I really hope they follow this trend - GMs buy adventure modules for easy of use! Candlekeep has been a similarly great resource! 2 chapters on worldbuilding then short bite sized adventures please
I like how they justify doing less work for YOUR benefit. I like how the pander then tell you, the DM, to make it up. Enjoy the microtransactions that are coming.
All of this. And the comment section is full of people asking for less world building and more bite sized adventures handed to them. DND is over in a perspective. And a brand new monster in another.
the episode idea sounds fun and interesting, i wouldn't push DMs though to think that they MUST get to the end of each chapter by the end of each session. that's going to lead to railroading and rushing groups of PCs through really fun scenes. i think that there will be plenty of groups who will want to spend the whole session at the Happy Beholder!
The individual chapters are all pretty short. Some story and a couple combat encounters and you're done with the chapter in a couple hours. It's relatively easy to get to the end of a chapter in one sitting.
I've been playing D&D in space since the mid 70s. The structure of the material plane now resembles what we were doing back then. I was on the fence about 5e, as I still have all the 2e spelljammer books. This gives me a solid reason to jump into 5e! I love what they've done with the setting!
A cliff hanger after every session? I'll be the roundabout The words will make you out 'n' out I spend the day your way Call it morning driving thru the sound and in and out the valley!!! 🎶
The cliffhanger-heavy structure is interesting. I've always had trouble reading through official adventures and knowing how far into a chapter I should get to. That might makes them easier to get through.
that's the way it was writ and works well. I actually used a level 1 SJ adventure from DMSGuild then after it I advanced them to 5 and started adventure from there.
I'm actually having to rewrite some of this because my adventurers love captain sartell and first mate Flapjack so much they've become loyal to her crew
I love that Spelljammer is back but I don't like the loss of traveling in the prime material for it. Traveling to another plane was higher level play and was the Planes cape setting.
@@sylvnfox yes but you could then exit the crystal sphere and head through the phlogiston to another one in the prime material. You didn’t need to travel dimensions.
@@PRGidaro it works mechanicly the same way. you leave one system, and fly to the other. all tey did was change a name. phlogiston = astral sea. same thing diffrent name. you can have encounters ship battles, ext. everything you did in the phlogiston you can do in the astral sea.
While I myself was initially disappointed with the length of these books, I disagree with anybody who says that this adventure is too short. Because I think they're looking at it wrong. It's the wrong mindset to compare it to something like wild Beyond The Witch light or curse of Strahd. This is more comparable to starting adventures from the campaign setting books like Krenko's Way from Ravnica or House of Lament from Ravenloft. And in that regard it looks really solid!
I will be honest; this makes me feel a lot better. I think Spelljammer is best when its more Farscape than Star Trek. And letting Flash influence the creation of the adventure sounds good.
Spelljammer is definitely more of like swashbuckling in space than big social issues, although you can certainly make a more star trek like rp-heavy campaign.
Sounds like we can finally imitate Lexx and play a John Crytin character. The ship can even be living ship with Navigator who can't leave the control room.
More or less. The first chapter in particular is kinda railroady because the players are riding on a ship of which they are not the captain of. But it gets you a good jump from episode to episode and gives a good variety sampler pack of what the setting has to offer.
This book was announced when I hit a huge hurdle in my homebrew campaign. We already knew that there were 5 shards of an artifact that made a key that could unlock an interplanar gate. My PC had a sword with 2 of those shards in a Luck Blade Longsword, and then the party beat a Death Knight who had one, and we obtained the 3rd shard. But the shards are cursed, making the people in possession of the shards unable to rest peacefully without having dreams about needing to collect the other shards, eventually being corrupted by this need to wield them all. She left the guild hall in the middle of the night and got into a fight with another PC that we needed to be temporarily sidelined from the game. As she was about to kill him, an Illithilich appears from the shadows and incapacitated her before she dealt the killing blow, and both were kidnapped, so the remaining party had to track them down and I took over as the DM. I wrote the Illithilich as a curious and eccentric mad scientist with a traveling laboratory. He has one shard of the key and has been seeking the others. While in possession of just 1 shard, he’s actually a neutral leaning character who is obsessed with the idea of understanding the factors that determine a creature’s lifespan and magical abilities, hoping to find the secret so he can learn how to exploit it and teach the Illithids how to live forever so their race can rebuild the empire and regain the vast knowledge they once held. His laboratory is inside of a Nautiloid and the only info I could find about them when I was designing my battle maps were some brief references in Baldur’s Gate and some very old Spelljammer content that didn’t easily translate to 5e, so I spent MONTHS winging it and trying to build a Nautiloid from the ground up, with the kind of layout and framework that would explain why he has this mad scientist laboratory and villagers “keep going missing.” Turns out that he isn’t murdering them and eating their brains, but rather, running a questionably ethical operation where voluntary research participants get 1,000 Gold per week of being a test subject to calibrate his machines. There’s an Easter egg in it where he has The Machine from The Princess Bride and he can take away many years of your life. But he also tries to put it back. All painful processes, and he’s trying to figure out how to get the most effective calibration settings. These machines weren’t very efficient so you’d take 10 years of someone’s life and when you transferred it to yourself, you might only get 1D4+1 years. His research and developments have improved the machines so it’s more like 2D4+1 but he thinks perhaps these shards can teach him something, because obtaining just 1 greatly expanded his abilities (and he now has a heavily modified stat block). The players arrive at the Nautiloid to hear our sidelined PCs “getting tortured.” But he’s actually putting years back into them that they’d lost in their fight with each other, and they learn that he isn’t as shady as they first assumed… yet 😈 Now he has my PC’s sword with 3 more shards, and if he attunes to that sword, he’s gonna go dark. For now he’s just thrilled to have guests to give a laboratory tour to. But in the middle of their tour, after seeing all of the monstrosities, abberations, fey, and fiends in their cages, and seeing the shelves of data he has collected on the creatures… an alarm goes off, and a Githyenki dragon rider appears from a gate to the astral sea. Vlaakith has finally found the Illithilich, Polaris, that she has been hunting for many years. She had the very last shard to the Astral Key artifact… and they’re about to chase her through the gate into the astral sea. Now Polaris is preparing for battle, and is about to pick up my PC’s sword to fight some Githyenki soldiers on his Nautiloid. That’s the cliffhanger we just left off on. Will Polaris get the final shard? Will he go evil? Will they have an epic Nautiloid astral sea battle with a bunch of weird and fascinating creatures and vessels??? I started writing more vessels and felt like it was all too much. Finally got some info about spelljamming helms so I could understand how the Illithilich pilots his Nautiloid which is great. But now I need a lot more material. And then y’all announced this book, and I was SO RELIEVED because bro, I was about to write one my damn self and it was a very intimidating task after I spent so long perfecting just ONE vessel 😆 oh man, seeing that Nautiloid in the teaser for the book made me squeal with delight that I wasn’t going to have to figure all this out on my own!! I cannot wait for it to get here, and to have so much more material that actually works with 5e at my fingertips ♥️♥️♥️
The level range is getting more and more concerning lately. 5-8 seems very short. Hope the DMs Guild community comes up with some good spelljammer content. I will still buy it tho >.
I mean, they say in the video that it's designed to be 12 sessions, so that's a solid 3 months of a weekly game. Might be better for some groups who maybe can't meet up as often, since they'll know that each session they *can* make it to is still advancing the story 1/12 of the way.
it is an intro adventure, think of it like Lost Mine of Phandelver. it is a place for a campaign to start and then the DM can take it to wherever they wish
the thing is Dark son had some very,,, "sensitive" concepts that wotc is stearing clear of. I don't see Dark Sun ever coming back, and if it does it will OT be the same as it was in the 90's.
I can't lie, I love the Spelljammer setting, however I'm not very thrilled by a 12-session campaign with the DM needing to do a ton of work to expand upon this setting. The Wild Beyond the Witchlight was also shorter than Rime of the Frostmaiden, I'm just concerned in the future we will continue to get short, 3 level adventures.
I literally hate that they cram an adventure into the book. Make it it’s own book, or just digitally release it. Fill the space in the -PLAYER OPTION BOOK- with player options. Wild concept. Give it a whirl.
So what I took from this is, as the DM, go plagiarize Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers comics & serials from the 1930s because none of your players are going to have seen them. 👌
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
This format of multiple ~4 page adventures sounds like exactly what I’ve been wanting! Can’t handle the huge campaign books anymore lol
I really hope they follow this trend - GMs buy adventure modules for easy of use! Candlekeep has been a similarly great resource! 2 chapters on worldbuilding then short bite sized adventures please
My PCs are going to love Luigi.
The delightful indie TTRPG "Call of Catthulhu" actually included as a rule that every session should end on a cliffhanger. It was great!
I like how they justify doing less work for YOUR benefit. I like how the pander then tell you, the DM, to make it up. Enjoy the microtransactions that are coming.
All of this. And the comment section is full of people asking for less world building and more bite sized adventures handed to them. DND is over in a perspective. And a brand new monster in another.
the episode idea sounds fun and interesting, i wouldn't push DMs though to think that they MUST get to the end of each chapter by the end of each session. that's going to lead to railroading and rushing groups of PCs through really fun scenes. i think that there will be plenty of groups who will want to spend the whole session at the Happy Beholder!
The individual chapters are all pretty short. Some story and a couple combat encounters and you're done with the chapter in a couple hours. It's relatively easy to get to the end of a chapter in one sitting.
I've been playing D&D in space since the mid 70s. The structure of the material plane now resembles what we were doing back then.
I was on the fence about 5e, as I still have all the 2e spelljammer books. This gives me a solid reason to jump into 5e!
I love what they've done with the setting!
A cliff hanger after every session? I'll be the roundabout
The words will make you out 'n' out
I spend the day your way
Call it morning driving thru the sound and in and out the valley!!! 🎶
well. there may not be basically any rules for ship combat but I'm glad Large Luigi is back
I wonder if any of them watched treasure planet because that movie would be awesome to run an adventure off of for spelljammer
I hope we get more official spelljammer content in the future since this setting easily connects to so many other settings
That’s exactly what I was thinking! I love treasure planet so much. 💗💗💗
All I’m asking for is spelljamming ship minis! Over than that this whole setting is awesome!
Thank you Todd.
It's my headcannon that Large Luigi uses the telekinetic eye for the sole purpose of using a glove to make hand gestures
Im sorry but im stealing this for my game
Flash Gordon was also an excellent black and white TV series in the 1930s-40s starring Buster Crabbe.
The cliffhanger-heavy structure is interesting. I've always had trouble reading through official adventures and knowing how far into a chapter I should get to. That might makes them easier to get through.
that's the way it was writ and works well. I actually used a level 1 SJ adventure from DMSGuild then after it I advanced them to 5 and started adventure from there.
Ending it with Luigi the Beholder, love it
Savior of the Universe!
Woop! Large Luigi is back!
I can't wait for the set this week!
I'm actually having to rewrite some of this because my adventurers love captain sartell and first mate Flapjack so much they've become loyal to her crew
I love that Spelljammer is back but I don't like the loss of traveling in the prime material for it. Traveling to another plane was higher level play and was the Planes cape setting.
what are you talking about, you can. you can lift off from Toril and fly to Krynn
@@sylvnfox yes but you could then exit the crystal sphere and head through the phlogiston to another one in the prime material. You didn’t need to travel dimensions.
@@PRGidaro it works mechanicly the same way. you leave one system, and fly to the other. all tey did was change a name. phlogiston = astral sea. same thing diffrent name. you can have encounters ship battles, ext. everything you did in the phlogiston you can do in the astral sea.
@@sylvnfox The astral is another plane but I guess we will need to see how they explain it in the new books.
So fricken pumped! Thank you so much for this setting!!!
While I myself was initially disappointed with the length of these books, I disagree with anybody who says that this adventure is too short. Because I think they're looking at it wrong. It's the wrong mindset to compare it to something like wild Beyond The Witch light or curse of Strahd. This is more comparable to starting adventures from the campaign setting books like Krenko's Way from Ravnica or House of Lament from Ravenloft. And in that regard it looks really solid!
Excited to get my hands on this, just gotta finish this storm kings thunder campaign
0:17 what was the spelljammer campaign he ran for 5 years?!
Has he ever spoken about it?! What kind of stuff went on!!! ty
I have two unique Beholders slated for my setting at the moment, and I am definitely going to be dropping hints about Large Luigi
I will be honest; this makes me feel a lot better. I think Spelljammer is best when its more Farscape than Star Trek. And letting Flash influence the creation of the adventure sounds good.
yea. though I was thinking Cowboy Bebop or Firefly. but Farscape works too 😁
Spelljammer is definitely more of like swashbuckling in space than big social issues, although you can certainly make a more star trek like rp-heavy campaign.
Sounds like we can finally imitate Lexx and play a John Crytin character. The ship can even be living ship with Navigator who can't leave the control room.
I adore this concept for games! What a super idea!!
It is a lovely adventure and will definately get folks thinking about where to go from here.
I hope they include a map for the Rock of Bral
They sure did! Double-sided, too, to show the topside and underside.
Is it fair to assume the adventure is quite linear then, at least in order to follow the cliffhanger plot points?
More or less. The first chapter in particular is kinda railroady because the players are riding on a ship of which they are not the captain of. But it gets you a good jump from episode to episode and gives a good variety sampler pack of what the setting has to offer.
8:55 Hey Chris, why the change from "Laughing Beholder" to "Happy Beholder?"
He is probaly misremembering the real name in the video.
During the intervening years Large Luigi has found true happiness instead of putting on a face for his customers.
The goal of the vibe of a spelljammer game seems to be treasure planet lol
Can't wait. Heading to my FLGS tomorrow for my alt cover set.
The adventures premise also reminds me a lot of the movie Dragonball Z: The Tree of Might.
maybe you could call it "Voyage of the Princess Ark"?
This book was announced when I hit a huge hurdle in my homebrew campaign. We already knew that there were 5 shards of an artifact that made a key that could unlock an interplanar gate. My PC had a sword with 2 of those shards in a Luck Blade Longsword, and then the party beat a Death Knight who had one, and we obtained the 3rd shard. But the shards are cursed, making the people in possession of the shards unable to rest peacefully without having dreams about needing to collect the other shards, eventually being corrupted by this need to wield them all. She left the guild hall in the middle of the night and got into a fight with another PC that we needed to be temporarily sidelined from the game. As she was about to kill him, an Illithilich appears from the shadows and incapacitated her before she dealt the killing blow, and both were kidnapped, so the remaining party had to track them down and I took over as the DM. I wrote the Illithilich as a curious and eccentric mad scientist with a traveling laboratory. He has one shard of the key and has been seeking the others. While in possession of just 1 shard, he’s actually a neutral leaning character who is obsessed with the idea of understanding the factors that determine a creature’s lifespan and magical abilities, hoping to find the secret so he can learn how to exploit it and teach the Illithids how to live forever so their race can rebuild the empire and regain the vast knowledge they once held. His laboratory is inside of a Nautiloid and the only info I could find about them when I was designing my battle maps were some brief references in Baldur’s Gate and some very old Spelljammer content that didn’t easily translate to 5e, so I spent MONTHS winging it and trying to build a Nautiloid from the ground up, with the kind of layout and framework that would explain why he has this mad scientist laboratory and villagers “keep going missing.” Turns out that he isn’t murdering them and eating their brains, but rather, running a questionably ethical operation where voluntary research participants get 1,000 Gold per week of being a test subject to calibrate his machines. There’s an Easter egg in it where he has The Machine from The Princess Bride and he can take away many years of your life. But he also tries to put it back. All painful processes, and he’s trying to figure out how to get the most effective calibration settings. These machines weren’t very efficient so you’d take 10 years of someone’s life and when you transferred it to yourself, you might only get 1D4+1 years. His research and developments have improved the machines so it’s more like 2D4+1 but he thinks perhaps these shards can teach him something, because obtaining just 1 greatly expanded his abilities (and he now has a heavily modified stat block). The players arrive at the Nautiloid to hear our sidelined PCs “getting tortured.” But he’s actually putting years back into them that they’d lost in their fight with each other, and they learn that he isn’t as shady as they first assumed… yet 😈
Now he has my PC’s sword with 3 more shards, and if he attunes to that sword, he’s gonna go dark. For now he’s just thrilled to have guests to give a laboratory tour to. But in the middle of their tour, after seeing all of the monstrosities, abberations, fey, and fiends in their cages, and seeing the shelves of data he has collected on the creatures… an alarm goes off, and a Githyenki dragon rider appears from a gate to the astral sea. Vlaakith has finally found the Illithilich, Polaris, that she has been hunting for many years. She had the very last shard to the Astral Key artifact… and they’re about to chase her through the gate into the astral sea. Now Polaris is preparing for battle, and is about to pick up my PC’s sword to fight some Githyenki soldiers on his Nautiloid. That’s the cliffhanger we just left off on. Will Polaris get the final shard? Will he go evil? Will they have an epic Nautiloid astral sea battle with a bunch of weird and fascinating creatures and vessels???
I started writing more vessels and felt like it was all too much. Finally got some info about spelljamming helms so I could understand how the Illithilich pilots his Nautiloid which is great. But now I need a lot more material. And then y’all announced this book, and I was SO RELIEVED because bro, I was about to write one my damn self and it was a very intimidating task after I spent so long perfecting just ONE vessel 😆 oh man, seeing that Nautiloid in the teaser for the book made me squeal with delight that I wasn’t going to have to figure all this out on my own!! I cannot wait for it to get here, and to have so much more material that actually works with 5e at my fingertips ♥️♥️♥️
To say you will have a good number of ships to use would be an understatement. Like half the book is ship descriptions!
The level range is getting more and more concerning lately. 5-8 seems very short. Hope the DMs Guild community comes up with some good spelljammer content.
I will still buy it tho >.
I mean, they say in the video that it's designed to be 12 sessions, so that's a solid 3 months of a weekly game. Might be better for some groups who maybe can't meet up as often, since they'll know that each session they *can* make it to is still advancing the story 1/12 of the way.
There's a free level 1-4 spelljammer intro adventure on DnDBeyond
@@zackb3462 so like the essentials kit in reverse?
@@kori228 think of the whole product as a beefed up essentials kit for the spelljamming setting.
They're trying to encourage you to write your own adventures.
Or they're giving us shorter campaigns so we buy the next one sooner.
Or both.
I'm pretty stoked they are doing spell jamming stuff
Flash ohooohooooooooooohhhhhh
Savior of the universe!
Wish it was a longer campaign than 12 sessions.... was hoping for a long space opera
it is an intro adventure, think of it like Lost Mine of Phandelver. it is a place for a campaign to start and then the DM can take it to wherever they wish
Topside? *flashback to Arcane*
The more I hear, the more I want.
im making it so Large Luigi has a brother by the name of Massive Mario.
I hope Chris watches the 80s DUNE and we get DARK SUN next.
the thing is Dark son had some very,,, "sensitive" concepts that wotc is stearing clear of. I don't see Dark Sun ever coming back, and if it does it will OT be the same as it was in the 90's.
I can't lie, I love the Spelljammer setting, however I'm not very thrilled by a 12-session campaign with the DM needing to do a ton of work to expand upon this setting. The Wild Beyond the Witchlight was also shorter than Rime of the Frostmaiden, I'm just concerned in the future we will continue to get short, 3 level adventures.
Agreed. It could start to feel lazy really fast. They need to push a big one soon.
@@KamiKazeKayaK hopefully they're going to reveal the next big one tomorrow
Well it's one of those things where its more of an adventure meant to inspire ideas to go with the new setting stuff.
Flash!
Haahaaah!
Would be so excited for this, if I had a group to play with. People don't seem to be looking for players on Mondays. x-x
What's your playstyle?
@@beasleydad I'm can enjoy combat and roleplay a lot depending on the game, got no preference
It follows the Flash Gordon archetype, as opposed to the Flesh Gordon archetype.
I literally hate that they cram an adventure into the book.
Make it it’s own book, or just digitally release it.
Fill the space in the -PLAYER OPTION BOOK- with player options.
Wild concept. Give it a whirl.
Disney treasure planet, stealing all of it for a spellerjammer campaign
LUIGI
what i went with is: the party found a corpse of a Giff
Weak.
@@justin9744 well there's more to it than that. chill out bro
@@justin9744 i was doing homebrew 5e spelljamming before the UA even got announced
Sounds like a railroad.
linear and railroad are not the same thing.
So what I took from this is, as the DM, go plagiarize Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers comics & serials from the 1930s because none of your players are going to have seen them. 👌
"In this book" ... I thought it was 3 books? Wait 64 pages? Ope....
Yes... he is literally talking about one of the three books...