Spelljammer: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

A chest of gold and a text crawl brings an end to Spelljammer.

       

Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace

Canada

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

Released 1992 for DOS
Date Started: 20 January 2021

Date Ended: 5 February 2021

Total Hours: 22 (two characters; more like 10-12 for the winning one)

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 31

Ranking at time of posting: 247/404 (61%)

      

Summary:

Spelljammer is a minor Dungeons and Dragons title, commissioned by SSI from one of its independent developers but under-resourced and under-funded. The result is a buggy, incomplete game whose positive elements do not outweigh poor balance, a truncated storyline, and a lack of product testing. The player commands a ship that flies through the cosmos of the Forgotten Realms, trading and ferrying passengers between planets. Officers on the ship are named characters of the usual Dungeons & Dragons classes and attributes (although the player can only create the captain), while unnamed fighters serve among the crew. First-person space navigation (albeit on a two-dimensional plane) occurs between menu towns on the planets; there is no planetary exploration. Occasional hostile encounters may be resolved by action-oriented space combat or by boarding ships and engaging in turn-based, top-down tactical combat. The combat system is the most promising feature of the game, but it's poorly utilized here.

     

******

     

I solved the crashing problem by disabling the sound. Of the solutions offered, it made the most sense to me--the crash was happening right when the game transitioned to a victory screen, when you'd expect some kind of triumphant music to load. Instead, the IRQ settings must have caused a floating point error in the sound buffer or whatever.

    

Once I figured out the problem, I continued with Hortense and her all-female crew. (It's curious that the game insists on making the officers the same sex as the captain. Is it some Puritanical fear of what will happen if a co-ed group serves on a confined ship for a long period of time? Does that mean all the miscellaneous crew are supposed to be the same sex as well?) Through a variety of trading missions, Hortense gained levels and fame, until she was finally offered the same quest as my previous Captain Chester: end the Neogi menace.

    

With Hortense, I spent a lot more effort trying to upgrade the ship and crew. I kept a spreadsheet of all the officers' inventory, checked every shop on every planet I visited, and bought upgrades when they were available. Soon, my fighters and thieves all had long swords +3 and a variety of armor upgrades. Many of my mages had cloaks +2. I never found magical weapons that mages could use, however, and my two clerics never did any better than maces +1. Hortense found a Ring of Invisibility at one point, but I never got the sense that it did anything in combat.

    

My crew towards the end of the game.

   

Money is relatively easy to make in this game. Sometimes, you get 6,000 gold pieces for a simple escort mission. But it's also easy to spend, particularly on repairing damaged ships, taxes, and the aforementioned equipment upgrades. For this reason, I didn't look into upgrading the ship itself until late in the game. I don't think I ever won a space-based battle.

   

For most of my playing time, I assumed that the developer did not intend anyone to level up except for the captain. Then, suddenly, late in the game, my fighter gained a single level. It was the only time that any of the officers leveled up or, as far as I can tell, even gained experience. Having won, I now believe that the intention was that all officers would be able to level up, and indeed that the player would postpone the final missions for quite a while, bringing the officers to maximum level first. I base this on the difficulty of the final combat, which I'll cover in a bit.

    

The best part of Spelljammer is not the space bits. Navigating from planet to planet takes too long. Space combat has too few tactics that actually work. The best part is the tactical combat system. It's possible that with the right balance, and after solving some of the bugs, it could have been better than the Gold Box system. It has most of the strengths of the Gold Box, including careful programming of a very large variety of spell effects (most of which the player will never see if he doesn't create a mage). The use of "stacks" for some enemies and for random crew is a weird bit of abstraction, but in the long run, I didn't mind it. It really was the only way to offer epic battles in a confined space.

   

Almost every battle completely exhausted my characters' spells, to the point that I started to think the creator should have allowed characters to rest and re-learn spells in the middle of combat under certain circumstances (e.g., they're more than x steps away from the nearest enemy, and in a closed room with a locked door). But I otherwise loved how important every "Cure Light Wounds" and "Magic Missile" became to victory.

   

There are some issues inherent with the combat system, such as it only supporting human-sized character icons. You'd never be able to fight a dragon. But the biggest problems are bugs. Low hit-point characters would sometimes die all of a sudden for no reason (this happens to enemies, too). Characters under the player's control will suddenly respond to the computer's control in a random round. Under the computer's control, they often unequip their weapons. The unnamed fighters have missile weapons if the computer controls them but not if you control them (late in the game, I figured out how to take control); if the computer controls them, their AI is horrible.

   

The most significant of these issues is how both computer-controlled characters and enemies behave around doorways. First of all, they're extremely reluctant to use them. Anything under the computer's control is far more likely to dither around its existing room than try to go through a doorway. If the doorway is locked, they never go through. Computer-controlled entities never attack anything standing in doorways, nor do they ever attack while standing in doorways themselves. They also never attack through doorways to visible enemies on the other side. Player-controlled characters can cast spells and shoot arrows through doorways, but only if they don't have doors. Anything with a door is treated as if it's always closed, even if a character is standing there keeping it open. These issues are particularly important because all combat takes place on ships, where doorways are everywhere. There are particular implications for the final battle.

    

When Chester got the quest to destroy the Neogi, he immediately heard from Clive the Fearsome's agent and headed to Garden. Hortense had to work a few missions between these two events. But eventually she visited Clive, heard about the dwarven citadel, and visited the derelict fortress. By now, I had solved the post-combat crashing issue, so I wasn't worried about it happening again. Oddly, the fortress this time was staffed not by undead but regular fighters and mages. This happens a lot in the game. You'll be tasked with destroying a "ghost ship" and you'll find regular fighters on board, or you'll be asked to take care of regular pirates and find out that they're surprisingly undead. It appears that the game has a fairly limited slate of potential foes that the characters can face. They never mix and match. You never find a mummy fighting alongside a couple of Neogi, for instance. It's always something like fighters + rangers + mages, zombies + ghasts + mummies + specters, or Neogi + umber hulks.

    

Anyway, the enemies were no harder than the undead. My clerics were able to make good use of "Hold Person." Hortense had gotten "Fireball" by now, and it's nerfed a bit for this engine, only affecting a one-square radius from its centerpoint. "Lightning Bolt" is much more damaging, but wow, do you have to count the squares carefully. It's easy to accidentally catch your mage in the bounce-back otherwise. As you can imagine, on the confines of a ship, there are a lot of places in which casting it is unwise.

     

Picking up where we left off.

     

At the end of the battle, we found the Scepter of Disguise and brought it back to Clive. The device apparently lets you make your ship look like any other ship, so you can get close without being attacked. I found that it worked fine on Neogi and not at all on anyone else. (And I was flying a Neogi mindspider by now, so I'm not sure it was the scepter.) Clive related that one of his ships had recently destroyed a Neogi vessel that was on its way to a rendezvous with another vessel. Clive wanted us to disguise ourselves as the Neogi ship and make the rendezvous ourselves. 

       

We see Clive for the last time.

    

We flew to the rendezvous point, where the other Neogi vessel dropped something in space and flew away. The object turned out to be a scroll, which ordered us (or, more accurately, the destroyed Neogi whom we were impersonating) to meet The Cleaver, captained by Master Akk'ais, and participate in a joint raid to capture umber hulk slaves.

   

We spelljammed to The Cleaver's location and hailed the ship. Without even trying to fight, Akk'ais surrendered to us and offered to tell us the location of the Neogi mother ship in exchange for his freedom. "I was against this banding together from the start," he explained. 

    

This may be the best graphic in the game.

    

Reaching the mother ship offered a few problems. First, it is surrounded by Neogi vessels--or perhaps one very persistent Neogi vessel. As you try to approach, you get sucked into encounters with regular Neogi vessels repeatedly. You can just sail away, but you get into another one almost immediately. I got fed up and tried to destroy them and found that my crew was no match for stacks of umber hulks. They run up, confuse, and slaughter any of my characters (or stacks of fighters) in a single round. And combat always started on the decks of the ships, so there was no opportunity to use the doorway trick.

           

Approaching the Neogi mother ship.

      

I had to keep fleeing and trying again, but eventually I managed to encounter the mother ship. It's a large single-level craft, full of doorways and small rooms. The party starts on a landing deck with no enemies, so it's easier to get started by creating barriers in front of the doors. Nonetheless, a combination of poor tactics, a lack of spells, and those goddamned umber hulks ruined my first attempt at the battle.

    

Reloading, I tried to take on the mother ship in ship-to-ship combat, but I had somehow unwittingly sold most of my ship's weapons, so that was a no-go. Ultimately, I had to withdraw, vowing to improve my levels, my items, and my ship's weapons before trying again.

    

I flew around doing random missions for a while. Hortense reached Level 9 and got one Level 5 mage spell: "Cloud Kill." None of my other characters leveled. I managed to get plate armoring for the hull and purchase new ship's weapons, plus upgrade some personal gear, but nothing that would really make a difference against umber hulks. Nonetheless, after a while I decided to try again. This time, I had my four mages load up on "Stinking Cloud," as it seemed like the only thing that would affect them.

    

This arrangement against umber hulks is not survivable.

    

All I can say is, thank the gods for the doorway bug, because otherwise I don't see how it's possible to win this combat. The umber hulks are just too strong. (Even if you didn't want to take advantage of the doorway bug, it's nearly impossible not to, because the enemies lurk on the other sides of the doorways, and you have to clear them before you can move on.) I should point out, however, that it takes a long time. Some of the rooms had three stacks of 5 umber hulks each. Each one takes about five hits to kill, and you miss about 50% of the time, so you're looking at over 100 rounds to clear out some of the rooms. You can't set the characters to computer control and walk away because they won't attack if they're standing in doorways. Fortunately, a few locations were a bit easier. There was one hallway in particular where my mages managed to "Lightning Bolt" a few stacks of hulks into oblivion.

    

There was one room with hulks immune to the bug. They insisted on staying at the north end of the room, and the doorway was to the south end. I had thought to have Hortense delay until the end of the round, pop in, cast "Cloud Kill," and hopefully get lucky with the initiative and run out at the beginning of the next round. But "Cloud Kill" was mysteriously absent from my spell list despite my having memorized it before the battle. I managed to kill them first by softening them up with a "Fireball," then by having a mage run in and cast "Stinking Cloud" to immobilize them, then bringing stacks of fighters into the room manually, then reverting them to computer control so they'd use their arrows. The whole thing took hours, though.

     

Trying to deal with those last two umber hulk stacks.

    

Once the battle ended, I got a bunch of gold. The mother ship still lurked in space. It had no crew to fire back at me, but still took about 15 minutes of firing my own weapons to destroy it.

       

Having blown this thing, it's time to go home.

    

As soon as it was gone, I was approached in space by an elven ship. I hailed it and the endgame sequence commenced. A cinematic showed a representative of the Council of Lords presenting us with a huge chest of gold. A text scroll told us that the Neogi were unable to maintain their fragile alliance, and the elves were able to drive them off.

   

 

From there, the game took us to the DOS prompt. I had expected that we'd actually be able to spend the gold and continue having random spelljamming adventures in Realmspace, but apparently not.

   

A truly great game could have been made from this setting and some of the mechanics the creators demonstrated. Imagine if the player could not only visit the menu towns on each planet but also explore dungeons, solve local quests, and find better equipment. Imagine if the character development system applied to everyone. Imagine if you could sail into the phlogiston (you can't here, not even manually) and take the crew to Krynn or Greyhawk. Imagine if space fights used the same mechanics as Space Rogue.

  

Alas, we get:

    

• 4 points for the game world. That's a compromise. In the manual, the Spelljammer setting is like nothing we've ever experienced. In the game itself, it's not much like the manual.

    

It would be nice if these different planets really felt like different planets.

      

• 3 points for character creation and development. I like the AD&D system to an extent, but it's not that exciting when applied to only one character. Possibly because of the bugs, methods of earning experience are opaque and inconsistent. Having to accept a large number of randomly-generated characters (with horrible attributes) sucks.

• 2 points for NPC interaction. You get some tips from other captains and bar patrons, but it annoys me that of the dialogue options with other ship captains, most are useless or jokes.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. Dungeons and Dragons has a nice bestiary, but not many of them are pressed into service for the game. There are no non-combat encounters or puzzles.

• 5 points for magic and combat. An 8-point system is ruined by bugs.

    

The animation shows the "Fireball" spell affecting one ring more than it actually does.

     

• 4 points for equipment. There are a lot of characters and a lot of equipment slots, just not a lot of equipment to find.

• 4 points for economy. That's another compromise. I like games with a lot of economic complexity--lots of ways to make money, and lots of ways to spend it. Here, you theoretically have a variety of quests, trading, and piracy for the one and personal and ship upgrades for the other. But so much is unbalanced and broken that it feels like a much simpler game.

• 3 points for quests. You get no choices, but you have a main quest and an infinite series of randomly-generated side-quests until you finish the main quest.

      

Picking up another random quest in a bar.

      

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are adequate but rarely fantastic. There are some sparse sound effects that I had to turn off midway through my experience. The interface is up to SSI's usual standards, which means that the mouse or keyboard can be used exclusively or in a pairing. I had to subtract a point for the amount of time that spelljamming takes, especially where there's no automatic way to tell the helmsman to keep trying until you get there. 

• 3 points for gameplay. Rating Spelljammer in this category is tough. Until you get the main quest, it's nonlinear, but what good is nonlinearity when you have the same basic experience on all the planets? I suppose it's somewhat replayable for different classes, but only because the character development system is broken. It has the right level of difficulty--but only by accident, because if not for the doorway bug, it would be far too hard. The duration is good for its content, but only because it has far too little content.

    

The sum of 34 is still far too high. I'm going to subtract 3 points for bugs and things that just don't work right, giving us a final score of 31. In some ways, that still seems too high, but the game did have some promising elements.

    

This ship looks like it would be disgusting to live in.

      

The March 1993 Computer Gaming World review by Jeff James mostly agrees with my take. James got more out of ship-to-ship combat than I did, and he encountered problems with hard drive performance that of course are no longer an issue. Overall, though, he felt that the tactical combat was very good but everything else was rough around the edges. He experienced many of the same bugs that I did, too. Ultimately, he concluded that Spelljammer "is a product with a good deal of promise, thwarted by an unfortunate number of defects." Pretty much every contemporary and modern review, including mine, says the same thing. A lot of them say that the game is part of the Gold Box series, though, when it demonstrably is not. I doubt the creator even had access to the Gold Box assets. It would have made more sense if he did--if the game had simply re-used the programming from Buck Rogers and the art from the Pool of Radiance series.

Spelljammer makes sense if you understand that SSI was facing a ticking clock. By 1992, TSR was unhappy with the stagnation of the Gold Box series and the consequent decreasing sales (echoing my opinion, none of the games from the TSR/SSI partnership ever sold better than Pool of Radiance). TSR did renew their license with SSI--they would ultimately extend it until the end of 1994, and they allowed SSI to keep publishing games developed under the license until mid-1995--but the writing was on the wall. SSI sank most of its development efforts into the forthcoming Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (1993) but also commissioned a number of titles to squeeze as much as they could from the Dungeons & Dragons cachet. Between 1993 and 1994, we see games like Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom (1993), a rushed Eye of the Beholder III (1993), Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse (1994), and Menzoberranzan (1994). I haven't played these games, but I know something of their reputation, and thus understand when "Digital Antiquarian" Jimmy Maher characterizes them as having "something of the feel of a lame-duck session of government."

     

In this light, Spelljammer was just one of many under-resourced, half-assed productions that SSI funded during this period, hoping that something would stick. They gave the project to Al Escudero, a Canadian developer who had come to them looking for work after Electronic Arts made a hash out of Deathlord (1988), a game I found admirable but unplayable. Escudero wrote a space strategy and tactics game called Renegade Legion: Interceptor (1990) for SSI and was ready for another project after a sci-fi follow-up was canceled. (I'm getting a lot of this account from a Wikipedia article that has been flagged for citing no sources for 10 years, so take it with a grain of salt; however, some comes directly from Escudero's account in a 2012 RPG Codex interview.) Given the development conditions that followed, it's amazing we got a game as good as we did. Escudero had only one primary programmer on his team, a young man named Alex Russell, whose younger brother went to high school with Escudero. They took pictures of friends in the Society for Creative Anachronism to digitize for character portraits. They worked on 386 machines in Escudero's basement and kitchen, and had to hastily rent an office for "Cybertech" when SSI executives came up for a surprise visit. In the middle of the project, SSI significantly curtailed what Escudero had intended for it, which would have included exploring dungeons on the various worlds.

      

Escudero ended up staying in the space he rented to impress the SSI executives. Cybertech worked on online games but was purchased by Electronic Arts, and the team dispersed to other projects, before they could bring a game to market. Escudero eventually transitioned into console games; his only other RPG credit is for design (though not lead designer) on Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony (2006) for the PlayStation Portable.

   

Listings conflict as to whether Escudero was on the design team for SSI's Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (1993), but either way, there's a good chance that will be our next Dungeons & Dragons game.