Spelljammer Spelljammer Shows Up In The Wild - Check Out The Tables of Contents

Copies of Spelljammer are starting to show up. Mike Long of Tribality is in receipt of the books and has tweeted some photos!

 

[Charlaquin]

To give some hope for Dark Sun...if the Dragonlance Battle Game Adventyre Path mashup is successful...Dark Sun was initially a Battle.System scenario set-up, amd am Adventure where the PCs lead the Free City of Tyr in a war to free the Tablelands from the tyranny of the Dragon Kings sounds like a good followup.

Yeah, you never know. Though at this point, I think it’ll be healthier for me to just operate under the assumption that there won’t be any Dark Sun for this iteration of the rules. Because even if there is, the chances that I’m going to like what they do with it seem slim. And I need to be ok with that. I know what I want out of Dark Sun, so I should just give it to myself instead of placing unreasonable hopes on WotC to do it for me.

 

[overgeeked]

To give some hope for Dark Sun...if the Dragonlance Battle Game Adventyre Path mashup is successful...Dark Sun was initially a Battle.System scenario set-up, amd am Adventure where the PCs lead the Free City of Tyr in a war to free the Tablelands from the tyranny of the Dragon Kings sounds like a good followup.

I thought they were two separate products.

 

[pukunui]

I thought they were two separate products.

They're two separate products that can be used together.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Yeah, you never know. Though at this point, I think it’ll be healthier for me to just operate under the assumption that there won’t be any Dark Sun for this iteration of the rules. Because even if there is, the chances that I’m going to like what they do with it seem slim. And I need to be ok with that. I know what I want out of Dark Sun, so I should just give it to myself instead of placing unreasonable hopes on WotC to do it for me.

I was at least hoping for a psionic class but I doubt we will even get that.
will it even have a sun and sand?

 

[Knightfall]

What if they make it that DarkSun takes place in the far past, and Doomspace is after the star finally went belly-up. Athas is gone. But some of our favorite DS creatures have survived. It's "unreachable"... without a time machine. (Or powerful chronomancy).

I had that exact same thought.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

shrug

Believe what you will. I'm going to believe the glass is half full.

As I've always said, it's impossible to do a faithful Dark Sun in 5e. The rules are too different to the ones the setting was designed for. And we all know an unfaithful Dark Sun designed to operate with 5e rules would upset more long-term Dark Sun fans than it would please.

The best solution is to start from scratch, incorporating the themes from Dark Sun into a new setting deigned to work with 5e rules, not against them.

Athas was dying. Better to let be dead, but have another world facing the same fate.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It has all the appearance of a very last-minute editorial choice to me. Someone balked at the last hurdle before at reducing Athas to stopover on a Spelljammer Contiki tour and they had to go back and hastily file the serial numbers off. Too late to do a complete rewrite, so all the Athasian monsters etc stay in the book, but just enough for deniability. Go back and change the names in the book, bash out a couple of paragraphs of alternative backstory to an Athas-like (desolate, dragon-ravaged, tyrant-ruled) planet. Presumably the leaked map was handed off to the marketing or social media dept ages ago and someone forgot to update them when the changes came through, so the old version was initially released by accident

If there's one thing I want from a gaming company, it's deniability.

 

[Parmandur]

I thought they were two separate products.

They are bundled together, though I think you can get the book seperately at least. There is an Adventure for standard D&D...that has mass combat beats. And a board game, that covers those story beats. The Adventure has a quick and dirty mass combat resolution system, similar to past 5E Adventures, bit you can also use your characters in m the board game.

 

[Knightfall]

Ooooo and then in the modern D&D multiverse there is a widespread Athasian diaspora! I love that idea!

This is was part of my thought process too.

 

[humble minion]

And we all know an unfaithful Dark Sun designed to operate with 5e rules would upset more long-term Dark Sun fans than it would please.

The 4e DS was mostly well received (with some reservations about tieflings etc) by the Dark sun grognards as far as I can tell, and it was unfaithful too.

As always, a setting updated to a new edition which preserves the spirit of the original will usually be looked on tolerantly, or even favourably. You don't have to adhere to the letter of the original. Plenty of people liked new Ravenloft, even if it did set fire to enormous swathes of the old lore. It wasn't my cup of tea, but you can't please everyone.

The problem is, of course. getting any two long-term fans to agree about what 'the spirit of the original' is!