Pádraic's Reviews > Spelljammer: Adventures in Space

I approached this with some caution, as I have no nostalgia for the Spelljammer setting, and indeed find the whole fantasy-in-space concept too goofy for my tastes. Nevertheless, there's always something to be taken and used for your own games, and onward I went. Three books here, so let's talk about them separately.

The Astral Adventurer's Guide is the meat of the setting information, mostly player-facing stuff. There are the usual couple of spells and backgrounds, but the real draw are the racial options. And they're a kooky bunch, though a surprising percentage of them are animal-based. We're in space, you could have gotten weirder than this. We've got bug people, monkey people, and hippo people, then some walking talking oozes, robot gnomes, and space elves. This last one is the least interesting, so it's particularly baffling that they occupy such a central role in the included adventure, but we'll get to that.

Then there's some explanations about how the setting functions. Basically, solar systems function like pockets of outer space, with the airless void and all that, but then when you go out further you transition into the Astral Sea, which you can then use to connect to other pockets with other systems in them. I quite liked the astral plane as it stood already, the backstage of the universe, so this change doesn't thrill me, but as ever with D&D, that means I can just ignore it without a fuss and carry on as I was.

More broadly, I don't understand why gravity on the ships and the air pockets and the orbits and all the physics stuff generally doesn't just function like it does in our real outer space. Instead they've invented a different, more complicated way for it to function. Some of this is a result of adding magic into the mix, but also they've not taken advantage of magic's key worldbuilding function: to just handwave the boring stuff. Instead they've used it to add more boring stuff. Now you've gotta explain to your players that oh, no, your totally reasonable instinct for how gravity functions is incorrect.

Things pick up a bit when we get to the example setting, the spaceport known as The Rock of Bral. It's pretty cool, scummy and chaotic. It has good factions and specific locations, loaded with plot hooks and secrets all over. My previous caveats stand, but this did endear me quite a bit to the general setting.

Then we've got Boo's Astral Menagerie, a sizeable collection of NPCs and monster statblocks for your Spelljammer adventures. A lot of them aren't anything to write home about, being just variations on the theme of "what if [regular monster] but in space", but there are some highlights.

There's the very gross Neh-thalggu, who has a near-fatal case of Fantasy Name Syndrome, but might be more terrifying than a mind flayer, its powers growing based on how many brains it's collected. There's also a picture of a ooze person holding a gun that is so goddamn funny. The eye monger is also great, a fake asteroid that eats people. But the clear winner is the zodar, an ancient set of armour, ominously looming. Nobody knows their true purpose or feelings, they speak only three times per lifetime, then they cash wish and turn to dust. Inexplicable, terrifying, very cool.

The adventure then is called Light of Xaryxis. It's not good. Some parts of the D&D community online talk about 'railroading' like it's the worst crime imaginable, but this really is railroaded all to bits. There's a series of linear encounters that always end up at the same next encounter, with no real player choices involved. The initial journey from your home planet into the stars contains a series of encounters that are literally just: you run into another ship, you run into another ship, you run into another ship.

And then when you arrive at The Rock of Bral there's no reason to explore, you're in and out. The same thing happens in Doomspace, a solar system whose days are numbered, spiralling into the abyss that was their sun, an extremely cool spot, but you spend five minutes on one of the planets and then you're on a space station dealing with the bloody space elves again, who are in this so much, the primary antagonists, despite being the least interesting part of the universe.

There are some other bits and pieces that are okay, there's a vampirate mutiny and a floating citadel shaped like a moth, but they're small and far between. The whole thing feels like a straight line to the end, which does have a potential interesting player choice and a heroic sacrifice, but an NPC just volunteers if none of the players do, rendering the whole thing pointless. Not recommended, and there's barely anything in the adventure worth stealing and using elsewhere either.