168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons’ fifth edition is entering its twilight years. We already know an updated edition is coming in 2024, and we’ve started seeing elements of it creep into the game already. This year’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Monsters Of The Multiverse introduced some✨ of the big changes to race and morality we’ve been expecting from the new edition – such as completely disentangling races for ‘inherent&rsquoও; alignments.
But Sixth Edition – or 5.5e, or D&D Next, or whatever you want to call it – is still at least 18 months away. We have a whole calendar year of 5E to go before the big change, and for its final few months Wizards of the Coast has decided to let loose and get weird. Enter 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spelljammer: Adventures In Space, the return of one of D&D’s most-loved settings updated for Fifth Edition for the first time. I had the c♌hance to sit down with Wizards of the Coast and lead designer Chris Perkins to see what’s going on in the Astral Sea.
For those who’ve never encountered Spelljammer, it’s easier to say what it isn’t than what it is. This isn’t the “sci-fi setting” many people think of when they first see “D&D, but in space”. Spelljammer takes place in the gaps between universes, in the high seas of deep space. While it uses the cosmic imagery of galaxies, nebulas, and meteorites, it’s more of a Lovecraftian nautical experience. The spaceships carrying people acro▨ss the stars are more Jolly Roger than USS Enterprise, and you’ll have to deal with anything the multiverse has to throw at you: Mind Flayers, ꦡBeholders encrusted in comets, Space Pirate Clowns, the works.
Spelljammer: Adventures In Space has the overall page count of your average sourcebookꦍ, however Wizards has decided to split it into three volumes of 64 page🅰s each. The first is the sourcebook, the Astral Adventurer’s Guide, which introduces you to Spelljammer and sets out the rules of the setting. The next is Boo’s Astral Menagerie, the monster manual that adds everything from giant Space Hamsters to those Space Pirate Clowns.
The third book is a self-contained adventure, called the Light of Xaryxis. This is an introductory adventure for those aiming to either start a new campaign in Spelljammer, or help transition their existing one to the setting. It assumes no prior knowledge of Spelljammer – even your characters begin completely ignorant to the Astral Sea before going through training and finally taking off to the stars. It includes both returning and brand new areas for the setting, such as the city-on🌟-an-asteroid the Rock of Bral, and new areas of Wild Space known only as Doomspace and Xaryxisspace.
Long-time Spelljammer fans may be familiar with some of Spelljammer’s more idiosyncratic cosmology, but there have been some big changes to the setting you once knew. In Ye Olde Sౠpelljammer of yesteryear, every star system was literally encased within a crystal sh🧸ell, with the wilder reaches of the Phlogiston serving as the oceans that connect them.
For 5E’s take on Spelljammer, the cosmology has been greatly simplified to better fit what has already been established in more recent books. Gone are the crystal shells and the Phlogiston, and instead we now have the “Astral Sea” and “Wild Space”. The Astral Sea serves as the more civilis💃ed (but only just) reaches of space, while the Wild Spac🅰e is the untamed gaps between realities – real There Be Beasties territory.
However, there are more than a few things for Spelljammer veterans to enjoy, most notably 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the six new playable races comin🃏g in the book. Leading the new races are the closest thing Spelljammer has to a mascot, the Giff. These Hippo-folk soldiers have no idea of their own history, and search the stars looking for answers. They’re also joined by the Astral Elves – Spelljꩲammer’s take on Star Trek’s Vulcans: composed and elegant, yet efficiently violent. We also get the Planet of The Apes-esque Hadozee, the four-armed insectoids known as the Thri-Kreen, and for the first time, a playable Ooze species called the Plasmoids.
The sixth race is a first for 5E: the AutoGnomes are D&D’s first-ever playable ‘pure’ construct. We’ve had things like the Warforged before, but they’re living beings. AutoGnomes, on the other hand, are totally artificial. This has caused some big rules shake ups for 5E that needed working through (for example, how do you heal a robot? How do you bring it back to life if it was never𒐪 alive?), but all will be explained in the Astral Adventurer’s Guide.
Spelljammer has long been one of D&D’s more popular settings. While it’s hardly on the same level as The Forgotten Realms, Eberron, or Ravenloft, its quirky aesthetic and literally endless environment to explore has earned it its fair share of fans. Despite that, Spelljammer was last seen in the game’s Third Edition in a reduced form following its debut in AD&D in 1989. If Spelljam𒈔mer is so beloved, why has it taken this long for it to come back?
According to Perkins, it’s actually the fact that we’re nearing the end of 5E that has allowed Wizards to head into space. 5E’s early years were all about setting up the brand and the new rules, and this meant a lot of time in a familiar setting instead of exploring new ones. The Forgotten Realms was the core focus of 5E for much of its life, and it’s only been in the last few years that we’ve been branching out into the multiverse with books like Van Richten’s Guide To Ravenloft and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Wild Beyond The Witchlight.
Spelljammer: Adventures In Space is considered the “final frontier” of 5E. Now that all the building blocks have been put in place, it can go for broke with things like interstellar ship combat (which uses the rules for ships and siege weapoꦗns already determined in the 5E rules), playable Oozes and Constructs, and evenꦗ ways of porting content from your existing campaigns into Spelljammer.
While we’re approaching the end of thi💙s era of Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards has made sure to leave room for Spelljammer to make a much speedier return if it proves to be a hit. Adventures In Space is considered a standalone p🍷roduct and can be enjoyed right out of the box, but if the presales are to be believed and this is as successful as Wizards is predicting, maybe we won’t have to wait another two editions for a return to Astral Sea?
🔥Spelljammer: Adventures In Space launches on Augus🌸t 16.