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Author Topic: Spelljammer 5E  (Read 3084 times)

honeydipperdavid

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Spelljammer 5E
« on: August 18, 2022, 06:01:37 PM »
First and out in the open, its a money grab at $70 when its worth $30 if that.  Its a single book, broken up into three books.  The pages that make up the set are of good thick quality, better than prior 5E material.  By breaking out the bestiary, it does make it easier to DM at a tabletop if you were to use the book to run the game.  As is breaking out the adventurer into its own book.  Now the rules and lore book, it is nice having it be separate because when I run out of bags to pick up my dogs crap, I have about 60 free sheets of paper to pick up his crap.  Now after reading that, if you get the impression that Spelljammer 5E has issues, well its got a few.

1st) Light of Xaryxis is the expected "subvert their expectations" and make the good guys (elves) the bad guys.  The whole premise is the Space Elves are going to harvest your planet to save their own.  The adventure as expected is a bit on rails.  There is no map for you in your spelljammer to travel around.  If there was, they would probably give you an astral train on a railway system to go from adventure point A to B.  It's functional, its got good content, they don't know what a random encounter table is to save their life.  There are some good ideas there that you can rip out and use elsewhere.  Is it a module: Yes  Does it have content you can run: Yes  Did you get what you paid for: Yes  Rating 100%

2nd) Boo's Astral Menagerie  They have about two sentences from Minsc and Boo in the book, so memberberries.  The first page they did clean it up a bit, and tried an attitude system, good try but failur.  They tried to put in a new attitude system with random rolls from 1d6, 2d6, 1d10, its all over the place.  The editor failed here.  Just give them a set +/- and have them roll a single D20.  The book is cluttered, they damn well didn't play test it with human beings.  What this part of the fails on is lore.  There is little to nothing to make the creatures distinct compared to the 2E version.  The sense of humor is really missing.  I mean who doesn't remember fondly the Tyranohamster Rex from the section on giant space hamsters?  At best they at least allowed the joke about gnomes using miniature space hamsters in a wheel running gnomish ships.  Once a censor realize it goes back to the tinker gnomes of 2E, they'll purge that joke.  It's a small bestiary, its equivalent to what you'd see at the back of a module.  Is it a bestiary: Yes.  Does it have content it should: No  Lore Content help DM: No  Rating 33%

3rd) Astral Adventurer's Guide This one is objectively bad.  A book about space combat that doesn't contain rules for space combat.  The rules for creating a space system are non-exist, like literally they didn't include them.  This is literally everything from the book word for word on creating a system:

Quote
Creating a Wildspace System
A typical Wildspace system has a sun plus a number of planets and moons orbiting it. Two examples of Wildspace systems, Doomspace and Xaryxispace, are described in the accompanying adventure, Light of Xaryxis. Use them as models when creating your own Wildspace system.

Space combat, they don't talk about grid placement of ships, no movement or turn rules, and they do everything they can to take you away from ship to ship combat and to just go to the ships and fight there, because that's spelljammer?  Wizkids put out a whole slew of mini's for spelljammer for combat and they look really good AND WotC betrayed them and made it where there is no ship game so no one will buy those miniatures because there is no game for them.  The concept of hullpoints from 2E doesn't exist so player spells are OP when it comes to destroying ships.  If a DM is going to go rules as written (RAW) and use this supplement they are going to have a bad time.  It has the minimum amount of lore on the rock of bral and took the easy route of copying the ships from 2E doing minimal updates.  Is this a supplement: No  Does this have space combat: No Rating 0.00%


Overall Rating: 44.3% 

This supplement is 100% Perkins and Crawford.  They crapped the bed on this one.  I mean they can write a module, but they can't write game rules to save their dog from getting monkey pox on its bum if their lives relied on it.
« Last Edit: August 18, 2022, 06:05:58 PM by honeydipperdavid »

Eirikrautha

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Re: Spelljammer 5E
« Reply #1 on: August 18, 2022, 09:51:43 PM »
Thanks.  As someone who loved Spelljammer and was the target audience, you've saved me a purchase.

honeydipperdavid

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Re: Spelljammer 5E
« Reply #2 on: August 18, 2022, 10:50:48 PM »
What you want is Wildjammer a free 5E Spelljammer made by a fan, 100 pages in 5E trade dress with good art and content.  They got helms, ships weapons, crews, modules (equipment from spelljammer you can add to your ship), fore mantle, and hulls.  They go over ship combat and the crew roles (I really like that one) boatswain, captain, fighter helmsmen (yes they put fighter craft in), gunner and helmsmen as roles with abilities you can roll during combat and gain levels to get more abilities, and a full line of spells fitting for Spelljammer.  They borrowed part of the combat system from magehand press but it is workable but its close enough to spelljammer to work as well.

This is the reddit post showing where to download it.  Sometimes dropbox throttles it because well, Spelljammer 5E was a dud for a lot of people so the downloads are too much for dropbox.  Even the normies over at D&D Beyond are pissed.  I got a a few hits over there for carping on what they released, so the regime doesn't want any negative feedback public.  It's f'n hillarious how bad they failed with the ship combat, total and utter failure and inability to write rules for gameplay.  This is Perkins and Crawfords baby and all they could deliver is a working module, that's it.  The failure is 100% on them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/oviyld/wildjammer_more_adventures_in_space_a_100_page/

Valatar

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Re: Spelljammer 5E
« Reply #3 on: August 26, 2022, 04:43:03 PM »
1st) Light of Xaryxis is the expected "subvert their expectations" and make the good guys (elves) the bad guys.  The whole premise is the Space Elves are going to harvest your planet to save their own.

That one's not really new, the space elves were a bunch of self-important fuckers in the original Spelljammer too.  They had the dominant space navy over every other species, and self-appointed themselves as the caretakers of the known spheres, giving basically zero shit about anyone else's problems.

honeydipperdavid

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Re: Spelljammer 5E
« Reply #4 on: August 26, 2022, 05:01:41 PM »
It's Elves, they are almost portrayed as haughty and self involved, especially in the older editions.  A lot of that comes from Tolkein's influence from the time.  They did get rid of the orcs, goblins and hobgoblins in space.  One would assume they are now the USA of Wildspace now and control the flow of goods.  I always treated them as defacto controller of Wildspace the way how Spain controlled the New World early on.  They want their money and you are going to pay your taxes, now move along.