(And they're great, because Thri-Kreen casters can perform material components with their extra mini-hands and still hold a shield & sword. Which makes them great for things like clerics & more.)
Some of the other races were interesting as well, Giff's advantage on strength ability checks, saving throws, and strength based saves is awesome in particular. Hadozee and Plasmoids look neat too.
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A lot of the sentient races in Boo's Menagerie should have been playable:
The Reigar for sure, as Celestial would be a rare creature type for a playable species.
Space Clowns too would have made for some wild Player Character possibilities, and I'm definitely going to homebrew the race, but Wizards of the Coast should be doing that work for us.
Dragonborn (and Draconic Bloodlines) should have gotten options for Lunar and Solar Dragons; another necessary homebrew
We've known since the Unearthed Arcana that the Mindflayers wouldn't be a playable race, but still, they were the prime candidate for the Spelljammer setting
The lack of new subclasses almost makes this not worth buying
The new backgrounds are awesome, some of the best available, but two are not sufficient. We should have gotten several times as many
The Spelljammer ships are pretty cool. Certainly the best surprise in the book
Overall I like the books, The new races all seem decent. My only complaint is they might as well not even had the section on creating your own wildspace system.
I was pleased with the new races and the adventure. I was disappointed by the lack of customization options for spelljammers, the lack of a "gazetteer" for really any of the settings, the lack of new magic items, and the general feeling that the page count was far too low. I'd really have liked a deeper dive into Doomspace as well.
Overall, I really like the set of books. But yeah, some more pages and information on Spelljammer, as well a guide on how to balance ship to ship combat would be nice.
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BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explainHERE.
Boo's Astral Menagerie is the strongest book of the set, lots of great monsters to use in my games going forward!
The Astral Adventurer's Guide is a weird bag. I like the ship descriptions and deck plans, I think the races are cool (just gonna ignore the hadozee wavedash cheese people on reddit are salty about). the backgrounds are interesting, although giving level 1 feats is power creep (this basically solidifies my plan to give all backgrounds a non-combat feat going forward). I would have liked to see more about running the day-to-day of being a spacer, i.e. how ships make money, what crew pay is like, some non-combat dangers. Some of my players enjoy the more simulationist aspects and would enjoy keeping a ship's log and tracking resources in the void. The Rock of Bral probably could have benefitted from even 3-4 more pages of content.
I need to read more of it, but Light of Xarixys is the biggest swing and a miss for me so far. There's some cool ideas to be mined, but the adventure is on such a rail that I can't in good faith run it for most of my players. My main group is ok with the occasional rail, but I've seen multiple points in the adventure where even they would go irrevocably off track. In the group I usually play in, I DM one-shots and short campaigns, so at first blush this could work, but we really prefer heavy roleplay and sandboxes, which Xaryxis does not have. I wouldn't use it to introduce folks to the game either since it starts at level 5.
I like all the different ships, though there's one that seems like the default pick for PCs so idk exactly how much value they add. Maybe they're just to fight against.
I've really enjoyed most of the monsters I've seen so far. They're more than just bundles of mechanics. They're story pieces! Thank goodness!
There's a reactions table! It's not called that, and it only applies to a specific (though pretty large) list of random encounters, but still, it's there! Now you can encounter monsters that maybe don't immediately want to kill you! Marvelous to have it written the heck down.
The setting seems pretty small. I mean, it's open for homebrew, but if you don't do homebrew, it's pretty small.
I'm skeptical of lots of the mechanics around ships. Like, it says you can perfectly navigate to anywhere just by wanting to. That's neat from a certain perspective, but is it fun? I'm not sure. Maybe? If you fall off the ship, you have so much time to get back that it's actually kind of hilarious. Idk. Stuff like that makes me wonder, is all. Are these meant to actually have an impact on play, or are they just fluff rules?
To quote what I wrote on another topic: after a cursory skim read, this book feels like it needed more time in the oven... like: a LOT of it.
- 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!?
- Being a sucker for space-based stuff I do love the deck-plans... but they seem a bit small for what they are meant to have. IE: not nearly enough space for the people they are supposed to carry. I'd almost use them at 2x scale as is.
- Magic items and spells - This section is a total joke: 2 spells and 3 magic items!? ALL of which are exclusively utility-based for spelljamming? You're telling me there's ZERO interesting spells or magic items out there in wild space!? In a world where Warhammer 40K, Star Wars, Mass Effect to name a few "space magic" systems exist this is just plain lazy.
- Speaking of lazy: allow an old nerd to wax poetic about the generation tables of old. Once upon a time, when a TTRPG book had a section called "createing x..." They'd include say: some templates, a table or two to roll on, that sort of thing... As it stands: allow me to quote verbatim the section "Creating a wildspace system":
"A typical Wildspace system has a sun plus a number of planets and moons orbiting it. Two examples of Wildspace systems, Doomspace and Xaryxispace, are described in the accompanying adventure, Light of Xaryxis. Use them as models when creating your own Wildspace system."
... And... that's it. Two examples; neither of which is particularly well fleshed out in its own right.
- And of course the greatest crime of this book... Dohwar aren't a playable race!?
It put to rest a big cosmology question of whether or not the various D&D worlds are on different planes in this edition, and it seems there is only one material plane. It went so far as to suggest you can teleport from one to another. So that helps answer some questions about banishment and other travel issues. Though it does make me wonder why someone would use dream of the blue veil when you can do the same thing with teleport. If you consider having the material component for dream would allow you to teleport with no error.
So far I am enjoying it! The only thing that jumped out at me in any negative sense was the plasmoid description about how they eat:
They consume food by osmosis, the way an amoeba does, and excrete waste through tiny pores.
It is a tiny gripe, but I do not think this is accurate. Immediately, it jumped out at me as wrong when I was doing a light skim. Osmosis is the movement of water. It would be more accurate to say diffusion for the movement of solute from a high gradient to low. But most amoeba consume through process called phagocytosis, which is where a phagocyte engulfs another particle, digests it, then expels the waste. This is essentially like other oozes do in D&D and which the plasmoid is classified as.
A very small bump in an otherwise fun read so far, but it has been on my mind since, so I thought I would share.
My very first impression was to wonder why the spelljamming helm requires attunement. I would think that requiring a spellcaster and concentration to use would be sufficient.
My next impression was that it feels very lacking in content. I'd been hoping for content options equal or at least close to what we'd gotten from Fizban's. Instead we got 2 (admittedly solid) backgrounds, 2 spells, and 3 magic items.
The selection of spelljammer ships was very nice. That said, spelljamming ships moving a maximum of anywhere from 3 to 8 miles per hour (25-70 ft./round), to suddenly jump to more than 4 million miles per hour just because nothing else is nearby just feels weird. Super fancy flying ship can be outflown by CR 1 beasts? Yes, I realize it's only in specific circumstances, but it still feels off to me.
Lastly, it felt confused as to what it was trying to focus on. Wildspace is a thing, and the Astral Sea is a thing. We got a tiny bit of information on each, but to me it felt like they had two entirely different ideas of what they wanted "space" travel to be and tried to use both instead of making them a coherent whole.
Overall, I appreciate that we have official rules for spelljamming in 5e, but it feels unfinished and more like a teaser than a full ruleset.
I've just gone through and re-read the crew sizes versus the space of these ships and... to reiterate my earlier point: these ships are RIDICULOUSLY tiny for the numbers of people they're expecting to cram in there. The Damselfly ship is particularly agregious: I'm supposed to believe a crew of NINE people sleeps in a room that's 3 squares TOTAL!? Pray to every god and the lords of hell that nobody packed beans for the trip!
So I'm kinda disappointed in the Spelljammer offering...
I do love the races (I love weird races) and the monster selection is good...
I feel that WOTC forgot the setting of Spelljammer with only one location Rock of Bral even described (and it's significantly shorter than the nearly 100 pages in second edition) but the biggest disappointment is they didn't even bother to do even a basic outline of Realmspace...
I won't be preordering again and will wait until I know there is content
I really do feel that they forgot the Spelljammer setting in the Spelljammer books... I just don't have time create a whole Sphere nor the money to waste on 2ed content... I need a QUALITY product that doesn't waste my time....
Dragonborn (and Draconic Bloodlines) should have gotten options for Lunar and Solar Dragons; another necessary homebrew
I think that white and crystal dragonborn can function as lunar and solar dragonborn.
True. Though I wish the Drakewarden subclass was rewritten to include a solar dragon pet with radiant breath damage (that was a flaw from the first; the drake companions should have included all of the gem-type dragons).
It's also an oversight that there's no Astral Half-elf race. Most - if not all - sub-species of elves get a half-elf equivalent
When I was reading the new boxed set I really felt like it was some Wizards developer using a very limited budget to open up a locked away setting for development on DMsguild. It almost seemed like, here's the bare essentials to the setting, sorry, best I could do.
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 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.
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Lets discuss what you liked and didn't like about the new Spelljammer: Adventures in Space box set
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I thought the plot of Light of Xaryxis was very similar to Spaceballs imo
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WE HAVE THRI-KREEN!
(And they're great, because Thri-Kreen casters can perform material components with their extra mini-hands and still hold a shield & sword. Which makes them great for things like clerics & more.)
Some of the other races were interesting as well, Giff's advantage on strength ability checks, saving throws, and strength based saves is awesome in particular. Hadozee and Plasmoids look neat too.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.A lot of the sentient races in Boo's Menagerie should have been playable:
The lack of new subclasses almost makes this not worth buying
The new backgrounds are awesome, some of the best available, but two are not sufficient. We should have gotten several times as many
The Spelljammer ships are pretty cool. Certainly the best surprise in the book
Overall I like the books, The new races all seem decent. My only complaint is they might as well not even had the section on creating your own wildspace system.
I was pleased with the new races and the adventure. I was disappointed by the lack of customization options for spelljammers, the lack of a "gazetteer" for really any of the settings, the lack of new magic items, and the general feeling that the page count was far too low. I'd really have liked a deeper dive into Doomspace as well.
Xaryxians?! ****, there goes the planet!
Overall, I really like the set of books. But yeah, some more pages and information on Spelljammer, as well a guide on how to balance ship to ship combat would be nice.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.I think that white and crystal dragonborn can function as lunar and solar dragonborn.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Boo's Astral Menagerie is the strongest book of the set, lots of great monsters to use in my games going forward!
The Astral Adventurer's Guide is a weird bag. I like the ship descriptions and deck plans, I think the races are cool (just gonna ignore the hadozee wavedash cheese people on reddit are salty about). the backgrounds are interesting, although giving level 1 feats is power creep (this basically solidifies my plan to give all backgrounds a non-combat feat going forward). I would have liked to see more about running the day-to-day of being a spacer, i.e. how ships make money, what crew pay is like, some non-combat dangers. Some of my players enjoy the more simulationist aspects and would enjoy keeping a ship's log and tracking resources in the void. The Rock of Bral probably could have benefitted from even 3-4 more pages of content.
I need to read more of it, but Light of Xarixys is the biggest swing and a miss for me so far. There's some cool ideas to be mined, but the adventure is on such a rail that I can't in good faith run it for most of my players. My main group is ok with the occasional rail, but I've seen multiple points in the adventure where even they would go irrevocably off track. In the group I usually play in, I DM one-shots and short campaigns, so at first blush this could work, but we really prefer heavy roleplay and sandboxes, which Xaryxis does not have. I wouldn't use it to introduce folks to the game either since it starts at level 5.
I like all the different ships, though there's one that seems like the default pick for PCs so idk exactly how much value they add. Maybe they're just to fight against.
I've really enjoyed most of the monsters I've seen so far. They're more than just bundles of mechanics. They're story pieces! Thank goodness!
There's a reactions table! It's not called that, and it only applies to a specific (though pretty large) list of random encounters, but still, it's there! Now you can encounter monsters that maybe don't immediately want to kill you! Marvelous to have it written the heck down.
The setting seems pretty small. I mean, it's open for homebrew, but if you don't do homebrew, it's pretty small.
I'm skeptical of lots of the mechanics around ships. Like, it says you can perfectly navigate to anywhere just by wanting to. That's neat from a certain perspective, but is it fun? I'm not sure. Maybe? If you fall off the ship, you have so much time to get back that it's actually kind of hilarious. Idk. Stuff like that makes me wonder, is all. Are these meant to actually have an impact on play, or are they just fluff rules?
To quote what I wrote on another topic: after a cursory skim read, this book feels like it needed more time in the oven... like: a LOT of it.
- 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!?
- Being a sucker for space-based stuff I do love the deck-plans... but they seem a bit small for what they are meant to have. IE: not nearly enough space for the people they are supposed to carry. I'd almost use them at 2x scale as is.
- Magic items and spells - This section is a total joke: 2 spells and 3 magic items!? ALL of which are exclusively utility-based for spelljamming? You're telling me there's ZERO interesting spells or magic items out there in wild space!? In a world where Warhammer 40K, Star Wars, Mass Effect to name a few "space magic" systems exist this is just plain lazy.
- Speaking of lazy: allow an old nerd to wax poetic about the generation tables of old. Once upon a time, when a TTRPG book had a section called "createing x..." They'd include say: some templates, a table or two to roll on, that sort of thing... As it stands: allow me to quote verbatim the section "Creating a wildspace system":
"A typical Wildspace system has a sun plus a number of planets and moons orbiting it. Two examples of Wildspace systems, Doomspace and Xaryxispace, are described in the accompanying adventure, Light of Xaryxis. Use them as models when creating your own Wildspace system."
... And... that's it. Two examples; neither of which is particularly well fleshed out in its own right.
- And of course the greatest crime of this book... Dohwar aren't a playable race!?
It put to rest a big cosmology question of whether or not the various D&D worlds are on different planes in this edition, and it seems there is only one material plane. It went so far as to suggest you can teleport from one to another. So that helps answer some questions about banishment and other travel issues.
Though it does make me wonder why someone would use dream of the blue veil when you can do the same thing with teleport. If you consider having the material component for dream would allow you to teleport with no error.
So far I am enjoying it! The only thing that jumped out at me in any negative sense was the plasmoid description about how they eat:
It is a tiny gripe, but I do not think this is accurate. Immediately, it jumped out at me as wrong when I was doing a light skim. Osmosis is the movement of water. It would be more accurate to say diffusion for the movement of solute from a high gradient to low. But most amoeba consume through process called phagocytosis, which is where a phagocyte engulfs another particle, digests it, then expels the waste. This is essentially like other oozes do in D&D and which the plasmoid is classified as.
A very small bump in an otherwise fun read so far, but it has been on my mind since, so I thought I would share.
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My very first impression was to wonder why the spelljamming helm requires attunement. I would think that requiring a spellcaster and concentration to use would be sufficient.
My next impression was that it feels very lacking in content. I'd been hoping for content options equal or at least close to what we'd gotten from Fizban's. Instead we got 2 (admittedly solid) backgrounds, 2 spells, and 3 magic items.
The selection of spelljammer ships was very nice. That said, spelljamming ships moving a maximum of anywhere from 3 to 8 miles per hour (25-70 ft./round), to suddenly jump to more than 4 million miles per hour just because nothing else is nearby just feels weird. Super fancy flying ship can be outflown by CR 1 beasts? Yes, I realize it's only in specific circumstances, but it still feels off to me.
Lastly, it felt confused as to what it was trying to focus on. Wildspace is a thing, and the Astral Sea is a thing. We got a tiny bit of information on each, but to me it felt like they had two entirely different ideas of what they wanted "space" travel to be and tried to use both instead of making them a coherent whole.
Overall, I appreciate that we have official rules for spelljamming in 5e, but it feels unfinished and more like a teaser than a full ruleset.
I've just gone through and re-read the crew sizes versus the space of these ships and... to reiterate my earlier point: these ships are RIDICULOUSLY tiny for the numbers of people they're expecting to cram in there. The Damselfly ship is particularly agregious: I'm supposed to believe a crew of NINE people sleeps in a room that's 3 squares TOTAL!? Pray to every god and the lords of hell that nobody packed beans for the trip!
I wrote this another thread
I really do feel that they forgot the Spelljammer setting in the Spelljammer books... I just don't have time create a whole Sphere nor the money to waste on 2ed content... I need a QUALITY product that doesn't waste my time....
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True. Though I wish the Drakewarden subclass was rewritten to include a solar dragon pet with radiant breath damage (that was a flaw from the first; the drake companions should have included all of the gem-type dragons).
It's also an oversight that there's no Astral Half-elf race. Most - if not all - sub-species of elves get a half-elf equivalent
When I was reading the new boxed set I really felt like it was some Wizards developer using a very limited budget to open up a locked away setting for development on DMsguild. It almost seemed like, here's the bare essentials to the setting, sorry, best I could do.
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.
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.