#spelljammer

Déjà-vu

The fourth and final Spelljammer box set, The Astromundi Cluster (1993) and it is a great, but too late, attempt to reboot the line.

The originalSpelljammer box set came out alongside D&D 2E in 1989 and it’s concerned with showing off the D&D version of space, as well as the ships to traverse it and the other magic and tech needed to survive in it. Up to that point, campaign settings were worlds. Spelljammer, then, was the highway that connects them. That’s cool and interesting! But it doesn’t really stand alone as a setting; you need interesting locations for that. But you didn’t get that until The Legend of Spelljammer in 1991, and that didn’t quite work, because it was a big ship that kept moving. Rock of Bral (1992) was better, but was only one city (and was, admittedly, briefly introduced in the core box). Think of this is Star Wars terms: what would that universe be like if the only place to explore was a Super Star Destroyer and Mos Eisley?

Sure, there are all these other crystal spheres like Duck Space and Slime Space, but they’re all vague and undetailed. Enter Clusterspace, detailed in this box. It’s the home sphere of the mind flayers! And we get a great big pile of campaign setting details. Factions! Not just planets, but multiple solar systems! Populated by weird humans, weird dwarves, very weird elves, and a selection of monster species. There are new ships, sun mages, at least one living asteroid, an anti-slavery secret society. Stuff to do, places to explore, wrongs to right! The adventure book provides context on how adventures can spin out of the various factions, collects several small adventure seeds and contains two longer scenarios, one revealing the secrets of the mind flayers, the other putting players at odds with demon-dealing Arcane (a mysterious merchant species). And David O. Miller did all the art, making for an unusually cohesive-feeling box. This is good stuff!

And frustrating stuff. First, because the designers made the decision to close off the cluster — if you’re inside, you can’t leave; if you’re outside, in the larger Spelljammer setting, you can’t get it. Sure, you can handwave that, but it’s still a weird decision to present the most interesting place in the universe as locked behind a wall.

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.