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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

I think that turns it down way too much. It makes travel between spheres pretty much impossible, because you'd run out of fresh air long before you got anywhere, and with such a small ship, there's no point in taking a ship, anyway -- magical jaunts of some sort would be better.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

But even with that, you still would have in-setting disruptions -- mapping and aerial reconnaissance are now easy . . . a flying ship can travel in a straight line and ignore most terrain, which is a huge advantage over land travel.

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Originally posted by see

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

I think that turns it down way too much. It makes travel between spheres pretty much impossible, because you'd run out of fresh air long before you got anywhere, and with such a small ship, there's no point in taking a ship, anyway -- magical jaunts of some sort would be better.

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The description of the helm in Dungeon of the Mad Mage includes that the helm generates both the gravity and "an envelope of fresh air", instead of gravity being automatic for all objects and the air envelope being dragged along by the gravity. So air issues are zeroed out by default, and would have to be deliberately re-added.

As far as ship size making it pointless, 500 cubic yards of cargo (the capacity of a Dragonfly) is a lot more than any spells let you bring along.

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Originally posted by see

Okay, so one other thing about the Dungeon of the Mad Mage helm is that it does not include rules for non-tactical helm speeds. With that in mind, for the thing I'm working on, I think I'm going to go with:

1) Most true helms in Realmsapce were destroyed in the Wailing Years.

2) Realmspace's place in the phlogiston changed thanks to the Spellplague, so it's no longer in contact with spheres that have lots of true helms.

3) The arcane/mercane haven't come back to sell true helms in Realmspace.

4) Various people have figured out how to make "tithe helms", which have the one-tenth speed, one-tenth size restrictions. While certainly outclassed by surviving true helms, they're useful enough to be the backbone of current space travel.

5) Helms cannot achieve the high straight-line speeds of 2e Spelljammer in arbitrary directions. Instead, they can follow "gravity lines" to a celestial body. To do so they have to be out of the atmosphere (implicitly the thermopause and defined at 500 miles for Toril) and flying directly at a body at least a half-mile in diameter in line-of-sight. When they do so, then they travel at 100 million miles an hour (no reduction for tithe helms).

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Originally posted by AuldDragon

Honestly, if players are just using a Spelljammer vessel to hop around Toril rather than *actually explore space* it's like have an extremely sturdy offroad vehicle and just driving three miles to and from work every day and nothing else. You're not using it, from the gameplay perspective, for its intended purpose. At that point, why give it to the players?

DMs need to control player access to stuff that they feel could disrupt gameplay. If I started out playing an FR campaign and had no intention of turning it into a sphere-hopping Spelljammer campaign, then the PCs would never get access to a Spelljammer helm or vessel. Then you never have to worry about whether the SJ vessels "break" a setting any more than you need to worry about the economics of the Moonsea, of Calimshan, etc.

Jeff

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Originally posted by AuldDragon

Honestly, if players are just using a Spelljammer vessel to hop around Toril rather than *actually explore space* it's like have an extremely sturdy offroad vehicle and just driving three miles to and from work every day and nothing else. You're not using it, from the gameplay perspective, for its intended purpose. At that point, why give it to the players?

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Originally posted by AuldDragon

DMs need to control player access to stuff that they feel could disrupt gameplay. If I started out playing an FR campaign and had no intention of turning it into a sphere-hopping Spelljammer campaign, then the PCs would never get access to a Spelljammer helm or vessel. Then you never have to worry about whether the SJ vessels "break" a setting any more than you need to worry about the economics of the Moonsea, of Calimshan, etc.

Jeff

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

As sleyvas points out, it's not all about the players.

And it's not just on a national level like his example -- it's canon that merchants are always looking for ways to increase their income. Sure, using a spelljamming vessel just for transporting goods across a continent isn't using it for its intended purpose -- but it would still be a huge advantage for a merchant. They wouldn't even have to cross the continent -- sail out from Suzail in the morning, take off as soon as you're out of sight of land, splash down a few hours outside of Waterdeep and sail into harbor. In less than 24 hours, you've transported tons of goods hundreds of miles. Aside from the cost of the ship and its helm, you have to pay for wages and food and such for a day, and that's it. You're not paying tendays' worth of these things, you're not paying for the fodder for the horses, you're not paying for the guards, and whatever your goods, they're arriving fresh.

Even the huge price of a ship and helm can be covered in a year or two, if you make a couple trips a tenday. And once it's paid for, the rest is pure profit.

This also assume you're paying for the ship. If you acquire it via other means, that cost is negated.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

On this, I fully agree. I myself would not include spelljamming in a campaign unless the players had a compelling reason to take the ship offworld and not come back for a while. I'd not remove spelljamming from existence or anything -- there might even be references to it, here and there. I just wouldn't do anything to expand on those references. And I certainly wouldn't nerf it to remove all potential save for breaking things.

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Originally posted by sleyvas

I kind of both agree and disagree. That being said, its not all about the players. If Kara-tur has fleets of them and it would immensely benefit their in world trade, we'd see the effect on the world if you don't put some controls in place. Granted, they'd be pulling some tricks to hide their nature. Not just the landing offshore and coming in as any other ship thing either. They might land at some other spot (say a small island) and transfer their cargo to several smaller vessels. Even if it slows things by a day, it would protect their spelljamming vessels immensely. They could also put in at multiple spots to sell their stuff at once rather than flood one market. Now granted.... this might be HOW its already happening and Kara-tur is getting rich beyond anyone's dreams and Faerun's none the wiser.

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Originally posted by AuldDragon

All we need to do is come up with quick plausible explanations for why Spelljammer doesn't breaak things, because canonically it doesn't, just as is the case with priestly magic, wizardly magic, psionics, magic items, etc.

Jeff

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

Well, part of the reason why it doesn't canonically break things is that it was bolted on to canon after the fact and then mostly ignored by all involved. The references to spelljamming in Realmslore are few, and aside from three supplements of questionable quality, Spelljammer didn't worry about the other campaign settings. I'm not familiar enough with Greyhawk to say how well Greyspace matched Greyhawk canon, but I know Krynnspace had some bad ideas, some really bad ideas, and direct contradictions of Dragonlance canon, and Realmspace lore concerning Toril and Selûne is questionable at best and should be, in my personal opinion, flat-out ignored from a Realmslore standpoint.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

Spelljammer, as a setting, pretty much went off and did its own thing, with only token nods to the published settings it was meant to connect. And those three published settings did pretty much the same thing: a nod here and there and then ignoring it while staying focused on their own thing.

Since it was never really integrated in Realms canon, I don't think we can say that spelljamming wouldn't break it.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

Also, we can't really think of plausible ways for it to not break it without changing what spelljamming is -- because if there were issues preventing such things, they'd have already been mentioned in either the brief bits of setting material that referenced spelljamming or in the Spelljammer material itself.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

And I don't see how a 10 ton ship that's 20x100 feet can carry that much cargo.

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Originally posted by see

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

And I don't see how a 10 ton ship that's 20x100 feet can carry that much cargo.

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Well, a Spelljammer "ton" is a unit of volume of 100 cubic yards, so a 10 ton ship is 1,000 cubic yards. Use half that for cargo (5 tons, or 500 cubic yards).

Alternatively, from the listed beam and length values, assume that a Dragonfly is a cylinder 20 feet in diameter and 100 feet long. In that case, a Dragonfly is 31,416 cubic feet, or 1,164 cubic yards. Of course, 20 feet beam is the maximum, so the real volume of a Dragonfly would be lower, but you can probably still fit in roughly 500 cubic yards of cargo.

Same cargo volume as 11 or so twenty-foot ISO standard shipping containers.

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Originally posted by AuldDragon

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

Well, part of the reason why it doesn't canonically break things is that it was bolted on to canon after the fact and then mostly ignored by all involved. The references to spelljamming in Realmslore are few, and aside from three supplements of questionable quality, Spelljammer didn't worry about the other campaign settings. I'm not familiar enough with Greyhawk to say how well Greyspace matched Greyhawk canon, but I know Krynnspace had some bad ideas, some really bad ideas, and direct contradictions of Dragonlance canon, and Realmspace lore concerning Toril and Selûne is questionable at best and should be, in my personal opinion, flat-out ignored from a Realmslore standpoint.

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While I agree Spelljammer was mostly ignored after 2e, it was still fully canon in 2e. And no where did any product give any indication that Spelljammer "broke" the setting. Thus, it did not, just as magic does not "break" the setting as I described. The question is then to describe how it does not, which I listed just a handful of off-the-cuff ways to do that.

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Originally posted by AuldDragon

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

Also, we can't really think of plausible ways for it to not break it without changing what spelljamming is -- because if there were issues preventing such things, they'd have already been mentioned in either the brief bits of setting material that referenced spelljamming or in the Spelljammer material itself.

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Weather is discussed. Monsters are discussed. Piracy is discussed. Plenty of other things are discussed. The rarity of helms is discussed. All of those things can plausibly make the "breaking" complaints about Spelljammer moot, unless someone *wants* Spelljammer to break a setting.

The actual effects of magic and psionics on the settings (economic, political, military, etc.) aren't actually detailed, even though their effects would be far more significant than portrayed. But we don't *want* them to "break" settings, so we handwave the specifics away. We can do that with Spelljammer, and hold it to the same not-at-all-rigorous standard as everything else. If we want to. And it need not change the setting or the rules one iota.

Jeff

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Originally posted by bloodtide_the_red

You can't fit spelljamming into the Realms....but then you also can't fit magic and fantasy either. Even the tiniest bit of magic and fantasy utterly ruins the whole idea of the Realms as a "14th century Earth like world".

You can jump through a million hoops to "fix" things so people in the Realms farm, trade and live "just like 14th century Earth", but it's a bit silly when you just say over and over and over again "Um, X does not happen as it would ruin the Realms".

All you can really do is ignore it.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

I'm not saying spelljamming would ruin the Realms. I'm saying it would have a dramatic impact on trade and warfare.

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Originally posted by AuldDragon

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

I'm not saying spelljamming would ruin the Realms. I'm saying it would have a dramatic impact on trade and warfare.

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By Spelljammer being a canon element of the multiverse and thus the Realms, and there being no explicit statement that it causes a problem, we can safely and reasonably assume it does not. If it *DID* have a "dramatic impact" they would have had to describe what that impact was. Saying the FR material makes little mention it isn't proof of the opposite; if anything it is proof that it causes no problems.

It's basically the same thing as the common anti-Realms complaint about there being too many high-level characters. We know they're not a problem because the campaign material doesn't indicate it is. Alternately, the same holds true for magic, monsters, the inflationary aspects of adventuring, etc. They don't cause the problems people may say they *would* because no where does the material indicate they do.

Jeff

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

It's not the same thing at all. We see those high-level characters in the Realms. They're there. They're active. They're in every single book and sourcebook.

Spelljamming, on the other hand, is not there. It's not active. It's barely mentioned in maybe a dozen places, and in almost every one of those, it's either a footnote or past reference.

It doesn't cause disruptions because it wasn't there to cause them. Spelljammer was ignored by damn near everyone who worked on the Realms.

The only reason it doesn't have an impact on the setting is because it basically doesn't exist in the setting. It's not that "oh, this happens to keep spelljamming from being a factor" -- it's that it never entered into the equation.

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Interplanetary Spelljamming
While spelljammer speeds are fast compared to most other travel methods available in D&D, they are not sufficient to travel between celestial bodies in anything resembling reasonable times. How, then, do spacers travel the Sea of Night? The answer is gravity lines.
A spelljammer that’s beyond the atmosphere (50 miles above the surface for Toril) may exploit a gravity line to travel directly toward a celestial body (any object at least half a mile in diameter) in line-of-sight. While doing so, the spelljammer travels at a speed of 4 million miles per hour. It automatically drops out of this speed when within a tenth of a mile of a celestial body (including its atmosphere) or another spelljammer.
One notable quirk of gravity line travel is that, when a helm returns to a celestial body, it arrives at the place it last departed that body, no matter how much time has passed or how many other bodies it may have visited since. Thus, if a spelljammer departs Toril by gravity line from a spot 50 miles above Waterdeep, next time it arrives at Toril by gravity line travel, it will arrive at that same spot above Waterdeep. (The only exception is if the body has at least one active beacon arcane; in that case, the helmsman can choose to arrive at the nearest point above any active beacon.)

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