Spelljammer 5e Reactions

The big bearded holiday fellow with the tiny fey and sleigh pulled by animal familiars left me a copy of Spelljammer under my artificial tree this year. Let’s take a look. There will be spoilers about the adventure Light of Xaryxis and the monsters, so jump off the train now if that’ll put a pin in your future fun.

So what do I think of Spelljammer? First off, I’ll agree with one of the big critiques which others have already voiced of the slipcase set (which is beautifully produced with fantastic art). It’s a bit thin, and the material would’ve probably been better presented to the user as one larger hardback. Much as I love the cover art on each of these books, they are about as thick as my kiddo’s picture books, and that’s basically what they feel like when you read them with the heavy, almost card stock paper that’s obviously been chosen to fill out the books volume. It is much easier to sit and read one of these picture—I mean game books. 

The brevity meant that Boo’s Astral Menagerie is the only bestiary on my shelf that I’ve been able to read in an evening and only the second one I’ve read through completely, cover-to-cover (I went on a Monster Manual binge read early during my time in the hobby). Maybe at some point I revisit how the monsters play, but not having used them yet, I can’t necessarily speak to that. The random encounter tables are quite good though, and I would definitely use them. They aren’t organized into separate tables by CR though, only by environment, so they may not necessarily be balanced for your group (and the GM is forced to do their own encounter math if they want to balance it). The tables are however weighted to try to minimize encounters with the high CR monsters. The attitude roll to determine potential hostility or friendliness is a helpful tool though that I think can spur some interesting improvisation. I know it’s a bit low rent to include monsters from another source in addition to the Monster Manual or SRD, but wouldn’t have minded seeing some suggestions using Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse either (it has plenty of monsters that are native or work in the Spelljammer setting—I mean, an Astral Dreadnaught is on the cover!). The ship encounters table is very flavorful and offers some great inspiration for how to flesh out your own NPC Spelljammer ships. Captains’ names and full crews included.

As for the monsters included, I very much enjoyed their descriptions and saw some interesting abilities from some of the stat blocks I read. Most are concentrated in the 0-10 CR range, which is where most of your play happens. There tend to be a lot of low CR, NPC-type stat blocks for various ancestries of spacefaring creatures, which seems designed to allow you to populate a ship with a number of lower CR creatures. As we’ll get to, there’s not a ton of setting details presented in the set, but the monster descriptions do a lot of heavy lifting and might even redeem the product as far as usability. I like the Psurlons as a nasty group of aberrations that work with Mindflayers when convenient. There’s plenty of interesting creatures to populate adventures with as far as I’m concerned. If you need more, grab some wacky monsters from Kobold Press. Some of their weirder creations will gel better with the Spelljammer setting than they do in Kobold Press’ default Midgard setting (and I say that with affection for Midgard).

The adventure, Light of Xaryxis, takes the Astral Elves included in the monster book and as player characters and makes them morally ambiguous bad guys harvesting the light force from other worlds to continue powering their own dying sun that gives them great magic and power. Pretty dope. Even cooler because they give you that summary at the beginning instead of forcing the GM to read the end to actually figure out who the bad guys are. The adventure module is for characters of fifth to eighth level, and this brings up some advice in the book that I quite appreciate; how to set up higher level characters to start a campaign. The advice is to build up to fifth level as written in the Player’s Handbook and then to give them 625 gp to spend on additional non magical gear, and give each character an uncommon magic item of your choice (they suggest the latter if you are “running a high magic campaign,” but I don’t really think Spelljammer is for you at all if you’re into low magic. The magical flying ships and space whales have sailed on that—pun intended and no apologies). It also makes me wonder why no advice on starting at higher levels is provided in the core rules. Might have been helpful…

The adventure is episodic in the style of Flash Gordon (which the writers recommend you go watch to really capture the adventure style). It’s a fairly linear jaunt across Wildspace and the Astral Plane to multiple systems. The adventure’s descriptions of Xaryxis Space and the Doomspace systems does double duty, as according to the Astral Adventurer’s Guide they are intended to be examples for you to create your own Wildspace systems and locales. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed them as examples, but the taste made me wish that this product included greater GM support in the form of more examples, or blank star maps that could be labeled with your own systems. That leads into my thoughts on the Astral Adventure’s Guide.

The Astral Adventure’s Guide again clocks in at 64 pages. It features sections on the unique rules of Wildspace and the Astral Sea. However, it omits rules on color pools, instead referring the reader to the DMG. The book also includes almost no setting information, instead acting mainly as a catalog of various deck plans and short descriptions of Spelljammer vessels. There’s also the character rules, but no additional subclasses, which feels like a missed opportunity. I also noticed that my set is one of the original printings without the corrected errata and changes to the problematic sections about the Hadozee (I’ll probably print a copy of the errata to stick in the book as a reference at some point). Finally it concludes with a very short section of the Rock of Bral that largely seems to be a rehash of the original Spelljammer accessory product of the same name (which is far more detailed). I do like the Rock of Bral as an adventure or almost extraplanar hub (it sits in Wildspace in whatever system you find most convenient), but the level of detail almost makes this a players guide, not a more detailed GM-focused product as it purports to be. This book could have been much more useful with random adventure seed tables and setting information included with random tables for non-combat encounters, like a Fizban’s or Bigby’s. As is, there is just not much support for the GM to create their own content or inspire creativity beyond the static examples provided by the adventure.

For those interested, the GM screen isn’t terrible in my opinion, at least for my style of play, but it does leave some important Spelljammer rules off. A lot of space is devoted to reprinting the random encounter tables from the monster book, which can be helpful for improv. Relevant rules like suffocating and weightlessness are also included, along with illustrations of the Astral plane and the way gravity works in Wildspace (I don’t know that I think the illustrations are necessary). What is missing is any sort of ship crew roles on the screen and the rules about how long air bubbles last (so basically most of the included new rules that you probably need to run aren’t there).

All in all, I don’t regret getting the set (I have it on good authority that bearded fellow found them for 38 bucks), but I wouldn’t grab them at full price. All that aside, while there’s some interesting details in the set, overall it really is lacking in detail, nor does it tie in will or include additional lore about the creatures to be found in the Astral Sea and Wildspace (you’ll have to find old copies of Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes and Volo’s Guide to Monsters if you want lore about some like Githyanki, Elves, and Beholders beyond their basic monster descriptions). You’ll need to do a lot of your own work to come up with adventure locations in the Spelljammer setting, but if you’re interested in gaining a little bit more information about the setting then picking it up with some of the older Spelljammer titles up from DriveThruRPG is probably worth it.