Spelljammer

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Spelljammer is basically FANTASY PIRATES IN SPACE with shitloads of strange stuff, like elves that have symbiotic weapons, mechanical gnomes and anthropoid hippos obsessed with dakka.

Unique creatures include space whales, space squid, space dragons, and, of course, giant space hamsters. However, in terms of sapient races, the setting also features the first playable lizardfolk, who get smarter when their eggs are warmed up by the sun in space, the Dracon, a race of Lawful Good dragon-centaurs with European-esque dignity culture and hilarious racism, the Arcane, a race of magically-advanced, mysterious aliens who created the spelljammer and sell its secrets to anyone who'll pay, the Giff, a race of explosion-loving hippo-men and consummate mercenaries, the Scro, a lawful-evil orc sub-species that are the brutal, disciplined Nazis to the regular orcs' barbarian horde, and the Neogi, a loathed race of eel-spider men who're despised across the cosmos for their inability to stop enslaving everything for five seconds.

And also some weirdly-chill Beholders and Mind flayers, though the former still try to exterminate all beholders not like themselves and the latter are still evil, just more business-predatory and less actual-predatory about it.

Why are There Ships in Space?

Because why the fuck not? Jeez, do you even RPG, reader?

Spelljammer was originally conceived as another setting for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, but instead of making yet another stand-alone setting, Spelljammer was designed to link together all of the settings of the time into a single universe. Or perhaps multiple unified universes, because each setting has its own Ptolemaic universe, called a Sphere.

A Sphere is a massive black orb of unbreakable crystal containing an entire solar system(and extending roughly twice the diameter of the farthest orbit). Inside the Sphere is what is known as Wild Space. Around the surface of the Sphere are burning portals that allow ships and creatures to pass into and out of the Sphere. These are typically seen from the surface of the planet(s) within as "stars".

Physics in Wild Space doesn't quite work like normal physics. Every object has it's gravity, but it's a little more pronounced, and is established as a flat plane going lengthwise. This means if you fall overboard a ship, you'll go down to roughly the waterline of an oceangoing vessel before you pass the gravity line and fall back "up". In addition, all objects leaving a planet's atmosphere will drag a portion of it with them that surrounds them in Wild Space like a bubble. A human will only have enough air with them for a few minutes of breathing before it becomes stale, but a Spelljammer can carry a few months worth, more if you have some greenery with you to refresh it. This is usually more than enough to get the ship through a typical voyage from one Sphere to the next. When two air envelopes meet, their atmospheres will mix together and diffuse. This can be bad if a Spelljammer gets closer to a larger ship whose atmosphere has already gone bad.

All of the various Spheres float within a space called The Flow, filled entirely with a substance known as Phlogiston. Phlogiston is gaseous, highly flammable, cannot exist within a Sphere, and not soluble in water. The Phlogiston flows between spheres like a mighty river or ocean current, providing propulsion and direction to ships sailing it. One of the more stable routes in the Flow is Radiant Triangle, circulating between Greyspace, Krynnspace, and Realmspace.

As the magical arts within one of the spheres became sophisticated enough in the long past, someone took to the stars in a magical spaceship. Literally a space ship, because the first Spelljammer was probably a sailing ship with a Spelljammer's Helm strapped on. They got lucky because Spelljamming physics is just messed up enough to permit this kind of travel, and the rest was history.

There's also the Spelljammer, a mysterious living ship that is the namesake of all other Spelljammers. Resembling a giant manta ray with a city on its back, it flies across space at random and is said to have existed since the beginning of recorded history, spawning countless legends in the same manner as the Flying Dutchman. It "feeds" on heat and light, which it converts into food for its inhabitants. Very rarely, it seeks a captain to pilot it- when it does so, it spawns numerous copies of itself known as Smalljammers. Legend has it that only one Spelljammer exists at any given time, and when it dies one of the Smalljammers grows into a new one (no word on what happens to the others).

Star Frontiers Heir

Before Spelljammer, TSR worked on a sci-fi RPG called Star Frontiers, and so they recycled a number of monsters from it for Spelljammer. The winged ape-folk known as Yazarians became the playable Hadozee in Spelljammer, whilst the centipede-taur Vrusk became the playable Rastipede race. Even the sapient slime race known as Dralasites appeared as monsters called Plasmoids.

Playable Aliens

Playable races of Spelljammer are... well, there's a lot of options, technically, but the ones associated with the setting came out almost entirely in the Complete Spacefarer's Handbook, alongside a more intelligent variant of Lizardfolk in the Spelljammer boxed set. They are surprisingly beastfolk centric, on reflection.

• Dracon
• Giff
• Grommam
• Hadozee
• Hurwaeti
• Rastipede
• Scro
• Xixchil

Post-AD&D

Given that it was regarded as a bottom-barrel setting even by TSR, Spelljammer didn't really fare very well in the editions that came after Advanced Dungeons & Dragons finally kicked the bucket in the tail end of the 90s.

In Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, Spelljammer fell from a major part of the overarching canon to being literally a nothing burger. Planar splatbooks like the Manual of the Planes didn't even mention Wildspace or the Phlogiston. There were one or two articles in Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine that kept the embers smoldering, but as a setting, Spelljammer was left to rot. It wasn't even farmed out to other publishers the way that Dragonlance and Ravenloft were.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition somehow managed to grind those embers even deeper into the ashes; whilst spelljammers appeared as an official kind of magical vehicle, none of the iconic Spelljammer monsters ever made into the new Nentir Vale setting, and the new World Axis cosmology basically made the Phlogiston obsolete. Even the Spelljammers were changed on a fundamental level, going from magical flying ships hurtling through fantasy outer space to magical flying ships that could also Plane Shift at will.

When Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition came around, Spelljammer fans obviously weren't holding their breaths. But then there was a trickle of hope; references to Spelljammer began to creep into the game via splatbooks and adventures. The concept of illithids as a spacefaring race was brought up in Volo's Guide to Monsters, whilst an actual Illithid nautiloid would feature in both the adventure Rime of the Ice Maiden and in the video game "Baldur's Gate III". This finally went so far as to result in an Unearthed Arcana that offered several Spelljammer races as PC options; former monsters Autognomes and Plasmoids, as well as the iconic Giff and Hadozee, plus the thri-kreen (who actually do have spelljamming significance) and the new "Astral Elves" (because we needed a distinct spelljamming elf subrace...)

Then came the big one: in April 2022, it was confirmed that there was going to finally be some official Spelljammer splatbooks! Fans were ecstatic; at long last, their beloved setting was returning to D&D!

...Then came the revelation that this would in the form of three 64-page long mini-splats that would be released as a boxed set in mid-August 2020: The Astral Adventurer's Guide (to compress all the player and DM lore into that pittance of pages), Boo's Astral Menagerie (Spelljammer monsters), and Light of Xaryxis, an adventure. Icing on the cake, the emphasis is now on sailing through the Astral Plane - in a throwback to 4e's Astral Sea, rather than Wildspace.

Links

• Assorted resources available here.