Starting Spelljammer Again

My Complete Spacefarer’s Handbook from 1992

I dusted off my 1992 TSR Spacefarer’s Handbook and read through it again. It’s in great shape because it never got much use. By 1993, we were gaming less often and getting ready to scatter across the USA to attend college, start our families, and all that jazz

I’ve found that since WoTC bases most of their “new” books on past TSR material, I can usually dig out the old books and use them as supplements to the current storyline. For example, Ravenloft with Curse of Strahd, Age of Dragons and Dragonlance Campaign Guide for the Hoard of the Dragon Queen, and Tomb of Horrors with Tomb of Annihilation. You get the point.

So after I bought the 5th edition Spelljammer set on Amazon for a deep discount, I read through the three books. The weakest is the adventure book Light of Xaryxis, honestly. I thought everything else was good and any gaps were easily filled with either the ship material from the 5e Salt Marsh book or charts from the TSR Spelljammer books.

So like the Spacefarer’s guide says, you have two ways to start a Spelljammer campaign: on the ground or in space. Most modules start on the ground but use campy ways to get the characters into space quickly. I remember Dungeon magazine having an adventure where a ship crashes and they investigate it, discovering secrets about Spelljamming. There was another where nautical Dwarves hire them as deck hands and suddenly sail off into space. And one particular SPELLJAMMER module just had the characters in the city square when an anchor drops from the sky to clunk down in front of them. Cheesy but it works cuz cheese tastes good.

In Light of Xaryxis, the cheese is weak. Without spoilers, basically a bad thing happens in town and a pirate captain says: “I’m going to my cool ship to escape the bad stuff, you should come along!” And so the railroad into space begins.

Ick.

And let’s not discuss “Spelljammer Academy” from DDB because although it has redeeming factors and content … No. Just no.

And so my obvious decision was to look at my players. I have a mix, thankfully, of age ranges and experience. The majority of them know NOTHING about Spelljammer other than: “Oh yeah that’s like D&D in space, right?”

So starting them off as “groundlings” who are introduced to the Spelljamming world makes sense. So there you go. We have a place to start. But the cheese is weak with Light of Xaryxis, so it was time to brainstorm ideas and solutions

I started with YouTube. Most of what I found was people bitching that 5e SPELLJAMMER was the worst product ever yada yada yada. Useless. Others were just summaries of the tasteless cheese in the book, and then a number of live play yahoos live playing for clicks. Not helpful

Then I heard that Chris Perkins had based Light of Xaryxis on the old Flash Gordon movie and serials. So I watched some Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, The new Star Trek series, a few episodes of Firefly, some Lexx, a couple Farscapes, and some classic Star Trek before I realized I was just watching TV and not creating a plan for the campaign. 😂🤣

So I read over the Light of Xaryxis overarching plot, avoiding the heinous side treks, cameo appearances, and other bits of fluff. There is a main plot there of two siblings struggling to get what they want. So I focused on that. And I started formulating my own cheese 🧀 to get the groundlings into wild space.

And if you pay attention to the blog here, you’ll see what I came up with: a starting city created with input from the players in a “shared storytelling” situation, a campaign focused on “one shot” style stories that link together like a tv show, and a hopefully logical enough progression leading up to the “bad stuff” in Light of Xaryxis.

And that’s that. That’s how Stella got her groove back. I mean, how I started a Spelljammer campaign again.