In reply to Tortuga (msg # 6):

Planescape was the standard multiplanar setting, yes, while Spelljammer wasn't.  Never tried to be, since it just had "interstellar" travel between crystal spheres (solar systems) in the same plane.

The way I remember it, the crystal spheres were different primes. You could literally fly from Oerth to Faerun.

Spelljammer was introduced because TSR was dropping their old cosmology in favor of Ptolemaic crystal sphere astronomy. No demons, no devils, no hells, just primes suspended in crystal spheres.

Then fans demand for a 2e Manual of the Planes turned into Planescape, and TSR dropped Spelljammer to go back to their old planar cosmology, where the different prime planes do not inhabit the same physical universe.

But maybe my memory fails me.
This message was last edited by the user at 13:44, Thu 14 May 2015.

It was both actually - the way I understand it each Crystal Sphere is it's own galaxy with different natural laws. The Heavens, Hells, and such planes exist separately yet also connected to each of the Spheres. So while Oerth is in one Sphere, Faerun in another and any other Prime world or system you can think of is out there to, but the 'outer planes' connected them all in some fashion. The Phlogiston(?) is the space between spaces, sort of a connecting subspace and in theory you could travel from there to the Outer Planes to, though it was not something easily done.
Also theoretically you could travel from Faerun to Earth this way.

As for Ravensloft it started out as a 2 part module but evolved in to it's own demiplane cause it was so popular (I have both versions).

Hell yeah I remember it fondly! I started playing with 2nd Edition and loved all of the campaign settings, and they definitely had some strange ones. Planescape was my favorite, but Spelljammer and Dark Sun were in the running for 2nd and 3rd. They were weird settings, not much like the 'regular' fantasy ones like Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms. Spelljammer was definitely the most unusual of them all, though...and some of the products had some inconsistent writing, and lore that didn't mesh well with previously established lore.

It had Large Luigi, the Beholder bartender that knew he was an NPC in a game. It had Falx, the planet where herds of Tarrasques roamed. Astromundi Cluster tried to make an origin story for Illithids that completely forgot all about the Far Realm, the Illithid Empire, the Gith, etc. Also hippo-people with guns (the Giff). The Xixchil, those thri-kreen cousins who loved performing surgery on people. "You asked for the eyes of an eagle, the beak and feathers were free!" And don't forget giant mutant space hamsters.

It was all fun, though.

As for cosmology... You have the Prime Material Plane, which is composed of Chrystal Spheres. Phlogiston fills the gap between the spheres and only Spelljamming vessels can travel through Phlogiston. You then have the Inner Planes and the Outer Planes. Inner Planes (4 Elemental, 4 Para-elemental, 8 Quasi-elemental, and 2 energy planes) are connected to the Prime by the Ethereal Plane. The Outer Planes (Hell/Baator, Heaven/Mt. Celestia, The Abyss, etc.) are connected to the Prime via the Astral Plane. Neither Astral nor Ethereal connect to the Phlogiston, so the Phlogiston is the only place on the Prime not connected to any other planes. Demi-Planes, like Ravenloft, are part of the Ethereal Plane.

All the other settings had their own Crystal Spheres, and theoretically our modern Earth  was somewhere out there as well.

Spelljammer was part of a TSR cycle when they were doing 'oh look, we can do this, and this, and...', giving the creative people what appeared to be pretty much free rein.  Of course those cycles tended to be followed by 'oh dear, we are bleeding money' cycles, when the creative staff was cut and the bean counters had their turn.  They never seemed to get the balance between creative and accounting right.  One of the purges led to the company Pacesetter, creators of Chill (the original boxed set) and several other games.  But Pacesetter didn't have the balance either; it was heavy on creation.  *sigh*  Too bad, they had some neat things.

And back to topic, yes, I remember Spelljammer, and specifically an adventure we played.  Must have been a Living City event, because I was playing my gypsy bard.  She wasn't very happy there, since we met some nasty psionic creatures, and many of the party 'died' by being drained of some attributes.

Spelljammer was a setting I always wanted to plsy, but started too late to get in on.

In reply to Wyrm (msg # 13):

The source books still exist, so it's never too late. And you don't even really need the books. It's the feel of a space fantasy game that matters, not the exact setting or the books.

I played AD&D when 2nd was in it's prime. I REALLY loved the Ravenloft settings, Then Dark Sun, and Finally Spelljammer. There used to be a campus RPG organization (RPSIG - Role Playing Special Interest Group) that I would frequent. Spelljammer was a game I could always bring and fit just about any character someone wanted to bring in to the one shot.

There was something about the Flow (Hyperspace) that really appealed to me. The only thing  that did not really appeal to me was the fact that the spell casters had to sacrifice their powers if they wanted to be a helmsman. I usually just had Billy on the day shift and Bob on the night shift so that the players never really had to pilot (Except on plot twists)

On the other hand, Spelljammer really pulled in the "Black Powder" crowd.

In My campaign areas the crystalspheres are the fortresses made by the gods during the Titan-God Wars. Each had a Meta-pax signed by the makers creating the meta-system (game rules) that they operate under.  I played very little 2nd edition at the time since their "improvements" made it impossible to play my campaign milieue using 2nd ed community standards.

Back in the 80s it became kind of en vogue to include science fiction elements into generic fantasy. So I guess that is just what Spelljammer did for TSR.
But imho it actually worked out fine once you had read into it. Together with the Dark Sun campaign setting and of course Ravenloft, these three were the most original ones TSR invented.
(anything went down the drain after 2e. escpecially the originality)

Was always my favorite conceptually followed closely by "Council of Wyrms" and "Planescape". Due to how hard it was to find and how it kinda got buried in later editions I never got to actually Play it.

I've never been a big sci fi guy but love the exploration a space setting could give so spelljammer makes for some nay amazing possibilities for a campaign. It really gave a nice meta view of the D&D universe as well with the crystal spheres and pairs interesting with Planescape. with the constant focus on forgotten realms in these last editions I'd love a revival of the older more colorful settings.

Whilst Ravenloft and Spelljammer were clearly quite original, I always felt Darksun was about on par with Planescape for originality.

I tend to agree that fluffwise, 2e was superior in originality to third edition; but third edition is a better rules mix to get new people involved.

2nd is my favorite edition; but I do have soft spots for all of them; other than 4th.

Recently I re-watched Disney's Treasure Planet and all I could do was think about Spelljammer.  It was a perfect Spelljammer campaign, of course we all know what the storyline was based off of, but I always felt like Spelljammer was a fantasy pulp adventure setting.  It just left as bit to be desired when they tied all the other settings together.  If Paizo could get the rights to that setting it would be awesome as a stand alone setting.

All this talk of spelljammer had set me ona grand quest. Once upon a time i had just about everything for that "universe". I placed all of my 2nd ed stuff in a box and gave it to someone who still played as I was moving a large distance and had to reduce my stuff.
Now I feel the urge to see if he still has any of what I gave him. I might just have to get a game together...
This message was last edited by the user at 12:46, Thu 28 May 2015.

Wow, Spelljammer, that's something I haven't heard in a LONG time.

Spelljammer....haven't played that in ages. It was my first attempt at a swashbuckling character, before that class came out. I distinctly remember our GM ruling that gnomish craft ran not on spelljammers, but giant hamsters on treadmills.......

The hamsters on treadmills was not a GM ruling, it was actually canon.  :)

Gnomish Sidewheeler, p33 Concordance of Arcane Space ... "price does not include gnomes needed to run things, or the giant hamsters that power the side wheels and wind the giant rubber band."

Never played, but I was recently given the Spelljammer boxed set and I'm eagerly reading through.
This message was last edited by the user at 13:08, Thu 04 June 2015.

I loved SpellJammer, still trying to recollect all the source materials off of EBay. Ironic, out of everything that I have bought and saved over the years as, "collectable," the only thing I could make some money off of collecting is my SpellJammer collection.  I was trying to hash together a Firefly style campaign universe using SpellJammer ships, but using the Firefly/Serenity source books is a daunting task, the two games just don't really mash at any point.

Spelljammer doesn't really mesh well with any existing sci-fi universe, because despite the 'spaceships', it's really very much a magical setting.

I remember seeing this poster for Spelljammer that had a hippoman with a flintlock. I thought that was cool, but alas, I never actually played that setting.

I saw SJ as a mechanism to move characters from one setting to another, and IIRC that's the way it was used in any scenario I played in.  Some play on the ships themselves (as in the one that ended in a near TPK when most characters' stats have been stripped by psionic monsters) but in a campaign, ending with the party in a totally new and different world.

I remember Spelljammer!  Loved all the different ships it had as well as the Giff.

You could certainly used Spelljammer just to move worlds; just like you could Planescape. You could also though make a great campaign out of it, if that's what you wanted.

Never got to play; always wanted to. By the time Spelljammer came out, I was mainly DMing.

I played it for about 18 months and enjoyed the whole thing.  Started off in the Forgotten Realms finding a shell type building.  Turned out that it could move, and thus began a thrill ride.