I’ve been DM’ing Spelljammer in 5e for a dozen sessions now. We started with the free Spelljammer Academy adventure released on Beyond and are now approaching the halfway point in Light of Xaryxis. At this point, my party and I have formed a number of opinions. The Spelljammer setting is pretty neat, but the official 5e products are not so great.
If you missed it, I’ve already posted my house rules for space combat in another post.
What follows are a series of thoughts I put out Twitter previously. As we finish Light of Xaryxis, I’ll probably post a “final opinions” take on the experience. Still, this far into playing it, I think there are some opinions that can be safely established and stated.
First of all, it’s rough that I’m having to rewrite as much of Spelljammer/Light of Xaryxis as I am, but at least that’s resulting in a much better experience for my players.
Getting past the glaring mechanical shortcomings of the work–particularly “don’t actually do space combat, just ram for boarding parties so players have more fun!”–I have zero love for the Spelljammer Academy into Light of Xaryxis combination.
Academy should not have been pushed as a prelude that naturally leads into Xaryxis, because it doesn’t. So much of Xaryxis expects that characters are totally ignorant to wildspace and spelljamming. The result is a lot of handholding and guided tours that are superfluous and frustrating to players.
That doesn’t even touch on how much characters are led to form opinions about things they’ll face in Xaryxis. The opinions Academy leads you to hold are contrary to what Xaryxis would have you believe. I’m having to do a lot to accommodate this especially as it relates to Vocath.
If you haven’t started Spelljammer, and you want to run Academy on the way to Xaryxis, then I very strongly recommended Academy Expanded by Alan Christensen on DM’s Guild. There’s still stuff I’m rewriting after it, but it has definitely helped me bridge these two products that Wizards didn’t do anything to connect.
In fact, I replaced the entire first chapter of Xaryxis with a Clone Wars intro-style recap of the situation. The first chapter doesn’t make sense at all for players who’ve gone through Academy. The setup for the adventure’s conflict doesn’t have to be experienced in combat to be understood, and going through the paces of Xaryxis’ first chapter strips players of the experience they’ve already had. If you don’t want to rewrite the first chapter yourself, or just recap it like I did, then Expanded’s alternative first chapter is essential.
Getting past that intro and just taking Xaryxis by itself, there’s a lot that feels like fluff. It seems like it’s there to add filler to sessions that really don’t contribute to the main narrative. Having room to breathe is good, so I’m not upset about “flesh out this part of the journey with some random encounters from one of the random encounter tables.” That’s not the part that’s frustrating. I am currently pruning other things that seem to be there primarily to force players to go “oooh… look at the setting!”
All in all, Spelljammer itself is cool and should have been a great product. I was very excited about Spelljammer’s release, but most of my party has very little interest in the adventure as delivered. That’s not even touching the weak space combat rules that have been talked about at length elsewhere. Those rules could have made the setting unique and exciting, but they feel like a tacked on afterthought that made my party want to skip space battles entirely until I reworked the rules.
I still think Spelljammer can be fun to play if you play homebrew or third-party campaigns and content, but this is on a short list of Wizards D&D products I regret shelling out for.