Spelljammer is for losers

polygon.com:

Movies are filled with heroes failing. Before they can be victorious in the final confrontation with the villains, the good guys often get beaten up, get captured, or lose people or things that they care about to ramp up the tension. That’s harder to do in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, where players typically expect to win every fight unless they have some extremely bad dice luck. The writers of the Spelljammer: Adventures in Spacebox set are trying to change that expectation with a cinematic adventure where failing can be even more fun than succeeding.

Inspired by the 1980 pulp science fiction film Flash Gordon, Light of Xaryxis is a zany space opera where the players must save their home world from being destroyed by an evil elven empire. To challenge their military might, the players will need to enlist allies including an alcoholic anthropomorphic hippopotamus, a renegade princess, and an amorous vampire pirate. There are splashes of space horror and a gladiatorial battle that show off many of the monsters in Boo’s Astral Menagerie.

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The adventure designed to take characters from level 5-8 is broken into 11 chapters, each meant to be run as a two- to three-hour session. Adding to the pulp adventure tone, every chapter ends with a cliffhanger and starts with a catch-up summary of the action so far. Often those cliffhangers will be the appearance of a nasty foe that the