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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9223357" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 92/151: May/Jun 2002part 10/12Space & Spelljamming: This is even more meaty, giving us 13 pages of ship rules, which are still very simplified in many cases. Most notably, while they do give ships distinct speeds for the purposes of close-quarter combat maneuvers, they completely abstract travel times, not even trying to give a scale for the planets and the distances between them. Gravity is massively simplified and decreases linearly with distance, because who wants to do quadratic sums for fun? Air supply also uses some pretty simple rule of thumb calculations. The thing that’s least abstracted, of course, is combat. Ships use similar rules to arial combat, but they’re generally larger and less manoeuvrable. We get full stats for 14 of them, from the standard human ships to the weird techno-organic illithid ones. So it looks like they’re concentrating on supporting cool combat scenes rather than worrying about larger scale logistical details, which fits with the talk of swashbuckling in the intro. You don’t have to worry about running out of air or food and dying slowly in the vast depths of space unless your DM puts you in that position via fiat for plot reasons. Equipment & Magic: Unsurprisingly, the new equipment is also skewed towards stuff to fight with, both on a personal level and ship armament. They have gunpowder, which is used in pistols and canons of the age of sail tech level that the setting is riffing off of in general. They also have flamethrowers, for when you really need to incinerate an alien monstrosity regardless of how much air supply that wastes. The magic items are kept to a small practical list, a space anchor that allows a ship to stay still without succumbing to gravity, an organic spacesuit that’s essentially a living plant, Spelljammer helms, which as in the old edition come in major and minor form, (but no longer leave the spellcaster of the group useless for anything else on a day they’re flying) plus their cheaper but more dangerous relative Lifejammer helms, which may get you home if you haven’t got any spellcasters on board, but at a heavy price to your con score. (better hope you’ve still got enough supples to rest and heal between sessions.) There is one rare special item as well though, the Crown of the Stars, which automatically makes you master of any ship you board, able to override it’s regular controls and fly it merely by act of will. But overall, this feels way too short, forced to strip things down to the bare necessities due to overall page count limits, so there’s no room for more interesting variant ideas that would really make the setting feel distinct.</blockquote>

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