The first and largest ship in the Spelljammer campaign setting is the mysterious ship called…well, Spelljammer: a giant manta ray floating through space with a city on its back. You might have guessed that from the setting logo.

The primary flaw of the initial Spelljammer box set was its sprawl detailing the vastness of space. It lacked a central hub for players to explore and base their activities. In my experience, this lead to an unanchored setting where the existence of so many potential plot threads paradoxically resulted in a kind of paralysis. Legend of Spelljammer (1991) sought to rectify that by providing a mysterious city ship to explore and potentially live on (or at least near, in one of the numerous smaller ships that travel in its wake).

If this was a traditional sci-fi setting, we would say Spelljammer (the ship) functions as a kind of massive spaceport, not unlike Deep Space 9, dotted with strongholds held by all manner of spacefaring races living together in something resembling peace. That gives players plenty to do while pursuing the central mystery – who the heck runs the ship? (Have I mentioned that the Spelljammer setting has a race of steampunk hippo people? It does.)

This box is a clear predecessor, conceptually, to Planescape’s Sigil and has its roots in the genre fiction convention of the multidimensional tavern, like Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, Gavagan’s Bar and The White Hart (all of which have an earlier literary precedent in “club tales,” a type of fantastic short story, usually told by a member of a gentlemen’s club like Josesph Jorkens or even Baron Munchausen).

As with most Spelljammer supplements, a portion of this box is dedicated to new and increasingly silly ships. That trend reaches is apex in tomorrow’s entry…