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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8580120" data-attributes="member: 5948">I never had much to do with Spelljammer when it was originally around, but a while ago i bought a few bits and pieces from drivethru and I've finally been reading some of it and WOW it's a lot weirder than i thought it would be.After the first readthrough I decided that if i played in the setting I'd play a goblinoid, living hand-to-mouth in a galaxy largely dominated by the people who actually genocided your species and wiped out their civilisation so effectively that your people can't even build ships any more and you're left as scavengers and hangers-on.  And then i read a couple of the modules and PCs are STILL assumed to side with the genocide elves, simply because they're elves and the goblinoids are worse.  Yeah, THAT'S gonna change, I bet.The prominence of aberrations - mind flayers, beholders, neogi - is kinda ahead of its time, thematically.  And while they're still overwhelmingly evil (and braineating), there's a lot of variation in personalities, and they're quite often portrayed as perfectly amenable to negotiation, bargaining etc.It may be grognard-heresy, but I wish more of the ships were more functional-looking and shiplike, and not just lazy copies of sea creatures or bugs, with huge unnecessary and inefficient head and claw appendatges etc and a few masts and the like stuck on as afterthoughts.  Or at least abstract it a bit more?And there's the adventure when, after running a grim & gritty infiltration of a orc/goblinoid space startion to investigate their new planet killer weapon - you immediately follow it up with a trip to a triangular planet where you have to convince the local rainbow pegasus ponies that the purple fruits are ok to eat after all, and then steal a tentacle planet's favourite toy to give it back to the fish-constellation whose eye it is.  Holy thematic whiplash, Batman!(An important NPC in this adventure is an elf so fat he is descibed as almost spherical.  Regrettably, there is no art - non-skinny elf art is more than a bit (ahem) thin on the ground.  A bit more predictably, he turns out to be a traitor, cos isn't it always the fat ugly ones amirite?)It's deeply strange that the line keeps referring back to Krynnspace, Realmspace, and Grey(hawk)space even though spelljamming is very rare on those worlds (with the interesting exception of Faerun's not-China).  A side-effect of 2e obsessive cross-promotion i guess, but it really doesn't work.  The line needs planets of its own, which aren't hangers-on of existing settings, where spelljamming is common and a routine thing, and where large numbers of the spacefaring races originate, trade, wage war.  No point being a swashbuckling space dog if there's no landlubbers to feel superior too!  There's all sorts of talk of trading going on here, but it's weird that there's not really anywhere detailed to trade stuff to or from.  Also, can Elminster please go away?</blockquote>

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