Neither setting boxed set was really what it pretended to be. Spelljammer pretended to be a D&D space opera, but was really an examination of how Renaissance ideas about cosmology would work in practice.
Hi Paul,
If you have time, could you clarify, as I do not understand?
The initial Spelljammer box set was about setting D&D in space. The subgenre was space fantasy, which could easily be called space opera. If it wasn't the space fantasy/space opera subgenre, or if Spelljammer failed in some respect with regard to that, I missed how it failed. Spelljammer has interstellar empires, adventures, a mysterious Flying Dutchman ghost ship (The Spelljammer), pirates, giffs with their arquebusses and cannons.
Jeff Grubb and Zeb Cook used some notions of Medieval cosmology as inspiration, but I do not see how Spelljammer is "an examination of how Renaissance ideas about cosmology would work in practice." Of the 192 pages of the original set (adding together the two books and not including the ship cards), only 9 pages are devoted to the chapter on "Arcane Space." And, even then, although I am no Renaissance scholar, I am pretty sure "Arcane Space" looks unlike how the historic notions of the heavens might have been envisioned. In his Foreword from 1989 for the
Lorebook of the Void, Grubb writes, "Zeb Cook pulled out some medieval woodcuts showing a traveler passing through the spheres of the world to discover the sun and planets on tracks, and with that the idea of crystal shells was born." I think these medieval woodcuts were a simple starting point to create a fun environment for adventure. I am pretty sure there was no serious attempt to replicate the historical ideas behind some of these concepts.
It might just be that you wrote this post in haste and you were trying to make a slightly different point. But, I think Spelljammer succeeded as space fantasy within the scope of D&D quite well. Better than if someone from TSR had tasked
me to do "D&D in space," (in the Foreword, Grubb writes: "The design directive for the SPELLJAMMER supplement was simple: Take the AD&D game into outer space.") that's for sure. I thought much of it was positively inspired.