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<blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 9079750" data-attributes="member: 8863"><p>Okay, Spelljammer is where we start getting to the hit or miss stuff.</p><p></p><p>Alzrius really does cover the main issue with this one. There's a lot of stuff that just doesn't work outside Spelljammer, because a good number of these monsters are designed to be encountered in space. This isn't something a typical D&D campaign is going to need. And a good number of these things are adventures unto themselves, and some of those might be the sort of thing that really can only get used once.</p><p></p><p>The most usable stuff got reprinted outside Spelljammer too. The various beholder kin mostly made it to to MM and the clockwork horrors went on to the 4th MC Annual and then to 3e's MMII (don't know if they made it past 3e). So this stuff had a little traction. </p><p></p><p>But Spelljammer's biggest winner of traction and arguably one of 2e's biggest traction winners overall was in the campaign setting box -- the neogi. Now those guys really have traction, and it's not hard to see why. They have an eel head and neck on a spider body, but Tony DiTerlizzii's illo in the MM makes the eel parts look really snaky. And anything that looks like a cross between a snake and a spider is guaranteed to trigger phobias. They were designed to be one of the big villains in the setting, and when people who are willing to tolerate <em>mind flayers</em> want to kill you on sight, you know you've hit the big time of evil. They enslave umber hulks on a very regular basis, so that gives them a connection to an existing monster. And of course, they got included in the MM which gave them much more exposure and they were adaptable to more normal D&D campaigns. The neogi were just one of the best damn things that came out of Spelljammer.</p><p></p><p>And yes, there's the giant space hamsters. We can't forget them. Spelljammer was gloriously gonzo, and is a setting that can do some serious mood whiplash. This is the setting where you can go from bumping into a gnomish sidewheeler with all those hamsters or encountering a platoon of giff, only to run into a bunch of neogi mindspiders, get trapped on the Spelljammer, find yourself enmeshed in the nasty plotting on the Rock of Bral, get killed or worse by the reigar simply for the art, end up in the middle of a six-way mutual beholder genocide, not to mention the scro, the mind flayers, the clockwork horrors, the witchlight marauders (spoilers for next time!), etc.</p><p></p><p>But all in all, MC7 is really an optional MC. Most of its stuff is probably useful in the context of a Spelljammer campaign, but far less so outside it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Orius, post: 9079750, member: 8863"] Okay, Spelljammer is where we start getting to the hit or miss stuff. Alzrius really does cover the main issue with this one. There's a lot of stuff that just doesn't work outside Spelljammer, because a good number of these monsters are designed to be encountered in space. This isn't something a typical D&D campaign is going to need. And a good number of these things are adventures unto themselves, and some of those might be the sort of thing that really can only get used once. The most usable stuff got reprinted outside Spelljammer too. The various beholder kin mostly made it to to MM and the clockwork horrors went on to the 4th MC Annual and then to 3e's MMII (don't know if they made it past 3e). So this stuff had a little traction. But Spelljammer's biggest winner of traction and arguably one of 2e's biggest traction winners overall was in the campaign setting box -- the neogi. Now those guys really have traction, and it's not hard to see why. They have an eel head and neck on a spider body, but Tony DiTerlizzii's illo in the MM makes the eel parts look really snaky. And anything that looks like a cross between a snake and a spider is guaranteed to trigger phobias. They were designed to be one of the big villains in the setting, and when people who are willing to tolerate [I]mind flayers[/I] want to kill you on sight, you know you've hit the big time of evil. They enslave umber hulks on a very regular basis, so that gives them a connection to an existing monster. And of course, they got included in the MM which gave them much more exposure and they were adaptable to more normal D&D campaigns. The neogi were just one of the best damn things that came out of Spelljammer. And yes, there's the giant space hamsters. We can't forget them. Spelljammer was gloriously gonzo, and is a setting that can do some serious mood whiplash. This is the setting where you can go from bumping into a gnomish sidewheeler with all those hamsters or encountering a platoon of giff, only to run into a bunch of neogi mindspiders, get trapped on the Spelljammer, find yourself enmeshed in the nasty plotting on the Rock of Bral, get killed or worse by the reigar simply for the art, end up in the middle of a six-way mutual beholder genocide, not to mention the scro, the mind flayers, the clockwork horrors, the witchlight marauders (spoilers for next time!), etc. But all in all, MC7 is really an optional MC. Most of its stuff is probably useful in the context of a Spelljammer campaign, but far less so outside it. [/QUOTE]
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