REVIEW: Skycrawl

Beginning in the late Silver Age of Dungeons & Dragons (and coming into full bloom during the Bronze Age), TSR devoted increasing amounts of energy on the creation and development of settings for the game. The earliest glimmers of the sea change in the way D&D – and especially AD&D was supported – can be seen in the Dragonlance modules, I have long contended that this sea change, while initially successful from an economic perspective, laid the groundwork for many (though not all) of TSR's later troubles. 

Nevertheless, it can't be denied that, during this period, a number of genuinely imaginative and interesting settings were produced for AD&D, some of which deserved better than the sausage factory that TSR had become allowed. A good example of this, in my opinion, is Spelljammer, first released in 1989. Spelljammer's high concept is "D&D in space," if, by "space," one understands Ptolemaic celestial spheres floating in an infinite sea of phlogiston rather than anything like the vacuous expanse beyond the atmosphere of Earth. The idea behind Spelljammer is to open up the heavens to D&D adventurers after the fashion of Jack Vance's "Morreion" (included as part of Rhialto the Marvelous). 

It's frankly a terrific idea and one that I can easily imagine Gygax himself having come up with, given his love of intricate magical cosmologies. Unfortunately, as developed by TSR, Spelljammer was often used more as a way to link up its other fantasy settings, like Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, than to present something genuinely weird, wonderful, and otherworldly – when it wasn't offering up thing like spacegoing elves as the 18th century Royal Navy, hamster wheel-powered gnomish space vessels, and Victorian hippo men, that is. Consequently, I look back on Spelljammer as a case of wasted potential, because the idea of "D&D in space" isn't a bad one and deserves a better treatment.

That's where Aaron A. Reed's Skycrawl comes in. Presented as a digest-sized 76-page softcover book, Skycrawl is much, much closer to what I wanted out of Spelljammer. For one, it has only the loosest of settings. Called the Azure Etern – I admit I'm not wild about the name – it's a "weird, whimsical, endless sky" where "villages cling to small rocky spheres lit by sentient suns, brave souls sail far beyond the reach of gravity toward far-flung delves and enchanted clouds, and strange skybeasts swim wild through vast and distant twilights." It's a wonderfully evocative and inspiring set-up for, as its name suggests, a hex crawl among the worlds of he infinite sky. 

Aside from some basic information on how gravity and sky ships work, as well as the nature of the "Sols," as suns are called, Skycrawl consists mostly of rules and tables for generating and exploring your own systems of Sols and Lands. Lands aren't necessarily worlds (i,e. planets) but might instead be floating cities, cloud labyrinths, or an archipelago of floating rocks. Thus, there's no default setting and each referee who uses the book is creating his own, a feature I like immensely. This creation is supported by more than twenty pages of tables that cover not just Lands and Sols but also the Folk who inhabit them and the ships they use to travel between them. There are also plenty of pregenerated examples provided, which I found helpful in understanding how to make the best use of the generators.

In terms of rules, Skycrawl offers methods of handling journeys across the endless Azure using abstract movement that nevertheless takes into account both planning and the possibility of unexpected events. Ship combat has its own sub-system that, in addition to the obvious, also handles boarding actions and repairs. More interesting, I think, is orcery, a magical-alchemical system for manipulating the ten heavy elements of the Azure into beneficial items. This is a fun, if open-ended, system that not only provides characters with something to seek out in the Lands they visit but also adds just enough detail to Skycrawl's loose setting to make it compelling. 

Further supporting the referee is a chapter on running a skycrawl. The chapter covers all the topics one would expect, such as preparation and record keeping, but many others specific to Skycrawl's rules and procedures. In many cases, there's not only discussion of these matters but examples and random tables to aid the referee. This ensures that the chapter doesn't descend into vague generalities but is instead well grounded in the particularities of Skycrawl. This is important, because the book is system-neutral, though it seems apparent to me that it's intended for use with Dungeons & Dragons and games whose rules are similar to those of the classic game.

Skycrawl is simply but cleanly laid out and illustrated throughout by the deft use of 19th and early 20th century woodcuts and lithographs. This gives the whole thing the quality of a Jules Verne or other early science fiction novel, which I think meshes beautifully with its core concepts. I found Skycrawl, despite its sparseness, vastly more imaginative and stirring than Spelljammer – a reminder, if we needed one, that less can indeed be more. Though I'm not currently refereeing a D&D campaign, if I were, I'd be sorely tempted to include some journeys into the Azure Etern. Skycrawl is a delightful toolkit for creating your own "serendipitous adventures in strange skies" and I am very glad to own it.