Reflections on Spelljammer Academy

Over the past four sessions my party played through the free adventure Spelljammer Academy; here are my thoughts about how it went.

• There is lots of room to expand these four scenarios. This year my group is playing every other week, and so it worked well to push through at a faster pace and thus set the group up for Light of Xayrxis.

• My players were sometimes alarmed about the tasks their characters were being sent to undertake. This was especially the case for one player who missed Session 3, and upon arriving for Session 4 learned that the heroes were crewing a salvaged tyrant ship bound for the beholder world of H'Catha.

• One option is to add more drilling of skills, especially at the start of sessions: target practice, weapons sparring, navigation exercises, lessons about wildspace geography, and the like. I can imagine starting sessions with the heroes engaged at such tasks, and then moving into specific missions—and thus adventures—afterward.

• Those exercises could then be used to set up a competition between groups of students, perhaps called crews, similar to that between the four houses in the Harry Potter novels and films. The DM could keep a running tally of how well they do, with some kind of prize or recognition for the overall winners at the end of the term.

• Another option is to make more use of the illusions in the simulation chamber; have the heroes deal with a jammer leech, fight off a scavver attack, lead a boarding party, train for the H'Catha mission, and the like.

Here is the link to my campaign notes, by the way. 

Spelljammer Campaign Notes

All in all, I was satisfied that these scenarios gave my players and their characters a good introduction to the Spelljammer setting. For DMs who want to draw out the training process, though, there's a good resource called Spelljammer Academy Expanded, available on the DMs Guild website. It presents stat blocks for more of the NPCs, ideas for expanding and adding encounters during the training, and ideas for transitioning from there into the Light of Xaryxis adventure.

-Nate

Spelljammer Academy Expanded