I am a fourth generation roleplayer, means that I started (after some VAMPIRE - ish errata) AD&D about 1996, but didn't know far more than Dragonlance and Birthright. It seems that SJ is setted somewhere in known realms of other Gaming Worlds... and that gets me a bit confused...
Hi, I got a kinda silly question: WHAT is Spelljammer...
I am a fourth generation roleplayer, means that I started (after some VAMPIRE - ish errata) AD&D about 1996, but didn't know far more than Dragonlance and Birthright. It seems that SJ is setted somewhere in known realms of other Gaming Worlds... and that gets me a bit confused...
Here's a little explaination the guy who runs the Beyond the Moons website and myself put together to explain just that question:
http://www.spelljammer.org/misc/whatissj.html
cruising around Beyond the Moons (http://www.spelljammer.org), you'll find all manner of resources related to spelljammer.
But what do that enigmatic names Krynnspace and Greyspace stand for?Starships landing on Oerth?!
Gives me the kreeps...
And starships have been landing on Oerth long before Spelljammer (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, for example
).But then, as an absolute newcomer, I must ask: Is Spelljammer a viable game setting, I mean, does it work as a stand alone product or does it just spoil any gaming world it includes? *Why was it dropped by Wizards? The concept itself doesn't sound too bad, yet promising!
Or is the idea of SJ just to crossover any kinds of races and knowledges?
That gives me the kreeps... Could it be that Drow are nothing more than an offshot of the Klingon Race and that Ivid the Undying is just the missing *link* for Grandmother Skywalker's *virgin* pregnancy...
But then, as an absolute newcomer, I must ask: Is Spelljammer a viable game setting, I mean, does it work as a stand alone product or does it just spoil any gaming world it includes? *Why was it dropped by Wizards? The concept itself doesn't sound too bad, yet promising!
Or is the idea of SJ just to crossover any kinds of races and knowledges?
It was mainly developed as a way of joining the existing worlds together, though it also took on a life of its own. The main reason WotC doesn't support it anymore? Same reason a lot of worlds are no longer supported: low sales...at least low by WotC's parent company Hasbro is concerned. Spelljammer was actually discontinued in 1994, before WotC bought TSR...and at that time TSR was in dire straits financially. Two years later, Lorraine Williams had all but bankrupted the company with poor financial decisions. Spelljammer was replaced with Planescape, another campaign setting designed to connect the existing worlds, though this time focusing on the planes rather than outer space.
I always liked the idea of magical space travel, though the crystal spheres seemed too strange for me (though a necessary contrivance---otherwise it would take too long to travel between worlds).
It began with the "simple" idea of taking D&D into space. It has always been my understanding that that alone was the impetus for creating Spelljammer - NOT (as is commonly supposed) simply finding some way to connect all the D&D worlds. Although Spelljammer officially did drag all the then D&D worlds into a single cosmological arrangement that was not it's basic purpose.
Spelljammer has several important core ideas. First is the helm. This is a magic device that when affixed to a ship (or just about any structure really) it drains spellcaster helmsmen who sit upon it of their spells and converts the energies to motive power for the ship. That's the most common type, other types of helms rather than powered by spells drain the "helmsman" of psionic strength, life force, or even burn up magic items.
These spelljamming ships can leave the atmosphere of a planet and travel to other nearby planets. This is possible because once a spelljammer gets a certain distance beyond a gravity field (from planets, other ships, even larger creatures can have their own gravity fields when floating in space) then the ship can leap to "spelljamming" speeds of... 100,000,000 miles per day. So, planets are generally as far apart as they are in the real world but the staggering speeds of spelljamming makes it possible to cross the distances.
Solar systems are generally contained within what is literally a crystal sphere. The space INSIDE such a sphere is called Wildspace. Outside of a sphere exists the Phlogiston or Flow. Using spells or naturally occurring gateways a spelljamming ship can pass through the indestructible sphere to the other side. There, in the Phlogiston, there are "rivers" that a ship can enter to travel to other spheres.
The rest is just cruchy bits like how does gravity work, how much air can you breathe when you're just floating in space, how to conduct ship combat, and so forth.
But then, as an absolute newcomer, I must ask: Is Spelljammer a viable game setting, I mean, does it work as a stand alone product or does it just spoil any gaming world it includes?
It certainly can work as a stand alone product, but that wasn't actually the way it was designed. It was DESIGNED much more as a set of rules to be ADDED to an existing setting to enable travel beyond earthly boundries to other "planets" and "solar systems" and yet further beyond that.
That, IMO, was something of a mistake because the Spelljammer rulebooks generally failed to take into proper consideration the logically devastating impact that "space flight" would have on a setting that was created without any such assumption. Spelljammer was not really a setting in it's own right. The Rock of Bral supplement provided an asteroid city-state that would serve as a fantastic base to build a campaign around but was still more intended to be dropped into an existing campaign somewhere as it never did have it's precise location in the D&D cosmology defined. Later there was finally a Spelljammer-dedicated setting called The Astromundi Cluster. I didn't much care for it. Also part of its basic premise was that it was impossible to get OUT of it's limited locale once you got in. A cosmic roach-motel if you will. Somewhat at odds with bothering to enable characters to fly between planets in the first place if you can't also fly between solar systems.
*Why was it dropped by Wizards? The concept itself doesn't sound too bad, yet promising!
Well, it wasn't dropped by Wizards - it was dropped by the company that Wizards bought - TSR inc. But that's kind of a whole other issue. If the idea of D&D in space appeals to people at all they tend to really like it, but some just don't care for it a bit. The Spelljammer rules are not without their problems (some actually quite big - but solveable) but the idea itself (IMO) has always been just too cool for words. It was ultimately dropped, as others have indicated, for much the same reasons that many settings were dropped by the old TSR inc. The sales levels of the products weren't where they wanted to see them at. The real problem was that it was in large part their own sales strategies (or lack thereof) that was responsible for the low sales of Spelljammer and many other settings. At the time D&D rules were exclusive to TSR - there were no 3rd party publishers allowed. As a result, every time TSR released a new setting the only sales they competed with were their OWN sales of their OWN settings. The more settings they produced the less each individual setting sold because they all got a smaller piece of the pie. Eventually, TSR tried to cut some of their losses and started discontinuing a lot of settings - Spelljammer was one of them.
Or is the idea of SJ just to crossover any kinds of races and knowledges?
Well SJ did form an official crossover for just about all races, worlds, etc. Planescape however proved a much more popular means for doing that (in addition to probably being a better-produced setting, although I've never personally cared at all for the Planescape idea and thus never really read it). It certainly outlasted SJ, but was itself ultimately discontinued - though I believe it was Wizards that discontinued it when they cut back even further on what products they wanted to support when they were going to introduce 3rd Edition.
The fun and beauty of Spelljammer does NOT lie in the way it connects other campaign worlds. I've always said that Spelljammer got screwed because it never WAS given it's own genuine stand-alone setting as it should have from the start. An excellent idea that was unfortunately flawed in execution. I also still say that somebody - some third party publisher - needs to be allowed to buy the rights to it, to produce a fully realized, stand-alone, 3.5 edition version of a Spelljammer campaign. I'd pay good money for that and run it in a heartbeat. My old Spelljammer campaign, though somewhat short-lived, was the one that I got the most requests to do again.
Oh, and BTW, I still keep some old Spelljammer-related stuff on my website although I haven't touched it in YEARS.
http://home.earthlink.net/~duanevp/dnd/spelljammer/spelljam.htm
I think the spelljammer concept was far better than the Planescape stuff, as far as I know, PS:T created a terrible chaos about where to put which world and how to manage certain element, like the shadow world of Cerilia or the Ravenleft setting.
Nowadays, SJ could become really popular - as many second edition books are freely avaible or can be downloaded. As far as I understand, SJ can only work fully if you have sourcebooks of more than one gaming world, and buying them in the bookstore can become really expensive!
you don't have to use the game-hopping element of Spelljammer to have fun with it.. .
matter of fact, there are many spelljammer specific modules unconnected to any game world....
Maybe. when I feel getting tired of my current settings, I'll give it a try...
****promotion****
Try I out my new Greyhawk Sourcebook, internet release is planned for finals of october!
That is what Spelljammer is about!
The PCs get to visit Feyspace, a sphere (I don't like that word, but "system" sounds too much like Star Trek) which is actually planets hanging from a tree. They also visit Herospace, which has 9 planets, 1 of each alignment, which is set up as a (money making) retirement home for ex-adventurers.
The finale is set on yet another weird sphere, which I won't describe as it might be a very big spoiler.
With these kinds of things to play with, why would anybody want to visit Greyspace (i.e. the World of Greyhawk) in a Spelljammer campaign?