Spelljammer...just wow

[Imruphel]

I always liked the idea of Spelljammer but the silly stuff was too much.

To the OP: try acquiring a copy of Dungeon 92. The Polyhedron part of that issue has an updated version of Spelljammer albeit without any monster conversions. I'm tossing up including some Spelljammer in my ongoing FR campaign. If I do, I'll be using these rules.

 

[WhatGravitas]

But fans of the Big Three saw it as a goofy imposition on their worlds (which it was), and they rebelled.

I blame the "goofy". It was a bit like Planescape, with all the interesting weirdness replaced by wacky goofiness.

I mean... "Giff". Seriously. But the setting had potential... Clockwork Horrors, Neogi, Nautilus ships... yeah, but it went too far on the "random strangeness"-scale. It needed more grit, more teeth, more... menace? More mystique? Something grander... like Planescape.

 

[Arkhandus]

He already mentioned having that issue of Polyhedron, in the original post. It's very minimal.

 

[Jer]

This setting is pure awesome. Why didn't it do well?!

Spelljammer was about 75% cool, 20% goofy and 5% WTF?. I liked a lot of things about the setting -- space roving beholders and mind flayers, the neogi with their umber hulk slaves, the fairly cool looking ships, the giff, the importation of the Star Frontiers races into the setting. There was some easily ignorable goofy stuff like giant space hamsters, but at the core of the setting is the whole "crystal sphere/phlogiston" cosmology they cooked up to link all of the different campaign worlds together. For a lot of folks, the travel between crystal spheres really stretched the setting to the breaking point.

Personally, we had a lot of fun with the setting by setting things just in space, ignoring the connection to other campaign worlds, and playing up the swashbuckling pirate in fantasy space aspects.

 

[Andor]

I always loved spelljammer. There was so much goodness, and as for whackiness... Gimmie a break. The average D&D game reads like an issue of the Weekly World News with swords.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If you didn't like SpellJammer it was very easy to ignore, since "core" setting material seldom included any SJ references.

Having the ultimate reward in the Ruins of Greyhawk be a ticket to the stars was a pretty hard-to-ignore element in what was arguably TSR's flagship setting.

 

[IanB]

Spelljammer had a number of good idea kernels but they were all caught up in a fairly crappy overall whole. One nice thing is a lot of the 'good' can be adapted to the Astral Plane without having to bring the 'bad' along with it, IMO. Just say no to crystal spheres and the phlogiston, and yes to neogi as interplanar slave traders and mind flayer astral warships, and you're OK.

 

[Ranger REG]

This setting is pure awesome. Why didn't it do well?!

It started off as a crossover setting linking TSR's many published settings together.

It later have its own setting but by then, not everyone is interested in crossovers.

If anything, it needs its own signature setting and do away the sciences of phlogiston and crystal sphere. The Polyhedron mini-setting Spelljammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon is as good as Omega World mini-setting.

 

[Andor]

Out of genuine puzzlement why are people so annoyed by the crystal spheres being linked by the phlostigen, by not by all the primes being linked by the planes of shadow, Astral, Deep ethereal, Sigil, and the infinite stairway?

 

[IanB]

Out of genuine puzzlement why are people so annoyed by the crystal spheres being linked by the phlostigen, by not by all the primes being linked by the planes of shadow, Astral, Deep ethereal, Sigil, and the infinite stairway?

Because they're not, unless you want them to be.

The thing that makes people get upset when Spelljammer (and to some extent Planescape) are mentioned is that they explicitly say the settings are all linked.

Contrast to the now-normal 3E method of keeping all settings in their own separate unconnected cosmologies.