The Spelljammer book did away with crystal spheres and the phlogiston, instead having wildspace gradually give way to the Astral Sea. The obvious answer to why this happened is that the writers felt like it, but I'd like to find an in-multiverse explanation. I have two theories off the top of my head, but I'd also like to hear other opinions.
- The Astral Sea has always been accessible through Wildspace, and Spelljammers go through something similar to color pools that the book describes as a "silvery haze". You would still reach the edge of a crystal sphere if you went a bit further.
- During the Spellplague, the Astral Plane contracted from its previous tree-like structure, collapsing onto the Prime Material. The Astral Dominions at the end of its branches came with it. It merged with or replaced the phlogiston and somehow destroyed the crystal spheres, becoming the Astral Sea we know today.
I was there in 1989; I lived it; I tried to make sense of it; it was never worth it.
I genuinely love D&D theorycrafting, but in this case you are better off just forgetting it ever happened. In order to satisfactorily figure out where it went, you'd first have to explain where it came from, and it simply has no roots in any other aspect of D&D lore.
That being said, I like your first idea, because the Astral Plane/Sea HAS always been accessible from Wildspace in all editions -- all you'd need is a modified Plane Shift spell.
Why didn't they do this from the get go, you ask, despite the fact that travel through the Astral Plane has always required no time and is therefore instantaneous? And despite the fact that the phlogiston strongly hampers travel and is intrinsically explosive? Because someone thought this was "cool."
Your second idea has a lot of 'what' but not a lot of 'why,' and is Forgotten Realms-specific. It's certainly one way of looking at things, I guess, which is all we can ever say about the structure of the planes.
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J Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
I saw the Phlogiston a balancing act since Spelljammer theory was rather lazy and has almost no roots in reality whatsoever. But it was a fun way of exploring new worlds and game aspects that groundlings would never experience. The concept was very playable at the time, and made for some fairly entertaining books. This new system seems like they took away all the dangers of space travel for a Pokemon inspired everyone is a winner fantasy. The big disservice I felt was taking away the ship battle tactics. Now mind you, ship battles required a lot of good old fashioned home brewing, but we took all the rules, and balanced off how to use your risks to your advantage as a seasoned Spelljamming captain. Now the combat is gone, and pretty much all risks are gone. I am surprised they even brought up oxygen as a risk factor, as spelljammer now feels like a generic ship ride with 0 encounters. "You embark on your spelljamming ship." 2 seconds later. "You arrive at the planet of Krynn, You feel that the 50gp you spent on this journey was well worth it.".
I think there should be major risks brought into the game to balance out the reason why only a few dare to challenge the stars. It is hard for me to fathom that they have hundred if not thousands of Spelljammer helms, sometimes just sitting on the shelf waiting for that discerning customer, considering the difficulty of making them. In past adventures I have played and ran, to upgrade helms would be massive storylines to quest out the materials, and a master who can harness them. I would force players to figure out their long term oxygen, how to not blow themselves up, and how to avoid or fight encounters in the Flow, or in crystal spheres.
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I am not sure what my Spirit Animal is. But whatever that thing is, I am pretty sure it has rabies!
Woof, gotta disagree with you there. Spelljammer was the pinnacle of Hostile Simulationist AD&D2. "We're going to model our universe in ludicrously precise but wholly inconsistent detail, and figuring out how to run a game in it is the Dungeon Master's problem." Good riddance.
Speaking of inconsistencies, the commonality of spelljamming was always the biggest one. Sure, spelljamming was hard, but you can't have a spelljamming ship without a helm and a high-level spellcaster, and Spelljammer material was chock full of busy trade routes and epic planetary conflict involving hundreds if not thousands of ships in the skies of the official settings. They were getting crewed from somewhere!
But somehow, this never quite percolated down to the actual material for those settings. Mentions of spelljamming were scattershot in '90s Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk material, and completely nonexistent anywhere else. Some setting design teams were clearly dead set against the idea of being linked to Spelljammer.
Were spelljamming helms rare? I have no idea! AD&D2 couldn't even agree with itself whether they were or not.
At the end of the day, D&D5 doesn't even begin to support the style of play that the 1989 Spelljammer box recommends, with detailed resource and travel-time tracking and large-scale tactical vehicular combat. I'm the first person to agree that the D&D5 Spelljammer boxed set was low effort (a design choice that unfortunately characterizes D&D in 2022), but a rehash of the 1989 release would have been worse than useless to 95% of today's players. The conflict and risk isn't gone, it's just changed -- today's players want to play Guardians of the Galaxy, not Battlestar Galactica.
If you care about this stuff, and I'm not saying you shouldn't, the old Spelljammer material is still available on DMsGuild.com, and converting it to D&D5 is no harder than it was to make sense of it against other AD&D2 material in the '90s. I'm looking forward to making judicious use of it in my upcoming D&D5 Spelljammer game, but only because after 24 years my BS detector is developed enough to know what to keep and what to throw away. Teenage me was not so fortunate.
The Phlogiston, in classic D&D, went nowhere. It was everywhere. It was the whole Prime Plane, other then the Crystal Spheres.
Where did it go....well that Mike guy in charge of 5E "loves" the old Planescape Setting. So he demanded Spelljemmer be stuck in Planescpe. So now you zoom your spelljamming ship up into space....and, er, somehow go to the Astral Plane.
The Phlogiston, in classic D&D, went nowhere. It was everywhere. It was the whole Prime Plane, other then the Crystal Spheres.
Where did it go....well that Mike guy in charge of 5E "loves" the old Planescape Setting. So he demanded Spelljemmer be stuck in Planescpe. So now you zoom your spelljamming ship up into space....and, er, somehow go to the Astral Plane.
FYI, Mike Mearls has been the Director of Game Design for Magic the Gathering for almost three years, now, and on Twitter, at least, he's a way bigger fan of Spelljammer and Greyhawk than Planescape.
D&D5 replaces the phlogiston with the astral plane because the phlogiston was the pinnacle of complexity for complexity's sake in AD&D2 design. It was a mashup of 2nd-century astronomy and 17th-century physics that even the designers didn't understand well enough to get right.
I do agree that we could have used more explanation of the transition between wildspace and the astral; the way the book is written makes it sound like there is no material plane between solar systems, which is wrong by any canon.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
J Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
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The Spelljammer book did away with crystal spheres and the phlogiston, instead having wildspace gradually give way to the Astral Sea. The obvious answer to why this happened is that the writers felt like it, but I'd like to find an in-multiverse explanation. I have two theories off the top of my head, but I'd also like to hear other opinions.
- The Astral Sea has always been accessible through Wildspace, and Spelljammers go through something similar to color pools that the book describes as a "silvery haze". You would still reach the edge of a crystal sphere if you went a bit further.
- During the Spellplague, the Astral Plane contracted from its previous tree-like structure, collapsing onto the Prime Material. The Astral Dominions at the end of its branches came with it. It merged with or replaced the phlogiston and somehow destroyed the crystal spheres, becoming the Astral Sea we know today.
I was there in 1989;
I lived it;
I tried to make sense of it;
it was never worth it.
I genuinely love D&D theorycrafting, but in this case you are better off just forgetting it ever happened. In order to satisfactorily figure out where it went, you'd first have to explain where it came from, and it simply has no roots in any other aspect of D&D lore.
That being said, I like your first idea, because the Astral Plane/Sea HAS always been accessible from Wildspace in all editions -- all you'd need is a modified Plane Shift spell.
Why didn't they do this from the get go, you ask, despite the fact that travel through the Astral Plane has always required no time and is therefore instantaneous? And despite the fact that the phlogiston strongly hampers travel and is intrinsically explosive? Because someone thought this was "cool."
Your second idea has a lot of 'what' but not a lot of 'why,' and is Forgotten Realms-specific. It's certainly one way of looking at things, I guess, which is all we can ever say about the structure of the planes.
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
I saw the Phlogiston a balancing act since Spelljammer theory was rather lazy and has almost no roots in reality whatsoever. But it was a fun way of exploring new worlds and game aspects that groundlings would never experience. The concept was very playable at the time, and made for some fairly entertaining books. This new system seems like they took away all the dangers of space travel for a Pokemon inspired everyone is a winner fantasy. The big disservice I felt was taking away the ship battle tactics. Now mind you, ship battles required a lot of good old fashioned home brewing, but we took all the rules, and balanced off how to use your risks to your advantage as a seasoned Spelljamming captain. Now the combat is gone, and pretty much all risks are gone. I am surprised they even brought up oxygen as a risk factor, as spelljammer now feels like a generic ship ride with 0 encounters. "You embark on your spelljamming ship." 2 seconds later. "You arrive at the planet of Krynn, You feel that the 50gp you spent on this journey was well worth it.".
I think there should be major risks brought into the game to balance out the reason why only a few dare to challenge the stars. It is hard for me to fathom that they have hundred if not thousands of Spelljammer helms, sometimes just sitting on the shelf waiting for that discerning customer, considering the difficulty of making them. In past adventures I have played and ran, to upgrade helms would be massive storylines to quest out the materials, and a master who can harness them. I would force players to figure out their long term oxygen, how to not blow themselves up, and how to avoid or fight encounters in the Flow, or in crystal spheres.
I am not sure what my Spirit Animal is. But whatever that thing is, I am pretty sure it has rabies!
Woof, gotta disagree with you there. Spelljammer was the pinnacle of Hostile Simulationist AD&D2. "We're going to model our universe in ludicrously precise but wholly inconsistent detail, and figuring out how to run a game in it is the Dungeon Master's problem." Good riddance.
Speaking of inconsistencies, the commonality of spelljamming was always the biggest one. Sure, spelljamming was hard, but you can't have a spelljamming ship without a helm and a high-level spellcaster, and Spelljammer material was chock full of busy trade routes and epic planetary conflict involving hundreds if not thousands of ships in the skies of the official settings. They were getting crewed from somewhere!
But somehow, this never quite percolated down to the actual material for those settings. Mentions of spelljamming were scattershot in '90s Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk material, and completely nonexistent anywhere else. Some setting design teams were clearly dead set against the idea of being linked to Spelljammer.
Were spelljamming helms rare? I have no idea! AD&D2 couldn't even agree with itself whether they were or not.
At the end of the day, D&D5 doesn't even begin to support the style of play that the 1989 Spelljammer box recommends, with detailed resource and travel-time tracking and large-scale tactical vehicular combat. I'm the first person to agree that the D&D5 Spelljammer boxed set was low effort (a design choice that unfortunately characterizes D&D in 2022), but a rehash of the 1989 release would have been worse than useless to 95% of today's players. The conflict and risk isn't gone, it's just changed -- today's players want to play Guardians of the Galaxy, not Battlestar Galactica.
If you care about this stuff, and I'm not saying you shouldn't, the old Spelljammer material is still available on DMsGuild.com, and converting it to D&D5 is no harder than it was to make sense of it against other AD&D2 material in the '90s. I'm looking forward to making judicious use of it in my upcoming D&D5 Spelljammer game, but only because after 24 years my BS detector is developed enough to know what to keep and what to throw away. Teenage me was not so fortunate.
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
The Phlogiston, in classic D&D, went nowhere. It was everywhere. It was the whole Prime Plane, other then the Crystal Spheres.
Where did it go....well that Mike guy in charge of 5E "loves" the old Planescape Setting. So he demanded Spelljemmer be stuck in Planescpe. So now you zoom your spelljamming ship up into space....and, er, somehow go to the Astral Plane.
FYI, Mike Mearls has been the Director of Game Design for Magic the Gathering for almost three years, now, and on Twitter, at least, he's a way bigger fan of Spelljammer and Greyhawk than Planescape.
D&D5 replaces the phlogiston with the astral plane because the phlogiston was the pinnacle of complexity for complexity's sake in AD&D2 design. It was a mashup of 2nd-century astronomy and 17th-century physics that even the designers didn't understand well enough to get right.
I do agree that we could have used more explanation of the transition between wildspace and the astral; the way the book is written makes it sound like there is no material plane between solar systems, which is wrong by any canon.
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you