Announced earlier this year, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space is an update to the classic D&D setting for Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. We recently sat in on a briefing with Lead Designer Chris Perkins who walked us through what's included the various editions of the books as well as some of the new rules and creatures coming to this revised spacefaring fantasy realm.
Chris Perkins, Lead Designer: Spelljammer has always been a bit of a weirdo and so we felt like this was a great opportunity to play with the form factor of the product. Instead of presenting it as a book—like we would typically do—what we decided to do was break it down into smaller, more digestible components. So, this product includes three books: a rule book/setting book called the Astral Adventurer's Guide, a monster book called Boo's Astral Menagerie, and an adventure, Light of Xaryxis. Coupled with a poster map of the Rock of Bral, which is a classic setting, and a DM screen all tidily tucked away in a beautiful slipcase.
There are two versions of this product, the mass-marketed version (shown in the previous image), which has its own slipcase design, and DM screen, and unique covers for each of the three books. And then there is the version exclusive to local hobby stores, which has different art on the slipcase, the books, and the DM screen. All the alternate covers were done by artist Hydro74... but apart from the changes in art, both versions of the product are identical.
Perkins goes on to explain some of the changes made to the Spelljammer setting in order to make it a better fit into the Fifth Edition lore. He begins with the art on the alternate DM screen, a rendering of the Astral Sea by artist Jedd Chevrier.
CP: Those who are familiar with the original Spelljammer setting, there were two elements of that setting that were interesting and weird. One was that every system, every planetary system is basically contained within a crystal sphere, so that if you were to rocket away from the sun to the edge of the system, eventually your ship would just slam into this crystal shell that encases every system.
Now, when we were building this version of Spelljammer, we were trying to hook it into the cosmology that is described in the Dungeon Masters Guide. And it's the cosmology that we've adopted in recent editions, that includes not only the Astral Plane, but this concept that the Astral Plane is like a sea... In the DMG, we make no mention of crystal spheres, we make no mention of the Phlogiston (the original Spelljammer's "space between multiverses"). And so, for this version of Spelljammer, what we opted to do instead is say, "Okay, Spelljammer is you traveling among the stars." The Astral Plane, astral means of the stars, and it is the heavenly realms. It is the medium in our cosmology that you pass through to get to other planes and the realms of the gods and things like that.
And so, what happens now is if you're on a planet and you hop aboard a Spelljamming vessel and you head into space, you are entering the vast ocean that is Wildspace (as pictured in the DM screen art below). And if you continue outward to the edge of your system, rather than bumping into a crystal shell, you start to enter or see around you this silvery haze. And the brilliant colors of Wildspace give way to a silvery purplish void through which the light of the stars of other Wildspace systems shine. At that point, you are crossing into the Astral sea, the Astral plane, which is a realm of thought, given form. And if you keep going through the Astral Plane, like the Phlogiston, you are passing through a medium and eventually can get to another Wildspace system. As the silvery mist begin to thin, you find yourself in another piece of Wildspace. And so, it's a divergence from the original, but we think it fits elegantly into the current cosmology.
When it comes to how you'll actually move through the Astral Sea and Wildspace, there are more than a dozen ship templates statted out.
CP: Many of Spelljammer ships are modeled after creatures in design, that's something that we preserved. I think it's one of the key elements that defines Spelljammer.
In the Astral adventures guide, we present 16 different ship designs that DMs and players can choose from. And this image (above) shows one of the more unusual ships used primarily by creatures called Neogi. This is a Nightspider. So, we presented those ships as examples and they run the gamut from the expected space galleons to bizarre things like this and hammerhead ships and squid ships.
We don't then go off and say, "Here is a kit you can use to build your own ships." We give you so many to choose from and so many of them are player-facing options that we felt we didn't have to do anything more than that. And of course, there will still be communities out there designing, creating their own ship designs or riffing on versions of Spelljammer ships that were created in earlier additions, and that's cool.
For those who don't know, one of the things we did keep from the original Spelljammer is the concept of gravity, planes and air envelopes. And that is when a ship enters space, Wildspace or the Astral Sea, it has a gravity plane, so people can stay, stand on the deck of the ship. It has an air envelope that manifests around it, so people can breathe on the ship. What that does in terms of play is immediately tell players, "Oh, we're not in normal space. And this is not a normal space-based campaign." This is fantasy. Thanks to magic. We're standing on a ship and breathing air as we rock it through Wildspace and that's cool and weird and different." And it means that ships in space more or less behave like ships on planets. There's no weird sense of having to reorient yourself or strap yourself in or anything like that. And so you can have very traditional D&D battles and encounters in space by virtue of these rules.