Saturday, February 6, 2021

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.

14 comments:

  1. “Azure Etern” reminds me a little of the “Rural Juror”.

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  2. I liked the concept of Spelljammer a lot, the execution not so much.
    So much so that I wrote my own take on it for Basic Fantasy by Chris Gonnermann.
    The supplement was inspired by the 3e version of Spelljammer, Shadow of the Spider Moon.
    It's a free pdf and you can find it here:
    https://www.basicfantasy.org/showcase.cgi?sid=110

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  3. Oh yeah, 'Rural Juror' ... I absolutely loved that film! For weeks now, I've been wondering what on earth to do if my PCs decide to take the sky ship, which they found under Dwimmermount's summit, for a ride. This sounds like a resource to lean on to flesh out such a journey. James, thank you so much for this recommendation.

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  4. I loved Spelljammer's over-the-top-ness, personally. I'll grant that TSR used the setting badly -- as you say, typically as an excuse to get tinker gnomes into non-Dragonlance settings -- but the material presented in the boxed set is so wonderfully baroque I couldn't help falling in love with it. From the cards showing detailed floor plans of all kinds of weird ships to the weird (even by AD&D standards) new monsters to the absolutely wild vocabulary, I loved everything about it.

    Mind flayers reimagined as a galaxy-spanning crime syndicate was amazing, Beholders as *literal* tyrants, with absolute, iron-clad rule over their own little worlds. And then the neogi -- a race obviously created to one-up the drow in the "evil and spidery" arena.

    Just me, perhaps, but, yes: I thought Spelljammer was fantastic, though they never should have explained the eponymous ship itself.

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    1. FWIW, I actually loved the boxed set where they described the Spelljammer itself. The idea of a floating megadungeon has stuck with me ever since as an amazing idea.

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    2. I didn't dislike the content as such -- what I objected to was giving a concrete "official" answer to the mystery of the Spelljammer.

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  5. By the way, wasn't the Astromundi Cluster meant to be Spelljammer's own setting?

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    1. Spelljammer's official setting is ALL of the crystal spheres and planets detailed in the published stuff and whatever you add. The closest thing to a "home port" sort of place is the Rock of Bral. The Astromundi Cluster details just one clutter-filled (and for me, somewhat uninspired) sphere.

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  6. I think that Weird Worlds is a great solution to the high-level PC conundrum---when they start to outgrow the pastoral medieval settings of your initial sandbox. (The Mythic Underworld too.)

    However, I currently prefer leveraging the Ethereal Plane as a quasi-space setting---because it easily accommodates all manner of strange and bizarre.

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  7. I find it fascinating that TSR went for ships in space before they actually had a major product covering ships in the water.

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    1. There's something to be said for being able to write the physics of how your "sailing ships" work from the ground up rather than mucking about with all that tedious realism stuff and getting in arguments with sailing buffs about proper rigging and all that stuff. :)

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  8. If you haven't seen it already, I'd recommend a look at the Savage Worlds "Sundered Skies" setting books from Triple Ace - they're on DTRPG as pdfs and in physical from their web store. It's not D&D, obviously, but it's a very good take on the "skycrawl/flying ship" campaign trope with some new wrinkles of its own. Like most things using the Savage Worlds engine it's pretty easy to adapt to other systems.

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  9. If anyone sees Spelljammer as a gate between TSR's holy trinity worlds or a place to hold a (btw fairly boring and mundane) megadungeon, then the fault is in the user's limited imagination, not in the setting. To me it is the most wide open of glorious starry skies and beckoning alien vistas. Boy, it has endless numbers of crystal spheres with TSR's worlds floating as mere specks in them, titanic star beasts juggling planets on thousand year trajectories, lost space empires, illithid pirate nautiloids, orc hammerships, planets where elves grow living ships, and countless other cool features for playing Pirates (or a number of other things) in fantasy space, detailed just in the _official_ supplements. Even Planescape (or Manual of the planes) feels confined in comparison.

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  10. One of the more imaginative Silver Age settings that TSR floated internally as an idea was a world of skyscrapers that towered above a perpetual cloud layer that hid the surface world. I always liked the idea of the dark fungi-ridden ground haunted by unimaginable and the dungeonesque nature of the lower tower levels. The good people (ie rich folk) would travel between distant towers via skyship). Others might use rickety bridges to cross to nearby towers. [I always get visions of how Roman thieves would raid adjacent tenebrae using a long plank.] Unfortunately it was deemed to be too much science fantasy to be developed further.

    [Disclaimer: This is mostly based on hearsay from well after the fact btw. I may be even more wrong in this regard than about anything I say. Caveat lector.]

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