Spelljammer Is Spelljammer Coming To D&D 5E?

Thanks to Stan Shinn over on Google+ for this scoop! WotC held a presentation at the GAMA trade show today, in which they covered both recent D&D performance (best year ever!), some previews of Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, and a small hint towards... Spelljammer?

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Here's Stan's report, direct from the trade show:

"Interesting Spelljammer and market news from the GAMA (Game Manufacturers Association) WOTC Seminar on March 13 in Reno (I’m there now).

Mark Price talked about D&D and showed some pictures from inside the upcoming Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes book. I have a few pictures (attached) prior to the Mordenkainen’s slides, but they asked us not to take or share pictures of the Mordenkainen’s book interior. They did show us a picture of a ‘Giff’ — a Spelljammer creature, which will be in the book. He looked like a steampunk hippo with a blunderbuss. Regarding why the creature was in the book, he said “I’ll let you speculate wildly about what that may mean.”

There was look of a wink in his eye so I’m pretty sure the hint was that Spelljammer is coming soon!

Other news from the seminar:

— 2017 was the best year for D&D ever in terms of sales
— Year 3 of D&D sales is stronger than their first year
— Actual play streaming is a key driver of D&D’s success, with 9 million users watching D&D on Twitch
— 8.6 million Americans have played D&D in the last 12 months (they did not give stats for overseas)"

It seems Xanathar's Guide was the fastest selling product in D&D history!

Wondering what Spelljammer is? Imagine D&D (2nd Edition) in space, except the ships are magic flying sailing galleons, and space is a "phlogiston" they can sail in with magical helms, and each world is in its own "crystal sphere", and all of D&D's settings exist in the same universe, and you can fly between them. Image above is of the AD&D 2E Spelljammer boxed set.

Of course, it might not be that. It might just be a monster entry Mordenkainen's Tome, and nothing more.

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[Dannyalcatraz]

Because there was no Amazon, D&D had a robust retail distribution model. While I am sure there were some rural area that might have had difficulty (just like they would have had difficulty with any books), there was never any problem finding D&D books in the early 1980s on any given shopping expedition.

In 1980-82, I lived in a place called Manhattan, KS. For context, the 2010 census listed its population at @52k...I think it’s more than doubled since we lived there. And K. State’s enrollment has been pretty consistently around 20k for decades. IOW, when school was in session, the population basically doubled.

There was a mom & pop bookshop which had a The 3 hardcovers, the original 3 books, a small array of minis- mostly Grenadier, Ral Partha, and Heritage- and maybe 8-12 modules at any one time. When something ran out, it was usually replaced by the exact same thing.

The college book store had a slightly different array of stock, but really no deeper.

Every once in a while, my folks and I would go to the bigger cities, which had bigger and better stores like Topeka & Wichita. Best of all was Kansas City. They had a mall that had 2 stores practically side-by-side that I’d hit: a seashell and mineral store right next to the escalator, and a game store at the head of it. Between those stores, I’d routinely blow over $100 or more when we hit that mall- @$320 in today’s dollars. (Assuming I had been saving my allowance, of course.)

And another store in KC was King’s Crown, owned and operated by a retired Marine. Quite possibly the neatest game store I’ve ever been in. While other staff rang people up and the like, he often wandered the floor answering questions...and putting everything back where it belonged. Mean, when you looked for a mini, each brand was stocked in numerical order.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Games Workshop used to be great. I used to go to one in Manchester (when I could) that was large and entirely dedicated to RPGs and hobby gaming. But then they went exclusively Warhammer, and a larger number of smaller shops. These days The Orc's Nest in London is pokey but packed to the gunnels, but I'm afraid to say most of my stuff comes from Amazon.

 

[Dungeonosophy]

You can't really "map" the material plane because the D&D worlds aren't in consistent positions with each other, and there's many many other worlds, many of them being fill-in-the-blank worlds that DMs can make as their Homebrew setting or a place to explore if it's a World-Hopping Campaign.

Yeah, that's the cop-out the 2E designers used. But the cosmology has changed in the meantime. There's nothing stopping Mearls and team from drawing a beautiful map of the D&D Material Plane.

Planets and star systems constantly move in the Star Wars and Star Trek galaxies, but that doesn't mean there's no map. Perhaps Spelljamming magitech has improved since the 2E era.

There'd still be millions of blank spaces for DMs to plop in another world, just like there are blank spaces on the map of the Star Wars galaxy and Star Trek galaxy.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I have got a question, a doubt, about the "time spheres" from "AD&D Chronomancer", something like an alternative timeline. The time travel is canon in Dragonlance. What if there aren't only "crystal spheres" but also "time spheres" and even "hollow earths", like the spin-off of Mystara? This could allow the reboot of some lines.

Spelljammer may become the most famous franchise of the genre of "space fantasy".

* If arcane-punk magitech is canon in Spelljammer. Why there isn't more advanced technology in the D&D worlds?

* What if the crystal sphere of Athas(Dark Sun) had got a "nearbough sphere", and this second sphere may be a "spin-off" of Dark Sun allowing new things from last editions(races and classes, for example).

* Would you bet anything about the idea of adding autobots and decepticons into Spelljammer setting like "cousins of warforged from Eberron"? Or Rom, the space-knight. It would for April's fool an annoucement about "my little centaurid: friendship is magic" like a sourcebook for Spelljammer. Spelljammer can be a fabulous experimentation laboratory to try the reboot of some old and almost fogorten Hasbro's franchise. It hadn't to be canon, but something like Magic planet-shift articles.

* Why not to add the races from d20 Future (Star Frontiers, Star*drive and Ganmma World) to any crystal sphere?

* What would happen if the worlds of Birthright and Mystara are visited by alien spelljammers?

 

[Kobold Avenger]

* Why not to add the races from d20 Future (Star Frontiers, Star*drive and Ganmma World) to any crystal sphere?

Many of the races from Star Frontiers already exist in Spelljammer.

But Star*Drive and Alternity came a lot later so races like the Fraal, Aleerin/Mechalus, Weren, Sheseyan and T'sa weren't even considered at the time.

 

[tardigrade]

You could try reading the original Spelljammer stuff then, since it was pretty explicit in its Ptolemic setup. The whole point of Crystal spheres connected by the phlogiston was allowing travel between worlds that didn't require planar magic.

Which isn't to say that a mishmash isn't possible, and and obviously we can all use whatever interpretations of the rules, fluff, and canon we like, but in 2e there was one Prime Material Plane, and all the published campaign worlds took place on it (except Ravenloft, which was on a demiplane).

The original Spelljammer stuff is literally all I ever read on this, but it was 20 years ago. I'm away from books at the moment but I notice the Wikipedia page for Plane (Dungeons and Dragons) says "The 2nd edition Dungeon Master's Guide states there are several prime material planes, but several other 2nd edition products say there is only one Prime Material Plane rather than several." It does also say "the Phlogiston is a part of the Material plane" but doesn't provide a source for this; I don't remember this ever being explicitly stated, and IIRC you couldn't access other planes from the phlogiston, which to me suggested a "special" relationship with the rest of the planar cosmology. But it's entirely possible I'm provably wrong, which I'm happy to acknowledge if you can provide actual quotes.

[edit] of course if I felt like being pedantic I could point out Planescape didn't generally take place on the Prime Material, and IIRC Birthright had a completely separate setup with a shadow plane etc, but also IIRC there was never any published way to move between Cerilia and other campaign settings, via spelljammer or otherwise.

 

[MechaPilot]

It could just as easily be "Return to the Barrier Peaks".


If it is Spelljammer, I don't see why they would attach the start point to any particular campaign setting. It's Krynn gnomes who are known to build spelljamming ships in any case.

They'll attach it to FR, because FR is the center of WotC's published world, and because it's (according to WotC data) the most popular setting that they own the rights to.

 

[delericho]

The original Spelljammer stuff is literally all I ever read on this, but it was 20 years ago. I'm away from books at the moment but I notice the Wikipedia page for Plane (Dungeons and Dragons) says "The 2nd edition Dungeon Master's Guide states there are several prime material planes, but several other 2nd edition products say there is only one Prime Material Plane rather than several." It does also say "the Phlogiston is a part of the Material plane" but doesn't provide a source for this

Yeah, the question of whether there is one PMP or many parallel Primes has had different answers in different places. IMO that's a good thing - sometimes it's better if not everything is locked down and definitively answered.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

They'll attach it to FR, because FR is the center of WotC's published world, and because it's (according to WotC data) the most popular setting that they own the rights to.

True, but they could quite easily make the start point transferable to any generic fantasy setting, because more people play homebrew+Greyhawk+Krynn+FR+et.al. than play FR. Lantan is a bit specific.