New Equipment (CSH)

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Most of the equipment used by groundlings can be put to work in space. Spelljamming crews are not substantially better equipped than their groundling cousins, except for the ship itself. Nevertheless, there are many pieces of equipment smaller than a ship that are uncommon for groundlings but have gained popularity among the peoples of space.
==Ship's Locker==
This section discusses equipment that is generally considered part of a ship, rather than part of an individual's gear. These items are not carried by individuals and may be purchased as part of a ship's outfitting at the listed prices.
Anchor. Spelljamming vessels need not always be piloted. There are times when all you want to do is hover in one place. In space this is easy, but in a planetary atmosphere, the ship tends to drift with the wind, which can move the ship an amazing distance in just a few hours. To keep their ships from blowing away, spelljamming captains use anchors.
A spelljammer's anchor looks like the groundling equivalent: a large metal hook, generally with two or three prongs, at the end of a long rope (called a hawser). The opposite end of the hawser is firmly attached to the ship, and the intervening portion is wrapped around a spindle so that it can be rolled up or let out by turning the capstan.
When a spelljamming vessel wishes to hover over a planet's surface (as when a ship that can land only on water wishes to visit a landlocked city), it lowers its anchor, dragging it across the ground until it catches on a rock or other fixed object. Some anchors are simply very heavy and are allowed to fall freely and imbed themselves in the ground when they hit. Once the anchor is secured, the capstan is turned to tighten the hawser, keeping the ship more or less in place. Most ships carry 200' hawsers.
From below, the sight of a flying ship dumping an anchor toward the ground can be disconcerting, to say the least. Spelljamming captains should avoid occupied areas (villages, farmhouses, etc.) when targeting their anchors.
===Cargo Hoist===
Cargo Hoist. Even after you are anchored, getting down from your ship requires some effort. Lowering rope ladders, fly spells, and attaching elastic cords to a passenger's feet and throwing him overboard (a favorite of gnomes) have all been found wanting for one reason or another.
The most common solution is the cargo hoist, a cranelike device that attaches firmly to the ship. The hoist consists of a boom that hangs over the side of the ship, a winch, and a drum holding a few hundred feet of line. A bucket, sling, or platform is tied to the end of the line hanging from the boom. The whole affair resembles a huge fishing rod.
Four or five stout deckhands can turn the winch, reeling up the line to raise as much as 1,000 pounds. Hoists are slow, requiring 15 minutes to raise a load to the deck (although only five minutes is required to lower a similar load).
When not being used, the hoist can be stowed along the gunwales of the ship. Larger ships (30 tons or more) carry multiple hoists; in general, a ship can use one hoist per 25 tons or less. Ships of 10 tons or less must use smaller hoists that can lift or lower only 500 pounds on a single trip, although only two men are required to operate this hoist.
If there is a rush to move cargo, the travel time can be cut in half. However, cargo hoists are temperamental. If the handlers are forced to hurry, a successful Seamanship roll is required to avoid snarling the line on the spool, which leaves the cargo hanging in midair and requires two hours to untangle.
Cargo hoists are much less expensive than a ship's launch with a spelljamming helm, and hoists allow captains whose ships can land only on water to trade with landlocked cities. Some landlocked cities with established spelljamming trade have anchorages outside the city where visiting ships can drop anchor in safety and use cargo winches to move themselves and their cargo up and down.
===Anchor Hoists===
Anchor Hoists. Another solution that has some popularity (primarily among new groundling crews and gnomes) is the anchor hoist. A typical anchor hoist is a wooden platform about 20' across, with a hole in the center through which the anchor hawser passes. Gears fasten around the anchor hawser, allowing the platform to be lowered or raised by turning a windlass on the top of the platform. Some anchor hoists have dew-filled spheres or other nonmagical lifting devices that they use to go up the line, using the windlass and ballast to pull them down. Metal braces reach below and above the platform, holding cylindrical guides that encircle the hawser and keep the platform steady.
The biggest advantage of an anchor hoist is that no one need be left aboard to reraise the platform. With a standard cargo hoist, four men must be available to raise the hoist. On small vessels, this may be half the crew.
While anchor hoists are convenient, they have a few problems:
* Anchor hoists are slow, traveling not more than two yards per round (unless the people on the platform are willing to fall faster by disengaging the chain—but stopping then becomes a problem). They are so slow that the spelljamming vessel must come within 100 yards of the ground for the trip to take less than an hour each way.
* The chain occasionally jams (on a roll of 1 on ldlO each trip), requiring 1–4 hours to repair.
* Their capacity is limited. They can carry only a dozen normal-sized beings or their equivalent in cargo (about one ton), and so are unsatisfactory for large cargo shipments.
* The anchor hoist can go only where the anchor goes, so it is not possible to use an anchor hoist as part of a stealthy approach.
===Sleeping Compartments===
Sleeping Compartments. All spelljamming vessels have places for the crew to sleep, even if only a hammock on deck. However, more sophisticated devices (first invented by the gnomes) have become popular with troop ships and other vessels that carry large numbers of people through the phlogiston.
In any long voyage, air supply is a critical problem. In order to move as few as 100 men, a ship of over 100 tons is required, primarily to support their air requirements. Even then, the air is often fouled before the ship arrives at its destination, if it travels from one sphere to another. A ship of the same size packed with men (ignoring for a moment their air needs) could hold perhaps five times the number it can feed and keep breathing.
The gnomish sleeping chamber (or, as the gnomes call it, The Wondrous Device for the Preservation of Life Indefinitely While Traveling Through the Flow With Trusted Friends Through the Natural Properties of Phlogiston) is an airtight, coffin-shaped compartment. When it is used properly, the traveler enters this compartment after the ship has left a crystal sphere and has entered the Flow. The compartment is sealed, trapping phlogiston and air inside. Within a short time (generally an hour or so), all the air in the compartment has become deadly, and the occupant lapses into the suspended animation caused by the phlogiston. When the destination is reached, the compartment is opened and the character is revived.
There are several obvious disadvantages to the sleeping chamber.
* Generally speaking, humans (or members of any other nonsubterranean race) get very uncomfortable trapped in a small chamber while their air runs out. The sensation is usually referred to as being "buried alive," despite the fact that the compartment is not actually interred. Panic can set in, so the occupants of these devices are either drugged or locked in to keep them from bursting out.
* It is essential that the compartments be opened and their occupants revived before entering a crystal sphere. As is well known, all phlogiston vanishes when the boundary of a sphere is crossed. Any being still trapped in deadly air will die. Thus, at least some of the crew must remain awake throughout the journey to open the compartments when the destination is reached.
* Not everyone survives the transformation of the phlogiston. A character who is shipped in one of these devices must make a System Shock roll (see Table 3 in the Player's Handbook) or die when the chamber is opened. Only one such roll need be made when the character is revived. For NPCs who do not have a Constitution score, there is a base 80% chance of survival.
Poor passengers (those who do not have enough money for a normal passage aboard a spelljamming vessel) will sometimes risk traveling by sleeping compartment if their need is great. Traveling this way is much cheaper, as the passenger does not require food or water for the duration of the journey through the Flow. However, the risk of dying is sufficiently high that most people couldn't be paid to ride in one of these. Only the desperate or the fanatical will use them, and only the fanatical will risk it more than once.
===Stow-Nets and Stow-Pods===
Stow-Nets and Stow-Pods. The danger of free-flying gear aboard a ship in combat is lessened by lashing gear down with nets or pods, or by securing all loose objects in closed, barred, or latched lockers.
Nets are cocoon-shaped bags of close-meshed hemp netting, clamped or even tied permanently to bars attached to the bulkheads of a ship. They open along a central seam by means of drawstrings.
Pods are large natural containers of plant material that can be collected in large jungles on many worlds. They are more fragile than nets (but much cheaper to obtain: free for the cutting to a crew in the right place) but soon dry out and split unless kept oiled or damp.
Pods vary in size and shape, but all hold their shapes by their own strength, tightening as they dry out rather than loosening to spill their contents. They are typically slit open lengthwise to clean out the seed and fruit innards, and to insert and remove cargo. Most are lashed around the middle against severe shocks, but under normal conditions stay closed by their own strength. Personal Equipment
==Personal Equipment==
This section describes equipment that spacefarers find useful. Unlike the previous items, these are typically owned by individuals.
Equipment Tether. Dropping your tools in wildspace can be a disaster; they tend to drift long distances and require lots of time to recover. Long-time spacers tether their tools and weapons to themselves by cords. These cords are typically 20'-40' long and woven of the strongest fibers and horsehair, waxed and wrapped with silk for great strength (3-6 points of chopping or sawing damage to sever such a cord).
Tethered gear that is knocked out of your grasp can be hauled in and retrieved. You can also hurl tethered weapons into another ship's rigging and be towed along, or haul yourself hand over hand to escape one ship and reach another. On the other hand, in a fight you can be dragged around helplessly by your tether-line, so using the cords in combat can backfire tragically.
Cold Light. Using fire in the phlogiston is dangerous. However, there are spaces on every ship that are closed off to the natural radiance of the phlogiston, and light is still needed in these areas.
The dwarves have identified a phosphorescent fungus called "cold light" that glows without producing heat (and thus without risking a phlogiston reaction). They build this cold light fungus into normal lanterns that can be used in the phlogiston.
To maintain the cold light, you must keep the fungus moist; this is usually done as part of routine ship maintenance. The light produced by the fungus is just below that of a candle, barely suitable for reading and maneuvering around a darkened hold. Nevertheless, the ease of maintaining cold light and its low price has caused it to outstrip its strongest competitor—the continual light lamp—over recent years, even though cold light is much dimmer.
Signalling Kit. Regardless of how you get around in wildspace, communication with people who are even a short distance away can be very difficult. Unless your air envelopes overlap, no sound will travel between you.
Various sorts of signalling devices have been developed to overcome this problem. A few options are:
* Signal lights: mixtures of flammable pollen and chemicals that can be ignited to give a flash of colored light. Various colors are available. Igniting these takes several seconds, and therefore they are difficult to use for extended codes. They also create a phlogiston reaction equivalent to that of a candle (1 die fireball, 4" across).
Other types of signal lights use a continuous source of light and a hood or door that can be opened and closed to flash the light. These may use cold light or continual light spells (see above) to provide the light source, and therefore can be used in the phlogiston.
Generally, signal lights are color-coded, so that amber lights, for example, are a distress signal, while green lights indicate that the signaler wishes to approach.
* Signalling mirrors: small reflective pieces of metal or glass that can be used to reflect light from a nearby fire body. Signalling with a mirror can be very quick but requires a fair amount of accuracy to hit a distant target. Moreover, a signalling mirror depends on the existence of a stable, stationary light source (such as a fire body); these are not always available. Even when a source of strong light is available, the mirror's signal flashes can be difficult to see in the continuous glow of the phlogiston.
* Smoke grenades: flammable chemicals that produce a thick cloud of colored smoke. The smoke spreads to a surprising size in wildspace while still keeping enough coherency to allow someone far away to make out its color. Like some signal lights, smoke grenades are very slow, so color schemes are used for general messages. However, the size of the signal cloud allows messages to be sent great distances, if the receiver is looking in the right direction, even if the sender doesn't know exactly where the receiver is (for example, a stranded drifter who is looking for help from anyone). Also, setting off a smoke grenade in the phlogiston causes a reaction similar to that of lighting a candle (1 die fireball, 4" across).
Priest Icons. Priests in a SPELLJAMMER® campaign suffer from restrictions that do not trouble the characters of other classes. In particular, a priest's abilities are greatly limited in the phlogiston and in crystal spheres in which his deity is not worshipped.
Specifically, priest spells of third level and above are not available in these circumstances. Within an alien crystal sphere, a priest can use the contact home sphere spell (see the Concordance of Arcane Space, Chapter 2) to receive higher-level spells temporarily, but even this spell does not work in the phlogiston.
Priests faced with this problem have developed a magical item called an icon. Icons are portable altars that can store the divine energy of the gods and transform it into the higher-level priest spells when the god's own bestowal is not available.
Icons can be used in alien spheres, but they are designed for the phlogiston where no other mechanism exists to regain high-level spells. (Priests do not need an icon to recover their first-and second-level spells, so a priest within a sphere may always use contact higher power to recover higher-level spells.)
To use the icon, the priest must sit before the icon and meditate upon the divine energy within it. The priest meditates for the same amount of time he would normally spend praying to his god for his spells. No additional time or effort is required to gain spells from an icon.
Icons are holy items of specific churches. They are not magical items in the normal sense, usable by any priest. An icon of Reorx would not be usable by a priest of Tyr, and vice versa. As such, although they are expensive, they are not traded like other magical items.
Icons are limited in their spell-bestowing power. There are three types of icons, each of which has a maximum level of spells it can bestow, a maximum number of spell levels it can store, and a recharge rate. These properties are summarized in Table 14.
 Table 14: Icon Types and Properties
Icon Type	MaximumSpell Level	Maximum Numberof Spell Levels	Recharge Levelsper day)
Icon 	3 	50 	5
Shrine 	4 	100 	10
Sanctuary	5 	200 	20
Note that spells above fifth level cannot be gained through an icon. Direct contact with the priest's deity is required to gain such high-level spells.
Icons can recharge their spell levels only in a sphere that is accessible to the priest's god. There must be an established group of worshippers somewhere in the sphere. It is not possible to recharge an icon if the only connection to the god is through a contact higher power spell.
Table 15 lists prices and encumbrance values for all of the equipment listed previously. DMs should feel free to adjust these prices to fit their own campaigns.
 Table 15: Price and Encumbrance List
Item 	Price (gp)	Weight (lbs.)
Launch 	40000 	N/A
Anchor 	3000 	N/A
Cargo hoist 	4000 	N/A
Anchor hoist 	7000 	N/A
Sleeping compartment	3000 	N/A
Stow nets/pods 	10/— 	5/5
Equipment tether 	3 cp/100' 	1
Cold light 	25 	3
Signaling kit 	10 	1
Icons: 	Icons: 	Icons:
Icon 	5000 	100
Shrine 	10000 	200
Sanctuary 	25000 	500