That was how I was introduced to my favorite Setting, Greyhawk, as a fuzzy background assumption given in the Core books during 3E. It did not take off as well as FR, despite being the official Setting assumed in books and used in Organized Play.
Yeah, pretty astounding that after 3 decades of active mishandling 1 in 20 people were still playing in GH. I somehow doubt that it has kept up as well as FR, maybe Exandria has replaced it. But it does explain why to this day "here how you play this in Greyhawk" keepa making it into new products.
He is referring to the AD&D wra sales information that has recently come to light. Spelljammer did not sell anything after 1989, basically.
The problem with that is that those sales numbers refer to the first boxed set only. So all that's saying is that 3/4 of the people who wanted it bought it right away. And that boxed set sold in excess of 80,000 units. Describing that as a failure is a stretch - there are an awful lot of D&D products that came nowhere near that.
Yeah, but comparing like to like it did not do well relative go other Settings at the time.
But, again, does that by itself make it a failure? Any ordered list is going to have some items higher than others.
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Considering the whole failure of TSR was that they were producing boxed sets at massive losses and no one knew what was actually selling unless it was selling poorly. Compared to other settings released at the time, yes according to sales SPelljammer was an albatross eking out its existence, It really can't be spun any other way. It applies to a lot of TSR's settings and products though because the company was so mismanaged but of the material available at that time it was the poorest seller. AS AD&D2e slogged along and sales dwindled a product that sold poorer than Spelljammer could be considered a great success like comparing X-men sales in 1998 to 1991, comparing Jim Lee's X-Men no. 4 to X-men no 100 of course it looks really bad, the industry had a massive crash and Marvel had declared bankruptcy but X-men was still one of the industry's top selling titles so Spelljammer's 80k units may have been a skunk in 1989 when AD&D was selling much better than when Planescape sold 64k in 1994 when Random House was returning unsold books, boxed sets and other materials and demanding payment on unsold products.
I disagree. You're drawing a lot of conclusions from a very small amount of data.
Indeed. The numbers who are currently buying a boxed setting does not give you good information about the number of people currently playing a setting. Remember, it's mostly DMs who buy settings, and there is always a time-lag between them buying the setting and them actually starting a campaign there.
I'm not even sure I agree entirely with that - Spelljammer is, by quite some distance, the weirdest of all the TSR settings. Even Planescape, the closest competitor, is built on a foundation of planes drawn mostly from real-world myths. So I think it was always destined to be very much a niche interest.
All 7 of them? I don't think they're going to be a problem. Whether or not the older fans complain about the Phlogiston being absorbed by the Astral Sea, I think that 5e Spelljammer will succeed on its own merits, not based on the feelings of the very few people that actually have been fans of it since it came out.
You'll note that my comment about alienating the vocal fans came in the context of there being a cult following big enough to be a strength. If there are 7 such fans, their opinions are irrelevant either way.
r/spelljammer had 1961 members as of June 2021, before Spelljammer 5E was announced. (They have 4290 now, but it's hard to tell how many are reinvigorated veteran fans and how many are brand-new.) There are still active Spelljammer forums as well.
I've been toying with the idea of phloguston nebulae, drifting through the Astral Sea and/or Wildspace, that have the old phlogiston effect and effectively act as navigational hazards.
Nothing wrong with weird. The reason it had trouble finding its market was the po-faced seriousness with which the marketing treated it. So people who liked their D&D serious bought it and were turned off by the dumb jokes, whilst the people who like dumb jokes were put off by the serious marketing. Spelljammer didn't really start to take off until after TSR stopped trying to sell it.
Spelljammer has its foundation in "what if 18th century science was right?", so plenty of real world there. Whereas Planescape largely ignored the planes in favour of "what if people took philosophy literally?", and thus has nothing to do with the real world.
Of course not! But weird does mean it was never going to be for everyone.
I'm reasonably sure a great many people were more familiar with Heaven, Hell, Elysium, and other planes than with the esoterica of long discredited 'science'.
I was using hyperbole. There are obviously more than 7 passionate spelljammer fans that have been around since it was first published (I thought I made that clear through the tone of my post, but I guess not).
Which barely feature in Planescape, which is almost entirely confined to Sigil, AKA "The Cage". Where familiarity with Nietzsche, Kant and Sartre will stand you in better stead.
If a setting was "for anyone" you wouldn't need any more. The whole point of having multiple settings is to appeal to different tastes.
