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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nyeshet" data-source="post: 3642041" data-attributes="member: 18363">Having not read much spelljammer, much of what I am about to say is supposition based upon my understanding of where the concept of crystal spheres came from. That said . . .It was once believed that the stars were set in the heavens - literally points of light / fire embedded in solid crystal spheres. There were several layers of these hollow, thick walled spheres. The outer-most one held the star, while inner ones held a planet (a wandering star - Incidentally the word 'planet' comes from an old other language term meaning 'wanderer.), the moon, or the sun. Later it was decided that some of these spheres were not so much solid as simply seeming solid to our eyes. The path of the outer planets, for example, seemed to use epicycles to pass through the apparent spheres of other planets. In any case, the entire 'universe' was basically housed inside these multi-layered crystal spheres. Spell jammer and Planescape, as I understand it, took the position that this was a literal truth, and each D&D world system (Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, etc) was embedded in its own crystal sphere - all of which existed on a single Prime. Through the use of planar travel or spell jammer ships the vast and complex distances between these spheres could be traversed, allowing characters made in one system to travel to and continue to play in another system as part of an epic (or pre-epic) journey. 3e made a bit of a change to this, suggesting that each Crystal Sphere was its own Prime - and thus only extra planar travel (through the Shadow plane, as I recall) could allow travel between worlds. I think this is mostly because they have not yet re-introduced SpellJammer. These links might help a bit: <a href="http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/images/aristotelian_cosmo.gif" target="_blank">Greek Cosmology</a><a href="http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/images/aristotelian_cosmo.gif" target="_blank">http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/images/aristotelian_cosmo.gif</a>Does this more or less answer your question?</blockquote>

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