I grabbed this as a pdf with great excitement back when they started republishing these things on DriveThruRPG - skimmed it at the time but only recently got to going through it in detail trying to extract playable content from it. This is not a positive review, if you want to save your time and read up on something you might spend your money on, hit the review tab at right and pick anything else.
Realmspace cover art by Thomas Baxa
First impression is that this is not the best supplement I have ever read with an odd fixation on nit-picky bureacracy like port taxes and a paucity of information on what you might find assuming you pay the man and just get on with things. I see a weird reflection of an adverserial gaming group reflected back - with a whole system flattened out into just a couple of images and 'gotcha' traps.
The pdf rendering is ok - obviously a scan but apart from typos in the bookmarks and incomplete bookmarking there is nothing unusable. There is a bunch of repetition between sections - a thing mentioned in a planetary description is described again in the adventure hooks section - which somewhat irritating because tracking down exactly where you read a thing is trickier than it ought to be. It is hilarious to see the old prices on it - a supplement for $10.95! 3x inflation in 30 years.
So what is all this stuff you get in the box?
4 pages of Introduction and Sphere overview
52 pages with details of astronomical objects from planets down to comets and wizards hideaways
6 pages on Spacefaring companies
4 pages of Adventuring ideas
3 pages of New magic items
6 pages on Religion in the stars
8 pages of a Bestiary
7 pages of More ships
So what is in here chunk by chunk
Introduction and Sphere overview, summarises the content of the whole book and then dives into the nature of the crystal sphere. A particularly AD&D feature, which we see throughout, it lots of 'if this very particular thing is done, you find this hidden detail' - and it is probably fatal; unleashing spells "at over 100 times the power and size of any normal spell". There are also some great, interesting details like the Wanderers - evil doers cursed to trudge the inside of the crystal sphere for all eternity.
Details of astronomical objects from planets down to comets and wizards hideaways. Here we go through the planetary bodies from the Sun out past Anadia, Coliar, Chandros, Toril, Karpri, Glyth, Garden and H'Catha. In this we get more 'instant death' traps like the magic-dead sargassos surrounding the sun where "by the time the ship exits the sargasso, the crew may be long dead from lack of air, water and food." Fun. The planets in general have some good gameable stuff, with the exception of Chandros which is just a planet-sized pit-trap. The halflings of Barsoom-like Anadia, the lizardfolk and others of Coliar and the pirates of Garden are all potentially interesting players in the in-system spelljamming trade. We have the illithids of charnel-world Glyth and the beholders of H'catha as lurking evils.
What we get for each of the planets varies widely - taking Coliar, a vast air world, with many floating islands and three groups populating them - aaracokra, lizardfolk and dragons. We get a decent chunk on how those three groups interact and behave but only two paragraphs of the six pages on Coliar address these settlements and otherwise a DM is on their own. We get a bit more on the mass at the centre of the planet patrolled by an ancient dragon that just wants to be left alone (why bother them at all?) and a confusing shiny object that is a hideout of Elminster, a mage from Toril but no hooks on why anyone would want to interact with either.
For Toril itself we get a strange overview of the core setting for the game - entries on Spelljamming ports in far realms focus on the immediate dockside interface - taxes, restrictions, guards and so on - but give us little to work with on what to find should a group roll with it, pay the taxes, get the licenses, accept the escorts and set out to see this place they have landed in. There are some good hooks buried in here but they take some prying out.
Spacefaring companies - I like a good set of factions and we get some decent ones here. Code Helm is a rescue organisation dedictaed to freeing slaves from the illithids of Glyth. Seed-Beholder Company is an odd one, dedicated to raising beholder seeds near H'Catha, they are an interesting case of a group cooperating with beholders that could be an opening to some kind of beholder political game? The Emerald Brotherhood are a classic adventuring party with a spelljamming ship, doing exactly what it says on the tin - potential allies or adversaries. The Gauntlet 'considers itself the police force of the Tears of Selune' - handy to have about, a great anchor for a 'night watch in space' campaign. The Enforcers are another spelljamming crew with the twist that they have a frost giant to act as a living catapult and pelt rocks at anyone they battle.
Adventuring ideas - we get eight hooks over five pages, one for Anadia, one for the Tears of Selune (Toril orbit), two for Karpri, one for Chandos, one for Glyth, one for Garden, and one for a wildspace wreck encounter. The detail level on these varies a lot - the Glyth idea is pretty much 'mindflayers attack, if they win, the PCs are dumped in the slave pens' and then up to the DM to figure it out from there. The wildspace encounter gives a ton of detail on an NPC, quirks, what is in his spellbook that is not really core to what is going on. Some of these hooks are re-hashes of situations described in the planetary descriptions and could have been completely substituted by a little table of oneliners and page references. Some meat here but a fair bit of gristle.
New magic items - a good selection of stuff here, some a bit strange like the Plate Mail of Cleanliness but otherwise a good list of wildspace magic items and magical ship weapons. Solid stuff.
Religion in the stars details the restrictions to spell casting various clerics suffer if they venture into wildspace - clerics of Chauntea cannot refresh their spells unless they are on a solid object with plant life, many of the gods of Faerun cannot send spells greater than 3rd level if their followers leave the system, some are unaffected and some cannt send spells at all. It is interesting to see choice of cleric have consequence, something that is definitely a signature of an earlier edition.
We get nine monsters in the Bestiary - the old habitat/society blocks are helpful in placing the creatures within their environments and giving DMs something to go on more than the stat blocks. Three of our monsters are for Anadia, neat, we get some flavour there. We get a fish for Chandros, the trap planet, hard to see the use for them. We get a giant monster for Karpri, nice, very useful, two wildspacers, good and a confusing two for the Sun. This seems odd to me because with the anti-magical sargassos and these really dangerous inhabitats, approaching the sun appears to be a terrible idea - and nothing in this book hints at a reason one would want to go there at all.
In the new ships section we get the Batship, more of a monster than a ship type, the Locust, a super-light attack craft and the Tsunami, a gigantic Locust carrier.
In the original there was a big map of realmspace in the back - would have been ~ A1 sized, looks nice and you could probably recreate it with a little effort.
Wrap up there are some ideas in here but this is far from my favourite Spelljammer book. I feel there is a ton of stuff here that is trivia and not much actual gameable content. Coliar should be a fascinating place - we get no named location at all. Pages devoted to Chandros are more or less a waste because the whole planet is a trap - a single page that says as much would be fine.
All in all, this is for the completionists only, you don't really get much more useful content on Realmspace than you do from the brief summaries in Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space or CGR1: The Complete Spacefarer's Handbook. The snips in the back of the 5e Spelljammer Academy adventure probably give you enough to go on. I don't want to rag on Mr. Henson who wrote this, maybe it was too early in the lifetime of Spelljammer, maybe it wasn't clear what the point of it all was, but I would have thought we'd get a lot more interesting stuff out of a system with a beholder planet, a mindflayer planet, an airworld stuff full of flying islands and a core campaign setting with at least three major spelljamming powers based on it.
I wanted to crack this open and the work to be converting neat ideas to 5e, or figuring out the hooks to slot them into my campaign. I find myself fighting to extract useable stuff and prep situations that aren't just 'gotcha' instant death traps. I feel obliged to use the damn thing and its actually costing me more prep time than if I never read it in the first place. Ware ye.
Not much in the way of reviews out there though the Enworld collectors thread has a few notes.
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