A few years ago, I ran a weekly spelljammer game. Two of them, in the beginning, set in the same system with a bit of overlap in events. Mostly, the adventures were isolated, as I struggled to pencil in details of the system as the party explored. Some things are still awesome (the world of Thorskul), some things I regret (like the world of Lentburn). I found the 5e spelljammer rules to be… serviceable.

As you can tell from my word choice, I wasn’t really impressed with the rules. There were certainly things that I liked, improvements and restructures from the rules intensive D&D 2e game that was it’s precursor.

Spelljammer 5e is great for incidentals. Explanation of travel between worlds. Good for games that have ships, but not for ship-based games. I kept coming across rule questions where the answer was not touch upon at all. Things like towing another ship, or how to navigate in a system. Space is big and it’s impossible to see things. How do we deal with that?

Some of these problems were handled in the 2e rules, but dealing with Ship Ratings looked to be a hassle. If you were super familiar with the vehicle combat of the age, it probably would have made a lot of sense, but I don’t want to have to relearn things.

I applied some patches during the campaign, things I had tinkered with as ideas. But then I let them sit until this month, when my regular D&D game was going to the stars and I needed to have something set in a stone-like material NOW.

In addition to a handful of troublesome mechanics I wanted to fix, I also wanted to introduce customizable ships. Ghosts of Saltmarsh had some upgrades you could apply to your nautical vessels. Like maybe 6 in total. That wasn’t enough for me. As I’m writing this, my spreadsheet has over 50 upgrades.

That’s part of what makes a ship-based game, for me. The ship needs to be a character, which means it needs to have its quirks, and be able to be upgraded as the players level. I see ship-based games as games that are about exploration on one hand, but trading, piracy, and exploitation on the other. And when players have money, it’s great to be able to charge 5k gold to make a ship more capable. (Actually, its super motivating for players to not have the money, but to see an upgrade that would be amazing for their next big heist.)

Big Changes

5e’s version of spelljammer got rid of the crystal spheres and the Phlogiston, which were very… weird… ideas. No shade on the writers, and the people who loved those aspects of the setting, of course. Spelljammer is inherently a weird setting. But I was very impressed with how 5e’s reworking of the systems changed so much, yet kept the soul of the concept. Hopefully, my tweaks are the same.

In 2e, ships were powered by magic-users, and were quite draining to use. 5e removed the draining aspect, and changed the crystal spheres floating in the Phlogiston into be pockets of Wildspace amid the Astral Sea. I love this idea so much, but I feel they didn’t go far enough with it. My take on Spelljammer makes ships powered by Psionics, the mental force of D&D. This explains why the ships don’t have engines, they just hang in the air exactly the way a brick doesn’t.

After that big change, a few small changes were easy to handle. Ship-to-Ship combat had some problems. First, it was pretty dull, there wasn’t really enough choice during a fight to matter. You wailed on the HP of the ship, which meant you were damaging a potential prize. A wizard could easily lob a fireball onto the deck of a ship, or a ranger could snip across a distance without penalty. And then how could you signal that you’d want to surrender? D&D has problems with escaping big threats in general… There’s a lot going on.

To resolve a chunk of these, I introduce Psionic Shields. While they’re up, you can’t target the deck of the ship, or people on it. That includes with Teleport effects, as well as sniped arrows or fireballs. These also keep a lot of the damage off of the hull of your shiny new pirate ship. And there’s interesting tactics, of trying to decide how much damage you want to pile on to break the shield, or if you’re saving your big guns for a clear shot.

Ship Actions are the second thing I introduce. They give the Helmsman options to control the ship. Movement is only part of it. Cycling shields, communicating between ships, scanning the region, there’s a lot of things they can do. And sure, a spellcaster is going to be mechanically better than a mundane, but you can have a fighter at the helm, no problem.

My fixes feel a lot like Star Trek, and I’m okay with that.

Skraz

There’s a bunch of other fiddly bits that I introduce, but it feels really good to have something solid out there that other people can use and build on. I’m sure I’ll have a lot more ideas for upgrades and rule clarifications that I missed. Edge cases I haven’t thought of that need some extra discussion. But it’s ready to go.

Enjoy!