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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Echohawk" data-source="post: 9267605" data-attributes="member: 9849">I'm going to take issue with this. The replacement of the phlogiston and the crystal spheres with the Astral Sea in the Spelljammer campaign is a much deeper change to the setting than it might initially seem. (I've written about this before here on ENWorld.) Not only are a sizeable portion of the Spelljammer monsters (a lot more than 1%) connected to the phlogiston or the spheres in some way, but the use of the Astral flattens the cosmology in a fundamentally disruptive way. Previously, there were maps of routes from, say, Krynnspace to Greyspace through the phlogiston and getting from one to the other might require require a trip through the Astromundi Cluster. This is not the case with the Astral Sea, since travel between any two places in the Astral Sea takes the same amount of time. To get anywhere in 5e Spelljammer, a pilot merely needs to think about that location while in the Astral. Effectively, all wildspace systems are equidistant from each other. The cosmos is completely flat with every system just one astral voyage away from every other system.This removes much of the naval flavour from Spelljammer. There can be no blockades of Realmspace by the Elven Armada, no rumours of strange beholder ships being increasingly sighted in distant crystal spheres gradually encroaching on Herospace, no ancient maps of new routes through the phlogiston to long forgotten spheres, no rumours of clockwork horrors gradually spreading from sphere to sphere.Yes, it is possible to come up with creative ways to replicate some of these scenarios using the Astral Sea. Yes, 5e is so light in lore that it doesn't directly contradict much from the 2e Spelljammer line. But the flattening of the cosmos represents a very significant change to the setting, certainly enough to question a glib claim that 99% of existing lore can be used as is.</blockquote>

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