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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[Azzy]

This was done in other adventures? I'm only familar with Curse of Strahd and PotA.

Yep, Tomb of Annihilation has reprints of monsters from Volos. Older adventures (Tyranny of Dragons through, at least, PotA) reprinted monsters from the Monster Manual that weren't in the Basic D&D pdfs.

 

[thundershot]

This news is most exciting! I really hope we get a nice hardcover Spelljammer adventure! That's right up their alley these days... Making an adventure include new stuff in addition to the actual adventure.

BRING IT ON! Spelljammer was our favorite setting back in the day. Best part is, you can play almost any module in it. Just have the PC's land on a planet and voila!

 

[Elderbrain]

It's ironic that they are including a Giff in the book - even if it turns out to be just an art piece and not a stat block - because in VGTM Elminster mocks Volo over his belief in the existence of such things (in the Mind Flayer section, where they discuss Nautiloids)... guess Mordenkainen is more savvy. Also, given how Spelljammer-specific the Giff are (did they ever turn up anywhere else?) I would bet money that this HAS to be a hint towards Spelljammer material in a future product. I expect that it will be an adventure with Spelljammer rules, rather than a Setting book (more Curse of Strahd than Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide). Likewise with Planescape (though I expect some Planescape material will be in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes).

 

[Shasarak]

It would be interesting to see a 5e Spelljammer. I think that Chris Perkins did some Spelljammer adventures in Dungeon.

 

[Ancalagon]

That artwork reminds me of the odd obsession that Easley, Elmore, and Caldwell had with putting feathers on everything.

And dubious armor.

 

[Rygar]

Regarding those Twitch stats (9M) -- that sounds totally realistic. A comparatively tiny place like EN World got 645K unique readers last month, and over 5M in the last 12 months. I would expect Twitch to get an order of magnitude or more higher. 9M totally feasible; it's probably more!

As @neuronphaser said, back in 2004 the BBC said 3M people were playing D&D. Now it's over 8M. In America alone!

Also that BBC article has a link to EN World on it, which is awesome!

The problem with those numbers for twitch is there's no context.

For example:
-How many of those hits are one person, multiple devices? How many are someone watching part of it on a bus/subway ride home, and finishing on their PC?
-How many of those hits are people who've never played the game, just hit a link of Reddit, or some page recommending the view, and will never play D&D?
-How many of those hits are people who were looking for some other content? Someone looking for Baldur's Gate, or someone looking for CRPGs by typing RPG for example.
-How many of those hits are bots traversing the network?

9 million views doesn't mean 9 million customers, it could mean 10 customers. It's a metric without meaning, because it has no correlation to sales, and the metric fails to indicate how many of those people watched the links for more than 5 seconds.

To put it another way, DragonLance reportedly confused the heck out of TSR. The novels sold extremely well, but the game didn't. So if we made the statement that 10 million people read Dragonlance book X, it wouldn't correlate to 10 million Dragonlance players.

Just to note, your numbers need context as well. 645k unique IP addresses doesn't equate to 645k unique readers. Given how frequently many people post here, it's a safe bet that a fairly substantial number of your hits are one user, multiple devices, multiple IPs. Additionally, we need more information. Is that 645k unique IP's that click into one or two articles and maybe one or two forum threads? Because a public webpage will always have some number of people scanning for security holes, and some number of spiders cataloguing the pages.

So IMO we don't really have a reliable metric for WOTC's claims, and given their past history of playing fast and loose with these kinds of statements, I think a more direct and clear statement is needed to demonstrate the claim they're making.

 

[Morrus]

Is Spelljammer Coming To D&D 5E?

So IMO we don't really have a reliable metric for WOTC's claims, and given their past history of playing fast and loose with these kinds of statements, I think a more direct and clear statement is needed to demonstrate the claim they're making.

Well, they’re not making them to us. We’re just eavesdropping at a trade show and hearing a tiny part of the story. Any potential partner or investor (well, not the latter - Hasbro isn’t looking for investors at GAMA) will have a much more detailed conversation with WotC before doing any basic diligence. Who knows? But they ain’t gonna prove anything to us.

So, we believe them, or don’t believe them, and carry on talking nonsense regardless. It’s not like the numbers have any real meaning or relevance to us anyway. If they’d said 5M or 12M, it’s still just “lots” unless you’re selling D&D books.

 

[delericho]

I would bet money that this HAS to be a hint towards Spelljammer material in a future product. I expect that it will be an adventure with Spelljammer rules, rather than a Setting book (more Curse of Strahd than Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide).

I'd be happy with that. I've found the 5e adventures have made for pretty solid setting books. Indeed, I found "Storm King's Thunder" to be a considerably better setting book than adventure.

(At least, that was true of "Curse of Strahd" and "Storm King's Thunder". I can't speak about the adventures since then, as after SKT I stopped buying.)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

ToA is useful as a setting too.

 

[Jer]

I'd be happy with that. I've found the 5e adventures have made for pretty solid setting books. Indeed, I found "Storm King's Thunder" to be a considerably better setting book than adventure.

I've actually come to the realization that pure setting books are almost useless for me these days. I get more out of an adventure with setting elements in it than I do an actual setting book.

I don't think this was always true - I used to put in a lot of time just reading setting material and thinking about games I might potentially run someday. But since I don't have time to do that anymore my value in setting books as setting books is reduced and the value of adventures with rich setting information along side them has skyrocketed. The 5e books are not quite what I want in this regard but they're close enough to work with.