Aerial Adventure Guide: Sky Captain's Handbook

Aerial Adventure Guide: Sky Captain's Companion

The Aerial Adventure Guide: Sky Captain's Companion is a rules and setting resource for adding airborne realms to a campaign. The book is written by Michael Mearls with additional writing by Joseph Goodman, Timothy Grubb, Gannar Hultgren, and Joseph Goodman, and is published by Goodman Games.

Much of the material in this book was originally published as 3 32-page volumes (one of which, Aerial Adventure Guide Vol I: Rulers of the Sky was reviewed here by me), though additional material has been added for this volume and the whole is updated to 3.5 edition rules.

A First Look

The Aerial Adventure Guide: Sky Captain's Companion is a 144 page hardbound book priced at $27.99.

The cover is illustrated by Michael Erickson. The cover image depicts a sabre-wielding elf amidst a fleet of flying ships. The background of the book has an image appearing like a tough hide of some creature, and the book's look and feel are similar to Goodman Games' Underdark Adventure Guide.

The interior is black and white with artwork by Carlos Henry, William McAusland, and V. Shane, with deckplans by Clayton bunce and cartography by Matt Snyder. Much of art are detailed and well done shaded ink illustrations, and the the deckplans are likewise excellent, though some of the artwork is simplistic and in some cases sketchy line-art.

A Deeper Look

As mentioned, the Aerial Adventure Guide was originally published as three slender sourcebooks. Other reviewers and I noted the relative low overall value of these books. This volume pulls together and updates all those volumes and adds additional material.

The book is organized into six chapters, plus an introduction, ship record sheet and ship deck plans (the deckplans are also replicated in an attractive fashion in the endleaves.)

The introduction isn't totally gratuitous and offers a few ideas for adding aerial realms to your campaign, including ideas for different sorts of aeriel realms and other features. There are a few rules considerations here, such as modifications to the settlement rules in the DMG

The first chapter covers character creation for character hailing from aerial realms, including details on new and existing races and classes in the setting, and new prestige classes and feats.

The races section introduces three new races:
- Archial: The acharial are treacherous intelligent spiderlike creatures. They are treated as aberrations, can spin webs, and have a tough hide. In a way, their presence hearkens back to spelljammer, which had the spider-like neogi.
-Avians: Avians are an uncivilized race of winged humanoids with taloned feet. I find the name of this race somewhat unfortunate because it refers to a type of creature. For example, if you say a feat is for "avians only" (and there is such a feat in this book), does it only apply to the avian character race, or could giant eagles take it too?
-Sky elves: This elven racial variant lives among the clouds. They are hardier than surface elves, but their lives have made them more gruff and dour. In addition to standard elf skill bonuses, sky elves receive a bonus to balance.

The race section also describes the role of surface races in the sky realms.

Heroic legacies are a selection of feats similar to regional feats from Player's Guide to Faerun in that they are more potent than standard feats. Further, the book suggests that one be granted free to starting characters in an aerial campaign, but otherwise only be available to first level characters. I am not to keen on the idea of "super feats", but in the context of aerial characters, they make some sense because they help explain how the player got into the sky realms and assists somewhat with survival and mobility (such as granting a flying mount or flying ability or the ability to use feather fall.)

The class section describes how the various classes fit into the sky realms and introduces three new prestige classes (only two of which appeared in the original volume):

-Air knight is a character trained in fighting on flying mounts; they are members of a prestigious order and gain access to flying mounts of varying powers as they advance.
-Elemental Convert: Based on the heroic legacy feats mentioned earlier, the elemental convert is a short (3 level) class than gains air elemental-like abilities.
-Sky elf battle captain: This short (5 level) class is an expert at leading sky ships in combat and also gains an airship and crew as a boon.

A brief section of new skills introduces three new profession skill categories that could come up in airborn campaigns: miner, sky sailor, and trader.

The new feats features a variety of new feats (again, with many new feats introduced since the first volume and/or updated to 3.5 rules) appropriate to flying characters, characters who ride flying mounts, and characters who man sky ships. As examples, aerialist provides bonuses to operating skyships and riding flying mounts, agile flyer improves the maneuverability of a flying creature improves by one class, hawkeyed reduces penalty to missile attacks and spot rolls due to range, and sky shipwright is an item creation feat allows the creation of skyships. New feat not appearing in the previous volume include racial feats for acharial and avians.

Finally, the chapter provides new equipment, both mundane and magical. Many of the new weapons are meant to be used from a height, such as bombs and weighted drop spears as well and weapons for skyships and adventuring gear appropriate for an aerial game. Magic items are similarly appropriate to characters in sucha game.

The second chapter, Aerial Combat, provides modifications and considerations for the standard d20 system combat rules when resolving aerial combats. Most of the modifications are sensible. An abstract movement system is provided for those who do not want to represent such battles with miniatures, and has some similarities to the way aerial combat is handled in Mongoose's Quintessential Elf.

The third chapter covers sky ship construction and operation, and combat. Skyships construction is fairly straightforward; different size skyships are basically handled like simplified creatures (note, however, that while the scale replicates the standard d20 scales, they correspond to different sizes than creature sizes.) A ship's size and materials determine most of the basic characteristics, and templates can be used to add specific characteristics. In addition to the construction rules, a number of sample designs are included. A skyship record sheet and deckplans for some of the samples appear in the back of the book.

The fourth chapter, The Sky Realms, discusses a number of specific sites in the realms above. The most significant of these is Selliane, a major sky elf city. Selliane is composed of a stack of linked cloud-islands. Selliane is the city it is, in part, because it has the rare quality of having a predictable path through the sky, making it an important trade point.

The section covering Selliane is 10 pages long, and covers details such as political bodies and figures, guard composition, and different wards of the city, with a few lightly detailed locations.

The Sky Realms chapter also includes a number of other locales and personalities ripe for use in a game.

The fifth chapter is the bestiary of the book, containing a variety of airborne threats. In addition to writeups of the earlier PC races and entries for common NPC groups, there are a variety of airborne threats. Floating or flying versions of common animals are one theme (whale-like leviathans and flying rays, for example), as well as airborne versions of common foes (star and wind dragons and a sky fiend devil), and menacing floating abberations. There are a number of templates as well, including the winged creature, air-infused, and werehawk templates.

The brief sixth chapter offers GM advice for running aerial campaigns. Discussed are approaches both introducing aerial realms to standard ground campaigns, as well as playing an aerial campaign from the start. The chapter also discusses types of adventures, provides some rules support for such, and discusses a little bit of possible cosmology that might exist in a more fantastic game worlds if the players explore what's up there even further.

Conclusions

In my original review of Aerial Adventure Guide Volume I, I commented that a combined volume would be much more cost effective. My expectations there were not only met but exceeded. Having all three volumes available makes for a more complete book, and the additional material helps shore it up and adds interesting options.

Overall Grade: B

-Alan D. Kohler

Sky ships, flying castles, cloud cities, and airborne monsters! The Sky Captain's Handbook is a complete sourcebook with everything you need to run an aerial campaign. With its focus on inspiring ideas for unique aerial adventures, the book contains new character options, races, monsters, feats, items, sky ships, and aerial combat rules that can be integrated into any fantasy campaign. After all, no matter what world sits at ground level, anything can float above.

The Sky Captain's Handbook collects all the information that was in the original Aerial Adventure Guide three-book series, updates it to 3.5, then adds more than 50 pages of new material. The Aerial Adventure Guide is a stand-alone book. It is 100% world-neutral.

Goodman Games Aerial Adventure Guide is a product I’ve been pretty hyped up for, as I thought it would mesh well with Bastion Press’s Airships (which was my biggest “surprise joy” of last year).

It’s written by Mike Mearls! (who is apparently now going by “Michael”) , which is good news. Mearls’ name on a book is about as close as D20 has to a hallmark of quality, and he doesn’t disappoint here.

As far as the new character mechanics presented go, the good stuff is really good. The Archials are intelligent race of evil, man-sized spiders.(with an excellent religiously-based reason for their evil behaviour). They are a very nicely done “enemy” race. The Avians were something of a surprise as I read about them. First off they are Barbaric, secondly they are not beautiful. I’ve lost count of the “winged races” I’ve seen written up that are presented as handsome paragons of virtue and the switch up presented here was like a breath of fresh air.

…and the bad stuff you may well ask? Well, the bad stuff isn’t all that bad. The Sky Elves included in the supplement both fill the “elf for every occasion” slot that Forgotten Realms has placed in the common parlance as well as fulfilling the “elf only” needs of a certain percentage of my fellow gamers (Hi Ron)

A quick aside regarding the section the use of surface races> This is the 50,000th supplement I’ve seen that attributes some kind of scientific and/or mechanical aptitude to Gnomes. I can’t find anything in the core rules that might hint as to why this keeps happening. Can anyone enlighten me down in the comments section below this review?

Anyway, moving on…

The Heroic Legacies presented seem an awful lot like the Regional Feats that WotC’s Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting brought us (that is; they are abnormally powerful “extras” that beginning PC’s get for free). Wait…that’s not fair. Some of them are abnormally powerful (Shipbuilder Family), while others would make a weak standard feat (Cloud Miner). So I guess, with the wide variety of power levels present in the Heroic Legacies section, we can actually assume that they were created not as power ups, but for the purpose stated: to explain how they came to live in the sky--though honestly I think we can expect to see more members of Shipbuilding Families and those of Stratosheric background represented in the ranks of the PC’s than we can Pirate Outlaws, which flies in the face of the usual choices my players would make left to their own devices..

A short section describes how the standard classes fit into the game world and then it’s onto Prestige Classes, which I usually think are—again—overpowered munchkin bait in any thing not by Bad Axe Games, but again I need to bite my tongue as the three presented here seem to have nice balance, utility and setting-appropriateness (surely that’s not a word?)

The Air Knight is what you would expect: a member of a knightly order that makes use of flying mounts. The Elemental Convert represents and evolutionary leap triggered by living in the skies (the counter-example given is that of the Drow, whose elven nature changed from living beneath the earth) . The dynamically-named Sky Elf Battle Captain looks very much like something from the age of sail, and I like it a lot.

The new Feats provided are a good selection tailored to use by any flying characters, those with flying mounts, those who pilot skyships and the new races presented (I particularly like the “web” feats available to Archials…the Archials are looking cooler to me with every read).

The second chapter, Aerial Combat, gives changes to the standard d20 system combat rules specifically for aerial combat. The abstract movement system provided was a very thoughtful add for those who of us who don’t use miniatures anymore (I should really get back to that…I love miniatures!) The Aerial Distance table provided on page 39 is a godsend for those of us who are bad at math. I would’ve wished for a similar table but with a Z axis as well as the X and Y presented (to mimic 3D distances) but I have no idea how you would lay such a thing out (Again, bad math here)

The next chapter covers the creation of Sky Ships. Skyship construction was pretty simple, even on first try and I thin it would be to anyone familiar with D20. The Size and Materials used to make the ship are the starting point and give you most of its basic “stats”. Templates are then used to add specific qualities (Zeppelin, Undead Hulk etc.). I’m not sure that these rules will replace Bastion’s Airships for my group, but they are at first glance of comparable utility, if not as flavourful.

Chapter four Sky Realms gives us what Airships failed to: a setting. Though sparsely described (and mostly concerned with the Cloud City of Sellaine) chapter four is teeming with good ideas for a sky-based campaign. The descriptions of Sellaine’s political situation, its important figures, its neighbourhoods and its culture provide a nice “Jumping off Point” (sorry) for a sky based campaign within its 10 or so pages.

The rest of the book is comprised of a bestiary filled with about what you would expect: Aerial Foes suitable for a fantasy setting, as well as a few appropriate templates and a short section on running Aerial Adventures.

All told, I think this book will be a welcome addition to our Airships game, really fleshing out some of the spots that Bastion overlooked in favor of their more comprehensive Skyship construction mechanics.

TB, in Dragonlance, they had tinker gnomes, dudes who made all sorts of whacky contraptions. At the time, it was an original idea. But then about everybody adopted it, so now most folks think of gnomes as tinkerers and engineers. Plus, they're silly folk, so if an invention seems bizarre, it's a nice thematic fit.

Me, I just smooshed gnomes and halflings together. My airships are steampowered ironclad firebreathing zeppelins, invented by Orcs.

Ah yes, Dragonlance, of course. I didn't know that Dragonlance tropes had become the default setting

Speaking of which, I should get to work reviewing Bestiary of Krynn

Definitely a 2nd Ed. holdover. Dragonlance was the biggest with the push of tinkering gnomes, but for this product directly there may be more influence from (IIRC) Spelljammer with their gnomish (side-wheel?) paddleboats or even Mystara's (a la Princess Ark) gnomish derigibles.

I think the craftsman aspect of Gnomes has been around much longer than Dragonlance. Even the old legends see them as miners, craftsmen, gemcutters. Tolkien originally used "Gnome" as the name of the "Ñoldor," (Deep Elves) just as he later later preferred "Dwarrow" (or even Dwarrow Elves) to "Dwarf". The Ñoldor were great smiths and lorekeepers. Another reason why I'm glad the Bard is now the favoured class of the Gnome.

Aerial Adventure Guide is a collection of three previous Goodman Game titles. The cost here is considerably less than the original three books and the hardcover format makes a nice change from the old 32-page stapled tomes. The book is also expanded from it’s original 96 pages.

Unlike Bastion Press’s Airships, this book isn’t just a focus on creating and manning airships, but rather, taking a campaign to the skies. In that vein, it brings new races, prestige classes, feats, monsters, ships, locations and campaign advice.

The book starts by discussing cloud realms, a moving location that has numerous forms and function, but serves as a starting point to populate civilizations and other likely encounters. Several examples of cloud realms are provided, and show that not all such locations have to be friendly or even hospitable. For example, the fire cloud is a mix of various elemental energies and due to their volatile nature, these clouds are avoided for the most part save for those greedy for the metals waiting to be mined within.

In terms of new character options, we have three new races, the arachail, avian and sky elf. The arachail aren’t my cup of tea as they are spider people who have a problem with the elves. My first though is that these are some type of drider reject and seeing that these creatures are thinking on trying to ally themselves with the dark elves, I may have the dark elves in my campaign go that route and declare war against those who’ve escaped Lolth’s judgement. I’m more impressed by the avians, a race of winged barbarians who lack the beauty and grace so often given to winged races. The sky elves are a good example of a standard race that can’t fly on its own, adapting itself to the skies.

Those wondering how standard races get along have a brief section that discusses the PHB races. The most interesting thing is half-orcs, who often don’t have the same problems being prejudged as orcs aren’t a great threat in the clouds.

Now to survive and thrive in such an environment, the authors feel that you need something called a heroic legacy. These are feats that are slightly stronger than normal. In an aerial campaign, you get one starting, but in a standard campaign, you have to take one as a standard feat, but only at first level. These range from weapon proficiencies in a certain field through the feat Pirate Outlaw, to gaining skills as class skills in addition to some ranks with them, a useful ability for those who feel that some classes are shortchanged in skill selection.

Those weary of PrCs won’t have a lot to fear from this book as it only includes three, air knight, elemental convert and sky elf battle captain. The first and last classes are masters of the air in terms of using abilities outside of direct combat. The air knight for example, has a mount and has numerous abilities when using said mount. The sky elf battle captain is a master commander of his ship. The elemental convert is a short class that becomes more like an air elemental, gaining the ability of flight and the ability to turn into a whirlwind.

The book includes other feats, separated from the heroic legacies. One nice thing about this section is that the arachial aren’t left out. GMs can customize their villains with new abilities such as blood drinker, where the creature gains a bonuses to various rolls after driking blood or creating numerous types of webbing. Avian’s also benefit with new combat maneuvers. Some of them may be a little out of place like Dive Bomb, where the character can inflict up to an addition 20d6 of dice damage.

For those looking for new equipment, the book covers all the standard bases. We have new ship weapons like flame bolts, ballista bolts with fire bombs on them, to new magic items ranging from featherweight armor to penetrating missile weapons that ignore hardness and inflict extra damage. I would’ve liked to see the caster cost as seeing the gold and experience to create an item always makes my players’ life easier.

The section on aerial combat is small and works on d20 principles. We have things like initiative, facing, combat options, attacks of opportunity and rules for crashing. Some charts to help illustrate the importance of facing and attacks of opportunity would’ve been nice to show the 3-D reality of aerial combat, but I can pretty much visualize what its getting at.

Those wondering about the ships themselves will find construction simple. Ships are pretty much monsters as they have many of the same statistics like armor class, hit dice, hardness, base, hard points (# of weapons), and other non-monster stats like crew and cargo. Now in addition to a section on designing ships and how ships work in combat, ship templates are included. These remind me of the templates from Fantasy Flight’s book on ships as they change various things about the ship such as the Sky Fortress, giving the ship more hit points per hit dice and increased hardness at the cost of speed and defense, represented through armor class.

One nice thing about the book is that by combining the originals, it provides you with places to set your campaigns in. The Sky Realms chapter has a focus on Sellaine, the so called Jewel of the Clouds, but also includes other locations that make for easier adventuring like Dreadfall, “a titanic artifact of evil” or Fulgash’s Tower, a floating tower created by a wizard that isn’t straight, being tilted to one side. These locals are good but could use more maps and details to help flesh them out further.

One of the largest section details the monsters. Here we get write ups of the arachials and avians, with a wide range of samples, from a mere 1st level warrior to a 8th level barbarian. Some of my favorites include the star dragon and sky serpent. One thing I was surprised at was the skaerdrim, “blue-skinned creatures with thick white hair and beards.” I say surprised because there are rules for playing them as a race. It’s also got to be one of the first classes I’ve see that uses an NPC class, the Expert, as it’s favored class.

For those who have no idea how to run an aerial campaign, despite the locations, there is a lot of advice, including information on trade goods and what to do after you’ve played in the skies for a while. What lurks beyond those clouds can be covered a few ways according to this book.

For lazy people like myself, they’ve included a lot of sample ship designs that includes the market price as well as all game stats and special abilities. These range from generic ships, basic medium ship, to the evil arachial spinner, a ship that resembles a winged spider.

The maps of the ships do a nice job of showing where everything is. It’s a fine example of a good use of interior cover space. Interior art ranges from fair to good. I’ve been a fan of V. Shane’s artwork for a while and he has several pieces here.

This book makes using the Cloud Realms simple and easy. It has enough material that if you want to work at it, you can run numerous games only in the clouds, as well as bringing some of the aerial realms, through monsters and heroic legacies, to your standard campaign.

I'm not sure if I loved this book. It sits on my shelf and gets much less use than "Cloud Warriors" by Fast Forward Entertainment. While FFE has put out some of the worst D20 material on the market (my opinion, of course), that book was written by Skip Williams.

It is 3.0 and not 3.5, but you could tell that much of the basics of aerial combat from that book was added to the 3.5 rules set. If you need more detail than that, however, Cloud Warriors is very indepth.

I will say, however, that Cloud Warriors really lacks the campaign depth you'd get from the Aerial Adventure Guide. In this manner, this book is above Cloud Warriors (pun unintentional, but I did see it as I wrote it).

If you're doing an aerial campaign, I suggest using both books in tandem. Each book has their strengths and your campaign could only be better for it.

Back at the dawn of 3rd party d20 publisher Goodman Games was the one who did the unusual and original supplements (a good thing!). They had intelligent alien dinosaurs! It's somewhat ironic that Goodman Games now has some of the absolute classics under their belt - the famous Blackmoor - Goodman Games purposely recreates the old ways with the hugely successful Dungeon Crawl Classics.

The Aerial Adventure Guide: Sky Captain's Handbook is a mix of the two. Here we have an original and exciting book and yet it's very much in the established D&D tradition. We have a new realm, new PC races, new monsters and prestige classes and equipment to suit.

One of my pet hates about books which introduce tempting new elements to a game is that - well - that they're tempting and new. If I want to have Example Knights in my game then I'd want to have had them there from the start and not have to add them later and explain why neither player nor NPC had mentioned them before. We don't have that problem with the Aerial Adventure Guide. It's possible to add the elements and characters from this book in such a way that they've never had any contact with the ground before. The sky realms can be so far up that they're nothing but rumour and legend on the ground - if that. They can be so far up that the ground can be "best left alone" or ignored by those in the sky.

There are three main races in the book; Sky Elves (the default goodies), Avian (in the middle) and Arachial (the baddies). The Sky Elves are touch vanilla - elves who way-back-when took to the skies via a typical high fantasy divine intervention. The Sky Elves now travel around on the cinematic centre pieces which are the flying ships. The avians are part human, part orc and part bird in appearance. They're tribal barbarians who live hard and die hard and I think are rather fun. The Arachial are only fun if you're the GM. These are sentient spiders who live off blood. They're wonderfully wicked. See that dark cloud in the sky? You'd better hope it doesn't see you. These three are all play-able.

There are prestige classes; the Air Knight, Elemental Convert and the Sky Elf Battle Captain. These are 10, 3 and 5 level classes respectively. They're all shamelessly high fantasy too - but that's acceptable, as is the book's claim to be completely world neutral. If you're dealing with flying boats then you're in a high fantasy game. The Sky Captain's Handbook would not suit Ravenloft. It doesn't need to, though.

There are feats. Do you have enough aerial feats? Thought not. There isn't a bloat of feats here and we don't have exclusively aerial feats either. Take the rather dangerous Blood Drinker feat - this Arachial only feat actually ensures the sky spider enjoys bonuses when it drinks Sky Elf blood.

The specialist equipment chapter runs naturally onto the aerial combat section. Aerial combat can be tricky - with this guide it is as complex or as simple as you want, but it shouldn't be tricky. I find the Aerial Distance Table particularly handy. At a first glance you have an entire page of numbers. My initial reaction was "What the fudge is this?" (as you can see, my first reaction was very polite) but it just takes a second look to see its worth. If you enemy is 50 feet long and 25 feet down from you - how far does your archer need to shoot? Okay, so take the square root of the sum of the square of the shortest two sides to find the length of the hypotenuse ... or, dump the maths, and check the Aerial Distance Table instead. You're shooting 55 feet. One day d20 will be metric.

I think Sky Ships are one of the great attractions to the Sky Captain's Guide. Goodman Games knows what gamers want - sure we want cool ships and rules for them but we also want to invent our own. Mike Mearls is an experienced author, he knows what to do, we have handy and easy templates and examples. Just as importantly there are plenty of inspiring illustrations too. Kudos to Carlos Henry, William McAusland and V. Shane for the art. In addition we've deck plans too - they're used as resources and as decoration - so kudos to Clayton Bruce as well.

As the presence of the Sky Elves, Avian and Arachial suggest the Aerial Adventure Guide is a fully fledged "campaign world". I have to use the quotes since you could play here as an independent world or you could add it to any high fantasy world of your own. The aerial world has floating islands; they look like clouds from below but have a visible surface - often with forests, castles or even the remains of previous sky civilizations. The Aerial Adventure Guide has a number of these floating islands written up. There are some especially nice twists here - like the inhospitable floating islands which are used purely as a source of iron ore.

There are some flying monsters in the core D&D books. The Sky Captain's Handbook introduces so many new sky terrors that the characters will be afraid to look up. Ha. Good!

The book finishes with help for the GM (rather than Sky Captains). This is warranted too. I doubt many fantasy GMs buying Goodman Games books will need help with the basics but aerial adventures are as about as far from standard high fantasy as you can get.

I liked the book. It's a handy hardback to have around. Aerial adventures is an easy and yet dramatic twist to throw into your game. As it's entirely possible to introduce the entire Aerial Adventure Guide without having to faff around the, "Why didn't I know about this before?" question I think the book is twice as valuable as any ground based alternative. It's good stuff.

* This Aerial Adventure Guide Sky Captains Handbook review was first published at GameWyrd.