PREAMBLE: SPELLJAMMER – WEIRD SHIPS, WEIRDER MONSTERS & PTOLEMAIC CRYSTAL SPHERES
Remember Disney's Treasure Planet? It came out at the beginning of this here millennium, in the year of our lord 2002., Little ol' me was obsessed with it as a kid. The concept of old ships sailing through a fantastical, wild space on solar winds, space pirates with mechanical multi-functional limbs, weird alien sailors ranging from the low-key eldritch to the slightly anthropomorphic all wrapped up in a solarpunk/18th-century aesthetic was just cool. Reading Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddel as a kid growing up ensured a a fascination and love for sailing ships and the ideas of exploring unknown vasts, endless oceans and stranger skies that have a strangle-hold on my brain to this day.
So, when I, as young adult around the mid-2010s first learned about Spelljammer, you can only imagine how absolutely stoked I was. Weird magic knights in magic space, vaulting over meteors haunted by many-eyed sphere tyrants, fighting asteroid-jumping spiders, chasing star-born dragons and navigating the phlogiston between crystal-sphere encased worlds? Shiver me space-timbers, I was taken with it all immediately. It was one of the greatest things I've ever read in my life! Surely, it had to be immensely popular when it came out?
Well, not so much.
The original Spelljammer sold a pittance compared to the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk and Dragonlance box-sets and books, and while it can count over twenty published books to its name, and did survive into the modern times, behind-the-scenes stuff at TSR and then later WotC resulted in some casual tie-ins and shout-outs throughout the editions, but no real major publications until 2022, when WoTC made an attempt at bringing Spelljammer back... with results that might be considered mixed, at best.
Ironically, Spelljammer sold more copies that Planescape, D&Ds other red-headed step-child, but the latter had arguably a little more of a known cult-following. Both settings deal, in their core-function, with the same issue: providing an adventurous method to link all the settings and cosmologies of D&D together. Spelljammer did it with the phlogiston, the crystal spheres encasing individual setting worlds, and the titular space-sailers, Planescape used the city of Sigil and its network of infinite portals. Both settings deal with far more out there ancestries, weird folk and stranger creatures than even the by then well-known beholder and mindflayer – the neogi, asteroid spider and infinity vine come to mind... as well as the dreaded honking space clowns...
Both settings also featured absurd and unique architectures – Planescape had the gothic-punk aesthetic of Sigil as provided by the unique art-style of Tony DiTerlizzi - who also happened to shape my childhood with the Spiderwick Chronicles – and Spelljammer had the itular ships themselves, with each ancestry and spacefolk being provided with unique and absurdly cool looking ships, modelled not just after the classic galleons of the Age of Sail, but after both mundane and fantastical fauna, such as the neogi deathspider with its segmented grappling legs, the moth-like elven man-o-war, or the dwarven citadel, which are just giant asteroids or mountains carved into a massive fortress with some magical engines slapped onto them. I love them all, dearly, and revel in their weirdness.
But the inherent weirdness and planetary romance/space fantasy feel simply did not catch on as much with a wider audience as the more contemporary fantasy provided by Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance.. There were other reasons, but covering those would extend what is to be a mere preamble into a twenty page essay, and I really gotta get to the main part of all this.
It's been now almost four years since WotC's last attempt at a Spelljammer product hit the shelves and with their shift instead toward their upcoming new Dark Sun publications, I have my doubts we'll see any further updates concerning the realms of Wildspace in the near future.
Luckily for us, there's a guy out there who seems to love Spelljammer just as much as I do.
Aetherdark – The Ring by Micah Abresch is a part of the greater Aetherdark line of books, which provide rules for Shadowdark RPG for space fantasy adventures, modular ship building, space combat and crew management. The Ring focuses the titular expanse of seven worlds and their colonies within the astral sea, their conflicts, relations and accords with one another and other dangers out within the vastness of the cold, dark night. It's a sizeable little book at around 222 pages, so we'll be here for a while. Good thing I brought a compass.
Drink up, me hearties, yo ho.
PART I: COVER, MAP & INTERIORS
The art in Aetherdark – The Ring is more on the sparse end, focusing mainly on maps, ship diagrams and on a small selection of example depictions of a featured world's inhabitants. Its all B&W art and pretty well done, I really like the amount of detail and uniqueness each little huddle of space elves and their fellows possess. There's no art for any of the monsters and foes the book includes , unfortunately, though the few The Ring adds fall more under armed militias, faction agents and rivalling aethership crewmembers, all of which are of the same stock as their respective world's main inhabitants.
The maps and diagrams are the real star of the show here – the initial hexmap of Ringspace and The Ring itself are fairly straightforward – a part of me wishes they had a bit more of that Age of Sailing vibe, with some wild space tiny space sea monsters and the like – but function over form is much appreciated here.
You'll notice a bit of an oddity: hexes of Ringspace are “merely” 336 miles wide, yet often host multiple entire planets – the explanation for this little phenomenon may be found in the core Aetherdark book:
“In the astral sea, the endless aether is deep, a bottomless expanse of unreality. Reality flattens that out, potential depth becoming a vast expanse. Looking like a star from a distance, as a ship closes in, a world begins to fuzz at the edges, rather than sharpening into the hard planes of a star.
Once you are within a dozen or so miles, the world grows, becoming a vast expanse of aethereal mist, hundreds of miles across. As you slide through this veil, you enter a vast world, though it looked the size of a star in the void.” (Aetherdark, p. 163)
In short, the worlds of Aetherdark are essentially suspended in their own, fuzzier version of the Ptolemaic crystal sphere cosmological model. The explanation could be handled a little clearer, and if you only happen to purchase The Ring without any other Aetherdark books, you're likely to be left stumped yourself.
The ship diagrams scattered throughout the book are a most welcome addition, and an effort was made to make them all look distinguished from one another, though none so far reach the more outrageous and bizarre standards set by the original spelljammer. You'll find more of those back in the core Aetherdark book, however.
Otherwise, The Ring follows the standard layout you can expect from most 3rd-party Shadowdark books: its clean, its functional, but you're not going to find anything avant-garde: A5 format, black and white, with a fat-trimmed writing style that focuses on the essential details.
PART II: THE RING AND THE TREATY
Wonder and Imperialism go hand-in-hand in almost every story set during the Age of Sail and The Ring does not shy away from it.The Seven Worlds of the Ring are but a hair's breadth away from calamity, rebellion and war when you start up an Aetherdark game.
The Treaty serves as an encompassing law that each of the Ringspace worlds subscribes to, and may primarily serve as a tool for the GM to bring conflict to the players or serve as a hook for adventures and is, as such, left deliberately vague in its specifics. The two examples listed, Privateering and Aethership Ownership, may serve not only as a nice bit of adventure hooks for crawlers intending to hoist the black flag, but also serves as a bit of a balm in case they, somehow, lose their own aethership... or serve as a point of conflict, should they happen to capture a ship of their own and its former owner is now hunting them down with a re-assessor fleet or two. I like it, and the encouragement to come up with your own bans and variations of the Treaty can give a creative GM all sorts of leeway for interesting scenarios.
PART III: THE WORLDS OF RINGSPACE
Now, we're digging into the main part of this cornucopia. The Ring is composed of seven worlds, each about as different as they come. Each of the seven worlds provides different core conflicts, adventure hooks, carousing events, factions, ancestries to draw on and a load of tables for unique mutations, cult patrons, events and more.
Each world section also gives you a brief and succinct summation of a world's general culture, clothing and mannerisms, their industrial and trade focuses, and unique background table. There's a lot to cover here, and I'll try to give each world equal attention:
First, there's Rogue Navidem, your wretched hive of scum and villainy atop a lone, sunless chunk of rock, separated into a rich upper city and a nest of toxic tunnels, turrets and troublemakers, with its main export being spell-bottles crafted from the very toxic, arcane effluvia that drowns the lower parts of the asteroid.
Devlienne is a small, harsh feudal world populated by orcs and protected by an arcane barrier that prevents the influence of extraplanar entities. Its empire all but exterminated the wilderness to make way for farmland to supply its cities. Their society is split into two castes: warrior-nobility and serfs, the former numbering in the thousands, the latter in the millions.
Solaria is less a functioning world and more a spiteful ball of rock and sand under the perpetual light of seventeen suns, whose population is far behind most other worlds of Ringspace, having just about reached bronze-age level of metallurgy and technology.
The Jungle is a region of steamy void inhabited by six enormous space-critters, one of which, the Long-Bison, serves as the homeworld of the Bisonians, who populate the inside of its maw.
Isolated from the rest of the Ring and without much in the way of advanced technology, the Bisonians struggle for respect and recognition amongst the worlds bound by the Treaty.
The Ichor Mines are the drifting corpse of a god – some hydra-like, worm-beast tangled into a giant knot, whose insides are being mined for its precious ichor and bone – all while the danger looms that said Dead God may not, in fact, be entirely dead.
Calrivi is a world trapped between light and shadow, two unmoving stars of brightest radiance and light-eating darkness, where only a thin strip of gloaming twilight is liveable. Around a thousand years ago, it was conquered by an immortal dwarf emperor, who named the entire planet after himself and seeks to expand across the rest of the astral realm. Little success on that front, however.
Finally, Volpith 4 is a world inhabited only by the crazy, as their planet is part of a system that gets swiss-cheesed on the regular by a giant, energy-bolt throwing ruby that drifts at its centre. The inhabitants of Volpith 4, gnomes, are ruled by a plethora of cults to various dark, intoxicating powers, demons and other beings, and the whims of the Ruby, whom they believe has an inherent dislike of anything resembling aetherships or outside contact in general. At least your cranky neighbour can't throw neighbourhood-blasting bolts of power.
Each of these worlds is incredibly unique and creative in their conception, come with a wide range of hooks and conflicts, many of which breach the confinement of their system and can affect others: Navidem, as the greatest power and trade hub of the Ring is resented by most other worlds for their mercantile control over much of Ringspace and are threatened with labour revolts, the Dead God of the Ichor Mines awakening could threaten the whole of the seven worlds, Devlienner noble scions take in droves to the astral sea to earn their respect as warriors and take up piracy to do so, Solarian colonization threatens a holy war between the gods, as the Solarians tear down temples of old to make way for their own houses of worship – each world brings its own share of problems both on an interplanetar, as well as local scale to throw at your players.
Not to mention, each world also comes with its own carousal tables, both for your PCs and for your aethership crew, tables for treasures and art pieces, new magical items, unique ships and the local constabulary forces as enemies to take on, tables for backgrounds and even unique spells and cultic powers available to natives of certain worlds.
It all serves to breathe proper life and uniqueness to each world of the Ring, and I really like the effort put into the various hooks and overall framework approach to each world.
However, there are also some things to criticise.
The worlds of the Ring do suffer of a lack of detail in some areas, mainly when it comes to factions and potential NPCs for the PCs to encounter. You'll receive many name-drops of mob bosses, noble houses and the like, but the book constrains itself mainly to naming them as the local rulers, without much detail into their operations or goals.
Rogue Navidem, for example, has five Notable Rulers, but their motives and personalities are left unexplored, beyond some small breadcrumbs.
Duke Dalosh here serves as an example: She is very wealthy and a mostly idle socialite who is more interested in throwing lush parties. It gives me an archetype to work with, but not much in the way of an intriguing character. Most other Rulers of Navidem and other characters mentioned across Ringspace fall under the same caveat, if they have any noticeable ones, at all. There are, sadly, also no major astral pirate crews or other rogue organisations listed that could serve as potential unaffiliated factions or antagonists. Rogue Navidem mentions a pirate guild, but is just that, a mention without detail.
Further, while there are plenty of rumours to be had, especially in Rogue Navidem, which, from the way it is designed as a trade , is likely the world your crew will always return to, there are no unique random encounter tables for any of the seven worlds.
While there are random events for aethership travels to be found in the core Aetherdark book, the lack of planet-specific encounters is a void you'll have to fill by yourself, and the random encounters found in the core Shadowdark RPG Rules won't be enough to really fill that caveat. Its especially noticeable considering the truly wild amount of tables you receive otherwise, from backgrounds to carousing events and the multiplicity of unique ships and goods to be found on each planet.
It also carries over into the Bestiary, which is sorely lacking. No space clowns, thankfully, but at most you'll only receive a handful of humanoid foes drafted from the world's native population as potential enemies to throw at your party, alongside their ships. Which is fine for space ship battles, but I feel a little cheated at not seeing any unique spawns of the Dead God, or the intestinal parasites of the Long-Bison.
The Aetherdark core book has a small selection of astral beasts, but they number at most a dozen, with the majority of that Bestiary also being humanoid pirates and aether crews. You do receive some mounts as fauna, and there are some fun ones like a giant tarantula spider or elephant-sized tortoises, along with some more mutation tables, but they do not quite scratch that same itch.
Its a bit of a natural consequence in the attempt of trying to fit seven whole planets/worlds/regions as adventure locations into one book, and the framework approach justifies some of the deliberate vagueness, but when you go out of your way to delve into the weird and space fantasy especially, a little more specificity is warranted. It's a tough line to walk, and The Ring does manage to walk it most of the time, but it makes these fumbles all the more noticeable.
PART IV: THE COLONIES
The Colonies follow the framework-design set-up earlier by the core worlds, and are mainly supported by the core Aetherdark rulebook. You'll sense a small pattern here, and I'll address it at the end of this review. The colonies are all explicitly stated to be under a constant state of rebellion, and should thus be prime adventure locations and conflict-zones for an Aetherdark campaign, and the book does a fine job of addressing how the various Ring powers interact out here. Usually, a world will have multiple colonies of multiple different Ring worlds, and the book goes out of its way to detail the three major processes of colonization each undertakes. The Navidem, for example, favour more subtle yokes than the likes of the Devlienner:
With over twenty colonised worlds, all of different colony combinations, it serves to set up quite the party of conflicts between the vastly different cultures. In addition, there are several worlds yet to-be colonized and sometimes ignorant of the mere existence of the Astral Sea, while the powers of the Ring squabble over who will get to pitch their first claim. Lovely.
PART V: RINGSPACE MOUNTS, TRADE GOODS, SHIPS AND DISTANT WORLDS
The last bit of the book mainly concerns itself with aforementioned mounts, trade goods to be ferried and found across the colonies, new ships to acquire and where upon the various worlds they are built and distributed, along with empty tables to list additional ancestries and worlds to incorporate from different 3rd-party and 1st-party lines. Its a neat idea that further hammers home the framework-design this book embraces and serves as a neat little end to the book as a whole.
PART VII: CONCLUSION
I like The Ring. Its space fantasy and planetary romance at its finest, with some really unique ideas for its worlds, plenty of adventure hooks and well-placed conflicts unique to each. It fully embraces the weirdness that comes when crossing the streams of fantasy and soft sci-fi. It suffers some penalties when it comes to the lack of a greater bestiary and random encounters for each locale, and, in the end, I wouldn't say it is something you can simply acquire as a stand-alone and play just with the core Shadowdark Rulebook. You will need the Aetherdark Core book to make sense of most additional rulings and how the various space battles work, along with some of the tables required to roll up the colonised worlds.
But if you are a fan of Spelljammer, planetary romance and gonzo in general, I'd say this book is just right for you. It makes some small fumbles, but as a framework setting it will give you a lot of options to provide fun space-sailing adventures for your players.
Hell, it even comes with its own Third-Party License, and I might just take advantage of that myself. I have a whole damn planetary romance setting I envisioned during the Shadowdark Beta-Days on the backburner, and this might just give me the excuse to start working on it again.
Micah is currently also conducting a kickstarter for more Aetherdark Zines, all of which have some phenomenal vibes and artwork, courtesy of Jeri Honeywell, who I've worked with in the past and who has done some spectacular work on the bestiary in Aetherdark core.
https://aetherdark.com/collections/all
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/abresch/distant-worlds?ref=creator_tab
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