. To quote Shadowlands, “the pain now is part of the happiness then – that's the deal”. Life and death are interlinked.

Take this example of an old school DM talking about a character death: http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2017/06/sir-tresken-vigilant-rest-in-power.html. Now bear in mind Sir Tresken will likely have been rolled up pretty quickly, with little optimization. A character was needed for a session, and lo, one emerged. One day, Sir Tresken died. Others had died before, but hadn't received such an obituary from the DM. I imagine some of them “get capped pretty quick” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bR3T1eThJU), too. After all, at first glance, in the old-school game, “the king stay the king”.At first glance.

But what about Sir Tresken?

“Sir Tresken also won the Twin Saddle of Vyanir, fashioned by Saint Garanax, the founder of his order, the dread Storm Riders. Garanax had used it to break the first of the war crows, leading them from the inverted White Jungle to the waking world. Sir Tresken followed in Saint Garanax's footsteps. Each traveled to Wishery from Rastingdrung through a shimmering door. Each served the same two mistresses. In the waking world, Tresken was the sworn servant of the Chatelaine of Storms, the witch queen from whom he drew his powers. But in Wishery, the Petal Blade bound him to the memory of the Lady Shirishanu, legendary poet-warrior paramour of the last of the Incandescent Kings. Had he lived longer Sir Tresken too would have broken wild crows and been the stuff of fairy tales.

…

At that same moment, in Wishery, as Tresken's life blood poured from a mortal wound onto the dueling ground, the Petal Blade gave a keening cry, a wave of raw grief that burst upon all at the pagodas of the hanging merchants. Fat Malichar burst instantly into tears, and even Nekalimon who hoped against hope that Tresken would be slain felt so sickened that he spilled the precious moonstones he was counting into the chasm below. The Petal Blade grieved on behalf of its mistress, and all of Zyan, for the waning of the hope that had begun to dawn in that hopeless place.

Sir Tresken died in the forty first session of our campaign. May he rest in power.”

Sir Tresken earned every moment of that. Forty-one sessions of ruthless, cutthroat play. That chump barbarian who died two sessions in, even the magic-user who went down after nine sessions – sure, they might have been fun, but Sir Treskens had created a legend. Not based on his backstory. Just based on – well – his story. And that makes his death tragic.

But what if he had survived? Well, keep playing, and you'll find a character like Sir Tresken.

That's the issue with a gameplay style which emphasizes pre-game prep – not just pages of backstory writing, but, and perhaps this is more to the point, one which also rewards serious pre-game statistical planning. The game becomes about efficiently utilising the optimised device, or experiencing the ramifications of the backstory, not about exploring a world and creating a story. It becomes actively obnoxious to let characters die – the characters, and the work put into them by the player, becomes the point of the game, rather than the gameplay itself. The effort you've put into backstory and character builds means it seems less fun for the DM to let your character die.

I'm not saying that's bad wrong fun. You do you. But I suspect it's not the best use of an engine like D&D's.

D&D suits emergent backstory best, is my contention. It's a game about exploration and discovery as much as it's a game about killing stuff. At its best, it's also a pretty simple game, where rolling up a character is quick and no-fuss. Given that, why not discover your character along the way, too? Again – I'm not saying that it can't be fun for the DM to create elaborate interlacing plot-threads based on your complex backstory. I'm saying it might be funner to think up a sentence summarising your guy or gal and then crash them into the world. See whether they become worthy of a backstory or not. Do you know what the backstory they'll get is? The game you actually play.

Maybe that backstory is you being turned into a tapestry by a Fungal Artisan two sessions in. But maybe it'll be like Sir Tresken, and a living sword will wail your death across the land, causing even your enemies to weep.

And maybe your tale will be greater yet.