I realize I've been on a bit of a Planescape kick lately (inspired in part because of the hints that we might be getting some 5e Planescape content next year) but we mustn't forget that in only ten days, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space will be arriving at game stores.
I've got mine pre-ordered, basically since they announced a release date three months ago.
Some D&D... "influencers" (God I hate that term - very dystopian) have gotten their hands on copies of the books and I've seen the tables of contents for them.
The whole box-set is relatively small - each book is only 64 pages, meaning a total of just 192 (for comparison, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft was 256 pages, with just a low-level intro adventure in the House of Lament, rather than a full third of it being adventure content).
Still, quantity is not necessarily quality (though I loved Van Richten's). By looking at the tables of contents, we can get a bit of a sense of the focus of the books.
The Astral Adventurer's Guide is the main rules sourcebook for the setting.
After a few pages of intro, we start with character creation. Two new backgrounds are introduced: Astral Drifter and Wildspacer. As we've seen, Spelljammer now takes place in two realms - Wildspace and the Astral Sea. Wildspace is still within the Prime Material Plane, and is basically like real outer space but with a lot more stuff in it. The Astral Sea is part of (more or less the whole of) the Astral Plane, and serves a bit as the "hyperspace" that you'll need to cross to get between different Wildspace regions. Notably, in the Astral Plane, there's no aging or need to eat, drink, breathe, and I think sleep. And it's god dead gods drifting eternally.
Next, there are the playable races: Astral Elf, Autognome, Giff, Hadozee, Plasmoid, and Thri-Kreen, which we've known about since the Travelers of the Multiverse UA.
Chapter two is "Astral Adventuring," and takes up the bulk of the book.
This covers the broad rules of how Spelljamming works, first in Wildspace, explaining the way that ships create gravity planes and how objects carry air envelopes. Then, it explains how the Astral Plane works, along with some info on creating Wildspace systems.
There are spells and magic items, though it doesn't seem like a ton of either.
The bulk of this chapter is about the different types of Spelljamming ships, and rules about how ship-to-ship combat works. There are 16 ships in the book, with deck plans. As I'm given to understand, ship combat is simplified compared to how it works in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, with the ships largely acting as platforms that might have weapons on them, but players can rely on their own character class abilities - sure, you can launch a trebuchet to strike the other ship, but you can also cast fireball.
Finally, Chapter Three is a couple-page description of the Rock of Bral, a famed Spelljammer location.
Boo's Astral Menagerie is the monster book for the setting, giving us a pretty substantial number of creatures to face out in Wildspace and the Astral Sea.
There are NPC stat blocks for each of the new playable races. And then there are a ton of creatures with weird names that mean nothing to me, like a B'rohg or a Reigar.
In total, we seem to have 72 stat blocks, and the only reprint would be the Chwinga (seen in Tomb of Annihilation and Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden). This include wyrmling/young/adult/ancient variants on the Lunar and Solar dragons.
This is actually, I think, a little meatier than most campaign setting bestiaries, and sits as a separate book so you can allow your party to check if they've got all their Hadozee racial abilities written down while you pull up the stats on a bunch of Vampirates you're attacking their ship with.
Light of Xaryxis is the adventure that comes with the box set - a more extensive adventure than the usual intro ones that starts at level 5 and goes to 8. I'm not going to get into the chapter names because A: it won't mean much and B: it could spoil things.
So, my sense of how they're approaching Spelljammer is very homebrew-focused. This seems to be focused more on the "how" than the "what," which honestly appeals to my DM style.
That being said, reading through the Planes of Law, Chaos, and Conflict (well, I haven't finished the second one yet) does make me feel like it'd be nice to get a bit more content out of WotC - obviously, the approach they've taken in 5th Edition has worked quite well for them, but it is perhaps a little sad that there's not a lot of revisiting of the stuff they've already introduced. This is also the first setting book that hasn't given us a new playable subclass, and I'd hoped we might see something new, for instance, for the Artificer.
Still, I'm really eager to integrate the concept of Spelljammers into my homebrew setting - as a setting, Spelljammer has the potential to "plug in" to other settings pretty easily. In some ways, that makes this a more useful thing than other sourcebooks for those of us who like to homebrew our campaign worlds.
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