Spelljammer Map of the Flow (WIP)

[JediSoth]

I got this map printed at Staples for my new 5E Spelljammer campaign. Fantastic work. My players (especially the one familiar with Spelljammer from the 2E days) oooed and ahhed over it for many minutes. I have a question though (and I know this is a pretty old thread and may not have a chance of being seen... in which case even that comment is moot :p), but for the travel times between spheres, does that take into account some sort of default speed?

[Big Mac]

I got this map printed at Staples for my new 5E Spelljammer campaign. Fantastic work. My players (especially the one familiar with Spelljammer from the 2E days) oooed and ahhed over it for many minutes. I have a question though (and I know this is a pretty old thread and may not have a chance of being seen... in which case even that comment is moot :p), but for the travel times between spheres, does that take into account some sort of default speed?

Hi JediSoth.

You would probably have more chance of getting answers about Spelljammer, over at the Spelljammer forum at The Piazza.

However, I do know the answers to this.

There are two and only two defined speeds in Spelljammer:

• Tactical speed and
• Spelljamming speed.

Tactical speed is relatively slow. It's the speed that ships travel at, when they are close to an object that prevents them from accellerating to spelljamming speed. (This includes being inside the atmosphere of a planet or asteroid, but also applies when two ships are in combat range.) A ship can travel faster, at tactical speed, if it has a helmsman that generates more Ship's Raiting. (Higher level helmsmen make ships go faster during combat.)

Spelljamming speed is a speed ships accellerate to, when there is nothing near to them. It's a million miles per day. And all ships travel at th same speed, regardless of how high or low a helmsman's levels are. (Effectively, the helmsmen makes no difference to spelljamming speed, and only makes a difference during take off, landing and combat.)

Phlogiston speed is an undefined thing. Nobody (within the spelljammer universe) was able to tell the exact distances travelled outside of th crystal spheres, according to the AD&D Adventures in Space boxed set. The duration of a trip was rolled randomly. The level of helmsmen had no effect on things. Even the skill of the navigator wasn't put into the random generation process (although it probably should have been).

Phlogiston maps came later, and Nerik's excellent work is based on them, but no canon method for calculating how quickly or slowly a spelljamming ship could travel along a phlogiston river was ever published.

But, if it is possible to "map" flow rivers, the it should be possible for navigators to calculate where those flow rivers are, and for helmsmen to try to move their ship into the fastest part of a flow river, to gain the maximum benefit from that individual river.

I think that what is needed are a set of tables for navigators and helmsmen to roll on. The navigator should be rolling for locating the correct river. The best results should get the ship onto the right river straight away. Lesser results should get the ship onto the river, but the should waste some time getting onto it. Failures should see the ship moving around the outside of the sphere it has just left, searching for the right river, with the navigator re-rolling to look for the correct one. Really bad failures should see the navigator telling the captain and the helmsman to get into the wrong flow river.

The helmsmen should then be able to influence the time the ship takes to get along the right (or wrong) flow river. I would suggest that if phlogiston speed used the Ship's Raiting (just like tactical speed does) that it would make higher level helmsmen more useful than lower level helmsmen. Alternatively, a helmsman could make an ability check (using whatever ability score they use for spellcasting) and that could be used to calculate if a ship can travel faster than usual (or slower than usual).

If you have a cool map, like Nerik's map, the other way to go would be to literally measure the distances between spheres and to knock up a chart of travel times, and stick to that, instead of using Jeff Grubb's random times from the AD&D Adventures in Space boxed set.

There is not really a "wrong" way to do this, but I'm sure different fans would prefer different approaches.

I think that I would personally like a mixture of a measured time (based on the distance between two spheres) combined with the random speed rules from the original boxed set. Perhaps 80 percent of ships could travel at a fixed speed, with the top 10 percent having helmsmen so good that they can get their faster, and the bottom 10 percent having helmsmen so bad that they keep dropping out of the flow river and they take extra long to get there. (Or perhaps each and every flow river could have a different percentage of "reliable travel times".)

[misomiso]

Can some one tell me if there is a version of this map that also marks the source material?

Don't mind at all that there will be fan made spheres or Hackmaster, but it would be really helpful to see WHERE all the information came from, so I can go and read about it.

I have a lot of old spelljammer material.

Many thanks