Originally published on Sidekickcast.com April 5, 2016
The 1990s were a time of terrible business management for TSR, the company behind Dungeons & Dragons, but it was also a time of great creativity. Few people argue that the 2nd edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a really good system, but just about everybody loves the campaign settings.
Every other edition of D&D has stuck to pseudo-medieval European settings – stuff like Dragonlance, the Forgotten Realms, and Greyhawk. Even in the more modern Eberron setting, with robot PCs and magic-powered trains, a group of adventurers heading into a dungeon to recover an artifact is pretty much the assumed standard.
2nd edition created settings that broke the normal D&D assumptions. You had a setting where the PCs were dragons, a setting where magic destroyed the environment with every spell, and a setting where a character’s beliefs could literally reshape reality. Then there was the Spelljammer setting, which is what I’m going to talk about today.
Supposedly, the concept of Spelljammer came from a picture of an armored knight standing on the deck of a ship that was sailing through space. Rather than pick the concept apart because of things like gravity, air, and the merciless vacuum of space, the designers started to develop a setting where that picture could be a possibility. The result was a mix of Ptolematic physics, monster-run galactic empires, giant space hamsters, and more.
The Line Between Fantasy and Science Fiction
Despite attempts to tie Spelljammer into the “big” D&D settings such as the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, the setting never really generated a lot of hype among gamers, getting cancelled after only four years in print. There are several reasons for this, but a big problem is that a lot of D&D-ers are really resistant to getting sci-fi in their fantasy.
However, Spelljammer is almost exclusively fantasy, with very little sci-fi mixed in. Sci-fi uses an extrapolation of science as we understand it – it bends the rules, but doesn’t break them. Spelljammer deliberately used an outdated model of physics to create its own rules about gravity, air, and space travel. That pulled it right out of the sci-fi genre and squarely into the realm of fantasy, despite the existence of starships.
Spelljammer used a mix of the Phlogiston theory and the Ptolemaic theory of space as the basis for its physical laws. Planetary systems were enclosed in crystal spheres, which themselves floated in a void known as wildspace. Any suitably large object generated its own gravity and air field, so magical flying boats could carry passengers on voyages of several months through multiple crystal spheres.
If you felt like you just got dumber by reading that paragraph, the setting isn’t for you. If you’re willing to accept the idea that the entire setting exists in a realm where our laws of space and time don’t always apply, the setting has some wondrous moments to them.
The Alien Races of D&D
You would expect a space-faring setting to have all sorts of weird alien races in them. Spelljammer did have some of those, including the fan-favorite slavers known as the neogi, but it also made heavy use of existing D&D lore. After all, D&D already had hundreds of weird alien races – they just happened to be called monsters in most settings.
Just look at some of the monsters that featured prominently in Spelljammer and tell me that you couldn’t see them on an episode of Star Trek.
You’ve got beholders, who were more common in Spelljammer than virtually any other setting. Rather than being deadly end-bosses in dungeons, these guys were basically space Nazis in a civil war of genetic purity.
You’ve got umber hulks, which were a massively powerful slave race used by the neogi.
You’ve got mind flayers, which were actually less villainous than their planetside counterparts. Rather than lurking in dungeons and eating adventurers’ brains, these guys were mind-controlling merchants. After all, running a mercantile empire provides lots of wealth and slaves, which in turn means many more tasty brains to eat.
The more you look through the Monstrous Manual, the more likely you are to realize that the only reason these monsters are considered traditionally fantasy creatures is because they were first encountered in dungeons and not on moons.
Pulp Space-Fantasy Adventures
I believe that the other reason this setting never really caught on with fans is because the tone was sillier than most gamers wanted. Gamers are not fond of people pointing out how silly their elf games are, and Spelljammer adhered to a very irreverent tone.
My two favorite examples? The giff and the giant space hamster.
The giff are hippos with handguns.
These guys are enormously strong anthropomorphic hippos that have low Intelligence and Wisdom scores. Very militaristic, they often form into well-organized platoons but still have a deep love of brawling. So you’ve got a bunch of hippo people in spaceships who try to have militaristic order but who routinely break down into brawls just for the fun of it. Their guns have a significant chance of misfiring, but they don’t care – they just like loud sounds and the smell of gunpowder.
Giant space hamsters are exactly as they sound.
On their own, these guys are just random silliness. But they also play an important part in showing off the general madness of tinker gnomes, who are responsible for breeding normal hamsters into grizzly-sized monstrosities. Basically, giant space hamsters are mad science run amuck.
The tone of this and other parts of the Spelljammer setting is decidedly silly. That makes it a huge win for me, who loves to celebrate silliness in my games, but less of a draw for the general public, who would prefer a veneer of seriousness in their games.
In many ways, Spelljammer was written in the style of classic pulps like Planet Stories and Buck Rogers, but the consumer public was moving into a more critical and serious-minded style of speculative fiction.
The Death and Continuation of Spelljammer
As I mentioned, Spelljammer only lasted four years in print, with the last product coming out in 1993. Despite that, it became a mainstay in the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse. The module Greyhawk Ruins included an opportunity to find a spelljammer vessel as treasure. The Forgotten Realms included palaces that had a hold from which spelljammers could be launched. Throughout the 2nd edition days, spelljamming was something that remained a thing in the D&D world.
One of the reasons that Spelljammer lingered on after it ceased publication was that it was one way to connect the various D&D settings. Throughout the 1990s, D&D was a multiverse, with each setting sharing a common cosmology. When 3rd edition rolled out, that changed – each setting got its own planar structure, and spelljammer vessels stopped getting even a passing mention.
That said, while Spelljammer couldn’t justify a product line, it did have its fans. When Paizo Publishing took over the D&D magazines, they gave a 3rd edition treatment to Spelljammer in Polyhedron Magazine. Similarly, 4th edition D&D catered to the setting’s fans enough to mention spelljammer ships as a way of traveling through the planes, although the old crystal sphere cosmology remained long dead.
[Addendum: Spelljammer did get a boxed set in 2022, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. It moved away from the Ptolemaic system in favor of traveling the Astral Sea as a way of getting between worlds. Without the broader support that the setting got in 2nd edition, its unique silliness doesn’t really shine through as much. The boxed set was part of the end of 5th edition’s lifecycle (before Wizards of the Coast decided that the next edition was also 5th edition), and was essentially a one-off in the same spirit as the setting’s appearance in Polyhedron.]
Overall, Spelljammer is the type of setting that really typifies the 1990s for TSR. The idea was cool and the creators were passionate about it, but there wasn’t really a lot of business sense in producing multiple products for it. Despite that, nostalgia and a vocal group of fans have kept the setting from disappearing completely.
Babbling Brooks 