For nearly as long as science fiction has been set in space, there have been recurring tropes seen time and time again within these various stories. With a little ingenuity, any of these common threads of space-themed media can be ported into your Dungeons & Dragons game. In this article, we provide inspiration to take to your table with the arrival of Spelljammer: Adventures in Space on August 16th. To infinity, and … D&D Beyond!
1. White whale
Stories of obsessive pursuit might be larger than those set strictly in space, but spacefaring journeys provide a brand new dimension to the trope. Whether hunting an individual across planets, or seeking a fabled treasure rumored to lie deep within the preserved body of an enormous cosmic entity, travel between worlds provides near-infinite possibility for adventure along the way.
This idea, along with many others to follow, is not strictly limited to player characters! A crafty DM might try twisting this obsessive pursuit around; the object of an NPC’s unyielding attention is something carried by a player at your table, or a galactic bounty hunter is after the character itself. Is the entirety of Wildspace and the multiverse enough to keep them hidden?
2. Threading the needle
The aforementioned bounty hunter is hot on the tail of your ship (wait, are they riding a shark with four wings through space?); maybe you can lose them in that unrealistically dense asteroid field! Or the desirable substance your crew is after can only be found near a cavernous moon’s core, but somebody else is eager to get their hands on it first. Whatever the reason, your ship’s pilot has the skills to avoid being splattered like a space-bug across whatever perilous obstacles that rush to surround the vessel.
3. The great frontier
Sailing to the far side of the world? So passé; it’s been done before. For the truly intrepid adventurer seeking the thrill of a new horizon, space is the next great expanse for exploration. Who knows what wild new experiences and resources await the first to go where no person has gone before?
4. Rebel captain flying a hunk o’ junk
It’s a little-known fact that any given piece of fiction set in the vast reaches of space is contractually obligated to contain at least one roguish captain whose vessel is a good sneeze away from the scrap heap. There’s always a reason why a newer, better ship simply won’t do, but damned if it doesn’t perform admirably when it counts. (Usually.)
Listen, we don’t make the rules. Search your heart and you know it to be true; you can already picture exactly the captain we’re talking about. No — the other one. … No, the other other one.
5. Malfunction
Ship malfunction comes in myriad forms. Perhaps a recent space battle left your ship’s power source compromised, and what follows is a perilous journey into the depths of your vessel, trying to repair an unstable or incomprehensible component.
Or maybe that bucket o’ bolts your captain swears by has finally teetered past disrepair and into full-on disaster, leaving your adventuring group careening through space with dwindling resources. Maybe you can wrangle together some gadabout to get you to safety, or maybe you can use what remaining maneuverability you have to visit a nearby moon or planet, potentially leaving you…
6. Stranded!
Another ages-long exploration trope, all or part of a crew might find themselves stranded on an inhospitable terrestrial body. Whether due to malfunction, mutiny, ship-jacking, or any of a vast number of reasons, pivoting from space travel to desert island survival is a classic chapter of any galactic adventure. Survival situations can certainly get more interesting when the sun goes down and the nightmare beasts begin to hunt.
7. First contact
From out of the inky black void comes slowly into view a craft of wildly alien construction. Or from behind a rocky outcrop of that moon on which your crew has found themselves stranded peers a curious set of eyes. Are these creatures dangerous? Can they communicate meaningfully or be diplomatically engaged? One rogue abomination on the hunt, or the gateway to a vibrant civilization? Countless variations of this story have been told already, and it remains one of the ripest opportunities for repeated adaptation, with ample opportunity to harness all three pillars of play!
8. Malfunction 2: Ship versus crew
Some wires have been crossed, or a strange interaction during your recent first contact with an alien vessel has changed something… Suddenly the ship seems to have a mind of its own. This isn’t a broken-down vessel, this is the work of a clockwork horror!
In the cold depths of space, having no control over your vessel can alone be a petrifying concept. But the vessel piloting itself can turn any spacefarer’s blood cold. Want to amp up the tension? Those repair automatons sure seem to be acting strangely …
9. That’s no moon!
The occasional asteroid drifting lazily by. A beautiful but harmless cloud of space dust. The oddly shaped outcropping on the moon on which you’ve stopped to refuel. Wait— Wh-what was that shadow? Captain, did you hear something clattering on our hull?
Not everything is always what it seems! Just when the party thinks everything is safe, the asteroid spider catches them with its pincers. (Or the planet-sized eldritch horror swallows their ship whole!) This iconic trope is perfect for catching any spacefarer unawares.
10. Stowaway
No, those noises you heard from the cargo bay weren’t an animated asteroid. Just some punk who wanted to escape the law or to seek their own adventure (can you ever trust them?). Or just some harmless space gunk...that turns out to be a puppeteer parasite!
Maybe a shipment you’ve brought aboard does a poor job of containing something dangerous. Perhaps something attached itself like a barnacle to your hull, and has somehow made it inside! Whatever the case, the discovery of an unexpected visitor is a fantastic way to shake up an otherwise long or uneventful journey!
11. Wormholes
Portals. Yawn. Next!
Wait… Time travel? Oh no.
12. War
Does space-focused science fiction exist if there isn’t some instance of galactic war? Regardless of proximity or character involvement, it’s bound to be happening somewhere. All of the epic conflicts between nations played on an overwhelmingly grander scale! Now mix with that the dizzying diversity of the entire D&D multiverse, and your campaign will be jumping the shark in no time.
Prepare for blast-off!
On August 16th, 2022, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space arrives on D&D Beyond, where you can take any (or all!) of the above sci-fi tropes and mold them into the fantasy space adventure of a lifetime. Want space-themed monsters to go with your space-themed tropes? Monstrous Compendium Vol 1: Spelljammer Creatures is available for anyone with a D&D Beyond account and features 10 monsters native to the expanse of the cosmos!
Ground control to Major Tom: Commencing your preorder during our Spring Sale (before May 2nd, 2022) will also net you 20% off the regular price!
Want more space tropes for your campaigns? Watch D&D Beyond's Amy Dallen and Joe Starr talk classic space tropes with The Streampunks RPG Group's Eric Campbell:
Cameron (@CameronRPowell) is a moderator for D&D Beyond. He is a real-life bard who accidentally dumped Charisma, and has played Purloque the loxodon cleric on Dice, Camera, Action!. When he’s not behind the DM’s screen, he enjoys hiking Icelandic volcanoes, knitting, and creating his hundredth unused character on D&D Beyond.
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Posted Apr 27, 2022Here’s one:
You go to space to stop a purple man from obtaining a bunch of color coded rocks to wipe out half of existence, but you fail, and then you have to go back in time to stop him, except it doesn’t work that way, because wibbly wobbly timey wimey, so instead you have to collect matching color coded rocks to bring half of existence back!
Come to think of it, that might be the plot of Avengers: Endgame.
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Posted Apr 27, 2022When Spelljammer comes out I will most certainly dm an among us one shot
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Posted Apr 27, 2022100% yes.
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Posted Apr 27, 2022yes!!!
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Posted Apr 27, 2022unfortunately yes
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Posted Apr 27, 2022PM me with the deets please I would most certainly love to join that one-shot
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Posted Apr 28, 2022Take me with youuuuuuuu!!!
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Posted Apr 28, 2022Wow. Just… wow.
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Posted Apr 28, 2022Han, Mal, Adama... yes OK I see your point.
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Posted Apr 28, 2022wait a minute.... is this an old-school reference about that GALACTICA: BATTLESTAR TV serial ???
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Posted Apr 28, 2022What about the trope where you try to learn the purpose of the entire universe, only to find it was 42? And then you try to figure out how that answer makes sense, but the entire process to do so fails because of evil psychiatrists? That's a classic.
All joking aside, Hitchhiker's Guide reads like a standard D&D campaign with easily distractable players and DM.
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Posted Apr 28, 2022ah! a hhgttg fan!
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Posted Apr 28, 2022Plot? That movie had a plot?
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Posted Apr 28, 2022amogus
Excellent chance to play a changeling race, or use a doppelganger, haha
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Posted Apr 28, 2022I liked that movie! I just made it SOUND really dumb!
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Posted Apr 28, 2022This article is missing one:
You're flying through space in your spelljammer when suddenly a mysterious probe knocks you unconscious and you live out an entire life in a simulation of a past alien civilization that suspiciously resembles humanity. When you die, you wake up in your old life, but you can play an instrument.
This is also a very convenient and believable way to for a DM to suddenly switch campaigns. It is also a very efficient way for characters to become proficient with instruments.
This may or may not have been inspired by Star Trek.
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Posted Apr 29, 2022It occurs to me to take an idea from hard sci-fi (that is, sci-fi that hews close to actual science: you know, the opposite of Spelljammer) and place it into Spelljammer: namely, the Fermi Paradox.
In the real world, the Fermi Paradox runs thus: the universe is massive, our own galaxy is massive, and there's planets around basically every star, so where is everybody? Why are no aliens sending signals? Why are there no Dyson Swarms visible in our telescopes? Heck, given the immense age of the galaxy, why hasn't our own solar system been colonized a hundred times over? Loads of science fiction writers have made explanations to this into stories.
You might think that the Fermi Paradox makes absolutely no sense in Spelljammer, and you'd be right. But we can construct a setup where it does make sense.
Consider this: On some world of the Material Plane, Spelljammer-style space travel is the only way to access other worlds, and it's never been done. The magic to create spacegoing ships has been thoroughly researched and worked out for almost a century, but no one's actually been able to build one. It's known that one could get to other worlds on these ships, and it's known that there are a lot of other worlds out there to visit. Some of them, sages figure, ought to have sapient [thinking] life. And at least some of them should know about spacegoing ships. And if some worlds manage to build them before others, the ones with the spaceships would colonize the ones without, or at least pop in for a visit. And, given the the estimated frequency of worlds, any world they can see would be able to colonize every other world they can see in a few thousand years, which sounds like a lot of time but is actually tiny compared to the age of the universe. But this world has never been visited by aliens, or anything that could plausibly be aliens, in recorded history.
So where is everybody?
So people come up with explanations for why no one has come. Maybe sapience is vanishingly rare, and the closest spacefaring people are so far away that they'd never get to us. Maybe spaceships are just impossible to build. Maybe we're wrong about the number of worlds: maybe they're few and far between, or so incredibly common that one could ply the stars for millions of years without finding us. Maybe space is inhospitable for whatever reason. Maybe no other sapients have ever had the desire to expand that we have. Maybe they've been here and we didn't notice. But one idea, that troubles nearly everyone, is one that also exists in our world: the Great Filter.
That is, maybe something wipes every spacefaring race out before they can do much long-distance traveling.
The campaign proper begins with the PCs being hired by a powerful artificer to crew the first spaceship. And they find... pretty much regular Spelljammer. The number of worlds is close to predicted, sapience is everywhere, tons of people have spaceships, most of them seem to enjoy exploring and colonizing... so how come people still keep discovering brand-new worlds? How have even the most widespread and dedicated space travelers traveled relatively little compared to what's out there? How is it that so many worlds are untouched by space travel?
Suddenly, the party has cause to be very VERY worried. Because the only thing that seems plausible now is the Great Filter. Something is coming to wipe out every spacefaring species. And the more the player characters discover, the more likely it becomes that the Great Filter is coming very soon. The campaign soon becomes about finding out what the Great Filter is (that's where you, the DM, get to think up whatever terrifyingly powerful, world-ending thing you want) and stopping it.
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Posted Apr 29, 2022It's terrifying. I love it.
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Posted Apr 29, 2022“This is the Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone… Mayday, Mayday…”
A seemingly helpless trader vessel is being attacked by ruthless pirates. Do you rush in to save the crew of the trader about to be destroy or do you approach with caution? After all this could be a trap. When you get close enough, both vessels might turn on you, but if the traders is really what they look to be you might be too late to save them.
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Posted Apr 29, 2022With the number of overt star wars references, you would think that the writer of this was being paid based on the number of star wars references.
Oh and James T Kirk who is possibly one of the most famous rougish captains of all time, had a ship that was about as far from junk as you can get .... So clearly that rule, about certain captains, is wrong.