Spelljammer D&D Direct Live Report: 9am PDT (5pm BST) SPELLJAMMER CONFIRMED! DRAGONLANCE!

D&D Direct, WotC's new video-format announcement show launches today at 9am PDT (5pm BST). If you aren't able to watch it, I'll be updating this article live. Feel free to comment below! Once it launches, you will need to refresh this page when you want to see new updates. The video is expected to last about 30 minutes.

If you CAN watch it, you'll find it on YouTube or Twitch at the above times. Otherwise, follow along below!

• 45 mins to go. Live updates incoming!
• 30 mins to go!
• 5 minutes to go!
• Here we go! Opens with a sea shanty.
• Forgive typos. They talk fast and I can't type.

• Spelljammer is confirmed!
• They talk REALLY FAST!
• Spelljammer Adventures in Space, project lead Chris Perkins, Trystan Falcone graphic designer
• Cities built on asteroids, dead gods floating in the ether
• 6 races---astral elves, autognomes, hedozi(?), gif, plasmoids, thri-kreen
• 3 hardcovers in a slipcase: Astral Adventurers Guide, Boo's Astral Menagerie, Light of Xaryxis adventure
• Prequel adventure in July
• Wizkids miniatures

Other stuff also discussed!

• Baldur's Gate 3 CRPG preview video (game is in 2023)
• Journeys Through Radiant Citadel intro video -- 3 of the adventures are: Wages of Vice (5th level), Caribbean; Orchids of the Invisible Mountain (14th level), feywild, far realm, Whistler new monster; Fiend of Hollow Mind (4th level), skeletons and spirits

• "Campaign Cases" -- Creature tokens! Terrain tiles! July!

D&D Movie directors now onscreen. The movie in March 2023 is called HONOR AMONG THIEVES.

• New D&D starter set. Comes with 'digital onboarding'. Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. We knew about that one.
• D&D digital monstrous compendium. Available to those with WoTC or D&D Beyond Accounts. Volume 1 has an eldritch lich and the 10 legged asteroid spider. And the starlancer. Might have misheard some of that!

• MMO Neverwinter video. Dragonslayer begins June 2022. (I wonder if they'll need a dragonance for that?)
• New D&D actual play video, Legends of the Multiverse. Lots of 80s cartoon style soft rock music. Boo is in it.

WIzKids skirmish game D&D Onslaught. October

Finally -- DRAGONLANCE WARRIORS OF KRYNN! SHADOW OF THE DRAGON QUEEN!

 

[Maxperson]

Now the prime isn't a single contiguous plane, but a bunch of wildspace spheres floating disconnected within the astral plane. D&D's cosmology retcons gave me a headache before, but this is ridiculous. What is even the difference between a wildspace sphere and an outer plane now? Without a larger cosmological distinction, it now feels utterly arbitrary.

Nothing has actually changed in that regard. The astral plane always bordered all of the prime planes, and later the one prime plane with all the spheres in it. All this does is show where in the astral you need to sail in order to access wildspace of the prime plane sphere. It doesn't put the spheres inside of the astral plane, so the prime is still one plane with all the "spheres" in it.

 

[Remathilis]

All I know is that Spelljammer was the punchline to many a D&D player I spoke with, so if jettisoning phlogiston and replacing it with Astral (and straight up ripping off the GotG/cosmic MCU vibes) will make Spelljammer more than goofy hippo people with aquebuses, I'm down for it.

For what it's worth, I loved Shadow of the Spider Moon and hope some of that made it into the new version as well.

 

[Micah Sweet]

One of the things people are skipping over, I think, is that the 2E and 5E versions aren't mutually exclusive.

The prime material plane can still contain the phlogiston.

Spelljammers used to travel out of the Wildspace of a system, through a crystal sphere, and into the phlogiston...all the while staying on the prime material plane.

Spelljammers now travel out of the Wildspace of a system, through a silvery mist, and into the Astral Sea...physically transitioning into the Astral plane.

5E is simply ignoring what's outside of Wildspace on the prime material plane.

You can easily say that Spelljammer ships don't physically travel to the Astral Sea and instead move into the phlogiston.

Yeah, it sucks for some of us old grogs that loved the original. But I think the complaining misses the point. We're getting new Spelljammer stuff. And hopefully DM's Guild Spelljammer stuff. I for one am looking forward to the wild and crazy stuff we're going to see.

I am looking forward to the DM Guild stuff. And a lot of the new WotC Spelljammer stuff looks usable with some work.

 

[Micah Sweet]

All I know is that Spelljammer was the punchline to many a D&D player I spoke with, so if jettisoning phlogiston and replacing it with Astral (and straight up ripping off the GotG/cosmic MCU vibes) will make Spelljammer more than goofy hippo people with aquebuses, I'm down for it.

For what it's worth, I loved Shadow of the Spider Moon and hope some of that made it into the new version as well.

The goofy hippo people with arquebuses were and remain one of my favorite parts of the setting. Too bad the no-culture rules for races now gutted them.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

The goofy hippo people with arquebuses were and remain one of my favorite parts of the setting. Too bad the no-culture rules for races now gutted them.

One of the alternate covers of these books has a giff with guns on it. I'm pretty sure Giff are keeping their firearms. They're just not getting any racial mechanics for it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

One of the alternate covers of these books has a giff with guns on it. I'm pretty sure Giff are keeping their firearms. They're just not getting any racial mechanics for it.

Cool. It doesn't really matter; I made a Level Up heritage and culture for them anyway.

 

[humble minion]

One thing that's conspicuously missing from the new Spelljammer art, miniatures I've seen so far is any sort of Shou Lung material. The Shou were a very prominent (probably the single most prominent) human faction in 2e Spelljammer, taking a bit of inspiration from Zheng He and the Ming trading fleets.. I was wondering if the new version would lean in hard on that and have a non-stereotypically-Anglo culture be the dominant human force in the setting, or whether they'd quietly edit the whole thing out because they thought is was just a bit too clumsily portrayed and Orientalist to be fixed in the page space available. So far, it looks like the latter.

 

[Micah Sweet]

One thing that's conspicuously missing from the new Spelljammer art, miniatures I've seen so far is any sort of Shou Lung material. The Shou were a very prominent (probably the single most prominent) human faction in 2e Spelljammer, taking a bit of inspiration from Zheng He and the Ming trading fleets.. I was wondering if the new version would lean in hard on that and have a non-stereotypically-Anglo culture be the dominant human force in the setting, or whether they'd quietly edit the whole thing out because they thought is was just a bit too clumsily portrayed and Orientalist to be fixed in the page space available. So far, it looks like the latter.

A real shame. I loved that the most prominent human culture in Spelljammer was of Asian origin. A missed opportunity.

 

[Parmandur]

One thing that's conspicuously missing from the new Spelljammer art, miniatures I've seen so far is any sort of Shou Lung material. The Shou were a very prominent (probably the single most prominent) human faction in 2e Spelljammer, taking a bit of inspiration from Zheng He and the Ming trading fleets.. I was wondering if the new version would lean in hard on that and have a non-stereotypically-Anglo culture be the dominant human force in the setting, or whether they'd quietly edit the whole thing out because they thought is was just a bit too clumsily portrayed and Orientalist to be fixed in the page space available. So far, it looks like the latter.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We know what's in about 5 pages of the Adventurer's Guide.

 

[humble minion]

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We know what's in about 5 pages of the Adventurer's Guide.

Yeah, it's very early days. But it's not just the book material we've seen. If the Shou were prominent in the setting, we'd expect them to have some representation in the minis line too, and I just haven't seen that. There's no dragonship in the ship miniatures line as far as i can see for instance, and we've pretty much seen the whole of that range already.