In my quest to support the delusion that folks care what I think I've decided to start doing a series of quick and dirty reviews of all the Spelljammer products. I hope these will be useful to newcomers and those without all of the products.
Rating System:
| * | Mediocre, poorly written product with little usefulness. |
| ** | A bad product for several reasons with one or two useful aspects. |
| *** | An average product with some good and some bad points. |
| **** | An above average product with few bad points. |
| ***** | An excellent product with few if any bad points. An essential SJ product. |
A collection of errata and notes on the original boxed set's design. There is nothing particularly important contained in this article, but it does what it sets out to do.
This article details an Arcane-controled sphere near Realmspace. It has all the touches of a Greenwood article: interesting background, superbly conceived NPCs, extreme power levels, and a premium on description over detail. The sphere has an artificial feel to it, but having an Arcane "homeland" is very nice.
Though many of the magic items are repeated elsewhere, it's a great article. It's also the first mention of Blackjammer's Cutlass and the Gauntlet of Tamus, the only two Spelljammer-specific artifacts. This column was always worth reading in Dragon, and this article is just as good as the others.
Andeloids, Infernites, and Metagolems are detailed. I personally love Metagolems (odd, since Denning created them and I usually dislike his work), but the others seem just a bit too odd for my taste. The write ups are well done, however, so if you like them you can use them as found.
Basically just a bit of harmless fluff about Giant space hamsters. The cover of Dragon #175 does have an excellent painting of an angelship landing on Bramble in Briarspace, however.
Basically just an article discussing various ways to move PCs from a groundling campaign to a Spelljammer campaign. I admit, this was never an issue for me, so it seemed like a waste of time, but there's nothing inherently dumb about the ideas. GMs may have their imagination sparked by the article.
A very nice article on piracy and privateering campaigns in Spelljammer. Excellent discussion of the relevant problems, plus a description of letters of marque, and random encounter tables for travel through the Flow, deep wildspace, and well traveled wildspace. Good information on treasure and economics, also. Would have rated it higher if it were set specifically on Bral, the information is a tad too general.
This is a sweet little article, with new spells, magic items, and a new monster all related to the neogi. A perfect article for fleshing out a neogi ship crew, or just Neogi society in general. Spelljammer needed more articles like these for iconic Spelljamming races like grommans, scro, giff, and such.
Yes, it's an April issue, and yes it's a somewhat humorous article, but the devices are actually excellent for spicing up Gnome vessels, which should be unpredictable and oddly dangerous. Does for Gnomes what the article in Dragon #184 did for Neogi. As a bonus, the "Band on the Run" article in this same issue contains a parody song, "The Gnomish Space Marines" which gnome crews might very well sing!
I just love this article. It gives us a glimpse of Spelljamming in Greyspace, a neat NPC group, a good model for PC bands to emulate, plus a wonderful model for integrating spelljammer into the economy of a large, highly detailed groundling world without major disruption. What's not to love?
If you plan to run neogi as anything other than a random encounter, you need this article plus the article in Dragon #184. Combined with the boxed set ship plans and the MC entries the neogi are detailed fully as the iconic Spelljammer villain. Like most "Ecology of..." articles this is a short story combine with game stats. The short story details a neogi attack on an elven shrikeship and is worth the read on its own.
A very interesting article that many Spelljammer fans may have missed. The traditional "Ecology of..." short story depicts life on Refuge, as well as detailing an Xixchil business on that Arcane port. Don't run an Xixchil NPC without a copy of this article, it's very well done.
Detailing Giff, Instecare, and Scro for 3e, this article is actually quite good. I don't play 3e, but the article actually has some Spelljammer flavor. Good for those using 3e in Spelljammer. Also, the suggested racial names are a nice touch. And, amazingly, the art actually fits. usually, 3e art makes me want to puke but this article's art inspired some NPC ideas!
An excellent article by one of Spelljammer's "founding fathers" it brings everything we have on the scro together into one place and provides a great deal of information on how to integrate them into a campaign. It's a wonderful model of how to integrate material that was developed in isolation into a comprehensive role. It's the original inspiration for my own "official" timeline article.
