D&D Going Nautical with the Ghosts of Saltmarsh

D&D's newest 5th Edition book has been announced: Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

Like Tales of the Yawning Portal, Ghosts of Saltmarsh will be an adventure anthology, with content that ranges from level 1 to 12. While TotYP was focused on old-school dungeon crawls, Ghosts of Saltmarsh's unifying theme is naval adventures. In addition to the adventures themselves, the book will have new rules about ships and boats, naval combat, and underwater mechanics.

My understanding is that the mechanical portion of the book will be fairly large (and apply to the other adventures.) If you want to have a pirate-themed (or otherwise nautical) campaign, this might be a good purchase for you.

Also of note: Saltmarsh is a part of the Greyhawk setting, one of the older worlds of Dungeons and Dragons. While they have designed this book to allow you to drop Saltmarsh into just about any other D&D world, it's nice to get some more non-Forgotten Realms content.

I believe this book is due to arrive in May, with a special, limited edition cover available only in game stores.

I've been a bit of a collecting fiend for D&D 5e books - I think the only ones I don't have are the Rise of Tiamat, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, and Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

I'll confess that the adventure books, while intriguing, are somewhat less exciting to me - I have a homebrew setting and one of my favorite things as a DM is to come up with adventures, so while these books can inspire me, I get inspiration from a lot of different areas (my last big adventure was inspired by Stephen King's Dark Tower and Zelda: A Link to the Past.) Books like Volo's, Mordenkainen's, and Xanathar's are endlessly useful to me, though. I also really enjoyed Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica and would love to run a Ravnica campaign at some point.

So I'm hoping the naval rules are both interesting and a big chunk of the book. I'm also curious to see what other books we might get this year. The Waterdeep duology only came out a couple months ago, and we will presumably be getting some book in the fall. Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica was a great tool to introduce the setting to D&D, and I'd like to see either some classic settings like Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape, or Ravenloft-beyond-Barovia, or perhaps some brand-new setting introduced in a similar book.

I'm also, as the name of the blog implies, an altoholic, and while I've only been able to play a grand total of two characters (ok, technically three if you count a one-shot Triton Paladin I rolled up because my friend's work group only had three people show up one night) I love conceiving of characters to play, and Xanathar's gave me a ton of ideas. So a "Player's Handbook 3" style book would be cool (yes, I grant that Xanathar's is more like a PHB/DMG 2.)

I also enjoyed Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes a lot, though I'd love to see the less obvious villains get some stat blocks. I mean, Demons and Devils are easy - how about some more Inevitables or non-Slaad Chaotic Neutral creatures? Also, while they're planes of goodness, it'd be cool to get more details on the upper planes and the ultimately benevolent but still potentially dangerous denizens thereof (this could be a good mix with a Planescape book.)