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dnd.wizards.com

Looks like Spelljammer and/or Planescape is back on the menu!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think you're meaning the stellar parallax, not stellar proper motion. Proper motion was already suspected in ancient times, and was proven as time went on and certain stars such as Arcturus had obviously shifted from their position over the centuries.

Tycho Brahe was specifically looking for (and failed to find, because he didn't have an elven lifespan) proper motion, because of his supernova observation led him to suspect the stars where not fixed. I don't think he knew about the Arcturus observations, which I think where Arabic*. Ironically, the failure to observe that, along with the absence of detectable parallax, supported the idea that stars where fixed, rather than refuted it, in the early years of observational astronomy.


*The failure of people from different parts of the world to put their observations together held things back for a long time. Not much has changed.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Aristotle was not a scientist - he did not make predictions that could be tested by experiment. So, without any evidence to either support or refute, his aether sat on the shelf gathering dust for many hundreds of years (also see: atom). When evidence that light was a wave started to become overwhelming at the beginning of the 19th century scientists thought there had to be a medium for it to propagate through, so they dusted off Aristotle's aether. But, having revived the idea, Michelson and Morley set out to look for it, and failed to find it. Thus, the idea was thousands of years old, but only "science" for less than a hundred.

Ptolemy, on the other hand based his model on observations, and yes he, along with most educated people for most of recorded history, knew the Earth was a sphere, so his "dome" that held held the stars was also a sphere. Ptolemy's model, with it's fixed stars, was in regular use in the West for a couple of thousand years (with patches) and was declared "True" by the Church.

Lol okay man. Aether was around as a concept people knew about, and thus a perfectly appropriate element for a story, for over a thousand years longer than you acted like it was, but we will just pretend that isn’t true because Aristotle wasn’t a scientist.

 

[Faolyn]

For what it's worth, in Spelljammer, the stars may actually move, because they're not necessarily fixed to the crystal sphere. One example gave (IIRC) was having them as fires attached to giant insects that crawl around on the inside of the sphere.

Also, there were giant constellation monsters, whose size was G (up to 1 million square miles). Because of course there were.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Sorry, but what is the speed of the spelljamming helms, and the distance between the crystal spheres?

I have a feeling about WotC wants to allow space about future "crossovers" with sci-fi, something like modules "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" and "City of Gods", and a "hidden pilot episode" for possible spin-offs.

But high-tech can break the power balance too easily in a D&D game.

 

[overgeeked]

Sorry, but what is the speed of the spelljamming helms, and the distance between the crystal spheres?

I have a feeling about WotC wants to allow space about future "crossovers" with sci-fi, something like modules "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" and "City of Gods", and a "hidden pilot episode" for possible spin-offs.

But high-tech can break the power balance too easily in a D&D game.

Between spheres travel times vary. They went hard on the phlogiston being a cosmic river with currents and eddies. Most travel between relatively close spheres took weeks or months.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Aether was around as a concept people knew about

Very few people have actually ever read Aristotle...

But you might make a case that he was the first science fiction author. No plots but lots of fantasy world building.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Very few people have actually ever read Aristotle...

But you might make a case that he was the first science fiction author. No plots but lots of fantasy world building.

Edit: Was being a donk.

Okay, so I don’t think how many people have read Aristotle is especially relevant here. Nor is the snide dismissal of one of western history’s most important philosophers, but that’s a tangent.

We’re talking about stories, and space operas. A lot of people know about Aether as a steampunk story concept. Almost no one knows about phlogiston. And if we did conclude that people generally don’t know and won’t easily grok Aether as a fantastical medium through which to move in space in order to have airships with sails that go about in space, we could just go the Treasure Planet route and make the sails gather solar power or whatever.

But Aether is fun. You can have storms in space, and you can still do the normal sci-fi space stuff, just further away from gravity wells and places where people gather in large numbers (the idea is Aether gathers around gravity wells and places where sentient beings gather, no one knows yet why).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Closeish, but definitely not the same. The stars moved. People knew the stars weren’t all in the same places as they were in the dusty writings they studied.

Like…the positions of the stars were recorded, the fact the stars were different in different places was discussed, astronomers compared contemporary stellar alignments with ancient stellar alignments.

And there were many different proposed models for what it all meant.

Anyway, this all came about because of a discussion of the space in space opera, so Ancient Greece and medieval Europe is purely tangential. It does’t matter what the ancient or medieval understanding of the cosmos was. Players that want dnd space opera want to play D&D in Space, not a weird cosmic ocean of flammable nonsense.

Oh, I dont know. I always found Spelljammer's wild, Ptolemy-inspired cosmology really cool. It was one of the things that intrigued me about the setting, and made it feel like fantasy. A lot of what made Spelljammer unique would be lost, I think, if you just flipped it to regular space or warped the premise to use the Astral instead.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Edit: Was being a donk.

Okay, so I don’t think how many people have read Aristotle is especially relevant here.

Sure it is, only a very few elites ever read his writings, so if you want to know what most people believed, it's no good looking at Aristotle.

Nor is the snide dismissal of one of western history’s most important philosophers, but that’s a tangent.

He led science up a whole bunch of blind alleys. Four elements bollocks! You can't learn about the world by thinking about it, you have to look at it.

We’re talking about stories, and space operas. A lot of people know about Aether as a steampunk story concept.

I think you are in a bit in a bubble with regards to the popularity of steampunk.

Almost no one knows about phlogiston.

Agreed.

 

[Faolyn]

Sorry, but what is the speed of the spelljamming helms, and the distance between the crystal spheres?

I have a feeling about WotC wants to allow space about future "crossovers" with sci-fi, something like modules "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" and "City of Gods", and a "hidden pilot episode" for possible spin-offs.

But high-tech can break the power balance too easily in a D&D game.

Travel still took days, weeks, or months. And the tech level in Spelljammer was the same as in any other D&D setting of the time, with the highest tech stuff being made by tinker gnomes (and therefore unreliable at best).