I was thinking about Beholders and remembered this cover from the Spelljammer boxed set.


I was thinking about Beholders and remembered this cover from the Spelljammer boxed set. This is one of my all-time favorite D&D paintings. And maybe the best Jim Holloway painting ever.
I ran a 4e Spelljammer campaign that worked pretty well. If 5e goes all in on their past settings like it seems they’re going to, I would probably buy every Spelljammer product they released just because. If I ran it right now, I’d probably run it like Stars Without Number, with drill routes being known paths through the Phlogiston and randomly created systems/crystal spheres.
Oh man…you could run SWN’s Hard Light adventure as is. A dwarf operation in an inhospitable sphere need adventurers to clear the asteroids of monsters before they mine them for rare minerals.

Comments

  1. Wait, they're going all in on their old settings?

    Oh my god... Planescape?

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  2. I'm googling to see if there are random sphere generators online anywhere.

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  3. Ian Williams that's my gut feeling. And the amount of planar monsters in the new MM makes me think Planescape is inevitable.

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  4. Back in the day we played a SJ game on the Spelljammer. Everyone was trapped on it. Factions of people and monsters trapped on a ship they can't control. Basically Stargate Universe before that show came on the air.

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  5. Also, the Gif in British officer uniforms from the 1800s is awesome.

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  6. Keith Senkowski _The_ Spelljammer as megadungeon/setting would be excellent.

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  7. It was. We ended up using a weird hybrid of the Birthright domain rules for the factions coupled with Battlesystem as shit quickly turned into an endless gang war broken by periods of calm when we came across planets and everyone scrambled to get resources and then back on the ship...

    It was a fun game. My brother and best friend played Gif (Crumwell and The Captain) who murdered everyone who got in the way of "Her Imperial Majesty's Grenadiers' with wheelock fire every chance they got. The two of them still talk about this game and we are all old men now.

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  8. Oh man, ACKS domain rules on a smaller scale would work for that.

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  9. ACKS is one of those things my list to get but keep forgetting.

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  10. You should not forget about ACKS. It's my D&D of choice for the last two years.

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  11. 4E Spelljammer was great. My only criticism was with the forced movement and falling off the edge of the ship. With as many powers as they had with forced movement it was always tempting to try to knock someone off the deck and out of combat. However with the save against falling rules it didn't feel right about how easy sometimes it was and hard other times.

    You would almost need to do a case study on the known flaws of 4E and compare against forced movement, saves, and level disparity.

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