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Let’s talk about Science Fantasy and such.
Adding science fiction elements to your fantasy wasn’t exactly new ground. In fact, it was extremely common during this era. Having just finished reading the novel Hiero’s Journey, by Sterling Lanier, an early 70s novel that was in the list of works that heavily influenced D&D and Gygax, I can vouch for that. We have psionics and post-apocalyptic fun with radiation and computers and such, but all in the venue of fantasy. Take a look at late 60s Dragonrider of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, a hugely influential novel that combines science fiction and fantasy. Early video games like Ultima and Might and Magic have no compunction about adding in science fiction elements to something that seems like normal fantasy. Early campaigns like Blackmoor and Greyhawk make no bones about including various science fiction elements. We have Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World printed very early, and are adding things like psionics to D&D in ‘76.
And we’ll even add in stuff like Spelljammer later. So I get the affectation to all things science fantasy from that era. But that’s not the game. That’s not D&D, no matter how much that veneer might look appealing to some, it’s false window dressing that obscures the point. D&D is something else. It can be pulp-ish, it can be epic, it can be dark, and so forth. But at the end of the day, it’s not Star Wars.
And this module? Ranked very highly by like everyone? Ranked 5th best in that Top 30 ranking they did to mark the 30th anniversary of D&D? It wasn’t even written for D&D. Nope – it was for Metamorphosis Alpha, a different RPG. Gygax mentioned that he turned to his notes from the Greyhawk campaign where he had a crashed starship as the location for an adventure, and used that concept.
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