Spelljammer...just wow

[Shemeska]

Then how come you can plane shift from Oerth to Toril?

Since when have you ever been able to do that?

 

[Ripzerai]

via an explicitly long, difficult and uncertain journey through the darkest parts of the Plane of Shadow.

Actually, according to the 3e Manual of the Planes, page 61, it takes 1d4 hours. That's it. Hardly a long journey. Not so difficult, either. Sure, there are monsters, but there are monsters everywhere. It doesn't much matter how rough the terrain is when the trip's over in 1d4 hours. Maybe the mountain's higher than any mountain on the Material Plane, but you only have to scale it for less than an afternoon before you can open the portal. The MotP also mentions Shadow Portals that allow you to make the journey instantaneously.

By contrast, spelljamming takes months or years (it takes 72 days just to get from the sun to the edge of a crystal shell in a typical sphere, and the second half of that journey won't have planets or asteroids to resupply at - then another 10-100 days through the phlogiston to the next sphere, and who's to say the next sphere is where you want to go?) and you're exposing yourself to the dangers of wildspace and the phlogiston, risking asphyxiation, dehydration, and starvation, not to mention pirates, slavers, and monsters the size of planets.

If your complaint is the ease of accessibility of other settings, Spelljammer beats the Plane of Shadow hands down for a truly challenging voyage.

 

[Glyfair]

Greyhawk, DL, FR etc all shared a common cosmology even starting back in 1e, well before SJ came up with its notions, and before PS expanded upon and fleshed out the planes.

D&D had a cosmology that was carried between worlds (although I wasn't aware it applied to Dragonlance specifically). That cosmology did have options for having alternate worlds.

However, that's a far step for specifying that you can get from setting A to setting B. Once it was specified then it became expected as the norm.

Note that I don't count fiction. That means that Ed Greenwood's articles on the three archmages don't count as tying the worlds together. It also means that the Runequest Griselda story that had Redfox appear in Glorantha doesn't tie her world into Glorantha.

 

[Korgoth]

Here's something for the naysayers on SJ:

The only valid arguments I've seen here ended up not being valid at all. The first was expecting D&D-space physics to be exactly like real-world physics. It's a fantasy game with fantastically odd sense of physics. I am glad space in D&D didn't turn out like real-world space or we'd have a Star Wars rip-off.

Hey, I was just indicating my personal perference. That's why I personally do not feel excited about SpellJammer. Am I wrong - am I actually excited about SpellJammer but somehow fail to see how excited I am about it?

Also, "Star Wars rip-off" is a total straw man. I thought I indicated that I liked the idea of sailing ships in space... I just wanted it to be like actual space. Solving the problems of space travel in a medieval milieu using magic rather than computers and advanced materials technology. That's different from Star Wars.

If you like it, good for you. That's cool that you like it. I think it has some interesting ideas. But ultimately, it leaves me "meh" because of the physics issue. Isn't that the sort of thing you wanted to know from this thread?

 

[AllisterH]

Like others, I think the main problem with SJ was that it didn't have a setting of its own and thus seemed to always having to be "part of the big 3, yet not defined by it".

PS I think was more successful in establishing itself. What I actually found/remembered from r.g.f.d was that people would use elements of PS but not SJ BECAUSE PS never intruded on to FR.

 

[RedFox]

Note that I don't count fiction. That means that Ed Greenwood's articles on the three archmages don't count as tying the worlds together. It also means that the Runequest Griselda story that had Redfox appear in Glorantha doesn't tie her world into Glorantha.

 

[the Jester]

Since when have you ever been able to do that?

Er... since 1e.

Why not? Alternate material planes and all that. Heck, I'm pretty sure that the old "wizards three" articles in Dragon involved one or two of them plane shifting in from time to time.

 

[Shemeska]

D&D had a cosmology that was carried between worlds (although I wasn't aware it applied to Dragonlance specifically). That cosmology did have options for having alternate worlds.

While the 1e material evolved quite a bit as it transitioned into 2e (and has continued to evolve for better or for worse since then), it had what were then called "alternate material planes" all linked to the same common inner and outer planes.

The 1e MotP for instance was pretty explicit in linking them together what with all the various cultural pantheons all existing in the same set of planes, and that was the least of it. Takhisis of DL/Krynn is named in the entry on Tiamat (in 1e it was claimed that she and tiamat were the same, while 2e onwards has had them as seperate beings), and so Krynn was certainly intended to be within that cosmology (the latter-day revisionism of 3e DL notwithstanding).

1e FR material had FR within the same shared cosmology as well, among other examples. The linkage did become more and more frequent towards the later years of that edition.

 

[Shemeska]

Er... since 1e.

Why not? Alternate material planes and all that. Heck, I'm pretty sure that the old "wizards three" articles in Dragon involved one or two of them plane shifting in from time to time.

Having looked at the appendix for the 1e MotP, seems you're right. In 1e at least it was possible. Wierd. Still, given how they defined the prime at times during that edition, that would mesh with the mechanics of using a planeshift. Though 2e's evolution of the prime material made that impossible, and 3e has likewise seemed to tacitly acknowledge SJ without going into it in much detail, and tried to make the Shadow plane the primary conduit between seperate worlds on the prime.

I don't recall the situation of planeshift being addressed in 3e so far as prime world to prime world goes, but I suspect that it wouldn't be possible to directly go between them with a planeshift (though hitting the planes and then planeshift back to a different world would be kosher).

 

[Raven Crowking]

I liked it, but never ran a Spelljammer campaign. I used a lot of the material in my home game, and statted out the worlds in my Crystal Sphere. I even included least helms that only flew within a planetary atmosphere.

It was a fun setting.

RC