Somebody sent me PDFs of the entire Spelljammer system from AD&D 2nd edition. Looking through them (they are impossible to read) it’s really striking how half-good half-great it all is, and how much love I have for such an obviously flawed work.
I’m stopping myself from revising Spelljammer from the ground up. I have the ideas; oh, I have the ideas. But I do not have the time, so it has to wait.
The good thing is that this is a super obscure AD&D campaign world from 1990, so I wouldn’t have to change much to make it entirely my own. In fact, my basic ideas about how space travel would work in a fantasy setting are totally different from theirs. I have very little interest in any of the monsters or locations they worked out, the “crystal spheres” stuff is so bad that it still annoys me in 2014, the mage and helm concept is so dumb and totally makes sailors useless so I’d toss it out wholesale, and it’s not like there are that many great character designs or ship designs.
The only stuff I really want to keep is a couple of the better ships, a few of the monsters, the Rock of Bral, and the word Spelljammer. I could cut that out and have something that was 100% mine that I could really do something with.
BUT I AM NOT GOING TO.
Not until I find a way to make it pay.