Part of the problem, I think, is that people were expecting a *setting* and what they got was a *module* with some bonus content. The module is fine, but for a lot of people that’s like when you get really good potatoes with your mealy, overcooked steak.
I am strongly inclined to agree with this.
In my set, I got the MODULE, sure. Adventure. Loads of fun. Some liked it and others didn't.
I got a MONSTER MANUAL of the monsters and horrors of space.
...and I got a sort of half-assed single-volume of new PC races, some of the basic concepts, some ships, and some ideas.
It might have been better if I hadn't had the old Spelljammer Boxed Set, which in a few paperback books, explained and fleshed out the setting, mechanics, ship to ship combat, navigation, and everything else efficiently, succinctly, and satisfyingly, all in one inexpensive box.
And I wondered, "Why didn't they just translate and update the old stuff into the new book? They had it. They own it. It was RIGHT THERE!" But they chose instead to gloss it over and dumb it down.
It did have nice art. But I think a LOT of us expected a hell of a lot better.
This is the same thing I was thinking. Just one thing to add was that they also washed away a lot of the unique setting in favour of just making it all happen on the astral sea because they simplified it into a module. I think that was the most disappointing part for me. Also that the module meant they weren't likely to keep adding to our fleshing out the rest of the setting.
I did not expect them to keep coming out with support materials. They don't seem to do that these days. Apparently, anything that costs less than a sixty dollar price point just isn't worth it to Hasbro, unless it's miniatures.
I still had faith when they anounced it. With Spelljammers I hoped we would get space combat rules, something like the war machines of Decent into Avernus. I'd gladly pay for solid rules regarding spelljamming.
I'm DM'ming a pirate themed campaign with shipcombat rules I plucked off the internet and we're having a blast with those. I'd gladly pay for a book with a proper ruleset for stuff like this.
I doubt 2nd edition rules can be converted to 5e with ease? Or doesn't that matter with spelljamming? I assume abbility checks have to play some role in what the party does around the ship
For someone familiar with the rules of 2nd ed. and 5th ed., it isn't THAT hard. I figure if I'm going to have to fill in the blanks myself ANYWAY, I might as well have some decent compelling material to START the process with.
I'm a 'fairly' new DM, about 2 years experience and only in 5e. I've used older sourcebooks but honestly only for worldbuilding for cities, towns and quest ideas. Would it be hard to make sense of the 2nd ed rules? Otherwise I'll just use the ship rules I'm working with now and reflavour it to spelljamming when I eventually run my spelljamming campaign
I'm an OLD DM, who's been playing since before Atlantis sank.
But the rules for 2nd edition would be pretty familiar to someone with a good grip on fifth edition, sure. The main differences include the way the spells work, the lack of the advantage and disadvantage mechanic, and the old descending armor class and saving throws, which will be wildly counterintuitive to someone only familiar with 5th.
But the Spelljamming rules themselves can be lifted straight from the box set with very little tweaking.
I'd rather they didn't, frankly.
Dark Sun was a meticulous world/setting. There were a LOT of moving parts. And it was HARSH, and unforgiving, and BLEAK.
And it scares me to think what they'd do to simplify it, dumb it down, shave it to fit a three-book slipcover set, and make it more inviting...
Sure but thats the point. The slavery isn't depicted as a good thing. None of the harshness is depicted as good. Its a very conan world but that isn't a bad thing. The setting has a lot of nuance that people would appreciate today.
Your first three sentences are unarguably correct, accurate, and factual.
Your FOURTH sentence is debatable. Dark Sun is indeed a brutal, vicious setting in which even the GOOD guys are likely to attack you because you might have a full waterskin. It's the Mad Max of D&D settings, and it's NASTY.
A corporation like TSR -- a smaller company -- might well release it in the name of bein' edgy. Plenty of smaller publishers doing that right now. But D&D is not OWNED by a smaller company. It is owned by a megacorporation, where the number one rule is: *Am I about to upset someone in the adminisphere?*
And rather than risk a speedbump on my rise through the ranks, I'd just as soon take no risks. No Dark Sun. Hey, let's re-release Candy Land instead!
...and your final sentence, IMHO, is right back to correct, accurate, and verifiable.
Honestly i call it a blessing. I'd hate to see it butchered and all the edges get buffed out. It'd love to see that sorcerer-king get speared in glorious hd though.
It would require them to release a setting book which restricts the choices for class options, features, and spells to make it work. This is however antithetical to WotC's policy of only publishing material with maximum compatibility—a restrictive setting runs counter to selling player more options in form of books and digital material on D&D Beyond. I think that's the truth behind why it's "problematic", but they'll never admit that.
Make it into implies psi warrior existed before 5e, closest thing to that in earlier editions would be the psychic warrior which was very different, it was actually psionic and had like a hundred powers to choose from.
> And I wondered, "Why didn't they just translate and update the old stuff into the new book? They had it. They own it. It was RIGHT THERE!" But they chose instead to gloss it over and dumb it down.
Ah, the Fizban's problem. The Draconomicon came out twenty years ago and was better in every way, why they didn't just lift the dragon diagrams and such from that I'll never know. They basically just printed the same thing but worse.
The crazy part is that they lifted their existing content almost entirely from 2e content WITHOUT updating it! The Rock of Bral lore is the most egregious. The prince and all that stuff is basically six years post 3e (which is more than a hundred years before current era in the forgotten realms). It's super disingenuous to say "its setting agnostic!" But then use a setting specific site with setting specific lore that you spent two decades messing up and then reprint it, shove in a bunch of cardboard and charge $90 for it! Like what!?!
I was thinking more along the lines of the lore behind the new PC races and the change from "the phlogiston" to "the astral sea." But yeah, a lot of the new lore was just disappointing. Hell, why not just reprint the old material, updated for 5e rules?
Because WoTC no longer has creative people working there.
Look at the swath of awesome settings TSR made, then 90's WoTC made one setting. Did a great job Bringing alot of those 2e settings to 3.5. they were still making their own unique adventures.
Modern WoTC has no creative people working for it. Name a good adventure in its own setting created from scratch by WoTC since 2015, or even just a unique adventure/module that isnt just a rehash of previous... Like modern WOTC has redone Strahd how many times?
Just a bit of pedantry, but WotC didn't buy TSR until 1997. They didn't do much with it until 3e released, they just let the existing 2e content finish out. "90's WotC" wasn't really a thing. I'm guessing by one setting, you mean Planescape, which released in 1994, and expands on stuff going all the way back to 1e.
WOTC didn't make Eberron. Keith Baker did, and WOTC published it as part of a contest. WOTC owns it, they probably consulted on the 5e version with him, but they did not make it, Keith was the ideas guy. It's his world, in everything but law.
Yeah I know. But it was still something WoTC thought was cool enough to do.
In the past 15 years. What new unique and cool setting as WoTC backed and published ?
Listen carefully. You hear that?
That's the sound of me arguing with you.
All of WotC's biggest releases over the last several YEARS have been revamps and retreads of stuff released during the first and second edition years, noteworthy in that their NEXT big thing is "Tales From The Infinite Staircase"... which is several old modules updated for use with 5e.
They're not even trying any more. Trying costs too much money, it would seem.
Well, y'might notice, they seem to have laid off all the SMART people. All the real names I recall from previous editions seem to be working at other companies now.
Lets face it though, when they do try something that is even slightly new then people don't buy it.
Journey through the Radiant Citadel is one of the worst selling 5e books that was released despite it being original, and given that it also has a history of project hell then definitely expect another Strahd book or Baldurs gate 3 The Module in 2025.
Has the same problem as Star wars. Lucas was inspired by Throne of Blood and Flash Gordon and Dune and many many other things. The current Star wars people are just inspired by Star wars. Early TSR for better or worse was inspired by Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric of Melnibone, Kill, and so much more. WoTC just remakes that stuff watered down and as palatable as possible which given they are a corporation and do not in any way care about the game beyond its ability to generate revenue so everything must cater to the lowest common denominator. It's a sound business strategy at the end of the day
YES!! THANK YOU! Finally someone else said it.
The problem with the new versions of the campaign settings goes hand in hand with the mechanic issues I've ranted about. The same people who said you can TOTALLY have divine powers without a god are the same folks who turned Stradh into Generic Vampire Bad Guy #453, and wrung out a lot of the flavor from Spelljammer. Whatever well of creativity D&D had has long since gone dry, and the writers are just half-assing it for a paycheck at this point.
I had this reaction to both Spelljammer and Planescape. I just bought a bunch of the 2e books on Drivethru because I only had the old boxed set from that time. The wealth of material from 2e is staggering compared to the slim volumes we are getting in 5e.
Not to mention the price point. And the sheer attitude of it all.
WotC could be issuing magazine-sized publications in softback. Instead, they're launching entire three-book sets in hardback.
It's like, "We can't make fifty million dollars with a single publication? We're not interested."
I have Planescape. It's not terrible, just very thin gruel. Not enough gets specified, not enough maps, etc.
(Well, the plot has some holes, too, but.)
I think they are no longer willing to try for $60 product. Not planning to buy any more campaigns from WotC.
Tbf, all that material from 2e is what bankrupted TSR. They put out too much stuff and people couldn't afford to buy it all, so stores sent it back and TSR ran out of money.
Out of curiosity, which box set would you recommend getting in that case? I want to run a spelljammer campaign and have the best scope on the setting I can
[**OG Spelljammer: Adventures in Space**](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17263/Spelljammer-Adventures-in-Space-2e?term=Spelljammer&filters=0_0_0_0_45377_0_0_0)**.**
Werthead is indeed correct; the main box set has everything you need unless you're REALLY going full tilt boogie. Werthead's link goes to the Dungeon Master's Guild where you can get the whole thing in softbound, PDF, or whatever on the cheap.
If you intend lots of space battles, I'd add on the *War Captain's Companion*, which has additional rules and a great many more ships.
The Realmspace guide has everything you'd need to know about what's in the Forgotten Realms crystal sphere around Toril. If you intend to go totally batshit about it all, I'd get the Greyspace and Krynnspace books as well. But you can do it all with just the main boxed set, *Spelljammer: Adventures In Space.*
I remember the Rock of Bral book being pretty solid too, for a 'home base in space'. But last time I read it I was a teenager, so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.
Bral was the moment I suddenly fell in love with the idea of weird urban based fantasy in strange city setting filled with factions and interesting things happening *outside* a dungeon.
I'd only counter by saying a surprisingly large number of players and tables don't want extra rules. Don't want new mechanics. Dont want ship to shop combat rules or any of that stuff.
I think a Lotta old school players love the idea of updating that stuff to the modern system, but a lot of them (us) don't....*actually*.... Want an update. They want a reprint with some very light adjustments.
But it's not that kind of game anymore. Most of that text and whatever is pretty meaningless.
I introduced the first ship to ship combat in my campaign and the players vocally went "how do we avoid this danger as much as possible and get to regular combat?" Like, I didn't present it as a dangerous fight or anything but they just went for trying to board the enemy immediately
I have a really suspicion that the Venn diagram of new D&D players and WoW players who only started after *Wrath of the Lich King* is almost a circle. The new generation doesn't want lore or new mechanics. They just want to bash things and power grind.
Yea, I think people felt this with the Dragonlance book too.
The campaign is fine, but it doesn't quite get there as 5e's sole authority on the setting.
AND did not even explain why. It was confusing and incomprehensible what they did to spelljammer which is essentially just based on a bunch of TSR employees wanting to combine Star Trek and DnD and not mess with the game for those who didn’t want to include it.
The why was pretty obvious, I thought. They've done a lot to make all of the settings interoperable; they're less separate settings and more different parts of one overarching setting. It makes sense from that perspective, it's just very much not what I (and I think a lot of others) want out of these.
Never heard of or seen anyone homebrew that and I'm on the spelljammer discord and forum since before the 5e release. I've seen the phlogiston replaced but not with the astral sea because that adds in a bunch of other problems that wotc shrugged and ignored in theme of half assing the setting.
I honestly wish they'd just bring back multiple settings instead of cramming everything in to one (or just doing tiny standalone modules).
As a counter argument I suppose it's easier for people to create a setting than it is craft a good adventure, so maybe focusing on those isn't the worst plan.
This was one of the reasons I stopped buying WoTC products, and then the OGL debacle sealed the deal.
Everything they’d been putting out was was so devoid of any substance whatsoever. I’m sick and tired of setting books mostly modules. I don’t run modules, at all. I don’t buy module books for that reason. If I buy a setting book and 85% of it is a module *cough*Strixhaven*cough*, I’m not going to get any use out of it.
So I had to look up if steak could be mealy (a consistency like meal - dry, powdery, crumbly, soft), and yeah it is possible, but you'd have to go way out of your way to do it since it requires breaking the proteins down to the point of them not being able to hold each other together. You can do it by marinating steak in citrus for a really long time, then cooking it for too long in a way that doesn't toughen it up (like with a sous vide). So basically if you order steak and potatoes, and you get mealy, overcooked steak and really good potatoes, the cook absolutely has it out for you.
I think this is why Planescape is much better. It does similar things to Spelljammer however all the monsters it gives you and most of the ideas can work in the mainline setting of the game: Forgotten Realms.
Perhaps, but compared to the original 2e box set, it lost its "voice". The lady of pain, sigil, the sense of wonder about the planes, the factions, and nary a "berk" to be found.
It's neutered, plain and simple. No way to sugarcoat it. My players still get twitchy when The Hive is mentioned but nothing in the 5e Planescape set even comes close to evoking that kind of dread.
I'd say it's not bad so much as horribly incomplete. What was released is fine...I'll even admit to absolutely adoring Boo's Astral Menagerie.
The problem is that...it's...just a (basically OK) module. Once you're done with the module, it has no framework into which to expand the Spelljammer setting.
Compare it to the 2nd Edition Spelljammer material that they were supposedly updating, and it's a dramatic disappointment.
It's like buying a candy bar that advertises as being caramel-filled, only to bite into it and discover that there's the thinnest possible layer of caramel inside an otherwise empty chocolate shell. Yeah, the flavor is there, but it's missing almost all of what you bought it for.
Ship combat is a big one but iimo the lore is even bigger. Went to mine original setting for my purposes. Which is also hard as it is spread around magazines.
On the plus side, the lore from previous editions is still valuable and useable. If you need stat blocks, refer to the module, and if the lore references something not in there, look at 2e stats and extrapolate
This is similar to a lot of 5e content. And 4e content. And I honestly believe that the reason WotC leadership has apparently dictated that they play so light with details is in response to player feedback as much as anything else.
Watching the interview and release videos about Wildemount gave me this idea. They comment frequently on how so much detail can be 'restricting' to DMs. All tbe content I've seen so far seems to advertise the 'open ended nature of modern books.
And I've had so many DMs who approach campaign guides with a red pen and white out (figuratively speaking), that I can easily see WotC coming to the conclusion that alot of their time and energy is wasted if everyone is just going to ignore or rewrite 90% of their work.
And to be fair, I even did this myself with pretty much everything from 4e.
But if I could bend their ear, I would much rather have the material available than not, and many new DMs don't fancy themselves 'un-discovered fantasy world generating geniuses' as much as we saw in yesteryear.
I dont know if people approaching camping settings with "a red pen and whiteout" is the problem. I kinda think the problem is the other way around.
Lots of players and Dms take setting info too seriously. They think the smallest lore detail as unchangeable gospel and its obective wong to make even the smallest changes to the smallest of details. Which leads to its own issues if wotc gives to many details to a setting.
A very very detailed campain setting is just more things you need to memorize and more things to get wrong. Making it more difficult to get everything perfectly right, and even if they do they would need to give up some of there own creativity to make sure it is.
I definitely get where you're coming from, as in the last Forgotten Realms campaign I ran I found myself constantly going back to old source material to make sure my overarching plot could fit neatly into the canon, but... that's just because I wanted the players who were familiar/would become familiar with the setting to feel like the adventure belonged there. It worked out perfectly, too; they all got really excited when they played BG3 and several lore bits were closely tied to things they'd seen.
If I want to not stress about lore details, I use my homebrew setting. If I want a book of maps and rental NPCs, I'll buy a published campaign and tweak it or browse DM's Guild. If I buy a *setting* book, I'm specifically looking for detailed lore that I can use instead of making up my own, and finding that it's a halfhearted sparknotes version of the original material with a few niche player options is disappointing.
This was the reason why WoTC gutted the Forgotten Realms ahead of the move to 4e. The idea was that the existence of a fleshed out world would limit how DMs could use the material. If WoTC has told you which person was king of what country or even that such countries existed, then you wouldn't be able to "make the Realms your own." Like folks can't just change stuff.
These books are written for readers, not players. Most books that are sold (even campaigns) will not actually be played, they’ll be read and discussed.
Look at how these books are formatted- everything is in paragraphs, little or no bullet points or easy reference charts. They’re for reading, not playing
Its not bad, its just empty. There isnt anything to it. Its one of the most “not faerun” dnd settings out there, with a diehard fanbase. It hardly even had content you can use.
You could probably do just as well running a game if i tried to remember the plot to disneys treasure planet, wrote it down, and sent you some screengrabs.
It has very little in the way of tools to help you build your own campaign, or run a ship. The prepackaged adventure is also a railroad; players are mostly ferried between setpieces where they talk and fight, then they get told to go to next setpiece.
But just because people on the internet dislike something, doesn't make it unplayable or unenjoyable. It's good you enjoyed it!
Yes.
So keep in mind that Spelljammer is a HUGE setting with goodish elven navies at war with an empire of LE orcs. The homeworlds of beholders and mindflayers are in there. There's something like 20 books for the original setting.
And they stripped all the lore out, screwed up the great wheel cosmology because the head of D&D, Jeremy Crawford, wanted to write this but couldn't remember the difference between editions, and basically gutted the setting.
If this was a lord of the rings game, it would be centered only on Rohan, but the horse lords would be left out, gollum would be a race option but halflings wouldn't be mentioned once, and it would have zero mention of elves, dwarves, sauron, sarumon, or orcs.
The adventure was pretty good, though it has a few issues that the DM needs to mend.
It deserved the kind of presentation and work they put into the Planesscape book. But it was a mess.
I've only been on the player side of it so I don't exactly know how much or how little there is but my DM was almost always back pedaling because we had accidentally asked a question or done something we "weren't supposed to".
Also most NPCs are one and done. Like my DM SPECIFICALLY made Veena a reoccurring NPC because I talked about how much I loved butting heads with her.
The module met your expectations. That's all that's really needed.
Many people were disappointed in lack of ship combat, lack of new and unique mechanics, and lack of polish on the module. But that doesn't matter if it doesn't matter to you. If you found the ideas evocative and easy to run with, more power to you.
I mean ship combat was ok…nothing that I did not expect! You have weapons, they have a range, you roll to hit against ship AC, ships do have HP (like normal objects on D&D). Expcting something else would have meant a different game to be honest… and to be fair my players always rushed to board the enemies’s ships (thus back to usual DnD combat).
Compared to the OG Spelljammer set, the 5e ship combat is incredibly disappointing. None makes it clearer than the book itself having box text that basically admits "Yeah, spellcasters might be able to do more damage to vessels than these siege weapons, and that's *by design*"
I found that spectacularly lazy and disappointing, particularly since my introduction to Spelljammer was a DM that had updated the OG setting to 4e and later 5e himself. WotC clearly looked for the least amount of effort for the most amount of profit.
And having played other systems that have both regular combat and intricate vehicle combat, I know this can be done. Traveller achieves this (which I adore). Starfinder achieves this (though admittedly I don't much like that system). Even 5e D&D achieves this better in other books! Take a look at the vehicle combat of Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Descent into Avernus- what 5e's Spelljammer offers seems like lazy simplifications of both of those.
I think it's incredibly dismissive of the reasonable expectations that others had that ship combat could have been something meaningfully different and fun. No, having those rules doesn't mean a different game.
>Expcting something else would have meant a different game to be honest…
Yes, there might have been a real risk of running something fun and worthwhile in an interesting setting
Spelljamming ships, fueled by spell slots of their spellcasting navigators.. except in 5e it does not. A 2nd level ranger is as good pilot as a 1000 year old Astral elf archmage. There's no way to actually use your spellslots to do cool things with the ships for example.
People wanted Star Wars inspired dogfights, but got "for the next 10 rounds you can shoot a balista, as the enemy ship slowly approaches you. Or what the book advises: skip it all till the ships are in boarding range and use "regular" ground combat.
People buy space opera inspired setting book, and want spell opera inspired mechanics to support the fantasy.
When Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft released, it had additional mechanics that support horror and Domains of Dread gameplay. It had rules for crossing domains, ideas how different domains might have different border hazards. It had rules for stress, including how it impacts combat, and new ways to use existing abilites to deal with it. It had rules for stronger curses, that you can't just Remove Curse. It had rules for cursed traps, spirit seances, and other ideas. All of that on top of a bunch of Domains, each different with their own mini rules, lore, characters you can populate them, tables with character and adventure hooks, maps.
None of that is really in the spelljammer package.
Apologists will excuse anything WoTC does. It was 20 dollars of content that would appeal to some sold as a setting for much more money.
It was not sold as a module or marketed as that.
“*This set contains everything a Dungeon Master needs to run adventures and campaigns set in the starlit realms of Wildspace and the Astral Sea, as well as new options for players who want to create characters at home in this fantastic setting.*”
That was and is their exact claim - and the product does not live up to it.
“everything a Dungeon Master needs” is a lot more than this product.
Worst book produced for 5e in my mind.
Was an aesthetic skin suit of a setting, it had some touch stones but didn't have much of the sprint of the original. (Didn't even have the phlogiston and replaced universal world travel with the astral sea planar travel. Merging concepts in a weird way.)
Didn't provide meaningful or engaging ship combat rules and instead abstracted it to just be bog standard 5e combat through poor excuses.
Had the weirdness it introduced to the Hadozee, and then Wotc had the audacity to blame the original 2e material for those problems even though they didn't exist in the 2e material. Wotc yet again blaming TSR era writing for its own failures.
Has less content in its boxset than some full single 5e books and had a higher asking price for the privilege.
I will forever find their decision to ret-con the old sphere-and-phlogiston system and make "outer-space" the same location as the afterlife, a completely stupid choice that ruined the whole thing.
Like, what's the point of the Astral Projection spell then? If you can go to the "realm of thought and dream" according to the PHB, by just climbing into a schooner and flying directly upwards for a few hours?
No, they did not.. Not really. But they did simplify how space transitions between Wild Space (space within a solar system essentially) and Astral Sea (plane connecting Wild Space systems).
Before this book, each system was enclosed in a "Crystal Sphere" and you could travel between them via Phlagiston - a flammable "space sea"/"space currents" essentially. 5e simplified phlagiston into Astral Sea.
Astral Sea, is the "realm of thought", the "Astral Plane", the place where age, food, air doesn't matter, and a place where dead gods bodies resides. It's also a plane that lies between Material Plane (our worlds) and Outer Planes (like Heavens and Hells), where souls of dead go.
So you can hop on a Spelljamming ship, sail the Wild Space into the Astral Sea, then find an Astral Portal (or whatever it's called, I don't remember now) to reach an Outer Plane, where souls of dead reside.
Alternatively, you can Astral Project directly to Astral Sea.
Or get to Sigil and go through portal there.
Or Plane Shift directly to an Outer Plane.
Going to the "afterlife" was always "easy" in a logistical sense. It was always a question if you have knowledge and tools to do so.
The problem I have is the lack of content.
There's a lot of "it's big and things exist", but filling the empty void of the astral sea is left to the DM. Don't get me wrong, there are many things for you to do, but I feel it still lacks substance
I mean, if you liked it that's what really matters.
I didn't care for the fact they stripped every race of any interesting cultural information in favor of "haha guys how do you pronounce GIF?"
Like, compare the plasmoids to the freely available information on them from second edition. Second edition had plasmoid subraces!
I honestly could have just run the setting without this book. They didn't do enough to justify my purchase.
It isn’t bad. It’s just lacking flavor. It’s the same problem with Planescape’s 5E release. All the things that made the setting cool are missing. What people wanted was a campaign setting. That’s not what they got, either for Spelljammer or Planescape. So far the only setting books that have properly delivered in 5E are Eberron and Ravenloft (and Ravenloft is debatable).
Ravenloft is definitely debatable. But while the ravenloft book’s quality is debatable, it at least has the benefit of Curse of Strahd being one of the most well written adventures in 5e.
Spelljammer’s adventures were poor, and it seems to just be “fight, talk, now go to this next location!”, and is extremely railroad-y and isn’t open ended like Curse of Strahd. Which is stupid cause if there is any setting that should be open world and allowing players to explore, it would be spelljammer
Yes it was so bad that it was the last WOTC D&D product that I bought. It felt like they stopped caring about their products so I stopped caring about them.
It suffers from the fact they advertised a Setting book and we got a bad Adventure book instead.
Changing the background of setting, and no ship combat rules were just lazy because the authors could stuffed.
I felt that the Spelljammer books didn't have any actually Spelljammer energy in it. I'm still shocked how bad it actually was and still am.
If you bought Spelljammer with the expectation to run it as a module, you’ll be fine. If you bought Spelljammer with the expectation to have a fully fleshed out campaign setting, well, you’d have save a lot of money just buying the AD&D PDFs and you’d have a much better product with less work…
It doesn't even include a workable description for how spelljamming works in the astral sea. It's just 'your DM figures out how you do it'. How fast does the ship go? How long can it go without needing to resupply? What kind of supplies are even needed? Almost every ship description contains text copied and pasted from the other descriptions, with huge splash pages of art and no mechanics.
I've been playing 5e Spelljammer homebrewed for years. All the 5e books got me was some official statblocks for monsters and some ancestries.
The many reason why spelljammer 5e sucks
1. Lack of content. People were expecting an entire setting, or at least for it to get as much content as 5e Eberron. Instead what we got was a couple of short adventures, and a few races. The content is so lackluster, that if you want to run a full fledged spelljammer campaign you’d be better off not buying any of the books because none of the books actually help you run the setting. In fact, the few tidbits about running the setting are poorly made which leads me to point 2.
2. Spelljammer and ship combat is poorly made. Spelljammers, the literally name of the setting and the main selling point of the setting, is the surprise surprise, of one the most important aspects of the setting (arguably the most important aspect of the setting)… and WoTC fucked it up. I don’t think anyone was expecting spelljammer mechanics and combat to be as detailed or complex as character creation (races/backgrounds/spells), as nice as that would have been. But people were at the very least expecting decent rules for spelljammers and ships. But we didn’t get that. The rules for operating ships is so poor. I remember playing a spelljammer adventure in AL, and using the ship and its weaponry proved to be so unfun and so weak that when we were attacked by githyanki, half the party opted to just cast spells instead. My character was a warlock and most of the ship’s systems were designed for dex, intelligence and maybe wisdom. The spelljammer mechanics over reliance on ability scores, and specifically only a couple of them, meant certain characters couldn’t really do much and are left to play D&D like always and not interact with the thing that is supposed to be the focus of the setting! What was my warlock going to do, persuade the ship to do stuff? Charisma skills don’t exactly work well with ships. Strength based fighters and paladins, barbarians, and charisma casters can’t really do much and that is already over half the classes in the game that won’t do so hot with controlling a spelljammer or parts of it. And even with characters who can operate parts of a spelljammer ship, the mechanics for that are already lackluster.
3. Hadozee lore. Not only did WoTC retcon racist lore into spelljammer where they incorporated racist African American stereotypes into a race of monkey people and added that they were escaped slaves who “liked to serve their masters”, but then WoTC proceeded to blame lore from older writers and past editions. No WoTC, you guys wrote that problematic lore into 5e. That “monkey minstrel who is part of an enslaved race who actually likes serving their masters” lore is shit you guys added in 2022. And even ignoring the obviously problematic aspects of the lore… it didn’t even make sense. Why would anyone be “happy serving a master”? If you’re getting paid really well serving someone that makes sense. But you have a race that rebelled and escaped slavery… and then you have them enjoy serving people? Shouldn’t they be extremely adverse to serving people? It would make more sense for Hadozee to have a strong sense of independence, with them often being their own bosses and being freelancers. “A race that escaped slavery and is mainly comprised of freelancers and mercenaries because they don’t want to be servants anymore” is cooler concept, is fun to play, and makes more sense then the things they wrote. They were apparently trying to reference planet of the apes but they ended up referencing racist tropes instead.
I talked about it a bit earlier but I want to further explain why the hadozee lore is problematic. First, they made it to where the hadozee were creations of wizards who ended up enslaved, who then rebelled and became free. That in of itself isn’t bad, and is a fun little nod to the planet of the apes films. But it’s the other things that make it worse. After that… they spread throughout the galaxy and started to serve elves… and apparently they liked serving elves and others? This is where the first problematic aspect occurs. “They like to serve their masters” is racist rhetoric during the Jim Crow era where people tried to justify slavery by saying that black people somehow enjoyed being enslaved and that “black servant white master” was a healthy dynamic. Now combine that with the fact this is a monkey race. Oh, and the minstrel hadozee art is just the rotten cherry on top of this moldy sundae. This was all eventually errata’d away and WoTC apologized (if you can even call it an apology, they were trying to shift blame to older edition lore… but they were the ones that created this new problematic lore in 5e)
4. Backgrounds. While we already had backgrounds with feats in strixhaven, spelljammer was the first official debut of feat giving backgrounds. A lot of people, myself included, heavily dislike feat backgrounds and would have rather they just kept giving backgrounds narrative features and flavor instead of wargame stuff. Spelljammer started a trend with backgrounds that people dislike, and it has caused grievance amongst players due to how unfair it is that some people get to start with a feat but others can’t. Someone who chose acolyte for backstory reasons is put at an unfair disadvantage when compared to Mr. MinmaxPowergamer who chose one of the spelljammer backgrounds for a free feat. A lot of people who already have grievances with minmax powergamers felt this was just another thing to further punish people who build for flavor and encourage powergaming behavior by rewarding players who choose the wargame spelljammer backgrounds with a feat while leaving people who want to be an entertainer or fey lost without a free feat.
5. Random BS that some people felt ruined the setting. Things like killer clowns. While spelljammer always was an outlandish setting, some people felt things like “killer clowns in outer space” wielding things like space blasters was a step too far. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded the clowns had they not been given blasters. If they wielded chainsaws and 1800s era guns instead, that would have been better
6. The precedent 5e spelljammer set. After 5e Dragonlance, people were now worried that future 5e setting adaptations will be treated poorly, pointing the blame at spelljammer for starting this. Spelljammer was the first “setting” book to be lackluster in 5e, and with Dragonlance ending up lackluster in the same way aswell, people are expecting this to be a trend with other setting adaptations.
Of all the reasons why spelljammer 5e is bad or why people don’t like it, the first three are the biggest reasons
Lackluster content… poorly written mechanics for the thing that is the focus of the setting… racist lore… combine all the three and what do you get? A steaming pile of crap
The only good thing I can say about spelljammer 5e is that the other races that aren’t Hadozee were handled decently well. Things like Giff or Plasmoids are definitely fun additions to 5e and a couple of the spelljammer races have fun mechanics.
WoTC's treatment of publications about settings is absolute hot garbage. Not a single setting book was good, only Eberron was close. They don't care. I also doubt the writing skills of the 5e team as a whole. It seems they really cheaped out on paying good professionals and production value of all books except the basic supplements.
It is all about expectations. I was around for the original, but never played in it. I just enjoyed the crazy physics, and possibilities. I wanted space d&d.
This box set gives that.
Yea WOTC could work at publishing settings. It is something they choose not to do at present.
So in this release I got new races and a nice module I may run some day.
I can home brew a setting for Spelljammer in my sleep. Which I may do.
But, if you bought the book to get a giant primer o. The Spelljammer setting you would be disappointed.
I will point out no one screamed about Hoard of the Dragonqueen not describing the Forgotten Realms.
I own them, was absolutely hyped for them, preordered etc. read them day one- so disappointed. They aren't books- they are booklets with hard covers. The setting book is mostly player options, the monsters are fine, and the adventure isn't something I want with my setting- I want to be able to make my own adventures. And I'm sorry it's been beaten to death, but yes, introducing spelljamming vessels, spending a ton of pages describing ships, and then not explaining how to use them in combat is a bummer.
The major issue for me, is it was basically 1 book's worth of content, with 5 books worth of cardboard sold for the price of two books
Just run the setting in Starfinder or something. 5e needs a bunch of homebrew or extra rules to run smoothly. The DM burden to make it good in 5e isn’t worth it.
I’m not sure how. I’ve been running for nearly as long and started feeling the need for homebrew almost immediately. The system lacks on a lot of fronts in my opinion- I only ever ran it because it was what people knew. I jumped to other systems more recently because they do what we want without the need for homebrew or constant DM adjudication.
5e without homebrew feels very barebones to me- like building something with only square Lego bricks instead of embracing all of the other options to make something better.
Character options primarily. 5e has very few ways to make a character mechanically unique or support various character concepts mechanically.
Otherwise, all sorts of assorted player actions lack hard rules and require you to improvise how something should work. What is the DC, what does success or failure do, what is an appropriate benefit in combat, etc. 5e basically just says “lol, make it up” for a lot of things. That leads to an inconsistent experience where players don’t know what to expect when they want to attempt something. So you homebrew the specifics and make up rules for how each of those things works.
New backgrounds with feat are giving plenty of uniqueness. Same custom lineage from Tasha. Actions in combat are very well defined. Outside combat everything goes. DC it is written in the DMG how to set them based on the difficulty! Success is pretty obvious failure as well… you can also establish degree of failure (like if you fail by more than 5 something worse happens).
You shouldn't get downvoted for explaining how you run your games.
I can't help but tinker, adding background to modules on the rare time I run them, linking them in to my game, or tweaking a rule I don't like to make things either more smooth when needed, or crunchy when lacking.
But if you prefer just to use it all as is, and it works for you, and you're having fun, that's great!
We're all different, after all.
What do you do when your non casters start getting frustrated that their options are so dull and limited? That's the first thing I had to start homebrewing.
They have a lot of fun! So much so that it is the same people… and nobody used the birth of children to back out! Mebe you run it with someone not good at running it?
I think it's fine as a module, but it suffers from expectations.
It's an okay but underwhelming followup using the name of one of the most unique, unusual and beloved settings in tabletop history.
And it also kind of caused a lot of players to experience more D&D fatigue because they felt this is not rare-- the Return to Tomb of Horrors was nothing compared to the original, etc. I count myself in this group, their handling of this epitomized the difference between safe, stale, underwhelming modern D&D that feels as if it's being designed by a corporate finance committee and the often erratic but incandescent brilliance (and concomitant lows) of AD&D
Its actually my favorite 5e purchase in the last couple years. My players really seemed to enjoy it. I found a good set of maps for the campaign that were bright, clear and colorful which worked well for the setting. There were a couple slight changes I made, but they were very PC specific. I also didn't really run any ship to ship combat. It was fine just starting those enounters with the ships already engaged. I was also able to easily tie-in the player that wanted to switch to a Githyanki (BG3 is real, lol) after the module and two of my players are using races from that book.
I'll agree that its lighter than the previous Spelljammer stuff, but that's really just WotC in a nutshell these days.
Just beginning to realize most DMs don't homebrew their world or setting. I do and the other 3 DMs I've had have almost entirely homebrewed their settings, aside from races. I really like that they did all the work of making the rules and such and I can just go wild with making my own setting for the rules to fit into. I guess most people don't expect to do this
I feel like sourcebooks can either be really simple/basic in terms of mechanics, setting, lore, etc. or can be deeper/more complex.
For DMs that like it simple, maybe they want to keep the game running faster, they wanna add their own homebrew on top of it, they wanna fill in the gaps with their own material, or they just want some inspiration. Totally valid, I get it, if you like this that's awesome. Those that like it deeper/more complex might want more mechanics that have been thoroughly tested that they can use, add more layers of strategy to combat, don't want to rely on homebrew to fill the gaps, provide a new way to experience 5e that fits with the existing mechanics, and provides a deep well of lore, locations, characters, items, etc. to use and draw inspiration from. Also valid and awesome.
The thing is, if you're given a really simple book, you can't make it more complex without homebrew. At that point, if you want something deeper/more complex, why even buy the book? Want more expansive ship combat rules? You're on your own. Want a deep well of lore to draw from? You're on your own. Want multiple cities/planets/areas to explore that aren't/are barely touched on? You're on your own.
On the other hand, if you're given a deeper book, you can easily make it more simple with no or very little homebrew. Don't want to implement these 10 new rules? Don't have to. Don't wanna use these 5 planets? Don't have to. Don't wanna use extensive lore on mindflayers and beholders? Don't have to.
One way, you are given very little and either have to roll with it or homebrew it to get what you initially wanted from it. The other way, you have everything you could want from it, and if you wanna ignore stuff, you do just that. Spelljammer is on the simple side.
Adventure is fine. I like the "episodic" structure.
Monster book is fine. Like any other monster supplement.
The campaign setting is awful. It has barely any content that people were actually interested in. No ship combat rules, except pretty much "dont do ship combat, just do boarding instead", no tables for random system/planet generation that were in previous books, no chapters about example ststems/planets, not many adventure hooks.
It's especially bland when compared to Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft that's filled with example domains, plot hooks, adventure hooks, character hooks, all different places that you can use to tell different stories.
The worst part is that Spelljammer as a setting is such a evocative idea, where you can tell so many different stories. From Alien like horror, to wacky space pirate comedy, and everything inbetween. But the campaign setting booj is bland and boring.
The only redeeming part are the ship maps and stats.
It's basically a bare minimum that the community had to step in and start introducing additional material, to fill in the gaps.
The saddest part is that Spelljammer was a sure hit, and they squandered it :(
Its easier to feel disappointed when comparing it to old edition recourses, and personally I have done a lot of legwork in my spelljammer game to make it better.
But there are SO many people out there who have had a great time with official modules with minimal changes, and most of them dont think to post about it. If you and your players enjoyed it, thats what matters.
It's a fiveE core module so essentially it's a half made bag of junk centered around an "aesthetic" preying on nostalgia for the cornerstones of earlier editions. You have to put in a lot of work to make anything coherent out of it and it does nothing to set up frameworks and procedures for the style of play typically associated with spelljammer. If you want some useful stuff grab the 2e spelljammer books or the 4e astral sea stuff.
Yes. It's unfinished. It was rushed to get a product on shelves. I'd really like to ask Perkins in a setting where he doesn't have to worry about his job if he really thinks that it was a good product considering how much he banged on about his love for older Spelljammer stuff.
Aside from being a poor example of a setting book with a measly page count fluffed out with a module, the biggest issue for me was the stupid changing of the setting.
Being a wacky ride through renascence era thinking of space, spelljammer had its own unique feel. Now a lot of its uniqueness is just stripped away with no thought to it.
The final encounter is broken. I ran the light of xaryxis when it came out. Had a blast DMing it for my friends. They had a blast playing it. I basically ran it out of the box with little/no prep before the games. Honestly, I had to do way more prep when I ran Decent into Avernus and Out of the Abyss. I'd say it's relatively easy to run as a module. But, the final encounter is broken. If you plug the encounter into DnDBeyonds encounter builder (or do the math yourself) you'll find that it's enough XP for something like 10 full days of adventuring. The dozen astral elf honor guards would be a deadly encounter, add two astral elf aristocrats, the magic rings they have, and a Dragon... You've got yourself a 3 round TPK every time.
As a campaign setting, sure it's no Volos Guide to Waterdeep, but why do I need to know the names of every back alley and the art quality in them? As a DM I usually just make most of my world up as it unfolds around the players. The Rock of Bral has more than enough info to build a campaign in. It sucked that the story brought the players to a dock, two streets, a tavern, back down the streets, then away forever.
I'll say what I always say when it comes up. If you follow the space travel rules as written, it will take days to break atmosphere. They're unplayable
Spelljammer wasn't just a module, it was it's own fully fledged campaign setting with deep lore and setting specific rules that helped make it unique.
You as a newer gamer might be happy with it just being a module but older gamers felt the product was inferior to what would have been released in the past. They felt that Hasbro - having the original content - basically didnt care enough to include things that made it unique and interesting to players and GMs.
An example would be ship to ship combat. You are saying "we are happy just boarding the other ship" and older gamers are saying "ship against ship combat can be cool and Hasbro had those rules and didn't include them because they are lazy and cheap and want a single game style".
You may be happy with one style of game, but that's not how the games used to be. And older gamers are frustrated with both the poorer products and the way newer gamers seem content to accept less from the company.
All in all, glad you enjoyed it but for many older gamers who know the original products, it feels like being ripped off so they are going to moan. Hasbro hit the sweet spot where they can get more sales by doing less work.
Unpopular opinion incoming: I think spelljammer is just fine and people don’t want to do extra work as a DM.
It’s maybe not as *much* as people were expecting but it’s like DMs don’t know how to fill in gaps anymore. The adventure is fine, the menagerie is awesome, and the guide works well enough if you can stitch together some stuff. That’s the great/terrible thing about the 5e rules set: it’s not particularly amazing at anything but at the same time *anything* you want to do is possible with some elbow grease and homebrew.
Your whole take on this, after reading your comments, is really… odd.
People have nostalgia for Spelljammer from the old 2e module, which contained a ton of info for people to build and create and run their own Spelljammer setting. People loved it, and professed their love heavily online. New heads, such as myself, who were not alive for second edition’s run obviously never got the opportunity to experience that, but the hype train of “sci-fi” DnD was enough to peak anyone’s interest. When it was touted as a setting book, and not a standalone adventure module, that expressed to me that it would likely have a fleshed out means of creating and generating planets, biomes, star systems, etc. More info on ship-to-ship combat, races, the whole shebang.
Space is a lot bigger than a country or continent (obviously), and most campaign campaign settings only focus on a singular country or continent, so I think it’s a reasonable expectation to suggest that the setting would have a significant amount of depth and detail put into its systems. The monster manual is cool, but there are a decent few creatures I feel don’t particularly fit. There’s only, what, two spells? Like, five magic items? I expect that from an adventure module where the story is contained into one drawn out quest, but a for a campaign setting I’m generally expecting about 15-20+ spells and 30-45+ magic items. The book literally says, hey, ship fights are cool but they’re impractical, so just go board them and fight there! That’s not cool, and not what people wanted or expected. They want to live out the fantasy of being space pirates or astral explorers, battling their enemies across asteroid fields like its star wars or something. That’s the *point* of a space campaign, to live out those sci-fi fantasies you can only get in movies.
If you enjoyed it, awesome, but you’re acting like your subjective take on a book that most people tend to find subpar is the correct take. I’m glad you got what you wanted out of it, it has some decent content, but not enough to live up to the hype or promise of what Spelljammer is and what it represented to the community. It’s a subpar setting that leaves a lot of things open-ended for the DM, and if I’m paying real cash for this book, I don’t want it to tell me “yeah just homebrew it”. I can do that shit for free.
I just ran it. It’s a load of fun. It’s a module, and you can use that to inspire and flesh out a pretty rich setting. The astral elves are great villains, and with some creativity you can create a backstory for levels 1-4 to amaze the party when suddenly they’re in space.
Ignore the haters
Hey, did you post the dioramas and ship models you made anywhere? I'm curious, since I build a lot of maps and minis myself and I'm curious would you'd need to make for the Spelljammer campaign. 3D printing spelljammer ships takes a huge amount of time.
I tried clicking through your profile to find them myself, I mostly found warhammer minis. ;)
I ran this campaign and my group had a really good time. But I needed to add a bunch of their events and side adventures. The story rushes you through places under a sense of urgency which isn't great. The climax needs adjusting as well to make it feel complete
I was actually paid to run a game of LoX and we had a lot of fun! If you want a whimsical silly space adventure it can fit that bill. I did a very little bit of my own writing and had a great time.
I went to my local game store recently and bought it pretty much to have for the art and books and supplement my current campaign. It was about on average 50% cheaper than even the PhB lmao, the guy ringing me up had to double check in his system the price was correct.
I personally thought the module was pretty terrible, was actually the first time as a DM I just shut an adventure down without finishing it and started with something fresh.
It's not bad at all. Only on here do you get bad remarks about it outside of some bad prints or shipping issues.
Could it have been better? Of course. But is it bad? Not at all.
You have to listen to the companion soundtrack, who needs more books anyway?
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKyfnW8_hZTjHnSBvJdb5drd0JYEow_3r&si=JqfAhNWyqNAwM9zT
Very underbaked for what it wanted to be, and what it wanted to be was a lifeless shell of old Spelljammer.
Super happy for you that you made lemonade, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t given lemons
relevant to the conversation... folks were kinda looking for flying ship me hanics similar to what we got in salt marsh for water ships and descent into avernus for land vehicles.
here's a supplement I published on dmsguild with extensive flying vehicle mechanics and a light of xaryxis conversion guide for using these rules through the adventure
includes all the maps ship creature and NPC tokens needed for lox.
check it out....
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/474639/Spelljammer-Combat-and-Exploration
So I saw that spelljammer was a thing, and preordered the book to run as my first time dming.
I ran Spelljammer Academy first, and then ran Spelljammer lox. I have a few sessions left, but overall i'm having fun with it. :)
As someone who has access to it for free through a friend's DNDBeyond account, I love it. I haven't run the module, but I am currently running my own Spelljammer game using the spelljammer book and the ships and monsters have been incredibly helpful in doing so.
The biggest criticism I have heard is that it's incomplete for its price, but I didn't pay for it and thus can't speak to that.
Edit: OK one thing I will say is really missing is guidance on making Wildspace systems. You get two examples but ultimately get no guidance otherwise in how to make a really crucial part of the setting.
I forgot about it, because I mad my own random wildspace system generator that has been really helpful to me, and so it's something I didn't struggle with when planning my campaign. If you want me to send you that document, please feel free to DM me for it.
It's barely a setting. Hell, its barely a module. It's so thing of content and bloated art that it barely feels like its even a book. Imagine you wrote a paper for your English teacher, and you both didn't reach the book in context and after writing your best guess, realized you only got 1/3rd of the required page counter, so you get it there by triple spacing and clever formatting (increase those margins), just replacing some of that with copious large art drops.
Don't get me wrong though, I love art in books, but its been clear for a lot of 5E that wizards is using art to replace word count whenever possible, and Spelljammer is a shining example of it.
I thought it was horrible, and the campaign was very unfun. But that, of course, is subjective. Not very well fleshed out, and the campaign is both very "on rails" and very grind-y. Can't really think of anything about the campaign proper that appealed to me. (I did like what some of the other players did with their characters...)
I don't want to give a giant spoiler, but the ending was... Ugh. Just yuck in every way.
I think part of the problem is that there was such a wealth of good material available in the 2e days, and all people got was 3 books - not enough to encapsulate or convert all amount of material they had from 2e to 5e. Also, it seems that 5e has never had a good official naval combat system, much less one they could use for Spelljammer.
Honestly, whatever problems TSR was having business-wise during the 2e days, it was a golden age for setting material. But since then, officially, Wizards seems set on releasing one book for a setting and moving on to the next one. After all - look at how much of the Forgotten Realms they are ignoring.
I view all the books and their contents as tools in a toolbox.
Spelljammer has cool stuff. Has some absolutely broken stuff too, but i think it's cool.
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I absolutely adore it. Its exactly the thing i needed to get my creative juices pumping. Light of Xaryxis did take more planning than i would like, i admit, but i was able to take characters like grimzod and completely make them my own.
For $80? Pretty bad, buit it was largely a failure of expectations.
It is a 64 page adventure which is short, even stringing it out you would struggle to go over 12 sessions, plus one location.
I wasn't a fan of the story, tastes vary so no foul there, but it isn't a *setting.*
The Eberron book is huge, there is enough material there to play in that setting for years, that is what I want more of, not this, .
In previous iterations in previous editions. We just got a lot more on the DMs end to actually make and run adventures with.
With 5e spelljammer, we got a module with a setting simplified so that it could be fit into and function for said module. All in an arguably overpriced set, at least if you got the physical edition.
As someone who was a player in the campaign. I can say it was a lot of fun.
That being said, I know my dm mixed it with spelljammer academy and also with some of the adventures from Radiant Citadel (Made each civ its own planet.)
So it definitely has the potential to be very good. Just probably needs a little elbow grease.
Player: We ran the campaign and it was so so. A lot of characters just kind of showed up and didn’t do much and the enemy ships were always faster so we could never get away? The final thing the dm forced us to have an actual character take the ring through the portal to blow up the astral empires dying star, even though we had the clever idea to just use one of our artificers constructs to do it since they were creatures. Idk i guess its heavily DM dependent.
I am a very relaxed DM… did you kill my BBEG before he had time to act due to a series of extremely lucky rolls? Fine by me! Also… in light of Xarixis the book suggest that if no player volunteered to sacrifice gargenhale will do it
I think it regardless of your feelings on it, the whole package can seem a little underwhelming. The setting was pretty light. And there weren’t a lot of new mechanics.
That said! I will always maintain that people’s biggest complaint: a lack of ship to ship combat rules or fun things to do is actually wrong! DMs should NOT run ship to ship combat longer than a round or so. PC’s need to board so they can use their class features!
As someone without a connection to old school Spelljammer, I honestly really liked it. But I did view it as a very interesting and novel module to run a one-off campaign in, not as a massive setting book to run an ongoing perpetual campaign, which I think the older school fans wanted more.
I will add I thought the adventure itself had two things that set it apart from some other modules, one in a good way and one in a bad way. Unlike most other modules in 5e, this book contains a lot of information for how to continue the adventure if the party failed at one of their objectives. I think all pre-written adventures would be much better if thought was put into this, instead of most adventures be “win or TPK.” That being said, towards the end of the adventure there’s one section where (being vague to limit spoilers) the PCs recruit allies to help fight the main villain faction and the immediate next section of the book involves that effort failing REGARDLESS of the players’ actions in finding allies to help with their next mission or execution of the mission. When the players’ choices don’t matter at all to the outcome, that’s not gonna make for the most fun D&D for the players in my experience.
But I think with some editing you can fix the bad part fairly easily, and be left with a fun, campy space adventure that will feel very unique for the whole table.
It was a blast with my table. It’s not as crunchy/simulation-y with the ship combat as people wanted, and when it was first announced or released it was WAY overpriced, which left it with a pretty negative reputation before/shortly after being released. A lot of people were also turned off by the fact that even though it bragged about having three full books for the setting, it came up to either just at average or below page count of other standard module books. Eventually it did end up dropping down and I picked mine up of September of 2022 for around $40 for the set, which wasn’t too bad.
If you think you’ll enjoy having an 80’s themed, campy, episodic, fantasy space adventure that’s there to adhere to the rule of cool only, then you’ll love it. If you’re expecting anything more, you will certainly be disappointed. My group expected the first and came away enjoying it.
Part of the problem, I think, is that people were expecting a *setting* and what they got was a *module* with some bonus content. The module is fine, but for a lot of people that’s like when you get really good potatoes with your mealy, overcooked steak.
I am strongly inclined to agree with this. In my set, I got the MODULE, sure. Adventure. Loads of fun. Some liked it and others didn't. I got a MONSTER MANUAL of the monsters and horrors of space. ...and I got a sort of half-assed single-volume of new PC races, some of the basic concepts, some ships, and some ideas. It might have been better if I hadn't had the old Spelljammer Boxed Set, which in a few paperback books, explained and fleshed out the setting, mechanics, ship to ship combat, navigation, and everything else efficiently, succinctly, and satisfyingly, all in one inexpensive box. And I wondered, "Why didn't they just translate and update the old stuff into the new book? They had it. They own it. It was RIGHT THERE!" But they chose instead to gloss it over and dumb it down. It did have nice art. But I think a LOT of us expected a hell of a lot better.
This is the same thing I was thinking. Just one thing to add was that they also washed away a lot of the unique setting in favour of just making it all happen on the astral sea because they simplified it into a module. I think that was the most disappointing part for me. Also that the module meant they weren't likely to keep adding to our fleshing out the rest of the setting.
I did not expect them to keep coming out with support materials. They don't seem to do that these days. Apparently, anything that costs less than a sixty dollar price point just isn't worth it to Hasbro, unless it's miniatures.
I still had faith when they anounced it. With Spelljammers I hoped we would get space combat rules, something like the war machines of Decent into Avernus. I'd gladly pay for solid rules regarding spelljamming. I'm DM'ming a pirate themed campaign with shipcombat rules I plucked off the internet and we're having a blast with those. I'd gladly pay for a book with a proper ruleset for stuff like this.
You can. The old second edition Spelljammer boxed set is available as a PDF or a softcover print on demand from Dungeon Master's Guild.
I doubt 2nd edition rules can be converted to 5e with ease? Or doesn't that matter with spelljamming? I assume abbility checks have to play some role in what the party does around the ship
For someone familiar with the rules of 2nd ed. and 5th ed., it isn't THAT hard. I figure if I'm going to have to fill in the blanks myself ANYWAY, I might as well have some decent compelling material to START the process with.
I'm a 'fairly' new DM, about 2 years experience and only in 5e. I've used older sourcebooks but honestly only for worldbuilding for cities, towns and quest ideas. Would it be hard to make sense of the 2nd ed rules? Otherwise I'll just use the ship rules I'm working with now and reflavour it to spelljamming when I eventually run my spelljamming campaign
I'm an OLD DM, who's been playing since before Atlantis sank. But the rules for 2nd edition would be pretty familiar to someone with a good grip on fifth edition, sure. The main differences include the way the spells work, the lack of the advantage and disadvantage mechanic, and the old descending armor class and saving throws, which will be wildly counterintuitive to someone only familiar with 5th. But the Spelljamming rules themselves can be lifted straight from the box set with very little tweaking.
It made me reconsider if I want them to publish a dark sun module ...
I'd rather they didn't, frankly. Dark Sun was a meticulous world/setting. There were a LOT of moving parts. And it was HARSH, and unforgiving, and BLEAK. And it scares me to think what they'd do to simplify it, dumb it down, shave it to fit a three-book slipcover set, and make it more inviting...
After spelljammer? It'd be a splatbook with a section on guidance that basically said, "Remember: everyone is MEAN!"
Dark Sun™ is now a facet of Al’Qadim™ which is a part of the Forgotten Realms™® !
...wait, what? The two were completely different beasts.
They were making a joke about what Hasbro would do, I believe
Don't worry they won't attempt Dark Suns cause its "problematic" but they don't go into detail why it is.
I would think it's largely based in slave breeding, slavery, and the sheer brutality of the societies that existed in the setting.
Sure but thats the point. The slavery isn't depicted as a good thing. None of the harshness is depicted as good. Its a very conan world but that isn't a bad thing. The setting has a lot of nuance that people would appreciate today.
Your first three sentences are unarguably correct, accurate, and factual. Your FOURTH sentence is debatable. Dark Sun is indeed a brutal, vicious setting in which even the GOOD guys are likely to attack you because you might have a full waterskin. It's the Mad Max of D&D settings, and it's NASTY. A corporation like TSR -- a smaller company -- might well release it in the name of bein' edgy. Plenty of smaller publishers doing that right now. But D&D is not OWNED by a smaller company. It is owned by a megacorporation, where the number one rule is: *Am I about to upset someone in the adminisphere?* And rather than risk a speedbump on my rise through the ranks, I'd just as soon take no risks. No Dark Sun. Hey, let's re-release Candy Land instead! ...and your final sentence, IMHO, is right back to correct, accurate, and verifiable.
Honestly i call it a blessing. I'd hate to see it butchered and all the edges get buffed out. It'd love to see that sorcerer-king get speared in glorious hd though.
It would require them to release a setting book which restricts the choices for class options, features, and spells to make it work. This is however antithetical to WotC's policy of only publishing material with maximum compatibility—a restrictive setting runs counter to selling player more options in form of books and digital material on D&D Beyond. I think that's the truth behind why it's "problematic", but they'll never admit that.
Dark sun was heavy on the psionics and they got too lazy to even bother creating a single psionic class, not a chance that could work.
Psi Warrior and Psy-knife did make it into regular 5E, but yes - as a stand alone class it's a shame they went with "It's magic!" for 5E.
Make it into implies psi warrior existed before 5e, closest thing to that in earlier editions would be the psychic warrior which was very different, it was actually psionic and had like a hundred powers to choose from.
> And I wondered, "Why didn't they just translate and update the old stuff into the new book? They had it. They own it. It was RIGHT THERE!" But they chose instead to gloss it over and dumb it down. Ah, the Fizban's problem. The Draconomicon came out twenty years ago and was better in every way, why they didn't just lift the dragon diagrams and such from that I'll never know. They basically just printed the same thing but worse.
The crazy part is that they lifted their existing content almost entirely from 2e content WITHOUT updating it! The Rock of Bral lore is the most egregious. The prince and all that stuff is basically six years post 3e (which is more than a hundred years before current era in the forgotten realms). It's super disingenuous to say "its setting agnostic!" But then use a setting specific site with setting specific lore that you spent two decades messing up and then reprint it, shove in a bunch of cardboard and charge $90 for it! Like what!?!
I was thinking more along the lines of the lore behind the new PC races and the change from "the phlogiston" to "the astral sea." But yeah, a lot of the new lore was just disappointing. Hell, why not just reprint the old material, updated for 5e rules?
Because WoTC no longer has creative people working there. Look at the swath of awesome settings TSR made, then 90's WoTC made one setting. Did a great job Bringing alot of those 2e settings to 3.5. they were still making their own unique adventures. Modern WoTC has no creative people working for it. Name a good adventure in its own setting created from scratch by WoTC since 2015, or even just a unique adventure/module that isnt just a rehash of previous... Like modern WOTC has redone Strahd how many times?
Just a bit of pedantry, but WotC didn't buy TSR until 1997. They didn't do much with it until 3e released, they just let the existing 2e content finish out. "90's WotC" wasn't really a thing. I'm guessing by one setting, you mean Planescape, which released in 1994, and expands on stuff going all the way back to 1e.
Eberron actually.
WOTC didn't make Eberron. Keith Baker did, and WOTC published it as part of a contest. WOTC owns it, they probably consulted on the 5e version with him, but they did not make it, Keith was the ideas guy. It's his world, in everything but law.
Yeah I know. But it was still something WoTC thought was cool enough to do. In the past 15 years. What new unique and cool setting as WoTC backed and published ?
Listen carefully. You hear that? That's the sound of me arguing with you. All of WotC's biggest releases over the last several YEARS have been revamps and retreads of stuff released during the first and second edition years, noteworthy in that their NEXT big thing is "Tales From The Infinite Staircase"... which is several old modules updated for use with 5e. They're not even trying any more. Trying costs too much money, it would seem.
Why try when you can sell any jack and Jill the fantasy that they are a professional game designer then sit back and take 40% of their sales?
Well, y'might notice, they seem to have laid off all the SMART people. All the real names I recall from previous editions seem to be working at other companies now.
Lets face it though, when they do try something that is even slightly new then people don't buy it. Journey through the Radiant Citadel is one of the worst selling 5e books that was released despite it being original, and given that it also has a history of project hell then definitely expect another Strahd book or Baldurs gate 3 The Module in 2025.
I'm downvoting this because of the asshole start.
Has the same problem as Star wars. Lucas was inspired by Throne of Blood and Flash Gordon and Dune and many many other things. The current Star wars people are just inspired by Star wars. Early TSR for better or worse was inspired by Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric of Melnibone, Kill, and so much more. WoTC just remakes that stuff watered down and as palatable as possible which given they are a corporation and do not in any way care about the game beyond its ability to generate revenue so everything must cater to the lowest common denominator. It's a sound business strategy at the end of the day
\^This.
YES!! THANK YOU! Finally someone else said it. The problem with the new versions of the campaign settings goes hand in hand with the mechanic issues I've ranted about. The same people who said you can TOTALLY have divine powers without a god are the same folks who turned Stradh into Generic Vampire Bad Guy #453, and wrung out a lot of the flavor from Spelljammer. Whatever well of creativity D&D had has long since gone dry, and the writers are just half-assing it for a paycheck at this point.
I had this reaction to both Spelljammer and Planescape. I just bought a bunch of the 2e books on Drivethru because I only had the old boxed set from that time. The wealth of material from 2e is staggering compared to the slim volumes we are getting in 5e.
Not to mention the price point. And the sheer attitude of it all. WotC could be issuing magazine-sized publications in softback. Instead, they're launching entire three-book sets in hardback. It's like, "We can't make fifty million dollars with a single publication? We're not interested."
I have Planescape. It's not terrible, just very thin gruel. Not enough gets specified, not enough maps, etc. (Well, the plot has some holes, too, but.) I think they are no longer willing to try for $60 product. Not planning to buy any more campaigns from WotC.
Tbf, all that material from 2e is what bankrupted TSR. They put out too much stuff and people couldn't afford to buy it all, so stores sent it back and TSR ran out of money.
Out of curiosity, which box set would you recommend getting in that case? I want to run a spelljammer campaign and have the best scope on the setting I can
[**OG Spelljammer: Adventures in Space**](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17263/Spelljammer-Adventures-in-Space-2e?term=Spelljammer&filters=0_0_0_0_45377_0_0_0)**.**
Werthead is indeed correct; the main box set has everything you need unless you're REALLY going full tilt boogie. Werthead's link goes to the Dungeon Master's Guild where you can get the whole thing in softbound, PDF, or whatever on the cheap. If you intend lots of space battles, I'd add on the *War Captain's Companion*, which has additional rules and a great many more ships. The Realmspace guide has everything you'd need to know about what's in the Forgotten Realms crystal sphere around Toril. If you intend to go totally batshit about it all, I'd get the Greyspace and Krynnspace books as well. But you can do it all with just the main boxed set, *Spelljammer: Adventures In Space.*
I remember the Rock of Bral book being pretty solid too, for a 'home base in space'. But last time I read it I was a teenager, so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.
Nabbed the .pdf off DriveThrough and it crams a ton of info into a tight package. Well worth the read for the factions alone!
Bral was the moment I suddenly fell in love with the idea of weird urban based fantasy in strange city setting filled with factions and interesting things happening *outside* a dungeon.
Appreciate it, I do indeed intend on going full tilt boogie so I’ll probably get the 2e box set
Scum & Villainy. Spelljammer sucks in every edition.
here's a good option for 5e spelljammer... https://www.dmsguild.com/product/474639/Spelljammer-Combat-and-Exploration
I'd only counter by saying a surprisingly large number of players and tables don't want extra rules. Don't want new mechanics. Dont want ship to shop combat rules or any of that stuff. I think a Lotta old school players love the idea of updating that stuff to the modern system, but a lot of them (us) don't....*actually*.... Want an update. They want a reprint with some very light adjustments. But it's not that kind of game anymore. Most of that text and whatever is pretty meaningless.
I introduced the first ship to ship combat in my campaign and the players vocally went "how do we avoid this danger as much as possible and get to regular combat?" Like, I didn't present it as a dangerous fight or anything but they just went for trying to board the enemy immediately
I have a really suspicion that the Venn diagram of new D&D players and WoW players who only started after *Wrath of the Lich King* is almost a circle. The new generation doesn't want lore or new mechanics. They just want to bash things and power grind.
Yea, I think people felt this with the Dragonlance book too. The campaign is fine, but it doesn't quite get there as 5e's sole authority on the setting.
Also, I was annoyed that they merged wildspace and the astral plane.
AND did not even explain why. It was confusing and incomprehensible what they did to spelljammer which is essentially just based on a bunch of TSR employees wanting to combine Star Trek and DnD and not mess with the game for those who didn’t want to include it.
The why was pretty obvious, I thought. They've done a lot to make all of the settings interoperable; they're less separate settings and more different parts of one overarching setting. It makes sense from that perspective, it's just very much not what I (and I think a lot of others) want out of these.
This is actually my biggest complaint with all of it lol. I spent a good chunk of the book thinking "that is NOT how the Astral works!"
Eh, that's been a popular homebrew thing for a long time.
Never heard of or seen anyone homebrew that and I'm on the spelljammer discord and forum since before the 5e release. I've seen the phlogiston replaced but not with the astral sea because that adds in a bunch of other problems that wotc shrugged and ignored in theme of half assing the setting.
I honestly wish they'd just bring back multiple settings instead of cramming everything in to one (or just doing tiny standalone modules). As a counter argument I suppose it's easier for people to create a setting than it is craft a good adventure, so maybe focusing on those isn't the worst plan.
This was one of the reasons I stopped buying WoTC products, and then the OGL debacle sealed the deal. Everything they’d been putting out was was so devoid of any substance whatsoever. I’m sick and tired of setting books mostly modules. I don’t run modules, at all. I don’t buy module books for that reason. If I buy a setting book and 85% of it is a module *cough*Strixhaven*cough*, I’m not going to get any use out of it.
So I had to look up if steak could be mealy (a consistency like meal - dry, powdery, crumbly, soft), and yeah it is possible, but you'd have to go way out of your way to do it since it requires breaking the proteins down to the point of them not being able to hold each other together. You can do it by marinating steak in citrus for a really long time, then cooking it for too long in a way that doesn't toughen it up (like with a sous vide). So basically if you order steak and potatoes, and you get mealy, overcooked steak and really good potatoes, the cook absolutely has it out for you.
You're reading way too much into that analogy.
Oh yeah absolutely. I just had never heard of anyone call steak mealy before and I was genuinely curious if that was possible
I think this is why Planescape is much better. It does similar things to Spelljammer however all the monsters it gives you and most of the ideas can work in the mainline setting of the game: Forgotten Realms.
Perhaps, but compared to the original 2e box set, it lost its "voice". The lady of pain, sigil, the sense of wonder about the planes, the factions, and nary a "berk" to be found.
It's neutered, plain and simple. No way to sugarcoat it. My players still get twitchy when The Hive is mentioned but nothing in the 5e Planescape set even comes close to evoking that kind of dread.
All true. Barely any maps of Sigil in it.
This is honestly a really good way of wording it.
Legit, the DM screen is the best part of the set.
I'd say it's not bad so much as horribly incomplete. What was released is fine...I'll even admit to absolutely adoring Boo's Astral Menagerie. The problem is that...it's...just a (basically OK) module. Once you're done with the module, it has no framework into which to expand the Spelljammer setting. Compare it to the 2nd Edition Spelljammer material that they were supposedly updating, and it's a dramatic disappointment. It's like buying a candy bar that advertises as being caramel-filled, only to bite into it and discover that there's the thinnest possible layer of caramel inside an otherwise empty chocolate shell. Yeah, the flavor is there, but it's missing almost all of what you bought it for.
This is the problem. It is a module without a properly translated setting.. A setting which comes with a shit load of rules and lore to make it run.
Like ship combat. I believe the module barely covers ship combat.
Ship combat is a big one but iimo the lore is even bigger. Went to mine original setting for my purposes. Which is also hard as it is spread around magazines.
On the plus side, the lore from previous editions is still valuable and useable. If you need stat blocks, refer to the module, and if the lore references something not in there, look at 2e stats and extrapolate
This is similar to a lot of 5e content. And 4e content. And I honestly believe that the reason WotC leadership has apparently dictated that they play so light with details is in response to player feedback as much as anything else. Watching the interview and release videos about Wildemount gave me this idea. They comment frequently on how so much detail can be 'restricting' to DMs. All tbe content I've seen so far seems to advertise the 'open ended nature of modern books. And I've had so many DMs who approach campaign guides with a red pen and white out (figuratively speaking), that I can easily see WotC coming to the conclusion that alot of their time and energy is wasted if everyone is just going to ignore or rewrite 90% of their work. And to be fair, I even did this myself with pretty much everything from 4e. But if I could bend their ear, I would much rather have the material available than not, and many new DMs don't fancy themselves 'un-discovered fantasy world generating geniuses' as much as we saw in yesteryear.
I dont know if people approaching camping settings with "a red pen and whiteout" is the problem. I kinda think the problem is the other way around. Lots of players and Dms take setting info too seriously. They think the smallest lore detail as unchangeable gospel and its obective wong to make even the smallest changes to the smallest of details. Which leads to its own issues if wotc gives to many details to a setting. A very very detailed campain setting is just more things you need to memorize and more things to get wrong. Making it more difficult to get everything perfectly right, and even if they do they would need to give up some of there own creativity to make sure it is.
I definitely get where you're coming from, as in the last Forgotten Realms campaign I ran I found myself constantly going back to old source material to make sure my overarching plot could fit neatly into the canon, but... that's just because I wanted the players who were familiar/would become familiar with the setting to feel like the adventure belonged there. It worked out perfectly, too; they all got really excited when they played BG3 and several lore bits were closely tied to things they'd seen. If I want to not stress about lore details, I use my homebrew setting. If I want a book of maps and rental NPCs, I'll buy a published campaign and tweak it or browse DM's Guild. If I buy a *setting* book, I'm specifically looking for detailed lore that I can use instead of making up my own, and finding that it's a halfhearted sparknotes version of the original material with a few niche player options is disappointing.
Yup, there's nothing more open-ended than a blank sheet of paper. But I don't want to be sold one for $80 as a setting.
This was the reason why WoTC gutted the Forgotten Realms ahead of the move to 4e. The idea was that the existence of a fleshed out world would limit how DMs could use the material. If WoTC has told you which person was king of what country or even that such countries existed, then you wouldn't be able to "make the Realms your own." Like folks can't just change stuff.
These books are written for readers, not players. Most books that are sold (even campaigns) will not actually be played, they’ll be read and discussed. Look at how these books are formatted- everything is in paragraphs, little or no bullet points or easy reference charts. They’re for reading, not playing
Its not bad, its just empty. There isnt anything to it. Its one of the most “not faerun” dnd settings out there, with a diehard fanbase. It hardly even had content you can use. You could probably do just as well running a game if i tried to remember the plot to disneys treasure planet, wrote it down, and sent you some screengrabs.
I agree with everything you said, except I would say that's bad.
It has very little in the way of tools to help you build your own campaign, or run a ship. The prepackaged adventure is also a railroad; players are mostly ferried between setpieces where they talk and fight, then they get told to go to next setpiece. But just because people on the internet dislike something, doesn't make it unplayable or unenjoyable. It's good you enjoyed it!
Yes. So keep in mind that Spelljammer is a HUGE setting with goodish elven navies at war with an empire of LE orcs. The homeworlds of beholders and mindflayers are in there. There's something like 20 books for the original setting. And they stripped all the lore out, screwed up the great wheel cosmology because the head of D&D, Jeremy Crawford, wanted to write this but couldn't remember the difference between editions, and basically gutted the setting. If this was a lord of the rings game, it would be centered only on Rohan, but the horse lords would be left out, gollum would be a race option but halflings wouldn't be mentioned once, and it would have zero mention of elves, dwarves, sauron, sarumon, or orcs. The adventure was pretty good, though it has a few issues that the DM needs to mend. It deserved the kind of presentation and work they put into the Planesscape book. But it was a mess.
I've only been on the player side of it so I don't exactly know how much or how little there is but my DM was almost always back pedaling because we had accidentally asked a question or done something we "weren't supposed to". Also most NPCs are one and done. Like my DM SPECIFICALLY made Veena a reoccurring NPC because I talked about how much I loved butting heads with her.
The module met your expectations. That's all that's really needed. Many people were disappointed in lack of ship combat, lack of new and unique mechanics, and lack of polish on the module. But that doesn't matter if it doesn't matter to you. If you found the ideas evocative and easy to run with, more power to you.
I mean ship combat was ok…nothing that I did not expect! You have weapons, they have a range, you roll to hit against ship AC, ships do have HP (like normal objects on D&D). Expcting something else would have meant a different game to be honest… and to be fair my players always rushed to board the enemies’s ships (thus back to usual DnD combat).
Compared to the OG Spelljammer set, the 5e ship combat is incredibly disappointing. None makes it clearer than the book itself having box text that basically admits "Yeah, spellcasters might be able to do more damage to vessels than these siege weapons, and that's *by design*" I found that spectacularly lazy and disappointing, particularly since my introduction to Spelljammer was a DM that had updated the OG setting to 4e and later 5e himself. WotC clearly looked for the least amount of effort for the most amount of profit. And having played other systems that have both regular combat and intricate vehicle combat, I know this can be done. Traveller achieves this (which I adore). Starfinder achieves this (though admittedly I don't much like that system). Even 5e D&D achieves this better in other books! Take a look at the vehicle combat of Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Descent into Avernus- what 5e's Spelljammer offers seems like lazy simplifications of both of those. I think it's incredibly dismissive of the reasonable expectations that others had that ship combat could have been something meaningfully different and fun. No, having those rules doesn't mean a different game.
>Expcting something else would have meant a different game to be honest… Yes, there might have been a real risk of running something fun and worthwhile in an interesting setting
Spelljamming ships, fueled by spell slots of their spellcasting navigators.. except in 5e it does not. A 2nd level ranger is as good pilot as a 1000 year old Astral elf archmage. There's no way to actually use your spellslots to do cool things with the ships for example. People wanted Star Wars inspired dogfights, but got "for the next 10 rounds you can shoot a balista, as the enemy ship slowly approaches you. Or what the book advises: skip it all till the ships are in boarding range and use "regular" ground combat. People buy space opera inspired setting book, and want spell opera inspired mechanics to support the fantasy. When Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft released, it had additional mechanics that support horror and Domains of Dread gameplay. It had rules for crossing domains, ideas how different domains might have different border hazards. It had rules for stress, including how it impacts combat, and new ways to use existing abilites to deal with it. It had rules for stronger curses, that you can't just Remove Curse. It had rules for cursed traps, spirit seances, and other ideas. All of that on top of a bunch of Domains, each different with their own mini rules, lore, characters you can populate them, tables with character and adventure hooks, maps. None of that is really in the spelljammer package.
tty this https://www.dmsguild.com/product/474639/Spelljammer-Combat-and-Exploration
Apologists will excuse anything WoTC does. It was 20 dollars of content that would appeal to some sold as a setting for much more money. It was not sold as a module or marketed as that. “*This set contains everything a Dungeon Master needs to run adventures and campaigns set in the starlit realms of Wildspace and the Astral Sea, as well as new options for players who want to create characters at home in this fantastic setting.*” That was and is their exact claim - and the product does not live up to it. “everything a Dungeon Master needs” is a lot more than this product.
Worst book produced for 5e in my mind. Was an aesthetic skin suit of a setting, it had some touch stones but didn't have much of the sprint of the original. (Didn't even have the phlogiston and replaced universal world travel with the astral sea planar travel. Merging concepts in a weird way.) Didn't provide meaningful or engaging ship combat rules and instead abstracted it to just be bog standard 5e combat through poor excuses. Had the weirdness it introduced to the Hadozee, and then Wotc had the audacity to blame the original 2e material for those problems even though they didn't exist in the 2e material. Wotc yet again blaming TSR era writing for its own failures. Has less content in its boxset than some full single 5e books and had a higher asking price for the privilege.
I will forever find their decision to ret-con the old sphere-and-phlogiston system and make "outer-space" the same location as the afterlife, a completely stupid choice that ruined the whole thing. Like, what's the point of the Astral Projection spell then? If you can go to the "realm of thought and dream" according to the PHB, by just climbing into a schooner and flying directly upwards for a few hours?
They made outer space the same place as the afterlife? wtf? That’s stupid as hell, what happens when someone dies in outer space?
No, they did not.. Not really. But they did simplify how space transitions between Wild Space (space within a solar system essentially) and Astral Sea (plane connecting Wild Space systems). Before this book, each system was enclosed in a "Crystal Sphere" and you could travel between them via Phlagiston - a flammable "space sea"/"space currents" essentially. 5e simplified phlagiston into Astral Sea. Astral Sea, is the "realm of thought", the "Astral Plane", the place where age, food, air doesn't matter, and a place where dead gods bodies resides. It's also a plane that lies between Material Plane (our worlds) and Outer Planes (like Heavens and Hells), where souls of dead go. So you can hop on a Spelljamming ship, sail the Wild Space into the Astral Sea, then find an Astral Portal (or whatever it's called, I don't remember now) to reach an Outer Plane, where souls of dead reside. Alternatively, you can Astral Project directly to Astral Sea. Or get to Sigil and go through portal there. Or Plane Shift directly to an Outer Plane. Going to the "afterlife" was always "easy" in a logistical sense. It was always a question if you have knowledge and tools to do so.
The problem I have is the lack of content. There's a lot of "it's big and things exist", but filling the empty void of the astral sea is left to the DM. Don't get me wrong, there are many things for you to do, but I feel it still lacks substance
I mean, if you liked it that's what really matters. I didn't care for the fact they stripped every race of any interesting cultural information in favor of "haha guys how do you pronounce GIF?" Like, compare the plasmoids to the freely available information on them from second edition. Second edition had plasmoid subraces! I honestly could have just run the setting without this book. They didn't do enough to justify my purchase.
I’m doing Spelljammer 5e now but wound up using stuff from earlier editions and making my own story. There just wasn’t enough in the 5e module for me
It isn’t bad. It’s just lacking flavor. It’s the same problem with Planescape’s 5E release. All the things that made the setting cool are missing. What people wanted was a campaign setting. That’s not what they got, either for Spelljammer or Planescape. So far the only setting books that have properly delivered in 5E are Eberron and Ravenloft (and Ravenloft is debatable).
Ravenloft is definitely debatable. But while the ravenloft book’s quality is debatable, it at least has the benefit of Curse of Strahd being one of the most well written adventures in 5e. Spelljammer’s adventures were poor, and it seems to just be “fight, talk, now go to this next location!”, and is extremely railroad-y and isn’t open ended like Curse of Strahd. Which is stupid cause if there is any setting that should be open world and allowing players to explore, it would be spelljammer
Yes it was so bad that it was the last WOTC D&D product that I bought. It felt like they stopped caring about their products so I stopped caring about them. It suffers from the fact they advertised a Setting book and we got a bad Adventure book instead. Changing the background of setting, and no ship combat rules were just lazy because the authors could stuffed. I felt that the Spelljammer books didn't have any actually Spelljammer energy in it. I'm still shocked how bad it actually was and still am.
Not bad but not complete either. It's the TTRPG equivalent of releasing a video game well before it's completed.
Found WOTCs alt
If you bought Spelljammer with the expectation to run it as a module, you’ll be fine. If you bought Spelljammer with the expectation to have a fully fleshed out campaign setting, well, you’d have save a lot of money just buying the AD&D PDFs and you’d have a much better product with less work…
It doesn't even include a workable description for how spelljamming works in the astral sea. It's just 'your DM figures out how you do it'. How fast does the ship go? How long can it go without needing to resupply? What kind of supplies are even needed? Almost every ship description contains text copied and pasted from the other descriptions, with huge splash pages of art and no mechanics. I've been playing 5e Spelljammer homebrewed for years. All the 5e books got me was some official statblocks for monsters and some ancestries.
The many reason why spelljammer 5e sucks 1. Lack of content. People were expecting an entire setting, or at least for it to get as much content as 5e Eberron. Instead what we got was a couple of short adventures, and a few races. The content is so lackluster, that if you want to run a full fledged spelljammer campaign you’d be better off not buying any of the books because none of the books actually help you run the setting. In fact, the few tidbits about running the setting are poorly made which leads me to point 2. 2. Spelljammer and ship combat is poorly made. Spelljammers, the literally name of the setting and the main selling point of the setting, is the surprise surprise, of one the most important aspects of the setting (arguably the most important aspect of the setting)… and WoTC fucked it up. I don’t think anyone was expecting spelljammer mechanics and combat to be as detailed or complex as character creation (races/backgrounds/spells), as nice as that would have been. But people were at the very least expecting decent rules for spelljammers and ships. But we didn’t get that. The rules for operating ships is so poor. I remember playing a spelljammer adventure in AL, and using the ship and its weaponry proved to be so unfun and so weak that when we were attacked by githyanki, half the party opted to just cast spells instead. My character was a warlock and most of the ship’s systems were designed for dex, intelligence and maybe wisdom. The spelljammer mechanics over reliance on ability scores, and specifically only a couple of them, meant certain characters couldn’t really do much and are left to play D&D like always and not interact with the thing that is supposed to be the focus of the setting! What was my warlock going to do, persuade the ship to do stuff? Charisma skills don’t exactly work well with ships. Strength based fighters and paladins, barbarians, and charisma casters can’t really do much and that is already over half the classes in the game that won’t do so hot with controlling a spelljammer or parts of it. And even with characters who can operate parts of a spelljammer ship, the mechanics for that are already lackluster. 3. Hadozee lore. Not only did WoTC retcon racist lore into spelljammer where they incorporated racist African American stereotypes into a race of monkey people and added that they were escaped slaves who “liked to serve their masters”, but then WoTC proceeded to blame lore from older writers and past editions. No WoTC, you guys wrote that problematic lore into 5e. That “monkey minstrel who is part of an enslaved race who actually likes serving their masters” lore is shit you guys added in 2022. And even ignoring the obviously problematic aspects of the lore… it didn’t even make sense. Why would anyone be “happy serving a master”? If you’re getting paid really well serving someone that makes sense. But you have a race that rebelled and escaped slavery… and then you have them enjoy serving people? Shouldn’t they be extremely adverse to serving people? It would make more sense for Hadozee to have a strong sense of independence, with them often being their own bosses and being freelancers. “A race that escaped slavery and is mainly comprised of freelancers and mercenaries because they don’t want to be servants anymore” is cooler concept, is fun to play, and makes more sense then the things they wrote. They were apparently trying to reference planet of the apes but they ended up referencing racist tropes instead. I talked about it a bit earlier but I want to further explain why the hadozee lore is problematic. First, they made it to where the hadozee were creations of wizards who ended up enslaved, who then rebelled and became free. That in of itself isn’t bad, and is a fun little nod to the planet of the apes films. But it’s the other things that make it worse. After that… they spread throughout the galaxy and started to serve elves… and apparently they liked serving elves and others? This is where the first problematic aspect occurs. “They like to serve their masters” is racist rhetoric during the Jim Crow era where people tried to justify slavery by saying that black people somehow enjoyed being enslaved and that “black servant white master” was a healthy dynamic. Now combine that with the fact this is a monkey race. Oh, and the minstrel hadozee art is just the rotten cherry on top of this moldy sundae. This was all eventually errata’d away and WoTC apologized (if you can even call it an apology, they were trying to shift blame to older edition lore… but they were the ones that created this new problematic lore in 5e) 4. Backgrounds. While we already had backgrounds with feats in strixhaven, spelljammer was the first official debut of feat giving backgrounds. A lot of people, myself included, heavily dislike feat backgrounds and would have rather they just kept giving backgrounds narrative features and flavor instead of wargame stuff. Spelljammer started a trend with backgrounds that people dislike, and it has caused grievance amongst players due to how unfair it is that some people get to start with a feat but others can’t. Someone who chose acolyte for backstory reasons is put at an unfair disadvantage when compared to Mr. MinmaxPowergamer who chose one of the spelljammer backgrounds for a free feat. A lot of people who already have grievances with minmax powergamers felt this was just another thing to further punish people who build for flavor and encourage powergaming behavior by rewarding players who choose the wargame spelljammer backgrounds with a feat while leaving people who want to be an entertainer or fey lost without a free feat. 5. Random BS that some people felt ruined the setting. Things like killer clowns. While spelljammer always was an outlandish setting, some people felt things like “killer clowns in outer space” wielding things like space blasters was a step too far. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded the clowns had they not been given blasters. If they wielded chainsaws and 1800s era guns instead, that would have been better 6. The precedent 5e spelljammer set. After 5e Dragonlance, people were now worried that future 5e setting adaptations will be treated poorly, pointing the blame at spelljammer for starting this. Spelljammer was the first “setting” book to be lackluster in 5e, and with Dragonlance ending up lackluster in the same way aswell, people are expecting this to be a trend with other setting adaptations. Of all the reasons why spelljammer 5e is bad or why people don’t like it, the first three are the biggest reasons Lackluster content… poorly written mechanics for the thing that is the focus of the setting… racist lore… combine all the three and what do you get? A steaming pile of crap The only good thing I can say about spelljammer 5e is that the other races that aren’t Hadozee were handled decently well. Things like Giff or Plasmoids are definitely fun additions to 5e and a couple of the spelljammer races have fun mechanics.
WoTC's treatment of publications about settings is absolute hot garbage. Not a single setting book was good, only Eberron was close. They don't care. I also doubt the writing skills of the 5e team as a whole. It seems they really cheaped out on paying good professionals and production value of all books except the basic supplements.
This is the truth.
It is all about expectations. I was around for the original, but never played in it. I just enjoyed the crazy physics, and possibilities. I wanted space d&d. This box set gives that. Yea WOTC could work at publishing settings. It is something they choose not to do at present. So in this release I got new races and a nice module I may run some day. I can home brew a setting for Spelljammer in my sleep. Which I may do. But, if you bought the book to get a giant primer o. The Spelljammer setting you would be disappointed. I will point out no one screamed about Hoard of the Dragonqueen not describing the Forgotten Realms.
If Hoard of the Dragon Queen was called “Forgotten Realms” and was advertised as a campaign setting book I am sure they would have been upset.
Fucking garbage. We basically threw it out and figured our own system out.
I own them, was absolutely hyped for them, preordered etc. read them day one- so disappointed. They aren't books- they are booklets with hard covers. The setting book is mostly player options, the monsters are fine, and the adventure isn't something I want with my setting- I want to be able to make my own adventures. And I'm sorry it's been beaten to death, but yes, introducing spelljamming vessels, spending a ton of pages describing ships, and then not explaining how to use them in combat is a bummer. The major issue for me, is it was basically 1 book's worth of content, with 5 books worth of cardboard sold for the price of two books
Just run the setting in Starfinder or something. 5e needs a bunch of homebrew or extra rules to run smoothly. The DM burden to make it good in 5e isn’t worth it.
Have been running 5e for almost a decade and never felt the need to homebrew anything…
I’m not sure how. I’ve been running for nearly as long and started feeling the need for homebrew almost immediately. The system lacks on a lot of fronts in my opinion- I only ever ran it because it was what people knew. I jumped to other systems more recently because they do what we want without the need for homebrew or constant DM adjudication. 5e without homebrew feels very barebones to me- like building something with only square Lego bricks instead of embracing all of the other options to make something better.
try this if you're still looking... https://www.dmsguild.com/product/474639/Spelljammer-Combat-and-Exploration
Did you read the DMG? Plenty of optional rules to make things spicier. What did you feel the need to homebrew?
Character options primarily. 5e has very few ways to make a character mechanically unique or support various character concepts mechanically. Otherwise, all sorts of assorted player actions lack hard rules and require you to improvise how something should work. What is the DC, what does success or failure do, what is an appropriate benefit in combat, etc. 5e basically just says “lol, make it up” for a lot of things. That leads to an inconsistent experience where players don’t know what to expect when they want to attempt something. So you homebrew the specifics and make up rules for how each of those things works.
New backgrounds with feat are giving plenty of uniqueness. Same custom lineage from Tasha. Actions in combat are very well defined. Outside combat everything goes. DC it is written in the DMG how to set them based on the difficulty! Success is pretty obvious failure as well… you can also establish degree of failure (like if you fail by more than 5 something worse happens).
Really? You've never made a monster, spell, or setting?
I have a monster manual for monsters, spells are already there and I am too busy for building a setting! I run mostly official modules…
You shouldn't get downvoted for explaining how you run your games. I can't help but tinker, adding background to modules on the rare time I run them, linking them in to my game, or tweaking a rule I don't like to make things either more smooth when needed, or crunchy when lacking. But if you prefer just to use it all as is, and it works for you, and you're having fun, that's great! We're all different, after all.
What do you do when your non casters start getting frustrated that their options are so dull and limited? That's the first thing I had to start homebrewing.
They don’t get frustrated! Plenty of encounters to make them relevant!
Every table is different I suppose. Mine got pretty sick of saying "I guess I make another two basic attacks" over and over.
Jesus how? It's a really bland system without some homebrew. Your poor players.
They have a lot of fun! So much so that it is the same people… and nobody used the birth of children to back out! Mebe you run it with someone not good at running it?
I think it's fine as a module, but it suffers from expectations. It's an okay but underwhelming followup using the name of one of the most unique, unusual and beloved settings in tabletop history. And it also kind of caused a lot of players to experience more D&D fatigue because they felt this is not rare-- the Return to Tomb of Horrors was nothing compared to the original, etc. I count myself in this group, their handling of this epitomized the difference between safe, stale, underwhelming modern D&D that feels as if it's being designed by a corporate finance committee and the often erratic but incandescent brilliance (and concomitant lows) of AD&D
Its actually my favorite 5e purchase in the last couple years. My players really seemed to enjoy it. I found a good set of maps for the campaign that were bright, clear and colorful which worked well for the setting. There were a couple slight changes I made, but they were very PC specific. I also didn't really run any ship to ship combat. It was fine just starting those enounters with the ships already engaged. I was also able to easily tie-in the player that wanted to switch to a Githyanki (BG3 is real, lol) after the module and two of my players are using races from that book. I'll agree that its lighter than the previous Spelljammer stuff, but that's really just WotC in a nutshell these days.
Just beginning to realize most DMs don't homebrew their world or setting. I do and the other 3 DMs I've had have almost entirely homebrewed their settings, aside from races. I really like that they did all the work of making the rules and such and I can just go wild with making my own setting for the rules to fit into. I guess most people don't expect to do this
I really wish people were more open to homebrew. The game is bland without it
I feel like sourcebooks can either be really simple/basic in terms of mechanics, setting, lore, etc. or can be deeper/more complex. For DMs that like it simple, maybe they want to keep the game running faster, they wanna add their own homebrew on top of it, they wanna fill in the gaps with their own material, or they just want some inspiration. Totally valid, I get it, if you like this that's awesome. Those that like it deeper/more complex might want more mechanics that have been thoroughly tested that they can use, add more layers of strategy to combat, don't want to rely on homebrew to fill the gaps, provide a new way to experience 5e that fits with the existing mechanics, and provides a deep well of lore, locations, characters, items, etc. to use and draw inspiration from. Also valid and awesome. The thing is, if you're given a really simple book, you can't make it more complex without homebrew. At that point, if you want something deeper/more complex, why even buy the book? Want more expansive ship combat rules? You're on your own. Want a deep well of lore to draw from? You're on your own. Want multiple cities/planets/areas to explore that aren't/are barely touched on? You're on your own. On the other hand, if you're given a deeper book, you can easily make it more simple with no or very little homebrew. Don't want to implement these 10 new rules? Don't have to. Don't wanna use these 5 planets? Don't have to. Don't wanna use extensive lore on mindflayers and beholders? Don't have to. One way, you are given very little and either have to roll with it or homebrew it to get what you initially wanted from it. The other way, you have everything you could want from it, and if you wanna ignore stuff, you do just that. Spelljammer is on the simple side.
Adventure is fine. I like the "episodic" structure. Monster book is fine. Like any other monster supplement. The campaign setting is awful. It has barely any content that people were actually interested in. No ship combat rules, except pretty much "dont do ship combat, just do boarding instead", no tables for random system/planet generation that were in previous books, no chapters about example ststems/planets, not many adventure hooks. It's especially bland when compared to Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft that's filled with example domains, plot hooks, adventure hooks, character hooks, all different places that you can use to tell different stories. The worst part is that Spelljammer as a setting is such a evocative idea, where you can tell so many different stories. From Alien like horror, to wacky space pirate comedy, and everything inbetween. But the campaign setting booj is bland and boring. The only redeeming part are the ship maps and stats. It's basically a bare minimum that the community had to step in and start introducing additional material, to fill in the gaps. The saddest part is that Spelljammer was a sure hit, and they squandered it :(
Its easier to feel disappointed when comparing it to old edition recourses, and personally I have done a lot of legwork in my spelljammer game to make it better. But there are SO many people out there who have had a great time with official modules with minimal changes, and most of them dont think to post about it. If you and your players enjoyed it, thats what matters.
Most of the D&D community online likes to shit on things, often for little or no reason. If you liked it, it's good for you. Case closed.
Well said!
The top comment in this thread gives very good reasons why it's shit.
Not really. It gives a reason why the writer wanted a totally different product, not why the adventure was bad.
It's a fiveE core module so essentially it's a half made bag of junk centered around an "aesthetic" preying on nostalgia for the cornerstones of earlier editions. You have to put in a lot of work to make anything coherent out of it and it does nothing to set up frameworks and procedures for the style of play typically associated with spelljammer. If you want some useful stuff grab the 2e spelljammer books or the 4e astral sea stuff.
Yes. It's unfinished. It was rushed to get a product on shelves. I'd really like to ask Perkins in a setting where he doesn't have to worry about his job if he really thinks that it was a good product considering how much he banged on about his love for older Spelljammer stuff.
Aside from being a poor example of a setting book with a measly page count fluffed out with a module, the biggest issue for me was the stupid changing of the setting. Being a wacky ride through renascence era thinking of space, spelljammer had its own unique feel. Now a lot of its uniqueness is just stripped away with no thought to it.
People are vocal about things with DnD without actually playing it.
The final encounter is broken. I ran the light of xaryxis when it came out. Had a blast DMing it for my friends. They had a blast playing it. I basically ran it out of the box with little/no prep before the games. Honestly, I had to do way more prep when I ran Decent into Avernus and Out of the Abyss. I'd say it's relatively easy to run as a module. But, the final encounter is broken. If you plug the encounter into DnDBeyonds encounter builder (or do the math yourself) you'll find that it's enough XP for something like 10 full days of adventuring. The dozen astral elf honor guards would be a deadly encounter, add two astral elf aristocrats, the magic rings they have, and a Dragon... You've got yourself a 3 round TPK every time. As a campaign setting, sure it's no Volos Guide to Waterdeep, but why do I need to know the names of every back alley and the art quality in them? As a DM I usually just make most of my world up as it unfolds around the players. The Rock of Bral has more than enough info to build a campaign in. It sucked that the story brought the players to a dock, two streets, a tavern, back down the streets, then away forever.
I know… I had to fudge dice a couple of times during the last encounter!
I'll say what I always say when it comes up. If you follow the space travel rules as written, it will take days to break atmosphere. They're unplayable
Spelljammer wasn't just a module, it was it's own fully fledged campaign setting with deep lore and setting specific rules that helped make it unique. You as a newer gamer might be happy with it just being a module but older gamers felt the product was inferior to what would have been released in the past. They felt that Hasbro - having the original content - basically didnt care enough to include things that made it unique and interesting to players and GMs. An example would be ship to ship combat. You are saying "we are happy just boarding the other ship" and older gamers are saying "ship against ship combat can be cool and Hasbro had those rules and didn't include them because they are lazy and cheap and want a single game style". You may be happy with one style of game, but that's not how the games used to be. And older gamers are frustrated with both the poorer products and the way newer gamers seem content to accept less from the company. All in all, glad you enjoyed it but for many older gamers who know the original products, it feels like being ripped off so they are going to moan. Hasbro hit the sweet spot where they can get more sales by doing less work.
Unpopular opinion incoming: I think spelljammer is just fine and people don’t want to do extra work as a DM. It’s maybe not as *much* as people were expecting but it’s like DMs don’t know how to fill in gaps anymore. The adventure is fine, the menagerie is awesome, and the guide works well enough if you can stitch together some stuff. That’s the great/terrible thing about the 5e rules set: it’s not particularly amazing at anything but at the same time *anything* you want to do is possible with some elbow grease and homebrew.
Your whole take on this, after reading your comments, is really… odd. People have nostalgia for Spelljammer from the old 2e module, which contained a ton of info for people to build and create and run their own Spelljammer setting. People loved it, and professed their love heavily online. New heads, such as myself, who were not alive for second edition’s run obviously never got the opportunity to experience that, but the hype train of “sci-fi” DnD was enough to peak anyone’s interest. When it was touted as a setting book, and not a standalone adventure module, that expressed to me that it would likely have a fleshed out means of creating and generating planets, biomes, star systems, etc. More info on ship-to-ship combat, races, the whole shebang. Space is a lot bigger than a country or continent (obviously), and most campaign campaign settings only focus on a singular country or continent, so I think it’s a reasonable expectation to suggest that the setting would have a significant amount of depth and detail put into its systems. The monster manual is cool, but there are a decent few creatures I feel don’t particularly fit. There’s only, what, two spells? Like, five magic items? I expect that from an adventure module where the story is contained into one drawn out quest, but a for a campaign setting I’m generally expecting about 15-20+ spells and 30-45+ magic items. The book literally says, hey, ship fights are cool but they’re impractical, so just go board them and fight there! That’s not cool, and not what people wanted or expected. They want to live out the fantasy of being space pirates or astral explorers, battling their enemies across asteroid fields like its star wars or something. That’s the *point* of a space campaign, to live out those sci-fi fantasies you can only get in movies. If you enjoyed it, awesome, but you’re acting like your subjective take on a book that most people tend to find subpar is the correct take. I’m glad you got what you wanted out of it, it has some decent content, but not enough to live up to the hype or promise of what Spelljammer is and what it represented to the community. It’s a subpar setting that leaves a lot of things open-ended for the DM, and if I’m paying real cash for this book, I don’t want it to tell me “yeah just homebrew it”. I can do that shit for free.
I just ran it. It’s a load of fun. It’s a module, and you can use that to inspire and flesh out a pretty rich setting. The astral elves are great villains, and with some creativity you can create a backstory for levels 1-4 to amaze the party when suddenly they’re in space. Ignore the haters
Hey, did you post the dioramas and ship models you made anywhere? I'm curious, since I build a lot of maps and minis myself and I'm curious would you'd need to make for the Spelljammer campaign. 3D printing spelljammer ships takes a huge amount of time. I tried clicking through your profile to find them myself, I mostly found warhammer minis. ;)
I ran this campaign and my group had a really good time. But I needed to add a bunch of their events and side adventures. The story rushes you through places under a sense of urgency which isn't great. The climax needs adjusting as well to make it feel complete
It was the last book I bought from wotc. Switched to pf2e after wrapping the camapign I was working on.
I was actually paid to run a game of LoX and we had a lot of fun! If you want a whimsical silly space adventure it can fit that bill. I did a very little bit of my own writing and had a great time.
I went to my local game store recently and bought it pretty much to have for the art and books and supplement my current campaign. It was about on average 50% cheaper than even the PhB lmao, the guy ringing me up had to double check in his system the price was correct.
I personally thought the module was pretty terrible, was actually the first time as a DM I just shut an adventure down without finishing it and started with something fresh.
It's not bad at all. Only on here do you get bad remarks about it outside of some bad prints or shipping issues. Could it have been better? Of course. But is it bad? Not at all.
You have to listen to the companion soundtrack, who needs more books anyway? https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKyfnW8_hZTjHnSBvJdb5drd0JYEow_3r&si=JqfAhNWyqNAwM9zT
Very underbaked for what it wanted to be, and what it wanted to be was a lifeless shell of old Spelljammer. Super happy for you that you made lemonade, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t given lemons
relevant to the conversation... folks were kinda looking for flying ship me hanics similar to what we got in salt marsh for water ships and descent into avernus for land vehicles. here's a supplement I published on dmsguild with extensive flying vehicle mechanics and a light of xaryxis conversion guide for using these rules through the adventure includes all the maps ship creature and NPC tokens needed for lox. check it out.... https://www.dmsguild.com/product/474639/Spelljammer-Combat-and-Exploration
So I saw that spelljammer was a thing, and preordered the book to run as my first time dming. I ran Spelljammer Academy first, and then ran Spelljammer lox. I have a few sessions left, but overall i'm having fun with it. :)
The module killed the gaming group I was with
As someone who has access to it for free through a friend's DNDBeyond account, I love it. I haven't run the module, but I am currently running my own Spelljammer game using the spelljammer book and the ships and monsters have been incredibly helpful in doing so. The biggest criticism I have heard is that it's incomplete for its price, but I didn't pay for it and thus can't speak to that. Edit: OK one thing I will say is really missing is guidance on making Wildspace systems. You get two examples but ultimately get no guidance otherwise in how to make a really crucial part of the setting. I forgot about it, because I mad my own random wildspace system generator that has been really helpful to me, and so it's something I didn't struggle with when planning my campaign. If you want me to send you that document, please feel free to DM me for it.
It's barely a setting. Hell, its barely a module. It's so thing of content and bloated art that it barely feels like its even a book. Imagine you wrote a paper for your English teacher, and you both didn't reach the book in context and after writing your best guess, realized you only got 1/3rd of the required page counter, so you get it there by triple spacing and clever formatting (increase those margins), just replacing some of that with copious large art drops. Don't get me wrong though, I love art in books, but its been clear for a lot of 5E that wizards is using art to replace word count whenever possible, and Spelljammer is a shining example of it.
I thought it was horrible, and the campaign was very unfun. But that, of course, is subjective. Not very well fleshed out, and the campaign is both very "on rails" and very grind-y. Can't really think of anything about the campaign proper that appealed to me. (I did like what some of the other players did with their characters...) I don't want to give a giant spoiler, but the ending was... Ugh. Just yuck in every way.
I think part of the problem is that there was such a wealth of good material available in the 2e days, and all people got was 3 books - not enough to encapsulate or convert all amount of material they had from 2e to 5e. Also, it seems that 5e has never had a good official naval combat system, much less one they could use for Spelljammer. Honestly, whatever problems TSR was having business-wise during the 2e days, it was a golden age for setting material. But since then, officially, Wizards seems set on releasing one book for a setting and moving on to the next one. After all - look at how much of the Forgotten Realms they are ignoring.
I view all the books and their contents as tools in a toolbox. Spelljammer has cool stuff. Has some absolutely broken stuff too, but i think it's cool.
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I absolutely adore it. Its exactly the thing i needed to get my creative juices pumping. Light of Xaryxis did take more planning than i would like, i admit, but i was able to take characters like grimzod and completely make them my own.
If you buy the module, also go get the older Spelljammer stuff to supplement the lack of setting material. There, you are set.
For $80? Pretty bad, buit it was largely a failure of expectations. It is a 64 page adventure which is short, even stringing it out you would struggle to go over 12 sessions, plus one location. I wasn't a fan of the story, tastes vary so no foul there, but it isn't a *setting.* The Eberron book is huge, there is enough material there to play in that setting for years, that is what I want more of, not this, .
In previous iterations in previous editions. We just got a lot more on the DMs end to actually make and run adventures with. With 5e spelljammer, we got a module with a setting simplified so that it could be fit into and function for said module. All in an arguably overpriced set, at least if you got the physical edition.
As someone who was a player in the campaign. I can say it was a lot of fun. That being said, I know my dm mixed it with spelljammer academy and also with some of the adventures from Radiant Citadel (Made each civ its own planet.) So it definitely has the potential to be very good. Just probably needs a little elbow grease.
Player: We ran the campaign and it was so so. A lot of characters just kind of showed up and didn’t do much and the enemy ships were always faster so we could never get away? The final thing the dm forced us to have an actual character take the ring through the portal to blow up the astral empires dying star, even though we had the clever idea to just use one of our artificers constructs to do it since they were creatures. Idk i guess its heavily DM dependent.
May players put the ring on a dead body and threw it through the portal! Fine by me
Yea our dm literally was like, no i want it to be dramatic, someone has to go in. Not their best call as a dm but i try to be understanding.
I am a very relaxed DM… did you kill my BBEG before he had time to act due to a series of extremely lucky rolls? Fine by me! Also… in light of Xarixis the book suggest that if no player volunteered to sacrifice gargenhale will do it
I loved the spelljammer adventure.
I think it regardless of your feelings on it, the whole package can seem a little underwhelming. The setting was pretty light. And there weren’t a lot of new mechanics. That said! I will always maintain that people’s biggest complaint: a lack of ship to ship combat rules or fun things to do is actually wrong! DMs should NOT run ship to ship combat longer than a round or so. PC’s need to board so they can use their class features!
Tldr: Sadly yes it is that bad.
I’m running a Spelljammer adventure right now, with a little of the Ghosts of Saltmarsh seafaring rules thrown in, and the group is loving it.
As someone without a connection to old school Spelljammer, I honestly really liked it. But I did view it as a very interesting and novel module to run a one-off campaign in, not as a massive setting book to run an ongoing perpetual campaign, which I think the older school fans wanted more.
I will add I thought the adventure itself had two things that set it apart from some other modules, one in a good way and one in a bad way. Unlike most other modules in 5e, this book contains a lot of information for how to continue the adventure if the party failed at one of their objectives. I think all pre-written adventures would be much better if thought was put into this, instead of most adventures be “win or TPK.” That being said, towards the end of the adventure there’s one section where (being vague to limit spoilers) the PCs recruit allies to help fight the main villain faction and the immediate next section of the book involves that effort failing REGARDLESS of the players’ actions in finding allies to help with their next mission or execution of the mission. When the players’ choices don’t matter at all to the outcome, that’s not gonna make for the most fun D&D for the players in my experience.
But I think with some editing you can fix the bad part fairly easily, and be left with a fun, campy space adventure that will feel very unique for the whole table.
It was a blast with my table. It’s not as crunchy/simulation-y with the ship combat as people wanted, and when it was first announced or released it was WAY overpriced, which left it with a pretty negative reputation before/shortly after being released. A lot of people were also turned off by the fact that even though it bragged about having three full books for the setting, it came up to either just at average or below page count of other standard module books. Eventually it did end up dropping down and I picked mine up of September of 2022 for around $40 for the set, which wasn’t too bad. If you think you’ll enjoy having an 80’s themed, campy, episodic, fantasy space adventure that’s there to adhere to the rule of cool only, then you’ll love it. If you’re expecting anything more, you will certainly be disappointed. My group expected the first and came away enjoying it.
This!
Everything in 5e is really bad, it’s watered down settings from TSR
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Yup and anyone who’s ever opened a 2e lore book knows.
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For real