Dungeons and Dragons 5E, Spelljammer

This campaign is called Scatterjammer. When I started playing RPGs regularly again about eight years ago, I started up a 4th edition D&D game, since it was the most recent edition that I actually owned. When that campaign fizzled out, I switched to 5th edition and have been playing one campaign after another since then. I invented a homebrew world that I called Scatterhome. There are a few things about this place that I really liked and I will probably write a post all about it another time. For now, it’s enough to state that Scatterhome became the home base for the PCs in the Spelljammer campaign I had been planning for quite a long time before the Spelljammer 5E set came out a couple of years ago. That set was missing a lot. A characteristic of a lot of the 5E setting content, I’ve noticed, is that, unless it’s Forgotten Realms, they’re really only meant for a single campaign that probably came with the setting. That is certainly the case with Spelljammer. Boo’s Astral Menagerie is a solid enough Monster Manual supplement but the Astral Adventurer’s guide is too light on detail for my purposes.

The premise of Spelljammer is just fun and silly and I have tried to keep the vibe fun and silly too. I have five players and, due to geographical peculiarities, we play online using Zoom and Roll20. We have a session once every two weeks on Wednesday nights and we’ve been going for over a year now. I always enjoy playing this game with the people I play with. My wonderful and dependable wife has been in every D&D game I have run since 2016 so she’s player one, the rest are a mix of newer and older friends. We have such a laugh with this game that we brush off the cons of running online.

But I have to be honest, the D&D system really slows things down. In one instance we spent three entire sessions on a ship to ship battle. Elements of that battle were immense fun and some of the players’ moves will live in infamy but, for a random wildspace encounter… I just think a different system could have handled it in a less time-consuming manner. Now, I am sure that, had I approached it differently, I could have sped it up as well, but only if I didn’t use the rules of D&D. It is actually something I’m considering for the bigger set pieces in the future. Black Sword Hack has an impressive system for dealing with NPCs fighting NPCs, allowing single die rolls to determine the outcome of their battles each round. It has a tendency to be a bit more deadly, perhaps, but it moves things along more swiftly. Even 4th Edition D&D handled this sort of thing better. You could have waves of enemies in a fight. The sheer number of them would scare the living shit out of the PCs but the majority of them would be Minions. They could still do damage but they only had one hit point apiece, so the party could mow them down with spells and the like.

If I want to actually reach the meat of the story we are trying to tell and that my players have told me they want in their stars and wishes, I am going to have to do something to allow large scale battles to resolve themselves much more quickly, that’s for sure. It’s either that or eliminate ship to ship combat entirely, and that seems like a shame in game where adventuring in wildspace is the whole point!

The party consists of

• A Gnome Battle-smith Artificer who abandoned a promising career in the navy for the faintest chance of adventure! Likes spiders. What happened to her uncle?
• A Gnome Illusionist Wizard who has a peculiar plethora of puzzling personalities and disguises to choose from. The main spelljammer. What happened to his brother?
• A Changeling Mastermind Rogue/Bard with a dark past and a mysterious identity (that’s a bit of a theme.) What happened to his dad?
• A Plasmoid Open Hand Monk following her ooze-heart to who-know’s-where? Has an Auto-gnome sister. What happened to her mum?
• A Giff Fighter/Oath of Vengeance Paladin who is the sole survivor from his family’s spelljamming vessel. Total Casanova. What happened to his dad?

I’m sure I’ll write a lot more about this campaign in the future. The players have come up with some fascinating and hilarious characters, who all have just enough back-story to allow me to get creative with how I weave it into the events of the game. Some of them are very keen on pursuing their personal story threads while others are more focused on the narrative I put in place at the start. DMing challenges and opportunities abound!