Spelljammer

• 1. Introduction

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  Spelljammer imagines fantasy ships sailing straight into outer space, vessels shaped like galleons, animals, birds, or fish rather than sleek spacecraft. Published for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons second edition, it gave the game a fantasy physics all its own for traveling beyond the sky. Flying ships in the setting carry crews across interplanetary distances, visiting moons, planets, and stranger stellar objects along the way. How does a tabletop game built on swords and sorcery invent its own rules for space travel without borrowing a single idea from science fiction? What let this one setting connect Dragonlance, the Forgotten Realms, and nearly every other Dungeons & Dragons world at once? And what happened to that setting between its debut and its eventual return for a later edition of the game?

• 2. A Universe Built On Crystal Spheres

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  Unlike Planescape, the other AD&D setting built to connect TSR's worlds, Spelljammer keeps all of its action on the Prime Material Plane. Crystal spheres and the phlogiston between them act as natural barriers, keeping otherwise incompatible settings apart. The cosmology borrows its structure from the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, but its flavor owes just as much to Jules Verne and his contemporaries. That gives the whole setting a steampunk, planetary-romance feel, layered with a strong Age of Sail atmosphere throughout.

  A crystal sphere typically spans twice the diameter of the orbit of its system's farthest planet, forming one gigantic shell around an entire star system. Its outer surface, the sphere wall, carries no gravity and cannot be damaged by any normal or magical means. Openings called portals let spelljamming ships pass through, though they can open and close spontaneously anywhere along that wall. Anything caught mid-transit when a portal closes shut may be cut in two. Unlike the true Ptolemaic model, these crystal spheres never nest inside one another.

  Inside the sphere wall lies wildspace, a region that looks like ordinary outer space, full of planets, asteroids, and stars. Its physics work differently. On a planet-sized body, gravity pulls toward the center, usually matching the pull of Earth's own surface. Aboard a ship or a giant creature, gravity instead runs toward a flat plane along its long axis, letting crews stand on open decks. This gravity is unusually cooperative, almost always orienting 'down' in whatever direction a humanoid would find sensible. Every body that leaves a planet's surface carries an envelope of air with it. Unlike real-world physics, that air does not disperse once it reaches the vacuum of space. These bubbles usually supply breathable air for about three months, a span the setting treats as standard.

  Beyond the sphere wall flows the phlogiston, also called the Flow, a bright and extremely combustible medium unlike air, fire, water, or earth. It cannot enter a crystal sphere by any means, not even the direct will of a deity. Every sphere instead floats within the phlogiston, bobbing slowly up and down over time. Currents called Flow rivers cut travel time between spheres, while the calmer 'slow flow' beyond them is passable, but dangerous.

  None of these ships could cross that ocean of gas without a device to convert magic into motion, the spelljamming helm.

• 3. Spelljamming Helms And The Arcane

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  Any spellcaster can sit at a ship's helm and set it moving, whether or not that vessel was ever built to fly. The mysterious race known as the Arcane holds a complete monopoly on that technology. They are the only known manufacturers and distributors of spelljamming helms anywhere in the setting. Mechanically, a helm works as a converter, turning a caster's own magical energy directly into a ship's motive power.

  Not every ship in wildspace needed a helm bought from the Arcane. Spacefarers tell of one vessel that answers to no manufacturer at all, a living ship called the Spelljammer.

• 4. The Ship That Gave It Its Name

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  Shaped like a gigantic manta ray, the Spelljammer carries an entire city across its back. It lends its own name to spelljamming itself, and to every term built from that word. Every spacefarer has heard of it, yet only a rare few claim to have actually seen it. Sightings stretch back as far as written records go. Even groundlings, people who live on planets with little contact with spacefaring communities, tell their own legends about the ship. Hundreds of conflicting legends surround it, enough that the setting compares its mythology to that of the Flying Dutchman.

  It is alive, though it eats nothing. Instead it absorbs heat and light through its underside, converting them into air and food for everyone living aboard. Normally it carries no captain and drifts the cosmos without direction or apparent purpose. On the rare occasion it gains a captain, through a process the setting keeps deliberately mysterious, it produces miniature offspring called Smalljammers. Only one Spelljammer exists at any given time. If it is ever destroyed, one of its Smalljammers grows to take its place.

  The wildspace lanes it drifts through are never truly empty, home to travelers stranger than the ship itself.

• 5. A Cast Of Strange Races

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  Xenophobic beholders and rapacious neogi share wildspace with militant giff, described in the sourcebooks as humanoid hippopotami. Centaur-like dracons, hubristic elf armadas, and orcs called scro, who run their own spacefaring campaigns, round out the roster. Insectoid Thri-kreen and bumbling tinker gnomes fill out the setting further, alongside the mysterious Arcane themselves. Illithids count as a major race too, but the setting presents them as more mercantile and less overtly evil than elsewhere in the game. The Monstrous Compendium series added many further minor races over the years. One of them, the simian Hadozee, later joined the 3.5 edition rules through the supplement Stormwrack.

  These races would keep appearing for decades, as the Spelljammer product line rose, ended, and eventually returned under new publishers.

• 6. From TSR To Wizards Of The Coast

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  Games historian Shannon Appelcline, writing in Designers & Dragons in 2011, called Spelljammer the first of a wave of settings TSR published starting in 1989. Designer Jeff Grubb created it. Appelcline described the result as introducing 'a universe of magical starships traversing the crystal spheres that contained all the earthbound AD&D campaign worlds.' He judged the setting's new technology 'innovative and popular,' noting it also offered a way to connect every TSR world at once.

  The 1989 boxed set, Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space, gave three existing TSR worlds their own sections. Realmspace covered the Forgotten Realms, Krynnspace covered Dragonlance, and Greyspace covered Greyhawk. Fans grouped these with a new sphere called Clusterspace under the name 'Big Three and Astromundi.' Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Mystara were left out; the first two did not fit the setting, and Mystara ran on D&D rules rather than AD&D. TSR expanded the line through Lost Ships in 1990 and Realmspace in 1991. The Astromundi Cluster followed in 1993, which Appelcline called 'a soft reboot of the Spelljammer line.' Earlier books, he said, mainly worked 'as a conduit between all of the other AD&D settings,' while this one focused on its own setting instead.

  Wildspace, the first adventure module, arrived in 1990, followed by four connected modules. A longer campaign, Heart of the Enemy, followed in 1992. An anthology titled Space Lairs closed out the line in 1993. Two Monstrous Compendium installments, Spelljammer Appendix in 1990 and Spelljammer Appendix II in 1991, catalogued the setting's monsters.

  By 1993, Space Lairs and The Astromundi Cluster were the line's final releases. Appelcline noted that TSR's next second-edition world, Planescape, arrived that same year 'to replace Spelljammer, which had just then ended.' Designer Slade Henson built it around Jeff Grubb's earlier Manual of the Planes, from 1987. Planescape's City of Sigil gave it a strong geographic center, resolving what Appelcline called a flaw that had denied Spelljammer players 'a good home base.'

  TSR discontinued the Spelljammer line before Wizards of the Coast acquired the company in 1997. Paizo briefly revived the setting in May 2002, publishing 'Spelljammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon' in Dungeon magazine issue 92. Adapted to the D20 system, the article added new rules for firearms and spelljamming. Rather than reusing Spelljammer's own monsters like neogi or giff, it drew creatures such as drow, formians, and yuan-ti from the Monster Manual. Wizards updated the neogi to 3.5 edition rules in the 2005 supplement Lords of Madness. The book added a map of a crashed spelljamming vessel and details of neogi culture. A Spelljammer homage later appeared in the 4th edition's Manual of the Planes, which listed Spelljammer ships as one way to travel between planes.

  Spelljammer resurfaced again in the 2018 adventure Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. A spelljamming ship and its illithid captain turn up stranded on the dungeon's 19th level. In October 2021, Wizards published the playtest PDF Travelers of the Multiverse. Four of its six new player races, the autognome, giff, hadozee, and plasmoid, all belonged to the Spelljammer setting. That prompted both Polygon and Bleeding Cool to suggest a full reboot might be coming. Wizards confirmed it on the 16th of August 2022, releasing the boxed set Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. The box included a Dungeon Master's screen and a double-sided poster map. It also held three 64-page hardcover books: the Astral Adventurer's Guide, Boo's Astral Menagerie, and Light of Xaryxis. A special edition featured cover art by Hydro74. A free prequel module, Spelljammer Academy, appeared on the Wizards of the Coast website and D&D Beyond that July. The Monstrous Compendium Vol 1: Spelljammer Creatures had already introduced ten setting creatures to 5th edition that April.

  That boxed set's own soundtrack was only one piece of a much larger footprint Spelljammer left outside the tabletop, in comics, novels, and games.

• 7. Beyond The Tabletop

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  DC Comics published sixteen Spelljammer comics between September 1990 and November 1991. Barbara Kesel wrote the series, with art from Michael Collins, Dan Panosian, and other contributors. The setting's first appearance filled a third of the 72-page TSR Worlds Annual #1. The ongoing title went on sale two weeks later, though both comics carried the same September 1990 shelf date. Jasmine, a winged human character who first appeared in Forgotten Realms comics, became one of the lead characters here.

  TSR published six interconnected novels, known together as The Cloakmaster Cycle, before the company folded into Wizards of the Coast. The books follow Teldin Moore, a groundling farmer from Krynn given a powerful, seemingly cursed magical cloak. That cloak pulls him first into wildspace, then across distant crystal spheres far from home. David Cook opened the cycle with Beyond the Moons in July 1991. Nigel Findley followed with Into the Void that October, then Roger E. Moore added The Maelstrom's Eye in May 1992. Elaine Cunningham contributed The Radiant Dragon that November. Findley returned with The Broken Sphere in May 1993, and Russ T. Howard closed the cycle with The Ultimate Helm that September. All six novels are now out of print. Random House published a new entry, Django Wexler's Memory's Wake, in June 2024.

  The only Spelljammer computer game ever made, Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace, came from publisher SSI in 1992. In 2002, a team of freelance modders built the Arcane Space Tileset for Neverwinter Nights. It added spelljamming ships, space and atmospheric terrain, and setting-specific monsters and NPCs.

  Legends of the Multiverse, an official streaming series, premiered on Dungeons & Dragons channels on the 27th of April 2022. It starred Deborah Ann Woll, B. Dave Walters, Gina Darling, Meagan Kenreck, and Todd Kenreck. Guest performers included Brennan Lee Mulligan and Aabria Iyengar, among several others. Wizards of the Coast released a digital soundtrack, Spelljams, alongside the 2022 boxed set. Each track on it corresponds to a chapter of the adventure module Light of Xaryxis.

  None of that reach stopped one early reviewer from handing the original release a distinctly unimpressed verdict.

• 8. Critical Reception

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  In the January 1990 issue of Games International, reviewer James Wallis judged the original release harshly. He faulted inconsistencies in the combat rules, writing that their cumulative effect made space combat unplayable. He called the setting's background 'imaginative and consistent,' though he felt there was too little of it. He praised the components' production values, yet called the book itself disorganized to the point of 'disarray and confusion.' Wallis gave the game two out of five, writing that 'Spelljammer may score well physically but fails mentally.' He added that only scavenging AD&D players hunting for ideas might find it worthwhile, calling it a game he could not recommend to anyone else.

  Writing for CBR in October 2021, Alexander Sowa argued Spelljammer belonged among the classic settings Wizards of the Coast should revive for 5th edition. He described it as 'a simultaneous fulfillment of sci-fi and fantasy dreams of exploration, venturing deep into unknown depths and contending with the strange and otherworldly.'

  The Gamer placed Spelljammer third on its 2022 list of the eight best Dungeons & Dragons settings ever. It called Spelljammer 'one of the most unique settings on this list' and summarized it as 'pirates meets sci-fi fantasy' with 'galaxy-traversing galleons.' In a separate February 2022 article for the same outlet, Paul DiSalvo noted that the setting had 'faded into obscurity.' Despite a wide range of second-edition Spelljammer books, DiSalvo wrote, it went largely unfeatured across the third, fourth, and fifth editions.

  RPG historian Stu Horvath, in his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, called the game 'gloriously bewildering.' He also weighed the new 5th edition version against the original, concluding it already felt less odd and more formulaic than where it all began.