Quote from: David Johansen on August 26, 2022, 11:07:44 PMI sometimes think they should have just moved  the spell jamming ships into the astral plane and ditched the magical space thing.  Replacing the philostogen with astral space is a step in the right direction IMO.

This is exactly what I thought after reading Spelljammer. I own the Ad&d 2nd edition Spelljammer box but never played. Definitely not my taste.

I picked up the 5e Planescape set for 50% off because I remember a few people telling me the 2e version was awesome. I skimmed through the three books for a few hours, and it's sat on my shelf since. I didn't really see the awesome, at least not in the current version. I talked to a friend that has the 2e version (many books) and he told me that it was mostly nostalgia and fuzzy memories, because the line was never really that great (in his opinion).

Quote from: HappyDaze on February 05, 2025, 01:57:19 AMI picked up the 5e Planescape set for 50% off because I remember a few people telling me the 2e version was awesome. I skimmed through the three books for a few hours, and it's sat on my shelf since. I didn't really see the awesome, at least not in the current version. I talked to a friend that has the 2e version (many books) and he told me that it was mostly nostalgia and fuzzy memories, because the line was never really that great (in his opinion).

I also own the 5e version. I have very little interest in the adventure module, and only mild interest in the bestiary book.  The setting book and 2 sided map, are decent enough.  Having a hub that connects to the spokes on the great wheel, is easy to envision.

Quote from: HappyDaze on February 05, 2025, 01:57:19 AMI picked up the 5e Planescape set for 50% off because I remember a few people telling me the 2e version was awesome. I skimmed through the three books for a few hours, and it's sat on my shelf since. I didn't really see the awesome, at least not in the current version. I talked to a friend that has the 2e version (many books) and he told me that it was mostly nostalgia and fuzzy memories, because the line was never really that great (in his opinion).

Thats because the 5e Spelljammer somehow succeeds in being WORSE than the Polehedron 3e Spelljammer article.

The setting is completely gutted, the ship system is barely there and more like an after thought and pathetically UN-thought.

The original Spelljammer was all over the place. Lots of potential. That TSR never really made use of. Of the modules I have, only two stand out as good and then there is a third that starts off as standard groundside, but in the second module of a trilogy leaps into wildspace and one of my favorite 2e campaigns to DM.

Alot like Masque of the Red Death setting, it is VERY reliant on the DM to use the tools given to make it into whatever they want. Its one of the settings strong points and one of its weaknesses. Some DMs really need a compass to follow and a blueprint to build from. But thats true of alot of RPGs. 1st ed Shadowrun comes to mind as another that was very directionless and relied on the DM and players to give it direction.

While I think ditching phlogiston is good because the cosmology is already a mess as it is, substituting the astral plane breaks the cosmology. There's no longer a single prime material plane, just wildspace bubbles floating in the astral. It's now possible to travel between heaven and hell using a spelljammer vessel. The nature of the astral plane is also made even more convoluted, since it now exists alongside and outside of the wildspace bubbles. This means that a spelljammer vessel can turn around and see the entirety of wildspace from within the astral.

The only way to fix this is to split the astral plane into layers with different properties, like a "near astral" and a "far astral", which defeats the point of removing the phlogiston in the first place.

Quote from: Omega on February 05, 2025, 07:07:27 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on February 05, 2025, 01:57:19 AMI picked up the 5e Planescape set for 50% off because I remember a few people telling me the 2e version was awesome. I skimmed through the three books for a few hours, and it's sat on my shelf since. I didn't really see the awesome, at least not in the current version. I talked to a friend that has the 2e version (many books) and he told me that it was mostly nostalgia and fuzzy memories, because the line was never really that great (in his opinion).

Thats because the 5e Spelljammer somehow succeeds in being WORSE than the Polehedron 3e Spelljammer article.

The setting is completely gutted, the ship system is barely there and more like an after thought and pathetically UN-thought.

The original Spelljammer was all over the place. Lots of potential. That TSR never really made use of. Of the modules I have, only two stand out as good and then there is a third that starts off as standard groundside, but in the second module of a trilogy leaps into wildspace and one of my favorite 2e campaigns to DM.

Alot like Masque of the Red Death setting, it is VERY reliant on the DM to use the tools given to make it into whatever they want. Its one of the settings strong points and one of its weaknesses. Some DMs really need a compass to follow and a blueprint to build from. But thats true of alot of RPGs. 1st ed Shadowrun comes to mind as another that was very directionless and relied on the DM and players to give it direction.

I have no idea why you thought I said anything about Spelljammer.

As a huge fan of science fiction, Spelljammer is an okay setting worth exploiting. You have to buy into the idea that the entire franchise including D&D takes place in the future, however. Star Wars takes place long, long ago; D&D takes place after a nuclear apocalypse or something. Staples of our own culture have their timelines all screwed up compared to popular perception.

Where do the Spelljammer books say it takes place in our future?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on February 05, 2025, 03:56:41 PMWhere do the Spelljammer books say it takes place in our future?

I don't pretend to be a D&D historian, so maybe somebody can fill us in here, but I'm rather certain that the only way all the D&D worlds merge is if D&D itself is technically post-apocalyptic, which also explains the supernatural elements. I believe official canon explained this but admittedly I don't have a ready source.

Edit: Learned something new today. The Forgotten Realms don't even take place on Earth (though it is a boring part of it?), so the timelines really don't have any relevance to us anyway. All the ancient ruins suggest long-forgotten pasts and forgotten kingdoms, however. It's not unreasonable to assume that they lost technology along the way and reverted back to older ways of doing things. I'm no D&D expert.

Okay, here we go. Spelljammer's Into The Void takes place in 1361 DR. All the 5E classic adventures are around 1490 DR. Either the astral planes are just very expansive or something was lost. I guess Spelljammer could be the equivalent of aliens visiting Earth, but why wouldn't kingdoms worship them as Gods in that case? Again, I don't know that much about the lore.

QuoteA week in the Forgotten Realms is a tenday (10 days, not 7)

Curious how this affects total year and century count.

QuoteDalereckoning is taken from the Year of Sunrise, 1 DR, when the Standing Stone was raised by the elves of Cormanthyr and the humans of the Dalelands.

So I guess this is the Faerûn calendar system.

Quote623 DR: First time a spelljammer is confirmed. It is actually the Spelljammer.

Quote1279 DR: The green dragon Dretchroyaster of Cormanthor attacks three dales and is wounded, but his lair cannot be found. In 1352, the Cult of the Dragon offers the dragon to become a dracolich, and a new lair in Monarch's Fall Glade, where the remains of a Spelljammer had been found. Dretchoryaster wished to find a way to transform into a Spelljammer and fly through Realmspace.  Dretchroyaster later appears again in the events of Vault of the Dracolich. (Note, the Grand History has an error, saying Dretchroyaster was slain in 1279).

I suppose Spelljammer as a setting can more be seen as 'ancient alien' technology found in the usual 5E settings. It doesn't necessarily make them post apocalyptic, but they certainly take place far after the birth of spelljammers, so much so that it's odd that they aren't mentioned outside Spelljammer sourcebooks unless the technology was lost or gate-kept to certain cultures and areas.

I'll jump on this necro bandwagon!

Hot trash the both of them.

I've never understood the appeal of D&D's planar realm nonsense. But I guess they had to came up with something to do with their whacked cosmology.

I knew Spelljammer was stupid the first time I saw it on the FLGS shelf. Nothing that I have read or heard about it since has disabused me of that first accurate assessment.

The honest truth is that I am an outlier in the rpg hobby; baseline D&D is far too gonzo fantasy for my tastes.

Crap like planescape and spelljammer lean into those aspects of the game, and make me barf a little in my mouth just thinking that they were sold as actual rpg products.

For all the nostalgia that they seem to invoke today in certain quarters, the fact is they sold like crap back in the day, and the reboots sold even crappier.

Yes WotC is hopelessly woke and incompetent, but in all fairness it is easy to wind up with crap when you were starting with utter feces from the get go.

It's a shame that Terran Trade Authority was licensed out twice to be made into an RPG but neither attempt came anywhere near the books-- my favorite space fantasy franchise by far. DTRPG even has one of the sourcebooks for sale even though it's not a game, that's how suited it was for a good role-playing system. It felt very realistic, blending proto-cyberpunk with traditional ship stats and mixing in just enough Roger Dean-esque fantasy to make it really intereting. Starliners was my favorite book.

Might be an old thread, but it's more interesting than most newer posts...

But Spelljammer, the original, is fantasy space. It takes the premise that the fantasy world of D&D is not like Earth, it's a fantasy world. Greyhawk was like this before Spelljammer, because you had the sun literally going around Oerth. It's stuff like worlds being on the back of a turtle. Impossible by anything remotely like science.

I think many D&D players/GMs, including myself, want more of sword & planet/planetary romance style fantasy, where you have weird creatures and magic, but it's just high technology. And that is a clash with Spelljammer style fantasy.

I disliked Planescape because it turned the planes into Fantasy Victorian London, but I think the idea is solid. Most political compass graphs are along two axes so why not alignment?