Game 397: Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace (1992)

      

Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace

Canada

Cybertech (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS
Date Started: 20 January 2021

 

This is my first exposure to the Spelljammer setting. I rather like it. It crosses genres in a way we rarely see: science fiction on top of a fantasy base. We see it go the other way a lot, as in Star Wars and Babylon 5. But fantasy characters usually remain firmly rooted on their own planets. If they don't, they typically travel to other places through some kind of magic portal or dimensional shifting, not by actually taking space ships. (Dungeons and Dragons uses this alternate approach with its "planes" and Planescape setting.) Might and Magic is an exception, but a confusing one, since you never really learn the rules of the (mostly hidden) science fiction universe. Brandon Sanderson's "Cosmere" is another example, although it also has kept most of the sci-fi parts hidden for now. 

       

I expected Spelljammer to occupy a completely different universe than the Dungeons and Dragons games I've played so far. Instead, it launches--quite literally--from the familiar Forgotten Realms Setting of Waterdeep. From there, instead of going south to Baldur's Gate or north to Luskan, it goes up--to space. And why not? Clearly there is a "space" in the Forgotten Realms. The planet is called "Toril," suggesting there are other planets. At nighttime, you can see stars.

       

You can play a female, but you assign sex after class and race, so all the default portraits are male.

     

But because Spelljammer is sci-fi grafted onto fantasy rather than the other way around, its space doesn't have to be our space--and it's not. The stars, therefore, are not other suns in the vast distance. They are instead small holes in the crystal sphere that surrounds what we would think of as Toril's "solar system," allowing people to see the "phlogiston" that exists between solar systems. Through the "wildspace" within solar systems and the phlogiston between them sail a variety of ships, powered by spellcasters wearing special helms called "spelljamming helms." [Ed. I was interpreting "helm" as "helmet," when I guess it's meant as the helm (wheel and other steering mechanisms) of a ship.] These ships don't need to worry about gravity and atmosphere because their science is not our science.

       

These are definitely the working-class versions of their associated races.

       

I guess the entire Spelljammer setting is no longer canon. It was only around from 1989 to 1993, when Planescape replaced it as a method for connecting the various D&D campaign settings. I think that's too bad. I admittedly don't have much experience with it, but I fundamentally don't "get" Planescape, whereas I took to Spelljammer immediately (in saying that, I'm talking less about the game and more about the documentation). I would have loved to see it appear in the Infinity Engine. It draws from Ptolemaic theory, Jules Verne, steampunk, and classic nautical fiction, including pirate adventures. I could have done with a whole series of games in this setting.

    

Spelljammer of course came after the GreyHawk, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Kara-Tur, and several other Dungeons and Dragons campaign settings, each with their own origin stories, and now they were connected in a shared universe. The game manual highlights the theological complications associated with insisting that these settings are all "spheres" in a shared universe and that the gods, therefore, may only be gods of their own "spheres." 

    

My first ship.

      

The box claims that the game uses the second edition of the AD&D ruleset, which had come out in 1989. I spent some time researching what that should mean. First, the caps on classes based on race are gone, but that's not a huge advantage here because the experience levels don't go very high and there's no sequel. [Ed. I was wrong about this. There are fewer restrictions, and I think some of the caps have been raised, but they're not gone.] But I also thought AD&D2 was supposed to offer more classes, including the bard and the druid, and those aren't present in the game. Neither are weapon proficiencies. "Melf's Acid Arrow" appears as a spell, but I think that was in AD&D1 and the gold box games just never included it. Some of you who have more expertise with the rules may have to alert me to more of the changes.

   

Either way, the same familiar races, classes, alignments, and attributes are present as you create your captain. Although the game could theoretically draw on the conventions of any of the constituent campaign settings, it seems to use familiar Forgotten Realms themes. Mages are thus just mages--not white or black or red. I don't know how clerics figure out what gods they worship; I guess it depends on where they were born.

 

I created a chaotic good half-elf ranger named Woodes. (The default name, strangely, was "Guilt.") The game automatically assigned attributes, but I was able to re-roll, and I did until I had acceptable intelligence, strength, and dexterity. The rolls were pretty generous, rarely going less than 13 and never less than 10 except for charisma. You start at Level 5 with nearly 20,000 experience points.

        

Later, I'll have wished I held out for more hit points.

         

The backstory has the main character born on Toril, unaware of the other worlds of the cosmos until he meets a spelljammer captain one night in a Waterdeep tavern. Initially skeptical of the captain's claims to have sailed the stars, the character's doubts are dispelled when the captain invites him aboard the vessel and takes him on a short trip to the moon. The captain explains that he wants to retire to Waterdeep and thus sells the craft to the character, who assembles a crew and embarks on his own career on the high aether.

      

If a Star Wars movie was just 90 minutes of title crawl.

   

The game begins with the ship in wildspace. It is a galleon called the Meandering Beast that can only land in water. A large crew is aboard, already assigned to various positions on the ship. In addition to Captain Woodes, I have:

   

• First mate: Grendal, a lawful good half-elf cleric
• Helmsman: Loric Brightshield, a lawful good human cleric
• 2nd Helmsman: Moran Silverleaf, a lawful good elf mage
• Navigator: Melcar the Wise, a lawful good human mage
• Lookout: Norv Greybard, a lawful good human mage
• Crew: Grog Stiffbeard, a lawful good human fighter
• Crew: Sir Aeron, a lawful good human paladin
• Crew: Stephan Longlegs, a lawful good half-elf ranger
• Crew: Sopa Swiftfingers, a chaotic good halfling thief

  

Screw evil characters, women, and gnomes, I guess. Everyone is Level 5 and has an appropriate selection of weapons and spells. Inventory includes cloaks, helms, and boots along with melee and missile weapons and trade items like holy symbols and thieves' picks. Oddly, some of the attributes seem a bit low for the characters' chosen classes. My clerics have wisdom scores of 11 and 12. One of my mages has an intelligence of 11 but a dexterity of 18.

  

My hardy crew..

        

The game has started me with no job and no clue. I'm adrift in a starfield with no particular destination. There are no log entries, no manifest, and three tons of cargo: one ton each of elm, pine, and limestone.

   

A check of the map shows I can visit any of the planets in Toril's system, both outer (Chandos, Garden, and Glyth) and inner (Karpri, Coliar, Anadia, and Toril). I don't know anything about the lore of these systems, but the manual has a short description of each. I decide to start where the manual does, on Coliar, home of "races of lizard men, aaracokra, and dragons." I set the destination and spelljam there automatically, which takes about a minute of zooming through space. 

       

You can set a course for a planet by selecting it on the map.

      

Upon arrival, I'm given a choice of Hisssta and Athanar; I choose the former. Arriving at a city in this game is like arriving at a port in Pirates! You have options to visit whatever the government building is called and talk to the governor (although you need an invitation, which I don't have), visit the docks to repair your ship, visit the cargo warehouse to buy and sell cargo and take special missions, buy and sell individual equipment at shops, get healed at a temple, and go to the bar for drinks, rumors, or work. Most ports seem to have some analog of all of these options.

      

Any game that features lizard men goes crazy with the onomatopoeia.

     

Every port requires you to pay a certain amount of money in taxes every time you dock. These vary from place to place and even time to time, and I haven't worked out the specific formula. I had a few jobs that were basically negated by the taxes required to dock and finish the job. I know--ha, ha, I was just expressing a willingness to pay higher taxes in my Star Quest entry. This is a fantasy game, and as far as I know, I'm not getting health care or highways for that money.

       

It's the "cargo tax" that gets you.

       

The developers took more inspiration from Pirates! than just the town options. The three basic ways of making money seem to be identical: buy and sell cargo, loot other ships (you can wait for hostile ones if you want to play "good"), and perform special missions. On this first visit, I am approached by a halfling who claims to have escaped from slavers and wants me to take him home to Anadia. I readily agree, even though a rumor in the same tavern says that "Anadia is so close to the sun that some ships burn before they can dock."

        

My first quest!

        

As I leave port, the crew demands to be paid, but that's a pittance compared to the taxes. I give them around 40 gold and then we're off to Anadia.

   

Right out of port, we're approached by a hostile spelljammer. Other than briefly playing with the options, which include firing ship's weapons and ramming, I haven't done much with the ship combat system. Instead, I simply close the distance and grapple. I want to see what the party combat system is like.

      

Ramming seems to be a bad idea.

     

It's going to take some getting used to. It is similar to Gold Box combat in rules. You and the enemy characters take turns based on initiative. During a character's turn, he has options to attack, defend, guard, cast, turn undead, change equipment, heal a companion, or flee (I don't know how that works in space). There's a new option to stop combat and "parlay" [sic]. You have movement points that I assume are based on encumbrance.

   

There are a few changes, though. First, the graphics are much different. They look a lot like Ultima VI. Second, each enemy icon can actually represent a stack of foes, and you have to kill all of them for the icon to disappear. Third, it turns out that I have crewmembers other than the officers! They're not named, and I can't control them directly in combat. They're mostly fighters, it seems, and they mostly shoot missile weapons, but they're pretty effective. 

 

The combat map varies from ship to ship, but it includes lots of barriers and rooms that can hide enemies and make it tough to track them all down.  

       

Until I got some experience, I wasn't sure which characters were mine.

         

This first combat goes horribly. I've forgotten to have my spellcasters memorize spells, so they're useless. My attackers are humanoid, and since I've never fought with this combat system before, I have a lot of trouble distinguishing friend from foe. My characters seem to go down awfully fast for Level 5. After a couple of them die, I kill the emulator and reload. This is before I got the quest on Coliar, so I have to return. The halfling isn't there anymore, but I get a similar quest (escaped from slavers) from a guy who wants to go to Toril.

       

In a later combat with lizard men, this was a bit easier.

        

You can only have one mission at a time, plus one cargo mission. The cargo missions almost always pay less than the ones you get in bars. I eventually learn that you get three chances per visit to accept or reject cargo missions, so you can try to hold out for one going to the same place as your other mission, if that makes sense.

   

You'll pay me 1,000 gold to deliver a single hammer to another planet?

        

When we get to Toril, I start recording the prices of cargo. I make a spreadsheet so that I can figure out how much each product (dwarven ale, steel, elm, cattle, copper, limestone, etc.) sells in each port and figure out which items might be profitable to trade. This soon becomes complicated. It turns out that the ports don't sell the same cargo, so it's hard to make comparisons. Even at a single port, the cargo offerings might change between visits. For insance, elm was selling for 250 gold per unit on Toril and 3,500 per unit on Hissta. I figured that would be like printing money. But when I returned to Toril to buy a bunch, there was no more elm. Finally, as I learned painfully, ports only pay half of what they sell the same cargo for. I'll keep recording the prices, but it seems like it's going to be tough making a profit this way.

    

I spent a while taking ferrying missions. A guy wants to go to Garden (huge taxes, but he paid well). A noble on Toril wants me to pick up his son's fiancée and bring her back to Toril. A family of refugees is trying to get to Ananda. The specific stories don't really matter.

   

Great. Now to pay half of that in taxes.

        

I get stopped by enemy vessels a couple of times, but my crew gets slaughtered every time. The closest I get is in a battle with some lizardmen, but they kill three of my characters, and I decide not to take that heavy a loss. I do finally memorize spells, and they work reasonably well, but it's not enough. A party of elves boards me at one point and just wipes me out with their arrows.

       

I did manage to fry a few of them.

      

Not all ships are hostile. The game has a "hailing" system that allows you to demand the enemy surrender or just hail him and talk. There are even some minor dialogue options within the associated conversation.

         

Talking with some vessel.

           

Finally, I see a strange ship that looks like a spider. Determined to win just once, I close and board it, only to find it completely deserted. All I can do is loot the ship. The game offers me the opportunity to trade ships, but while the new one has more cargo room and better offensive capabilities, the manual says it can't land at any ports. That's a dealbreaker. I do loot it for an upgrade spelljammer helm, some gold, and some minor bits of inventory (e.g., a suit of chainmail). It's pretty lucrative for not having to do any work. According to the manual, these spider ships are built by the Neogi, a "cross between a wolf spider and a moray eel." I can't quite picture that.

          

Woodes wanders an empty ship. Nothing to do but "loot" it.

       

Since different ships hold different numbers of crew, I suspect the goal here is to make enough money that I can afford a bigger ship with a bigger crew compliment, so it's like going into battle with an army. I haven't really looked at ship prices yet.

  

I'm wondering whether I get any experience for these non-combat missions, and it turns out that my main character does. He goes up to Level 6 as I complete the next mission. The rest of the officers don't seem to budge.   

       

Now I want to know how it determines experience. Light years traveled?

         

Back on Waterdeep, a government official meets me in the bar and asks me to look into a pirate vessel creating mischief around Anadia. I agree and head for the innermost planet, which involves skirting around the sun. I find no pirates on the way to the planet, but as I pull away, a pirate ship appears off my bow. I close and grapple. I'm determined to finally win one.

    

One wonders what all those appendages do.

     

My hopes dissipate as soon as I see my enemy: illithid. About seven of them, along with a bunch of fighter and gnome thralls. They're immune to magic and manage to stun several of my characters per round with psionic attacks. I manage to kill exactly one of them before I inevitably lose the battle.

        

Aren't mind flayers awfully advanced for Level 5?

        

Miscellaneous notes:

     

• A lot of the shopkeepers are digitized photos. They look pretty bad.

       

Ah, I see this bar carries The Boss Hog Edition 六.

      

• Although space is a 3D environment, you only ever have one heading to a planet, and you can only ever move in two dimensions.

• Half the time I choose "spelljam to destination," I arrive near the planet but not at the planet. I sometimes have to choose it a few times.

• The interface is great. The game can be run by mouse or keyboard; the keyboard commands are obvious and intuitive. 

• When the game began, I had hoped my adventures would take me to Krynn and Greyhawk, but it appears that the game is limited to the Forgotten Realms system of planets. 

• None of my mages who have Level 3 spells have "Fireball." The manual insists that it exists, though. It seems like a bad idea to cast it on a ship.

      

As far as I can tell, the few changes to the combat system don't weaken it at all. I still think it's a great system. I just wouldn't mind winning a combat for once. As for the rest of it, I can see why the game didn't really click. Flying from port to port without much to do in space and with no way to really explore the planets doesn't make for a very exciting game.

   

Time so far: 4 hours