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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8615411" data-attributes="member: 5948">I never played Spelljammer back in the day, but i picked up a bunch of the products from DMsguild a while back and had a read through.  Oddly enough, it was the serious stuff that spoke to me the most.  It's actually quite a grim setting on a macro scale despite all the trippiness.  The big competing major powers are a stew of feuding braineating aberration slavers and a roving armada of arrogant genocide elves.  The wacky hippo people are basically principleless mercenaries who'll kill anyone so long as they get to make cool explosions doing it.  I do think they missed a bit of a trick with the scro, they could have been made much more sympathetic than they were and the setting would have been more interesting, but this was 2e and it was the era of Pretty Elves Uber Alles, and even the modules involving the scro railroaded the PCs into working for the genocide elves from the very first scene.It certainly did lead to some tonal whiplash though.  There was one duology of modules where the first one has you doing a gritty infiltration of a scro warbase packed with brutal feuding troops to discover the truth about their new planet killer weapon - and then the sequel is a complete hallucinogen holiday where you have to steal a tentacle planet's favorite toy and use it to repair a fish constellation, and then have to try to convince the planet of the rainbow pegasus ponies that it's ok to eat the purple plants after all.I do think that the idea of having most of the major powers be various degrees of evil or unlikeable works well for the setting  though - it pushes the PCs into a sort of privateer lifestyle, where they're a plucky band on their ship acting independently, trusting nobody but themselves, relying on their wits to dodge the Imperial Star Destroyers and beholder ships in weird and profitable corners of space.  And that's certainly what you want out of a setting like this.</blockquote>

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