Dungeon #21: Jammin'


#RPGaMonth - March Part 1:  Dungeon #21


So, this is my late review for March. Actually, it is only a part of it.

This is one of the RPG books I own for the longest time. If I recall correctly, I bought this one in 1991. It is number 21 from January/February 1990. It says on the inside that the Dungeon had 31000 copies printed at that time.

At that time I couldn't read English very well and wasn't really able to make much use of it, but the back cover fascinated me nevertheless.  So, I bought it used for 5 Deutsche Mark (~ 2$ at the time).

In it you'll find a Gaelic themes adventure called the Cauldron of Plenty (AD&D lvl 2-4), a higher level (15-18) D&D adventure called the Bane of the Elfswood, a general Fantasy adventure for AD&D (lvl 8-10) by the name of Incident at Strathern Point and a greek themed adventure for AD&D Lvl 6-8 which has the title The Chest of the Aloeids. I only skimmed those, but they look fine to me.

What I read and ran was the last adventure by Jasmes Ward himeslf called Jammin'. This is an introductory adventure to Spelljammer that can be played without the Spelljammer box set and serves as kind of an advertisement to the setting.

The following will contain hefty spoilers if you plan to play it, you should really stop here.




The group meet same moreorless shady thief which seemed to be a Grey Mouser type to me in a tavern, who hires the crew to get some treasure of some moon god from a flying ship that will land in the mountains this evening.

In truth the ship is a stranded space ship, that got stuck on the ground on our thief wants the party to loot the ship to collect his share afterwards. It is a pirate ship run by undead spirits lead by a spectre captain  now. In true pirate fashion the skeletons have pistols and weird stuff.

In play the game went on like a dungeon crawl, where the players explorer the ships deck. The spectre keeps the skeletons in a certain folded state and will only activate them after certain events. It has an aura of mystery how this sailing ship can be found in a small lake in the mountains with no connection to rivers.

If the players are succesful to defeat the spectre and his crew they will have their on ship to sail the wild space, i.e. the airless void that contains the planets.

I liked it very much: it feels a bit old fashioned, but in a wonderful and weird way. Spelljammer as a setting seemed great, and I will write more about it in the second part.


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