Using THE Spelljammer as a campaign setting: Could it work?

[GuyOnline]

Yello. So, I assume most people who clicked on this thread are aware of Spelljammer, and by extension about THE Spelljammer, the giant manta Ray ship with dozens of towers and inhabitants on it’s back.

The book that gave us all the information about the Spelljammer (or at least about it’s inhabitants and lifecycle) talks about ways you could have an adventure on the Spelljammer, or have it as the final goal of the campaign, but one thing it never brings up is the possibility of running a campaign set entirely or at least almost entirely on the Spelljammer itself. So, I’m curious, and I want to ask all you Spelljammer fans out there: do you think it could work?

My personal thoughts from the get go are that it does have a lot of potential, since there’s a wide variety of factions, races, and unique individuals all with their own goals and plans and plights that players could interact with, help with, or mess with. Not to mention there’s a final boss villain ready to go with The Fool and his long term plans to kill everyone on the Spelljammer and then the ship itself.

The main problem with using the ship as a setting is the effects of the magic infused air. Since it stops players from either wanting/trying to leave the Spelljammer or wanting/trying to harm it, a lot of creative ideas or story possibilities are shut down immediately and the DM either has to come up with some reason why the players aren’t effected or consistently railroad the players away from doing certain things, which I can imagine wouldn’t be fun.

But of course those are just my thoughts, what do you think about the idea?

[Mutazoia]

Yello. So, I assume most people who clicked on this thread are aware of Spelljammer, and by extension about THE Spelljammer, the giant manta Ray ship with dozens of towers and inhabitants on it’s back.

The book that gave us all the information about the Spelljammer (or at least about it’s inhabitants and lifecycle) talks about ways you could have an adventure on the Spelljammer, or have it as the final goal of the campaign, but one thing it never brings up is the possibility of running a campaign set entirely or at least almost entirely on the Spelljammer itself. So, I’m curious, and I want to ask all you Spelljammer fans out there: do you think it could work?

My personal thoughts from the get go are that it does have a lot of potential, since there’s a wide variety of factions, races, and unique individuals all with their own goals and plans and plights that players could interact with, help with, or mess with. Not to mention there’s a final boss villain ready to go with The Fool and his long term plans to kill everyone on the Spelljammer and then the ship itself.

The main problem with using the ship as a setting is the effects of the magic infused air. Since it stops players from either wanting/trying to leave the Spelljammer or wanting/trying to harm it, a lot of creative ideas or story possibilities are shut down immediately and the DM either has to come up with some reason why the players aren’t effected or consistently railroad the players away from doing certain things, which I can imagine wouldn’t be fun.

But of course those are just my thoughts, what do you think about the idea?

One of the bigger problems you are going to face is scale. The Spelljammer is big, but it's basically the size of a small city. Waterdeep is bigger than the spelljammer. Specifically, the Spelljammer has room for about 5000 whereas Waterdeep is home to over 130k. Trying to run an entire campaign on the Spelljammer will force you to use the same locations and NPCs (at least the major ones) over and over again and will probably get a little samey fairly quickly.

I suppose, if you really wanted to try it, you could ape Stargate Universe and have the PCs looking for resources to keep the Spelljammers population fed on different worlds as the Spelljammer passes through random Crystal Spheres on its way to its final resting place. They would have a limited time to go down, explore, find what they need and get back before the Spelljammer leaves them behind. And then there would be the occasional assault by various peoples trying to claim the power of the Spelljammer for themselves.

But to do all of that, you run into the "the PCs are immune to the never leave gas" and then have to figure out a reason for them to stick around long enough to give a damn.

[Tanarii]

Not really, assuming by campaign you mean the modern usage of "one smallish group of players".

1st level AD&D 2e characters on the Spelljammer are dead meat. It's either going to be a very short campaign or a slightly longer meat grinder (even by AD&D standards) that eventually everyone gets tired of making new characters for and the group moves on.

Even under the older usage of the term campaign, it wouldn't really work well, for the same reasons. Players will get tired of never having a character get to second level before they die.

[GuyOnline]

One of the bigger problems you are going to face is scale. The Spelljammer is big, but it's basically the size of a small city. Waterdeep is bigger than the spelljammer. Specifically, the Spelljammer has room for about 5000 whereas Waterdeep is home to over 130k. Trying to run an entire campaign on the Spelljammer will force you to use the same locations and NPCs (at least the major ones) over and over again and will probably get a little samey fairly quickly.

I suppose, if you really wanted to try it, you could ape Stargate Universe and have the PCs looking for resources to keep the Spelljammers population fed on different worlds as the Spelljammer passes through random Crystal Spheres on its way to its final resting place. They would have a limited time to go down, explore, find what they need and get back before the Spelljammer leaves them behind. And then there would be the occasional assault by various peoples trying to claim the power of the Spelljammer for themselves.

But to do all of that, you run into the "the PCs are immune to the never leave gas" and then have to figure out a reason for them to stick around long enough to give a damn.

That’s something I actually thought about after starting this thread and while reading through the Legend of The Spelljammer boxset again

I did actually have one idea, though as always I don’t know how well it’d work in practice: kill the current Spelljammer and replace it

It’s pointed out that each Spelljammer has it’s own unique “soul”, so a new Spelljammer taking the place of the old one might not be identical and it could lack the “charming air” effect altogether (plus possibly different requirements and restrictions on captaincy).

The players could find the “teenage” (and thus weaker) Spelljammer after it’s just finished growing up and become it’s protectors, using it as a home base and traveling the spheres, taking up refugees and new friends from their different adventures and slowly building up a new culture and society on the ship like with the old Spelljammer.

Maybe the reason the old Spelljammer died was because of the Fool finally achieving his goal and managing to survive the death of the ship, and now he spends his time hunting down all of it’s spawn-including the Spelljammer’s successor. So you can have him as the main villain constantly sending out zombified servants to attack the players and try to capture/kill them, meaning the players find themselves constantly on the run.

Maybe he’s even managed to zombify the former Spelljammer and is using it as his secret weapon and trump card in his crusade. That would be one hell of a final boss.

[Mastikator]

It could work but as people have said it's small, so you have to increase the density of stuff, more things per square meter to interact with.
How would I run it nobody asked? I'd do a short campaign where the spelljammer is for whatever reason trapped somewhere so far away that it's impossible to leave, then throw in some mystery, probably a murder mystery, which is involved with the spelljammer being stuck, which the players must solve.
How could it be stuck? Maybe it's fleeing Hadar and slowly getting closer, if the players don't solve the mystery everyone dies. You could throw in some tiny side quests that buy time.

I'd probably divide it into 3 stages too, maybe the first one is to solve a murder mystery that also reveals that Hadar is coming for them, second phase the spelljammer is overrun by horrors that the players must evade and hide from, phase 3 begins when they destroy the eldritch crystal that was summoning horrors, the players must now confront the "caller of hadar". With the BBEG dead the spelljammer is able to escape Hadar and go wherever the players want, as gratitude for saving it the spelljammer allows the PCs to leave if they want. I'd probably have the PCs gain level at each phase. How did the BBEG and the horrors manage to not be charmed by the spelljammer? Special gift from Hadar. Could Hadar actually kill/eat/absorb the spelljammer? I have no idea and neither does google apparently, but in this campaign the answer is yes.

[awa]

I feel some of these problems are not as big as people think.
I'm not wildly familiar with the exact mechanics of the spell jammer but theirs nothing saying you have to start a game at level 1, and most of the players ive had over the years would accept "your characters dont know this but the ship emits a magic stopping you from harming it or leaving".

It is a relatively small setting as I understand it but you can still have out side forces come to the city, So when ever you need new characters well a new ship arrives.

[Telok]

You can always run the "no leaving" thing as more of a compulsion to return, something that gets stronger the longer people are off of it. Maybe model it on the geas spell? That allows for excursions while still maintaining the link to the ship and the original stuff.

Possibly the biggest issue for a "on-Spelljammer" game would be that Spelljammer is about... 4 'dungeons' and the size/population of a cruise ship. You'll run out of material unless you can regularly import people & problems. Of course that leads to overcrowding and having to kill people to maintain a head count within the life support capabilities. Which might be a nice moral quandry, once, or you may have amoral murderers (not murder-hobos because they have a home now) who happily decimate people for fun.

[Vahnavoi]

Yes, you can do this. It's the weird space fantasy equivalent of playing a series of games about people stuck on an aircaft carrier. You said the ship comes with some factions and individuals already established. Have you considered letting your players play some of them?

[GuyOnline]

Something I remembered in regards to the size of the Spelljammer, by the way is someyhing I read from the (very very) old Spelljammer fan site which rewrites various parts and buildings of SJ as much larger demiplanes. This could work as a (relatively) easy fix to the problem of the ships small size.

[KorvinStarmast]

Yello. So, I assume most people who clicked on this thread are aware of Spelljammer, and by extension about THE Spelljammer, the giant manta Ray ship with dozens of towers and inhabitants on it’s back.

The book that gave us all the information about the Spelljammer (or at least about it’s inhabitants and lifecycle) talks about ways you could have an adventure on the Spelljammer, or have it as the final goal of the campaign, but one thing it never brings up is the possibility of running a campaign set entirely or at least almost entirely on the Spelljammer itself. So, I’m curious, and I want to ask all you Spelljammer fans out there: do you think it could work?

My personal thoughts from the get go are that it does have a lot of potential, since there’s a wide variety of factions, races, and unique individuals all with their own goals and plans and plights that players could interact with, help with, or mess with. Not to mention there’s a final boss villain ready to go with The Fool and his long term plans to kill everyone on the Spelljammer and then the ship itself.

The main problem with using the ship as a setting is the effects of the magic infused air. Since it stops players from either wanting/trying to leave the Spelljammer or wanting/trying to harm it, a lot of creative ideas or story possibilities are shut down immediately and the DM either has to come up with some reason why the players aren’t effected or consistently railroad the players away from doing certain things, which I can imagine wouldn’t be fun.

Gene Wolfe wrote a book about an adventure somewhat like this in The Urth of the New Sun. This is his sequel to the four book series - The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe's writing style is an acquired taste, but the "you are on a ginormous ship sailing through space and there are all kinds of unusual people on board, not all of whom are friendly" angle is covered very well.
(I just checked: he released that in 1987, which is before Spelljammer was a thing, so I wonder if it had any influence on Spelljammer as it was created).

Might be worth mining for inspiration.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Something I remembered in regards to the size of the Spelljammer, by the way is someyhing I read from the (very very) old Spelljammer fan site which rewrites various parts and buildings of SJ as much larger demiplanes. This could work as a (relatively) easy fix to the problem of the ships small size.

This. There's nothing stopping you from making the Spelljammer ten times as big as the book says it is, or a hundred times, or having it be riddled with TARDIS-style "bigger on the inside" regions, or whatever else you feel like you need to give yourself a little more elbow room.

Also,

most of the players ive had over the years would accept "your characters dont know this but the ship emits a magic stopping you from harming it or leaving".

This. No campaign functions without player buy-in, and most people worth playing with don't deliberately set out to wreck the GM's premise and setting.