‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Teases Spelljammer and One of its Craziest Villains Yet

The lead story designer for Dungeons & Dragons just teased one of their craziest villains yet.

Yesterday, Christopher Perkins, the lead story designer for Dungeons & Dragons and the DM for the popular series Dice, Camera, Action and Acquisitions, Inc., posted the top of a page from the upcoming adventure storyline Dungeon of the Mad Mage. The new adventure, which is set to come out in November, explores the Undermountain, a mega-dungeon located underneath the famous city of Waterdeep.

The Undermountain is a massive place, with all sorts of strange creatures and monsters trapped inside courtesy of Halaster Blackcloak, the famous Mad Mage who created the dungeon and lives in its bottom lairs. But the page leaked by Perkins should be particularly delightful to fans of the space-themed Spacejammer campaign setting.

The page (shown below) explains that one of the Undermountain’s levels contains the remnants of a spacefaring pirate ship and its crew, a clear reference to the Spelljammer universe. It seems that Halaster Blackcloak stole the magic spelljammer helm that allows the ship to travel through space and stranded the crew inside its cavern. What’s more, the ship was captained by a mind flayer named Captain N’ghathrod, who resorted to eating the brains of his crew to stay alive. The image on the page even has a hamster, a reference to the giant space hamsters found in the Spelljammer universe.

The sight of a mind flayer (one of the classic Dungeons & Dragons monsters) wearing a pirate outfit should delight fans, along with the very obvious reference to the Spelljammer universe. Perkins had previously mentioned that Dungeon of the Mad Mage would reference Spelljammer, but no one expected players to actually find a full ship trapped in the dungeon.

Fans have longed for a return to the Spelljammer universe, which mixes sci-fi tropes with classic D&D fantasy, and game developers have teased references to Spelljammer for months. For instance, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes contained a statblock for the giff, an anthropomorphic hippo species originally found in the Spelljammer setting.

Since Dungeons & Dragons is slowly bringing back its various campaign settings (they brought back Eberron earlier this year, and are introducing the Magic: The Gathering world Ravnica in the fall), it seems that Spelljammer could be next. At the very least, fans will get to battle an illithid space pirate when they explore the Undermountain in November.