Why did Spelljammer fail?

[Bjorn]

For those of you who don't remember, Spelljammer was a setting for AD&D 2nd Ed. that featured ships (spelljammers) that sailed through space.  The Spelljammer universe was filled with massive, solar-system sized crystal spheres floating in the phlogistion; each of those spheres contained a reality, including (in theory) all of the other settings published by TSR.

In many ways, Spelljammer should have been a success.  It had pirates, a good mix of comedy and serious elements, it was broadly open-ended, and it could be easily be combined with any of the (many, many) other products TSR was producing at the time.  But it wasn't a success; it flopped, pretty badly.  In the spirit of the worldbuilding thread, I thought it would be interesting to discuss what went wrong.

Before going into this, I think it's fair to say there were reasons not directly related to the setting itself that worked against Spelljammer.  TSR had a glut of settings at that point, and just kept churning them out.  Additionally, the novels in the Spelljammer line were, quite frankly, crap.  That might sound irrelevant, but Dragonlance, for example, took off in large part because of the Dragonlance Chronicles, and interest in Forgotten Realms was kept high by the continuous stream of readable books, at least two of which failed to feature Drizzt Do'Urden.  There are probably other reasons, too, but none of them are very relevant to the question of "what can go wrong when you try to build a setting?"

Here's my list of what went wrong, organized more or less from most to least important.

No place to start. Spelljammer spent a lot of time talking about the various non-human and sphere-spanning organizations and cultures you could come across, and almost as much time talking about how you could incorporate other settings into a Spelljammer place.  The problem was that none of the other published settings had spelljamming as an established feature of the world, and everything that Spelljammer introduced was just too massive in scope to provide a good place to start a new campaign off.

What the setting needed was some good descriptions of spheres where spelljamming was an integral part of the society: an asteroid field reality, for example, where spelljammers were needed just to visit your next door neighbour.  Without that, the DM was left a bit adrift on the crucial question of: how do you get the PCs on board a spelljammer?

Already been done.  This ties into the point above.  As designed, it seemed like the intent was that at some point, once your ongoing campaign had reached a certain (high) level, the expectation was that the DM would introduce a spelljammer into the mix, either by having it land in front of the PCs or having the PCs discover some abandoned hulk.  Bored with their home reality, having firmly and utterly conquered it, the PCs would seize on the opportunity to sail the phlogiston, see new worlds, and kill different monsters.  Exactly like, you know, the Planes.  Except the Planes had even more possible diversity, and you could travel them with a single spell or magical artifact, rather than having to spend a month sailing a ship from one place to the other.

The campaign designers really spent a lot of time playing up the "see new worlds" aspect of Spelljamming, but extra-dimensional travel already gave you that, with the difference that plane-walking was built into the core rules, and hence all the settings, from the start.  The unique aspect of Spelljammer was, well, the spelljammers, and a lot of times it felt the designers missed that point, that the spelljammers were, to them, just a plot device for schlupping the players around.

Cumbersome new rules.  There's not much else to add to this.  The spelljammer rules were hefty, new, and a bit of a pain to use.  The wargaming influence was a little bit too strong.  Most people I know seemed inclined just to try and avoid having to use the rules at all, and that just reinforces the "spelljammers as plot device" problem.

It's my turn to wear the pirate hat! The idea of having the players be air/space/sea pirates is one of those things that sounds really fun, but tends to get bogged down in logistics.  If it's an eight-man ship, and you only have four players, do you really want to have to GM four NPCs at all times?  If the players are crew, then how do you run the game in such a way that they're not being railroaded?  If one of them is the captain, well, only one of them is the captain, so how do you settle that?  None of this is unsurmountable, of course, but it's the sort of nagging issues that tend to make people shrug and look for settings that are a little more flexible in the type of game they can support.

So what are your opinions?

[Dracos]

Oddly, I've never read the Spelljammer campaign setting.  My experience with it, largely, derives from the computer game that, if you're being accurate, was a reasonably accurate portrayal of it.  Countless 'planets' in a gigantic sphere with you being the captain of a small spelljammer.

It also suffered from terribly forgetable planets, with everything just being there and planets reduced to little more than a dock, with the spelljammer traveling between port to port.  That said, given it was one player, it probably was more fun than the spelljammer campaign setting, where everyone else would kind of be pointless.

I've always seen the big problem with ever grabbing conceptually from this is the huge tech difference.  Sure, you could ignore it...but anyone role playing well in most other D&D settings would be witnessing something that that's lightyears above anything they have, could proceed with oribtal bombardment of all possible enemy cities, etc.  You have an environment where it seems weird that they can be launching things at each other through space, but that guns haven't become common yet.  I know it's magic based, but this sort of thing always bothered me.

Dracos

[Bjorn]

They actually futzed a lot with things like gravity to explain why, e.g., you didn't fall off the deck of your space schooner, and how catapults and the like would work.  The net result of all of that was that orbital bombardments wouldn't really work -- but it takes you right back into the whole "cumbersome rule" bit, because gravity stopped being intuitive.  Gravity.

The setting sometimes suffered from an inability to settle on a tone.  The same rule book that devoted pages to coming up with a semi-consistent theory of gravity that would make seaships work as spaceships also had a page-and-a-half monster entry on Giant Space Hamsters.

[Dracos]

They...

I don't realy want to know how.

I really don't.

Dracos

[Dracos]

Bjorn, can you add this article to the article page on the site? =)

Dracos

[Anastasia]

I'm not overly familiar with Spelljammer, but one part of this sums up my feelings on the matter.

Already been done. This ties into the point above. As designed, it seemed like the intent was that at some point, once your ongoing campaign had reached a certain (high) level, the expectation was that the DM would introduce a spelljammer into the mix, either by having it land in front of the PCs or having the PCs discover some abandoned hulk. Bored with their home reality, having firmly and utterly conquered it, the PCs would seize on the opportunity to sail the phlogiston, see new worlds, and kill different monsters. Exactly like, you know, the Planes. Except the Planes had even more possible diversity, and you could travel them with a single spell or magical artifact, rather than having to spend a month sailing a ship from one place to the other.

The campaign designers really spent a lot of time playing up the "see new worlds" aspect of Spelljamming, but extra-dimensional travel already gave you that, with the difference that plane-walking was built into the core rules, and hence all the settings, from the start. The unique aspect of Spelljammer was, well, the spelljammers, and a lot of times it felt the designers missed that point, that the spelljammers were, to them, just a plot device for schlupping the players around.

For a couple of years, I thought Spelljammer was an expansion of Planescape. It covers the same tired ground - while an understandable alternative to the wankery of Planescape, it failed to differentiate itself at all from a casual perspective.

[Dracos]

You know...I can't say I've ever heard the two linked before.  The whole space ships bit just mentally didn't mesh with planescape in my mind.

Dracos

[Anastasia]

It did for me. 'Explore the Crystal Spheres and all the worlds around, an infinity to see!' Replace Crystal Spheres with planes and you're all set for Planescape.

[Bjorn]

For the record, Spelljammer came out first.  But conceptually, yes, they're very similar.  The difference is that Planescape did things right.  Everything was centered on Sigil, solving the "where do I start" problem; using planar gates to do the travelling meant no additional rules were required; and you could go ahead and use traditional party dynamics. In addition, the whole "primacy of philosophy" thing gave Planescape another unique twist, that you could use or ignore at your own discretion.

[Anastasia]

For the record, Spelljammer came out first.  But conceptually, yes, they're very similar.  The difference is that Planescape did things right.  Everything was centered on Sigil, solving the "where do I start" problem; using planar gates to do the travelling meant no additional rules were required; and you could go ahead and use traditional party dynamics. In addition, the whole "primacy of philosophy" thing gave Planescape another unique twist, that you could use or ignore at your own discretion.

I didn't know Spelljammer came out first. Huh. That's worth considering.

While I'd argue with you about Planescape being done right on general principals, it does seem better constructed on a glance.

[Bjorn]

I didn't know Spelljammer came out first. Huh. That's worth considering.

The settings that were released during TSR's ownership of the 2nd Ed. line are:

* Spelljammer, released in 1989.
* Time of the Dragon (a second continent for Krynn), released in 1989.
* The Avatar Trilogy was also released in 1989, updating the Forgotten Realms for Second Edition.
* The first Ravenloft campaign setting was released in 1991.  This is a bit complicated, as Ravenloft actually dates back to the first edition as a module.
* Dark Sun was released in 1991.
* Al-Qadim was released in 1992.
* Planescape was released in 1994.

I haven't included things like Council of Wyrms that seem closer to being new games than campaign settings.  Having said that, Planescape was the last setting created by TSR before its bankruptcy.

It's interesting to note that none of these settings did very well.  Most people don't even know there was a minotaur empire on the other side of Krynn.  Most of the settings were killed in the end by TSR mishandling; Time of the Dragon and Dark Sun are particularly glaring examples of this.

The two exceptions to failure were Ravenloft and the Forgotten Realms update.  Ravenloft didn't do spectacularly, but it got to ride the Vampire surge, drawing in all the gamers who wanted to do the whole "creature of the night" stuff but didn't want to switch over to White Wolf.  The Forgotten Realms did well, partly because of the huge numbers of popular novels written for the setting, and partly because it was the only generic setting available for 2nd Ed.

While I'd argue with you about Planescape being done right on general principals, it does seem better constructed on a glance.

For that discussion, you have to stop and define what you mean by "right."  Like just about every setting that TSR released from 1989 on, Planescape wasn't a generic setting.  It was based around a particular style and a particular type of adventures.  If you were interested in that flavor of campaign, then Planescape was perfect.  But if what you were interested in was a general framework that you could bend to fit the sort of campaign that you had planned, then Planescape was no good.  In fact, *none* of the settings were any good for that, except FR -- which is why FR is the only one still kicking.

[Anastasia]

*Raises hand*

I know about Taladas. I'll also second Dark Sun - interesting idea, but it never felt finished or flushed out entirely, or supported at all.

The two exceptions to failure were Ravenloft and the Forgotten Realms update. Ravenloft didn't do spectacularly, but it got to ride the Vampire surge, drawing in all the gamers who wanted to do the whole "creature of the night" stuff but didn't want to switch over to White Wolf. The Forgotten Realms did well, partly because of the huge numbers of popular novels written for the setting, and partly because it was the only generic setting available for 2nd Ed.

I think Ravenloft also did okay because it was very well done. I always felt Ravenloft had a very distinct and interesting atmosphere to it, moreso than any Vampire surge. I will note I'm biased in this, however, as Vampire had no holding in my area whatsoever. Some pyscho who killed a kid related back to Vampire, and it never got rooted in my community because of it.

So yeah.

For the rest - To be honest, I was taking a potshot at Planescape more than anything else. I happen to loathe that setting to it's horrid core, so don't mind me. <_<

[Bjorn]

*Raises hand*

I know about Taladas. I'll also second Dark Sun - interesting idea, but it never felt finished or flushed out entirely, or supported at all.

Dark Sun was particularly retarded.  They came out with this unique, different setting, and then with the very first set of novels, and their corresponding modules, set out to change everything that made the setting unique.  They didn't even have the grace in the modules to let the PCs be the agents of change; they were just faceless auxilliaries backing up the NPCs from the novels.  So the setting got left in limbo; the core details of the world were being changed from on high as the writers were still trying to flesh it out, and so the expansions that did get released tended to feel very tentative, and be useless besides.  Why do I need a supplement devoted to describing some random chunk of desert when you haven't finished describing the major cities?

Taladas was cool, except that the boxed set assumed you had access to the original 1st Ed. Dragonlance corebook, which was out of print.  Besides, TSR never released anything but the first boxed set.

The two exceptions to failure were Ravenloft and the Forgotten Realms update. Ravenloft didn't do spectacularly, but it got to ride the Vampire surge, drawing in all the gamers who wanted to do the whole "creature of the night" stuff but didn't want to switch over to White Wolf. The Forgotten Realms did well, partly because of the huge numbers of popular novels written for the setting, and partly because it was the only generic setting available for 2nd Ed.

I think Ravenloft also did okay because it was very well done. I always felt Ravenloft had a very distinct and interesting atmosphere to it, moreso than any Vampire surge.

Ravenloft is quite distinct from Vampire, I agree -- the latter lets you be the monster, while Ravenloft was a mix of traditional vampire hunting and Call of Cthulhu.  And it was a very well-done setting.  What I was trying to say was that despite being a one-tone campaign setting, which was a problem for most of the other settings released, there was a general surge of interest in small-v vampires around the time of Ravenloft's release which helped bolster it.

For the rest - To be honest, I was taking a potshot at Planescape more than anything else. I happen to loathe that setting to it's horrid core, so don't mind me. <_<

Mind if I ask why?  As might be obvious, I'm a bit of a fan of the setting, so I'm interested to hear why it didn't work for you.

[thepanda]

There was another continent for Krynn? Man, I miss everything. I used to love the Dragonlance setting, until, you know, they changed everything into garbage.

"Let's get rid of a well made, well liked magic system and replace it with crap! Everyone loves crap, right? And, um, let's turn it into a card game. The kiddies love the Magic. They'll be running over themselves to give us stuff!"

Edit: Card, not car.

[Bjorn]

There was another continent for Krynn? Man, I miss everything. I used to love the Dragonlance setting, until, you know, they changed everything into garbage.

They didn't really publicize it.  It was a single boxed set, released right at the beginning of the 2nd Ed.  Frankly, it was almost completely different in tone from classic Dragonlance.  It probably would have done better as a complete stand-alone world.