The fourth and final Spelljammer box set, The Astromundi Cluster (1993) and it is a great, but too late, attempt to reboot the line.

The original Spelljammer box set came out alongside D&D 2E in 1989 and it’s concerned with showing off the D&D version of space, as well as the ships to traverse it and the other magic and tech needed to survive in it. Up to that point, campaign settings were worlds. Spelljammer, then, was the highway that connects them. That’s cool and interesting! But it doesn’t really stand alone as a setting; you need interesting locations for that. But you didn’t get that until The Legend of Spelljammer in 1991, and that didn’t quite work, because it was a big ship that kept moving. Rock of Bral (1992) was better, but was only one city (and was, admittedly, briefly introduced in the core box). Think of this is Star Wars terms: what would that universe be like if the only place to explore was a Super Star Destroyer and Mos Eisley?

Sure, there are all these other crystal spheres like Duck Space and Slime Space, but they’re all vague and undetailed. Enter Clusterspace, detailed in this box. It’s the home sphere of the mind flayers! And we get a great big pile of campaign setting details. Factions! Not just planets, but multiple solar systems! Populated by weird humans, weird dwarves, very weird elves, and a selection of monster species. There are new ships, sun mages, at least one living asteroid, an anti-slavery secret society. Stuff to do, places to explore, wrongs to right! The adventure book provides context on how adventures can spin out of the various factions, collects several small adventure seeds and contains two longer scenarios, one revealing the secrets of the mind flayers, the other putting players at odds with demon-dealing Arcane (a mysterious merchant species). And David O. Miller did all the art, making for an unusually cohesive-feeling box. This is good stuff!

And frustrating stuff. First, because the designers made the decision to close off the cluster — if you’re inside, you can’t leave; if you’re outside, in the larger Spelljammer setting, you can’t get it. Sure, you can handwave that, but it’s still a weird decision to present the most interesting place in the universe as locked behind a wall.

Second? It’s the last Spelljammer product. Good job, TSR.