Spelljammer Spelljammer Shows Up In The Wild - Check Out The Tables of Contents

Copies of Spelljammer are starting to show up. Mike Long of Tribality is in receipt of the books and has tweeted some photos!

 

[Remathilis]

Off-topic, but has always been my beef with Elder Scrolls lore. Like, yeah, I guess it’s cool that Khajit have their own religion with lots of parallels and points of divergence from what the other races believe, but… I’ve literally talked to Sheogorath. He’s not a cat, and he’s not particularly into skooma.

Didja now?

 

[Weiley31]

Based on what we are seeing in these screensahots, probably not too hard to use.older material and convert. Bonus, you can ameliorate the work by throwing it up on the DMsGuild.

And judging by the Deck Plans showed off from Spelljammers: Adventures in Space, you can still straight up use the Deck Plans from the 2E books and it's all kosher/good.

 

[Weiley31]

Didja now?

If ONLY Elder Scrolls would start letting us use the domesticated cat looking Khajit variants. It would be GLORIOUS!

 

[Parmandur]

And judging by the Deck Plans showed off from Spelljammers: Adventures in Space, you can still straight up use the Deck Plans and it's all kosher/good.

Yeah, the writeup doesn6look any more difficult than making a Monster star block.

 

[Charlaquin]

Didja now?

Well. That’s just delightful.

 

[Ath'kethin]

The problem is that (at least in its 2E rendition) the combined cosmology of Planescape officially said that there's only the Great Wheel. Krynnfolk were just clueless berks for thinking that Tiamat was named Takhisis and lived in the Abyss, when the cool and edgy bloods all knew that wasn't the case.

That's all true. And one of the major things that put me off Planescape back in the day was the shocking and overwhelming arrogance of its in-world presentation. The setting seemed unnecessary enough before busting in on the older settings and their lore like a locker room bully.

I thought for years I was in the minority there, but seeing the setting's (surprisingly) abysmal sales numbers makes me feel a bit more on the right side.

 

[Yaarel]

According to the interviews with Crawford and Perkins, the "Astral Plane" includes both Wildspace and the Astral Sea. Perkins pointed out that astral literally means "of the stars", so it makes sense for Wildspace - being space - to be part of that plane, metaphysically speaking.

I think, by implication, the idea that these are truly separate planes from the Material is being revised (or at least downplayed). But also, Wildspace is more like a liminal region - perhaps comparable to the Border Ethereal? - that straddles both the messy world of mortals and the timeless realm of thought and emotion that connects to the Outer Planes. The Astral Plane as described in the core books is now the Astral Sea (like in 4E), and is just one part of the broader Astral Plane, with also bleeds into the Material in the form of Wildspace. At least that's my guess.

I did assume that they'd have it be like the Astral was hyperspace, or the Warp of Warhammer 40,000: a plane you could purposefully drop into using certain magic/technology that could circumvent having to travel for centuries between stars by going the long way through Wildspace (which would just be the region of the Material outside planetary atmospheres), but it seems not. Rather, the Material Plane consists of individual worlds nested in the Astral Plane, and if you just fly far enough, you pass through the veil. But we'll see...

Honestly, I suspect that what'll appear in the books won't, in fact, be a cosmology fully coherent with the Great Wheel or anything else. I think they may deliberately downplay the role of planar travel in Spelljammer, and just give a nod to the idea of the Outer Planes in the form of Astral Dominions, and not necessarily reference, save in passing, that this "Astral Plane" is the same "Astral Plane" described in the DMG and elsewhere. Basically, Spelljammer will be its own thing, as it always was.

Much of what is speculated here turns out to be official.

 

[Yaarel]

This is what I will be using, in order to facilitate travel the "long" way, i.e. space like our space.

In my head canon, the ethereal brings magic with it, so there are areas of thick magic (most D&D campaigns), thin magic (some steampunk or quasi magical settings) and low or zero ethereal areas (our Earth). It helps the fictional conceit that some of the stars we see from D&D worlds might be Earth or something like it.

Gotta have room for the SS Beagle to fly!

My view is the material plane is exactly like reallife outer space.

The problem is the stars are impossibly far away.

The solution is to dematerialize out of the material plane and into the astral plane.

In the astral plane, the wildspace simulates ("overlaps") a particular solar system (or similar system). The astral sea can faster-than-light travel between the wildspace systems. Then the traveler rematerializes at the solar system of the distant star.

 

[Demetrios1453]

That was my plan too. The Astral Sea will be both hyperspace and an undersea equivalent. Maybe I'll even give some bad guys an experimental Spelljammer Helm that lets them emerge anywhere inside of Wildspace, to essentially give them a "submarine".

Same here. As I said before, I'll just have it that you could just choose not to go to the Astral and keep traveling on to other Wildspace systems through the almost empty space between them, but they are so far apart that doing so is impractical, if not downright impossible, so everyone just goes to the Astral "hyperspace" anyway. In the end, there's zero real difference, other than just keeping the Material Plane more contiguous in my headcanon....

(Added thought: the voids between systems would be excellent places for Far Realm/Great Old One entities to lurk, distant and unseen)
(Added added thought: the silver haze spheres were originally placed there by gods/powers/whoever to block said entities from entering inhabited systems and causing havoc there, but accidentally had the side effect of allowing mortals access to the Astral.)

 

[Parmandur]