I guess I can see the logic in saying Spelljammer is so big that multiple cultures and racial origins probably exist within it. But... That's not useful. I mean, it's also so big that it probably has monsters in it that aren't in the book -- but they still wrote some, so why did they do that? I'd rather have *something.*
I have been able to do a deep dive into the material yet but so far I like what I see. It sort of seems like a 5e conversion of the 2e stuff and not a brand new setting and I am fine with that since I own pretty much all the 2e stuff. I have my own 5e Spelljammer cosmology which is sort of similar but distinctly different (mine is more based in 4e stuff). Not sure which one I will use going forward.
Now I want all my 5e campaigns to go into space. 😁
I'd like to call the 5E Spelljammer a minimally viable product, but its not. It is an adventure with a small monster manual lacking mechanics to do space travel and combat. Its essentially a slightly large Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh without ship rules. Its a D- product at best (62%), I guess you could call it a minimally viable product, maybe? I definitely did not get my moneys worth and I would advise people to not put any spend towards it.
Looking at the three books:
-Adventure: It does work and can be used. Meets the spec, 100%.
-Menagerie: It's missing a lot of Spelljammer monsters content. Especially the humor. One of my favorite spelljammer monsters is the Radiant Golem, think of an sentient iron golem with a death aura that's mostly good but not too smart. It wanders the crystal spheres trying to find friends and latches onto parties while killing them by their aura and asking why the party is attacking him and being sad about how organic life dies too soon - great adventure hook. Or the many flavors of the Miniature Giant Space Hamster such as: Rather Wild Giant Space Hamster, Invisible giant space hamster, yellow musk giant space hamster, carnivorous flying giant space hamster, two-headed lernaean bombadier giant space hamster, fire-breathing phase doppleganger giant space hamster and the fan favorite tyrnohamsterus rex. I was hoping there would be more content, there isn't. There is little to no lore about a lot of the beasts, they really minimized it. I get that it saves money and they don't have to hire good writers to put this out, but come on man, this is not good content for DM's. Look at the monstrous compendiums for Spelljammer and you'll be very happy with the content there compared to this. Best thing I can tell people is to google the 2E to 3E conversion for D&D and start converting. It puts out a limited group of monsters from Spelljammer probably about 66%.
-Astral Adventurer's Guide: did not meet spec. Space combat and travel sections appears to be a creative writing class rejected work. Its at an intern level of thought and content at the very best. They took the outline from the 2E book, and didn't do any of the work. They did the easy work of copying ships and rock of bral from 2E to pad this book, but the work of doing the actual conversion to make space travel and combat fun, it wasn't done. 20% complete.
The Books have great art. Really did a stellar job
Races seem cool and fun. Lots of interesting details here. may require light tweaks to tone down some abilities for some DM'
I haven't finished the adventure, but it seems ok. Pre written adventures are never my thing, so I don't have strong feeling either way
The actual content on rules was a lot lighter then I expected. I know 5e isn't a crunch system, but I expected more from the space combat section. (biggest disappointment in the book for me) It is barely even there.
More descriptions of wildspace/systems would be have been good.
repairing rules seem bizarre. Mending shouldn't be as good as it is.
Seems to cheap to make a spelljammer chair, and not much flavor or diference (2nd had some really neat differences in this area)
Overall I feel like I need more details to successful run Spelljammer and plenty of resources between Reddit and Dmsguild, but in the past, this content was more of extra icing on the cake and now it feel required, which is disappointing. I've run games for 30 years and can make up plenty as I go, but when I buy a project from wizards I would more of a useful baseline.
Other then showing off the cool art, most of what I'll actually use will come from other sources, and first time I thought the option of a refund and will now hold off on new content and read reviews before I just jump in and buy.
The races are nice; but they lack a lot in the way of flavour... did being "setting agnostic" really also mean sucking out everything to do with a species culture-wise? Because that seems like a major over-correction. Not to mention: there is at least one major rules as written exploit that was spotted in the UA version of these that was NOT corrected at all. And only two backgrounds!?
They kind of do have to remove culture to make a thing setting agnostic.
If you think about humans on earth, we have probably hundreds of different cultures speaking hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages. You couldn’t write a source book for earth and say, this is the human culture, and this is how you can expect any human to behave in a given situation. (And to take it a step further, those cultural behaviors people have are not hard wired. Personally, I was adopted and I have no cultural ties to my biological family. I don’t identify as that nationality, I’m not a big fan of the foods, I don’t speak the language, nothing.) That’s just one species on one planet. If you start talking about a multiverse, it gets exponentially harder to make generalizations. So for a book that doesn’t discuss worlds, but is really only about how to travel from one to another, how can they make any cultural generalizations, when they don’t even know the home planet of any given member of a species.
I will say I agree with most of the rest of your criticisms. I would love a d100 chart for making a random planetary system. Though that would end up requiring a level of improvisation many DMs aren’t comfortable with, if, say you rolled there are three inhabited worlds, now the DM has to go and homebrew them all. So I can see why they don’t want to leave it to chance.
The issue with the setting agnostic thing at least in this case is, they gave us a setting book and then tried to keep it setting agnostic. Now I don't know about you but that seems absolutely ridiculous.
That's a good point. I guess I didn't really see it as a setting book, as much as a way to get from one setting to another. But, yes, I guess it is a setting book, since you could certainly have an entire campaign in it.
The thing is, a character can't be "from" the astral sea, since you don't age while you are there. I don't think anyone could give birth, or hatch an egg or what have you. And even if they did, the babies would never mature into adults. So, all the creatures must have spent time on some world or at least in some wildspace somewhere. (Which really makes astral elves in particular kind of confusing. Are they all that original band who came to the astral sea, and they never reproduced?) But I agree it would have been nice to have a couple lines like Giff who grew up in realmspace tend to act like this, while giff in eberronspace tend to act like that. with the disclaimer that any individual might not.
The races are nice; but they lack a lot in the way of flavour... did being "setting agnostic" really also mean sucking out everything to do with a species culture-wise? Because that seems like a major over-correction. Not to mention: there is at least one major rules as written exploit that was spotted in the UA version of these that was NOT corrected at all. And only two backgrounds!?
They kind of do have to remove culture to make a thing setting agnostic.
If you think about humans on earth, we have probably hundreds of different cultures speaking hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages. You couldn’t write a source book for earth and say, this is the human culture, and this is how you can expect any human to behave in a given situation. (And to take it a step further, those cultural behaviors people have are not hard wired. Personally, I was adopted and I have no cultural ties to my biological family. I don’t identify as that nationality, I’m not a big fan of the foods, I don’t speak the language, nothing.) That’s just one species on one planet. If you start talking about a multiverse, it gets exponentially harder to make generalizations. So for a book that doesn’t discuss worlds, but is really only about how to travel from one to another, how can they make any cultural generalizations, when they don’t even know the home planet of any given member of a species.
I will say I agree with most of the rest of your criticisms. I would love a d100 chart for making a random planetary system. Though that would end up requiring a level of improvisation many DMs aren’t comfortable with, if, say you rolled there are three inhabited worlds, now the DM has to go and homebrew them all. So I can see why they don’t want to leave it to chance.
The issue with the setting agnostic thing at least in this case is, they gave us a setting book and then tried to keep it setting agnostic. Now I don't know about you but that seems absolutely ridiculous.
But if it was completely not setting agnostic, and if a race is tied to aa specific plane/place, then it's hard to play them outside of that setting. Personally, I would've liked more information on how the races usually function in Astral Space, and on Spelljammer. However, I understand making it at least partially setting agnostic, because as I previously said, it can make it hard to separate the information from that setting and adapt it into others if it is too tied to one setting.
Astral Adventurers Guide: The player options were really fabulous, and the ships were neat, but the book really lacked in the Dungeon Mastering department. No lore, a very lazy sentence for creating Wildspace systems, and nothing really for creating Spelljammer adventures
Astral Menagerie: This one I liked; it had some really cool monsters in it
Light of Xarixys: I like the premise, elves being the villains is something I find really interesting. The adventure structure isn't my favorite though, I might use the plot but rewrite the adventure to be better for my groups
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Once again, like with any Vehicular rules they added before, there's HUGE holes, or things that arn't covered and some rules feels sluggish.
Also of what i saw, they barely touch on anything, just the minimal explanation and efforts then moving on...
I am ONCE again forced to go on DMsguild to find actual content that i can use from a 15$ PDF, even tho i've bought a 45$ digital content from the official source...
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"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
Once again, like with any Vehicular rules they added before, there's HUGE holes, or things that arn't covered and some rules feels sluggish.
Also of what i saw, they barely touch on anything, just the minimal explanation and efforts then moving on...
I am ONCE again forced to go on DMsguild to find actual content that i can use from a 15$ PDF, even tho i've bought a 45$ digital content from the official source...
Did you not read about Wildjammer, its a free 100 page supplement for 5E that is a conversion from 2E to 5E for spelljammer. Its pretty good for space combat, you can sub it in for adorable section on space combat and make it work. The roles they set up for crewmen to make space combat fun, is really a good idea as well.
The races are nice; but they lack a lot in the way of flavour... did being "setting agnostic" really also mean sucking out everything to do with a species culture-wise? Because that seems like a major over-correction. Not to mention: there is at least one major rules as written exploit that was spotted in the UA version of these that was NOT corrected at all. And only two backgrounds!?
They kind of do have to remove culture to make a thing setting agnostic.
If you think about humans on earth, we have probably hundreds of different cultures speaking hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages. You couldn’t write a source book for earth and say, this is the human culture, and this is how you can expect any human to behave in a given situation. (And to take it a step further, those cultural behaviors people have are not hard wired. Personally, I was adopted and I have no cultural ties to my biological family. I don’t identify as that nationality, I’m not a big fan of the foods, I don’t speak the language, nothing.) That’s just one species on one planet. If you start talking about a multiverse, it gets exponentially harder to make generalizations. So for a book that doesn’t discuss worlds, but is really only about how to travel from one to another, how can they make any cultural generalizations, when they don’t even know the home planet of any given member of a species.
I will say I agree with most of the rest of your criticisms. I would love a d100 chart for making a random planetary system. Though that would end up requiring a level of improvisation many DMs aren’t comfortable with, if, say you rolled there are three inhabited worlds, now the DM has to go and homebrew them all. So I can see why they don’t want to leave it to chance.
The issue with the setting agnostic thing at least in this case is, they gave us a setting book and then tried to keep it setting agnostic. Now I don't know about you but that seems absolutely ridiculous.
This is the order of the day with races now; we can't talk about history, values, traditions or lore without somebody being offended; It's why when Mord's was released all 30 races were boring as hell from a lore perspective.
Which brings us to Spelljammer and my honest thoughts on it; It's a really mixed bag!
The good! The monster manual is wonderful; chock full of wonderfully thematic monsters that can and will surprise and delight player. 10/10 all around.
The not so good! the module is interesting in concept but it absolutely feels like a rough draft; there is a distinct lack of option for how players want to approach issues or solve problems and the module has like, 5 "fail state contingencies" which tells me that the module wasn't properly balance tested and that player success or failure is ultimately of little importance in the grand scheme of much of the module.
The *really* not great: the player's guide has... issues. while the races are interesting to be sure pretty much everything else feels very slipshod; most of what we see with spelljammers appears to have been written by two different authors who weren't comparing notes as we get information on wildspace basically being what we would think of outer space being with rules for gravity and air (of which you will have so much that it's effectively a non-issue) but because wildspace is inexplicably part of the astral plane there are bizarre questions that need to be asked about the cosmology (also why air is even a thing since the astral plane is full of it. For that matter given how movement in the astral plane works why the hell do we even need spelljammers in the first place?).
All of which would be stupid but acceptable if they had actually included rules for how spelljammers handle as vehicles so that we could get some actual honest to god maneuver warfare with the different ships and how they work which Wizards of the coast left out despite them having been very much a key component in 2nd when this product was new. And this is the third bite at the apple that WotC have had with implementing vehicle rules and the one where it was *most* important.
I had high hopes for spelljammer, both because I love the whimsical romantic idea of boats in space and because as a setting it was way more in line with what the company wanted the game to be then any other setting. Like if ever there was a setting to have lore free agnostic races it's here. But considering what I got for $96 I really can't advise people to get this supplement in good conscience.
My advice: get the books seperately if you can. they're way too expensive as a set for what they offer.
Spelljammer: Adventures in wildspace is the next disappointing thing WOC has produced. I got excited about rime of the frostmaiden=deeply disappointed. I got excited about Spelljammer-I can't believe this product was allowed to be released. Way too many cop outs like, This is up to the DM or the DM decides this. What? Really? The writers actually got paid for this? Is this what I should expect for Dragonlance? Complete waste of money, I ve seen homebrew rules written by 10 year-olds who do a better job writing.
I think D&D's going through a rough patch right now. It's clear that they're trying to avoid controversy, and that's all well and good but they're playing it a little too safe. The lack of new lore around new races, the unwillingness to introduce meaningful mechanical differences between adventures... It feels to me like a lack of confidence. "Yeah, I guess we have a Fireball spell, but if you don't like it, you could make it an Acidball instead..."
Idk. I guess if there was gonna be a time for such wobbliness, it would be now, when they're actively testing new stuff for a big revamp. But it doesn't really make me want to buy products at the moment. (Not that I'm complaining. Products are expensive.)
Well, I am complaining, because their products ARE expensive, I do not feel I am getting my money's worth. I feel like WotC owes me my money back in addition to Fleshing out the Spelljammer books. I mean, can I get rules for fantasy space battles in the book about fantasy space battles? Or is that just up to the DM?
I think D&D's going through a rough patch right now. It's clear that they're trying to avoid controversy, and that's all well and good but they're playing it a little too safe. The lack of new lore around new races, the unwillingness to introduce meaningful mechanical differences between adventures... It feels to me like a lack of confidence. "Yeah, I guess we have a Fireball spell, but if you don't like it, you could make it an Acidball instead..."
Idk. I guess if there was gonna be a time for such wobbliness, it would be now, when they're actively testing new stuff for a big revamp. But it doesn't really make me want to buy products at the moment. (Not that I'm complaining. Products are expensive.)
Actually you cant even change fireball into acidball. I want to say it was in TCoE but they actually say that you can change the visuals of your spells all you want but you can not change the damage type unless you have a feature that allows it.
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If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
I think D&D's going through a rough patch right now. It's clear that they're trying to avoid controversy, and that's all well and good but they're playing it a little too safe. The lack of new lore around new races, the unwillingness to introduce meaningful mechanical differences between adventures... It feels to me like a lack of confidence. "Yeah, I guess we have a Fireball spell, but if you don't like it, you could make it an Acidball instead..."
Idk. I guess if there was gonna be a time for such wobbliness, it would be now, when they're actively testing new stuff for a big revamp. But it doesn't really make me want to buy products at the moment. (Not that I'm complaining. Products are expensive.)
It's not a lack of confidence, it's a decision to go all in on the newcomers at the expense of the grognards and part of that appeal means taking no stance on anything from a lore standpoint.
I think D&D's going through a rough patch right now. It's clear that they're trying to avoid controversy, and that's all well and good but they're playing it a little too safe. The lack of new lore around new races, the unwillingness to introduce meaningful mechanical differences between adventures... It feels to me like a lack of confidence. "Yeah, I guess we have a Fireball spell, but if you don't like it, you could make it an Acidball instead..."
Idk. I guess if there was gonna be a time for such wobbliness, it would be now, when they're actively testing new stuff for a big revamp. But it doesn't really make me want to buy products at the moment. (Not that I'm complaining. Products are expensive.)
Actually you cant even change fireball into acidball. I want to say it was in TCoE but they actually say that you can change the visuals of your spells all you want but you can not change the damage type unless you have a feature that allows it.
And in that same book, they made not one, but two features that allow it.
A better example exists, but I'm not touching it because the nuance will get lost as we enter the godsdamned Thunderdome again, and I'm tired of that "debate." It hasn't happened in this thread and I'm not gonna be the one who starts it. So here's a worse example instead. Still illustrative, just willfully ignoring a lot of counter-evidence. "We made you this hippo race, but they're not, like, that great... I mean, the whole 'being a big hippo' thing is pretty lame, really... You don't need to be big or weigh a lot or anything, that's fine, just be whatever weight you want..."
The lack of new lore around new races, the unwillingness to introduce meaningful mechanical differences between adventures... It feels to me like a lack of confidence.
It's not a lack of confidence, it's a decision to go all in on the newcomers at the expense of the grognards and part of that appeal means taking no stance on anything from a lore standpoint.
I don't think that's true at all. (Or, to rephrase: If the thought they have is that newbies hate lore, they're wrong, and I think they're putting so much money into this that they're probably not wrong, so that's probably not their thought.) I was a newcomer once, and the thing that made it difficult for me wasn't that races had lore -- I love that stuff. It was that everything was so. Much. Godforsaken. Math.
And feat prerequisites. Oh my goodness, the feat prerequisites. Hey, maybe we'll get them back. Yaaaay....
The lack of new lore around new races, the unwillingness to introduce meaningful mechanical differences between adventures... It feels to me like a lack of confidence.
It's not a lack of confidence, it's a decision to go all in on the newcomers at the expense of the grognards and part of that appeal means taking no stance on anything from a lore standpoint.
I don't think that's true at all. (Or, to rephrase: If the thought they have is that newbies hate lore, they're wrong, and I think they're putting so much money into this that they're probably not wrong, so that's probably not their thought.) I was a newcomer once, and the thing that made it difficult for me wasn't that races had lore -- I love that stuff. It was that everything was so. Much. Godforsaken. Math.
And feat prerequisites. Oh my goodness, the feat prerequisites. Hey, maybe we'll get them back. Yaaaay....
I think you're sort of missing the point here. There's a difference between "what new players actually want" and "what the executives, trends, and market research firms that listen to social media SAY new players want". It's the same reason that the AAA video-game industry tends to have waves of functionally the same game produced by a dozen different companies: they're chasing trends as opposed to trying to forge something of their own. In this case: it's avoiding controversy on one side and pandering to the Critical Role audience on the other; which is a problem, because Critical ROle is NOT D&D: it's a reality TV show ABOUT actors playing D&D.
I think my biggest complaint with the Spelljammer books is they feel very... small.
I feel like there could have been a lot more just stuff involving spelljammers, the namesake of the setting, how to use them, equipment for them, etc. It all feels just very empty outside of a list of set ships and one or two lines of description for each.
As for character options, the races are great. I really like their inclusion, but still feels lacking in regards to having more fluff about them. I get the setting agnostic approach, I'm just not personally a fan of it. And would have loved much more in the way of feats, spells, magic items, etc.
I feel that Astral Adventurer's Guide and Boo's Astral Menagerie are good for what is there, there just... isn't much there. Could probably have combined these two books without losing much, and would probably take up less physical space on the shelf that way too.
I think my biggest complaint with the Spelljammer books is they feel very... small.
I feel like there could have been a lot more just stuff involving spelljammers, the namesake of the setting, how to use them, equipment for them, etc. It all feels just very empty outside of a list of set ships and one or two lines of description for each.
As for character options, the races are great. I really like their inclusion, but still feels lacking in regards to having more fluff about them. I get the setting agnostic approach, I'm just not personally a fan of it. And would have loved much more in the way of feats, spells, magic items, etc.
I feel that Astral Adventurer's Guide and Boo's Astral Menagerie are good for what is there, there just... isn't much there. Could probably have combined these two books without losing much, and would probably take up less physical space on the shelf that way too.
I have to agree with you mostly. I love Spelljammer and the books are awesome, we got a lot of cool races and more. The problem is that we only have 192 pages among all three books, which is slightly small even for just one D&D book. So it kinda makes it confusing why it's being marketed as a big bundle and priced so much higher for that reason when it's not extra large at all.
I mean, a DM screen and map are both cool things, and I love all the content in the books, but I just wish there were more of it. The screen and the map don't make up for 20 extra bucks in my calculations at least.
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I guess I can see the logic in saying Spelljammer is so big that multiple cultures and racial origins probably exist within it. But... That's not useful. I mean, it's also so big that it probably has monsters in it that aren't in the book -- but they still wrote some, so why did they do that? I'd rather have *something.*
I have been able to do a deep dive into the material yet but so far I like what I see. It sort of seems like a 5e conversion of the 2e stuff and not a brand new setting and I am fine with that since I own pretty much all the 2e stuff. I have my own 5e Spelljammer cosmology which is sort of similar but distinctly different (mine is more based in 4e stuff). Not sure which one I will use going forward.
Now I want all my 5e campaigns to go into space. 😁
I'd like to call the 5E Spelljammer a minimally viable product, but its not. It is an adventure with a small monster manual lacking mechanics to do space travel and combat. Its essentially a slightly large Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh without ship rules. Its a D- product at best (62%), I guess you could call it a minimally viable product, maybe? I definitely did not get my moneys worth and I would advise people to not put any spend towards it.
Looking at the three books:
-Adventure: It does work and can be used. Meets the spec, 100%.
-Menagerie: It's missing a lot of Spelljammer monsters content. Especially the humor. One of my favorite spelljammer monsters is the Radiant Golem, think of an sentient iron golem with a death aura that's mostly good but not too smart. It wanders the crystal spheres trying to find friends and latches onto parties while killing them by their aura and asking why the party is attacking him and being sad about how organic life dies too soon - great adventure hook. Or the many flavors of the Miniature Giant Space Hamster such as: Rather Wild Giant Space Hamster, Invisible giant space hamster, yellow musk giant space hamster, carnivorous flying giant space hamster, two-headed lernaean bombadier giant space hamster, fire-breathing phase doppleganger giant space hamster and the fan favorite tyrnohamsterus rex. I was hoping there would be more content, there isn't. There is little to no lore about a lot of the beasts, they really minimized it. I get that it saves money and they don't have to hire good writers to put this out, but come on man, this is not good content for DM's. Look at the monstrous compendiums for Spelljammer and you'll be very happy with the content there compared to this. Best thing I can tell people is to google the 2E to 3E conversion for D&D and start converting. It puts out a limited group of monsters from Spelljammer probably about 66%.
-Astral Adventurer's Guide: did not meet spec. Space combat and travel sections appears to be a creative writing class rejected work. Its at an intern level of thought and content at the very best. They took the outline from the 2E book, and didn't do any of the work. They did the easy work of copying ships and rock of bral from 2E to pad this book, but the work of doing the actual conversion to make space travel and combat fun, it wasn't done. 20% complete.
Overall I feel like I need more details to successful run Spelljammer and plenty of resources between Reddit and Dmsguild, but in the past, this content was more of extra icing on the cake and now it feel required, which is disappointing. I've run games for 30 years and can make up plenty as I go, but when I buy a project from wizards I would more of a useful baseline.
Other then showing off the cool art, most of what I'll actually use will come from other sources, and first time I thought the option of a refund and will now hold off on new content and read reviews before I just jump in and buy.
That's a good point. I guess I didn't really see it as a setting book, as much as a way to get from one setting to another. But, yes, I guess it is a setting book, since you could certainly have an entire campaign in it.
The thing is, a character can't be "from" the astral sea, since you don't age while you are there. I don't think anyone could give birth, or hatch an egg or what have you. And even if they did, the babies would never mature into adults. So, all the creatures must have spent time on some world or at least in some wildspace somewhere. (Which really makes astral elves in particular kind of confusing. Are they all that original band who came to the astral sea, and they never reproduced?) But I agree it would have been nice to have a couple lines like Giff who grew up in realmspace tend to act like this, while giff in eberronspace tend to act like that. with the disclaimer that any individual might not.
But if it was completely not setting agnostic, and if a race is tied to aa specific plane/place, then it's hard to play them outside of that setting. Personally, I would've liked more information on how the races usually function in Astral Space, and on Spelljammer. However, I understand making it at least partially setting agnostic, because as I previously said, it can make it hard to separate the information from that setting and adapt it into others if it is too tied to one setting.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
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Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.Astral Adventurers Guide: The player options were really fabulous, and the ships were neat, but the book really lacked in the Dungeon Mastering department. No lore, a very lazy sentence for creating Wildspace systems, and nothing really for creating Spelljammer adventures
Astral Menagerie: This one I liked; it had some really cool monsters in it
Light of Xarixys: I like the premise, elves being the villains is something I find really interesting. The adventure structure isn't my favorite though, I might use the plot but rewrite the adventure to be better for my groups
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Once again, like with any Vehicular rules they added before, there's HUGE holes, or things that arn't covered and some rules feels sluggish.
Also of what i saw, they barely touch on anything, just the minimal explanation and efforts then moving on...
I am ONCE again forced to go on DMsguild to find actual content that i can use from a 15$ PDF, even tho i've bought a 45$ digital content from the official source...
"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
Kain de Frostberg- Dark Knight - (Vengeance Pal3/ Hexblade 9), Port Mourn
Kain de Draakberg-Dark Knight lvl8-Avergreen(DitA)
Did you not read about Wildjammer, its a free 100 page supplement for 5E that is a conversion from 2E to 5E for spelljammer. Its pretty good for space combat, you can sub it in for adorable section on space combat and make it work. The roles they set up for crewmen to make space combat fun, is really a good idea as well.
This is the order of the day with races now; we can't talk about history, values, traditions or lore without somebody being offended; It's why when Mord's was released all 30 races were boring as hell from a lore perspective.
Which brings us to Spelljammer and my honest thoughts on it; It's a really mixed bag!
The good! The monster manual is wonderful; chock full of wonderfully thematic monsters that can and will surprise and delight player. 10/10 all around.
The not so good! the module is interesting in concept but it absolutely feels like a rough draft; there is a distinct lack of option for how players want to approach issues or solve problems and the module has like, 5 "fail state contingencies" which tells me that the module wasn't properly balance tested and that player success or failure is ultimately of little importance in the grand scheme of much of the module.
The *really* not great: the player's guide has... issues. while the races are interesting to be sure pretty much everything else feels very slipshod; most of what we see with spelljammers appears to have been written by two different authors who weren't comparing notes as we get information on wildspace basically being what we would think of outer space being with rules for gravity and air (of which you will have so much that it's effectively a non-issue) but because wildspace is inexplicably part of the astral plane there are bizarre questions that need to be asked about the cosmology (also why air is even a thing since the astral plane is full of it. For that matter given how movement in the astral plane works why the hell do we even need spelljammers in the first place?).
All of which would be stupid but acceptable if they had actually included rules for how spelljammers handle as vehicles so that we could get some actual honest to god maneuver warfare with the different ships and how they work which Wizards of the coast left out despite them having been very much a key component in 2nd when this product was new. And this is the third bite at the apple that WotC have had with implementing vehicle rules and the one where it was *most* important.
I had high hopes for spelljammer, both because I love the whimsical romantic idea of boats in space and because as a setting it was way more in line with what the company wanted the game to be then any other setting. Like if ever there was a setting to have lore free agnostic races it's here. But considering what I got for $96 I really can't advise people to get this supplement in good conscience.
My advice: get the books seperately if you can. they're way too expensive as a set for what they offer.
Spelljammer: Adventures in wildspace is the next disappointing thing WOC has produced. I got excited about rime of the frostmaiden=deeply disappointed. I got excited about Spelljammer-I can't believe this product was allowed to be released. Way too many cop outs like, This is up to the DM or the DM decides this. What? Really? The writers actually got paid for this? Is this what I should expect for Dragonlance? Complete waste of money, I ve seen homebrew rules written by 10 year-olds who do a better job writing.
Yes.
I think D&D's going through a rough patch right now. It's clear that they're trying to avoid controversy, and that's all well and good but they're playing it a little too safe. The lack of new lore around new races, the unwillingness to introduce meaningful mechanical differences between adventures... It feels to me like a lack of confidence. "Yeah, I guess we have a Fireball spell, but if you don't like it, you could make it an Acidball instead..."
Idk. I guess if there was gonna be a time for such wobbliness, it would be now, when they're actively testing new stuff for a big revamp. But it doesn't really make me want to buy products at the moment. (Not that I'm complaining. Products are expensive.)
Well, I am complaining, because their products ARE expensive, I do not feel I am getting my money's worth. I feel like WotC owes me my money back in addition to Fleshing out the Spelljammer books. I mean, can I get rules for fantasy space battles in the book about fantasy space battles? Or is that just up to the DM?
Actually you cant even change fireball into acidball. I want to say it was in TCoE but they actually say that you can change the visuals of your spells all you want but you can not change the damage type unless you have a feature that allows it.
If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
It's not a lack of confidence, it's a decision to go all in on the newcomers at the expense of the grognards and part of that appeal means taking no stance on anything from a lore standpoint.
And in that same book, they made not one, but two features that allow it.
A better example exists, but I'm not touching it because the nuance will get lost as we enter the godsdamned Thunderdome again, and I'm tired of that "debate." It hasn't happened in this thread and I'm not gonna be the one who starts it. So here's a worse example instead. Still illustrative, just willfully ignoring a lot of counter-evidence. "We made you this hippo race, but they're not, like, that great... I mean, the whole 'being a big hippo' thing is pretty lame, really... You don't need to be big or weigh a lot or anything, that's fine, just be whatever weight you want..."
I don't think that's true at all. (Or, to rephrase: If the thought they have is that newbies hate lore, they're wrong, and I think they're putting so much money into this that they're probably not wrong, so that's probably not their thought.) I was a newcomer once, and the thing that made it difficult for me wasn't that races had lore -- I love that stuff. It was that everything was so. Much. Godforsaken. Math.
And feat prerequisites. Oh my goodness, the feat prerequisites. Hey, maybe we'll get them back. Yaaaay....
I think you're sort of missing the point here. There's a difference between "what new players actually want" and "what the executives, trends, and market research firms that listen to social media SAY new players want". It's the same reason that the AAA video-game industry tends to have waves of functionally the same game produced by a dozen different companies: they're chasing trends as opposed to trying to forge something of their own. In this case: it's avoiding controversy on one side and pandering to the Critical Role audience on the other; which is a problem, because Critical ROle is NOT D&D: it's a reality TV show ABOUT actors playing D&D.
I think my biggest complaint with the Spelljammer books is they feel very... small.
I feel like there could have been a lot more just stuff involving spelljammers, the namesake of the setting, how to use them, equipment for them, etc. It all feels just very empty outside of a list of set ships and one or two lines of description for each.
As for character options, the races are great. I really like their inclusion, but still feels lacking in regards to having more fluff about them. I get the setting agnostic approach, I'm just not personally a fan of it. And would have loved much more in the way of feats, spells, magic items, etc.
I feel that Astral Adventurer's Guide and Boo's Astral Menagerie are good for what is there, there just... isn't much there. Could probably have combined these two books without losing much, and would probably take up less physical space on the shelf that way too.
I have to agree with you mostly. I love Spelljammer and the books are awesome, we got a lot of cool races and more. The problem is that we only have 192 pages among all three books, which is slightly small even for just one D&D book. So it kinda makes it confusing why it's being marketed as a big bundle and priced so much higher for that reason when it's not extra large at all.
I mean, a DM screen and map are both cool things, and I love all the content in the books, but I just wish there were more of it. The screen and the map don't make up for 20 extra bucks in my calculations at least.
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