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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8621367" data-attributes="member: 8461">It seems oddly appropriate, with everyone gushing about the 5E reincarnation of Spelljammer, that we come now to <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17106/Tale-of-the-Comet-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Tale of the Comet</a>, the first product in the Odyssey line....or at least, notwithstanding the release of <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/281750/Savage-Coast-Campaign-Book-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">The Savage Coast</a>, an online-only Odyssey product that had been released a year prior to this (and was itself a re-release of material from <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17305/Red-Steel-Campaign?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Red Steel</a> and <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17423/Savage-Baronies-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Savage Baronies</a>), along with its supplement <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/281751/Savage-Coast-Orcs-Head-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Savage Coast: Orc's Head</a>.Now, the product history on the sales page for Tale of the Comet talks about how the Odyssey line never really got a firm definition as to what it connoted. While that might be technically true, I think that if you look at the themes of the products released under the Odyssey banner – themes like "swashbuckling wolf-men conquistadors in a land of magical radiation," "your high-fantasy world is invaded by the Borg as controlled by Skynet," and "werewolf barbarians fight wizards in undead mechs" - you can see a unifying element in how outré these ideas are.If the Tomes line was "back to the classics," in other words, then Odyssey can be summarized as "not your daddy's D&D."The irony here, of course, is that exploring a crashed alien spaceship is a classic D&D adventure, as per <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17065/S3-Expedition-to-the-Barrier-Peaks-1e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks</a>. But whereas the robots and alien life forms there were largely lacking in sapience and mostly content to stay on the ship (even if creatures like the aurumvorax, which originated there, would eventually get out to invade the wider ecology of Greyhawk), there's no such passivity to be found by the aliens here.Instead, what's fallen to the PCs' homeworld is a local offshoot of an interstellar war where the good guys are a benevolent alien race called the rael (no relation to the real-world UFO religion <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism" target="_blank">Raëlism</a>, except in the name), who to my considerable irritation are never given game stats anywhere in the product. I mean, we get stats for rael NPCs, but never PC racial information for characters who want to play one. I get that's not the theme of the product, but still...walling off options like that irks me. The presumption, lacking anything more concrete, is that they're basically human except for a few cosmetic differences, but that's an unsatisfying answer.Still, far more notable are the antagonists here, which are the machines. Controlled by a genocidal A.I. known as the Overseer, the machines seem bent on the destruction of all organic life, which seems pretty ludicrous for something set in the AD&D multiverse. I mean, let's leave aside the question of how the Overseer would react to things like air elementals (which are basically living wind) or the Tarrasque (which can't be killed without magic). Does it also plan to wipe out the undead? What about when the gods finally decide to strike back at the machine that's killing the mortals who provide it with the worship that sustains them?There's no good answer to these questions in the boxed set, because Tale of the Comet has several implicit assumptions that are necessarily incompatible with AD&D's default multiverse, something which made me frown quite a bit when I realized that. Namely, this presumes that space functions like it does in the real world, rather than AD&D's wildspace, and that magic is a rare phenomenon; or at least, rare enough that neither the Overseer nor the star-faring rael have ever encountered it before. And while it does seem to assume that the planes and the gods are real, it downplays them heavily despite the scope of the galactic war it presents.Now, that's not to say that the setup is bad unto itself; if you've never been a fan of Spelljammer, prefer to downplay planewalking, and like your deities to be a bit less on the interventionist side, then Tale of the Comet is absolutely for you...especially if you prefer <s>chocolate in your peanut butter</s> technology with your magic.Make no mistake, that's the big draw here: blaster rifles, stun grenades, incendiary missile arrays, and more are now in the hands of your PCs. The boxed set goes on at length about bringing these into your game, and (in what struck me as rather odd at the time), takes you behind the proverbial curtain in doing so, as author Thomas M. Reid openly addresses the players about his thinking with regard to balancing technology in a high-fantasy magical setting. While his reasoning works well enough (in that high-tech materials are far and away stronger than your PCs local weapons and armor, but that magic can make up the difference), the open discussion of the design philosophy feels odd for a supplement. I mean, I'd expect this in the DMG, or a <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/complete-looking-back-at-the-leatherette-series-phbr-dmgr-hr-and-more.677493/post-8243231" target="_blank">related product</a> covering how to run things, but in a mini-campaign setting like this? Maybe it's just me, but it struck me as odd.Of course, there's more to this than just a discussion of how to bring in ray guns alongside swords and spells. The boxed set devotes a decent amount of coverage to Paradise Lake, a remote region where the rael and the robots crash-land. (Naturally, the sight of the crashing ship is the titular "comet.") It also includes an adventure, or at least a detailed outline of one, where the PCs react and respond to the initial invasion – did I mention that the machines will abduct people and forcibly implant cybernetics in them to turn them into a zombified fighting force known as the Doomed? That Borg reference I made earlier wasn't idle – followed by one where they push into an off-world arcology where the invasion is being staged from.Interestingly, there's no real discussion of fighting the Overseer, as the PCs never encounter the big bad behind the machine invasion. I mention that because the final book in the boxed set approaches the idea of why it's almost impossible to kill the Overseer should the PCs be intent on trying, noting that it has multiple power sources keeping it up and running, has made multiple copies of itself (all working together in sync), along with hidden backup copies, including one ready to be shot into deep space if all else fails. And no, this setting doesn't have planet-busters, so that's out (otherwise the Overseer would have started using them itself).Of course, if you want to continue playing a planet-hopping campaign against the machines, the boxed set closes out with a set of conversion rules to the Alternity RPG that WotC was releasing at the time...Looking back, I found Tale of the Comet to be a very mixed bag. I liked the possibilities opened up by the introduction of expansive rules for technology in AD&D 2E, and while the Overseer and its mechanical minions presented a compelling new foe, the fact that using this required throwing out so much of the AD&D cosmology irked me. There was also no real discussion about the wider ramifications of introducing high-tech weapons and armor to your campaign world if you wanted to keep the terrestrial focus, though the fact that most of them needed ammunition that wasn't locally available made for a built-in control measure (and I guess if you were concerned about that, using this boxed set in the first place was probably not a good idea).Of course, the meme value of bringing this level of sci-fi into your D&D game shouldn't be underestimated. The sheer number of quips re: "come with me if you want to live," "just nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure," and "resistance is futile" is guaranteed to last for several sessions.Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.</blockquote>

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