Spelljammer: Adventures in Space – Adventure Book Preview

This year’s D&D Direct event revealed, among other things, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, a new Dungeons & Dragons adventure book bringing the fan-favorite Spelljammer setting to the 5th Edition.

And with that book set to be released on August 16, 2022, we now get this PC Gamer preview that talks about the setting and its new iteration, and features plenty of quotes from D&D’s senior story designer Chris Perkins.

Here’s an excerpt:

The old Spelljammer was never particularly serious either. Playful and goofy, it contained space hamsters, gnomish inventions powered by space hamsters running in wheels, gun-toting hippo people called giff, telepathic penguins called dohwar, and a disciplined army of space orcs called scro—which is just ‘orcs’ spelled backwards.

As the space hamster on the cover of Boo’s Astral Menagerie suggests, at least some of that tone remains in new Spelljammer, though that’s not all there is to it. “D&D has always run the gamut when it comes to playing with genres,” Perkins says. “Some D&D games are very serious, some are very dark. There’s horror D&D, there’s a lot of whimsy in D&D. Basically, my only goals or instructions in that regard was to just make Spelljammer feel like a D&D setting by making sure all those elements were present so that a DM could then choose what sort of fantasy Spelljammer game they want to run. If they want to do cosmic horror there are cosmic horror-type creatures in Boo’s Astral Menagerie, if they want to do something swashbuckling, campy, and whimsical there are creatures and elements along that line as well.”

And if they want to combine camp and horror, there are evil clowns explicitly based on the ones from 1988 movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space.