 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and I hope you have spatial awareness because the Outer Gods of D&D have touched our little homeplane with not one, not two, but three full books to kickstart the 5e introduction to Spelljammer. I'm gonna talk about the first home in this threesome, The Astral Adventurer's Guide, and I'll spend next week's video spacewalking you through the full campaign adventure, Light of Xarixis. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if Space Pirate D&D is somehow not the coolest experience that you've never asked for, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So let's start with the stars of this spacebook, the new races and backgrounds that everybody has been excited for since Spelljammer was first announced. You got your obligatory elves that show up even when they're not invited, short-stack warforged replacements, oozes, hippos, terrifying monster bugs from beyond the void, and monkey men. Each race comes with the ASIs filed off because Tasha's word is law, and they all follow the theme of Space Pirate, so you can play as the space captain that heavily influenced your formative years. Of course, we have to start off with the elf, because if we spend more than 10 minutes not including them in conversation, trees will start appearing in my driveway, and I won't get any toys for Christmas. Astral Elves start off similar to their brethren. You got Dark Vision, Keen Senses, Faea Ancestry, and a trace that is almost the same, but it gives you a new proficiency every time you use it, because wizards only just now started putting stats on the whole shared lives part of the Elven reincarnation gimmick. Beyond that, Astral Elves also get some new star-shaped bells and whistles in the form of light-based cantrips, and a Misty Step ability that behaves just like Misty Step but is not considered a spell and it scales off of your PB, meaning that not only will you be saving on spell slots, but whenever you press your porf button, you still get the opportunity to cast a leveled spell before or after, which adds a layer of flexibility that the Eladrin will talk about in therapy. Every time they make a new elf, it's always a better elf than what came before it, so if 5E goes on for any longer, you can expect to play elves that come stocked with the level 10 spells at the start of the game. For those of you who bought Eberron for the races, but only ever wanted to use the Warforged, you have finally been targeted with a new and improved incarnation of steel soldiers in the autonome. A race of sentient steel boys who were created by the rockin' stoners to fulfill all sorts of tasks and absolutely not gain sentience. Unfortunately, rocknomes die sometimes, and the robot counterparts are often left dealing with that problem by considering their place in the universe and deciding to fly into space. As a Warforged counterpart, autonomes carry a lot of the same gimmicks. You don't need to breathe, eat, sleep, you're resistant to poison and poison effects, you can stop moving for 6 hours and nobody can tell if you're sleeping or just staring, and you get two free proficiencies, but they don't have to specifically be one skill or one tool. What autonomes get differently are the size and shape of a robotic gnome, making you both small in stature and a construct, but you also get a neat gimmick of spending hit die when hit with mending, and certain signature healing spells will still get the job done. Finally, instead of a flat plus 1 to armor, autonomes can make their base AC 13 plus dex if they don't put any armor on, and they can add a d4 to any attack roll, ability check, or saving throw based on their provisions bonus. Ultimately, the autonome is just a better Warforged. You basically get all of the Warforged abilities and then some, with the only potential gripe being that you're forced into a small size, but it doesn't even affect your speed. I know that I personally will just choose not to see the size requirement, and I'll allow any Warforged aficionados to shape the filing numbers off of the autonome so that they can finally play the Ironman that they've always wanted. One of the things that I did not expect when I took my spectral rocket ship into space was a semi-aquatic mammal with a gat and a British accent, but the gif are here to steal your spice and colonize the astral sea so I say teleho. Being a gif opens your mind to the astral spark, giving you a pseudo fury of the small that deals force damage and may as well be called fury of the big because size doesn't matter. They also get an improved version of powerful build that supplies them with constant strength check and strength save advantage, as well as the normal please forget that this used to be a large race mechanic. Finally, all gif are born with an evolutionary understanding of how guns ought to work, giving them proficiency with all firearms, ignoring the loading property, and letting them snipe from long range with no penalty. If this sounds familiar, that's because it's just the gunner fee, with the best part of sharpshooter tacked on. Except for the part where gunners can ignore disadvantage at 5 feet away, which kind of makes it impossible for gif to gain this benefit, since you're obviously not going to take the gunner fee if you already have most of it. Granted, plenty of DMs forget that this rule exists anyway, so as long as they're distracted by your second amendment, you should have no problems. In case you play the gif on a normal adventure, I should also add that gif have a swimming speed equal to their walking speed, but please do not use that as an excuse to jump into open space because your natural aquatic nature will not make your screams any more audible. This next race is the result of crossbreeding between sea scallywags and monkey. Hado Z are a race with a name that will irritate any DM and carry skills that match the name. First things first, like any monkey, you can be big or small, you have a climbing speed, and you can use a bonus action to use your feet as a way of manipulating small objects. And like substantially fewer monkeys, you can use your reaction to roll a d6 plus pb to tank slash avoid incoming damage. They also have no fear of heights, using their reaction and big leathery skin wings to glide across the air and land as a reaction for zero damage. When I say that the DM will get annoyed with this race, what I mean is that all of their abilities are made with unoreversed cards in mind. As long as they're not caught without a reaction, they can say no to fall damage, they can say no to normal damage, they can pick shit up even when their hands are tied, and the glide mechanic will force DMs into the terrible position of either doing math or just getting confused and saying sure, your jump works, I guess. Personally, while I like the idea of adding more creative races, I'm going to be very careful about who I let monkey around in my games before someone makes me go ape shit. Have you ever wanted to play as an early 2000s Nickelodeon mascot? Well, now you can get prime for slime time as the premier primordial soup of space and sea, the plasmoid. This Pikmin Energizer exists as both the facsimile of the vague humanoid shape and also as a sentient ball of slime. And it comes with all the goopy gimmicks that you would expect from a beloved Robin Williams Deuteragonist, including slipping through crevices one inch wide, molding and reshaping your body between having limbs and being a Dragon Quest NPC, and reproducing asexually by popping out a tiny pseudopod that can go around and perform basic tasks for you before being re-assimilated and having its individuality violently reabsorb into the greater slime mass. Plasmoids are also gifted with a 5e favorite ability of telling poison to fuck off, but in a twist, they are also adept at dealing with acid, getting resistance to both. They also have dark vision and can hold their breath for an hour, which confuses me in the very simple matter that they don't have mouths or visible orifices. I can tell that the dev team was having fun with plasmoid because it really got front-loaded with crazy abilities and gimmicks, and as a person who was desperately hoping that the plasmoid didn't get cut between you ate a book, I could not be happier. And when I finally stepped down as an internet funny man, I intend to enjoy the remainder of my days as a slime rancher. And finally, we come to the other most creative creature of 5e, the three queen, a race of spacefaring insects that have a penchant for bugging around. Like other races in this book, they can be medium or small, and they get darkness so that they can look out into the black vastness of space. But beyond that, they get a natural armor of 13 plus decks, they have advantage on stealth, and while they can't speak anything but three queen, they have the incredible ability to just stare at somebody until that person starts hearing bug noises in their brain that resemble human speech. This telepathy ability is universal, as long as you have language, you can understand the three queen, which means that wizards and scholars who dedicated their lives to language can get fucked. Lastly, like all insects, three queen have six limbs instead of the normie four. And these smaller limbs can be used to manipulate small objects like you'd expect, but they're also strong enough to wield light weapons, meaning you can carry a shield, two short swords, and something else that you want, like a magical focus, a ranged weapon, a bomb. The world is your carapace, and now, just like the movie, you too can live a bug's life. Beyond the races, this book also has two backgrounds revolving around the cult of space and being a typical astral pirate. While I don't think that backgrounds are normally anything to write home about, what's important about these backgrounds is that they went down the same route as Strixhaven. That space religion gives you access to the clerical magic initiate feat at level 1, and choosing to be a star pirate gives you the tough feat, which means, and I may be jumping the gun here, 5e is going to be releasing more backgrounds with feats attached to them as a way of retroactively giving people level 1 feats, and I could not be more happy. I've been using level 1 feats as a homebrew rule ever since I was introduced to the concept, and I never looked back. It's practically unspoken by now that 5e games do that. Backgrounds have always been nice, flavorful ways of helping new players get into the roleplaying scene, and their features are neat, but ultimately a little pointless, and if I even remember that I have them, I only end up using the gimmick once or twice in a campaign. But if the real advantage of taking a specific background was that it came with a free feat, then suddenly, both of these ideas are combined into one interesting choice that you make at character creation. I personally still plan on letting people pick whatever feat they want if they decided that the provided background feat isn't their cup of tea, but I like that the precedent is there. Overall, I think I say this too much, but 5e has stepped up its game with these new races. They're all so off the wall and weird, and I can't wait to see how they perform in an actual campaign. Luckily for me, this massive box set has an adventure included, so I'll be tackling that next time I'm on your device. Until then, taking my advice with these races will surely make you the biggest star in space. But that would normally do it. However, this isn't a normal day. As you might have noticed, I've been working on a big video called How It Feels to Play a Barbarian. Here's a link to the trailer. It's a vignette style love letter to the class and anyone who plays it, and if it does well, then you can expect videos on the Rogue, the Bard, and further. But this project is also a massive undertaking, and so if you have the chance, you should check out my Patreon, where I've already shown off behind-the-scenes photos, videos, and snippets of the Barbarian video. And I'm going to continue with the Rogue, the Bard, etc., so if you've ever felt like supporting what I do, there has never been a better time. But yeah, Daffy out.