Setting Books Galore Incoming

 In a series of tweets by Ray Winniger (who is the overall lead on D&D - he's a bit less public-facing than folks like Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford) we've gotten a bit of news (or reiteration) that's pretty exciting:

In addition to the announced books coming in the late summer and fall, there are two unannounced campaign setting books being worked on that are going to be "reviving" classic settings. This would likely include the long-rumored Dragonlance book, but also leave a slot open. For one, led by Chris Perkins, the manuscript is apparently nearly complete, whereas the other is just "ramping up in earnest," but these two are in production, which I believe means that they're practically guaranteed to see release.

In addition to these two projects, there are two brand new settings (that Winniger specified were not Magic: the Gathering worlds) that are in early development, as well as a return to a setting they've touched on in 5th edition but would be returning to.

The big caveat for these three projects is that things in early development get abandoned all the time, so he stressed that any of these three projects might not see the light of day.

So, how to interpret all of that?

Well, of course, this is all going to be speculation, but let's take a look:

First off, the confirmed two "classic" settings.

Again, Dragonlance seems a shoo-in. Unless there's some other setting that's particularly focused on dragons, the draconic subclasses and variant races seem to point there. I know that Krynn (the name of the world of Dragonlance) does have something a bit different from Dragonborn with the all-villainous Draconians, but I imagine (particularly with D&D moving away from any race of humanoids being "pure evil") that we might see a development of the Dragonborn in that setting.

Now, as for the other confirmed one, I'll confess that my knowledge of older settings is a bit limited. Personally, the ones that would get me most excited are Planescape and Spelljammer, as I'm always eager to break from the medieval, relatively mundane worlds of standard fantasy (one of the big reasons I love Ravenloft).

But, there are plenty of popular settings that aren't quite so outlandish. I won't pretend to have much of a conception of things like Beta World or Birthright, but I could see something like Dark Sun or Greyhawk getting a release (though the latter might be in a different category.)

Personally, I'd be happy for them to kind of alternate between the more grounded settings like Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance with the more planar-insanity stuff of Ravenloft and Planescape, which is why I'd hope to see either PS or Spelljammer follow Dragonlance.

Now, moving on to the ones in early development.

Naturally, these might be completely from the ground up, in which case I'd need to spy on Wizards of the Coast to have any clue what they're about. I do think that a new setting should have a real hook to it - frankly, the Forgotten Realms covers so many potential adventure themes (there's a reason it's the default setting) that just making another medieval/renaissance-era world with a bunch of archmages and dragons is going to be kind of redundant.

There are a couple vibes I'd like to see them try:

First off, the one I've been obsessed with lately: a western-themed world. I'm not the first person to point out that D&D actually works really well as a western, especially at low levels, where you're going from town to town, taking on bounties and clearing out mines filled with monsters. Eberron has Western-like elements, of course, but a focus on the rugged frontier would be cool.

I also think a nautical-themed world has a lot of potential. Ghosts of Saltmarsh introduced some cool concepts for running naval combat encounters, which admittedly might be a little complicated, but I think there are enough subgenres of nautical fiction and fantasy (from pirates to undersea dives to cosmic horror) that you could have a whole setting dedicated to it.

Next, what seems sort of obvious, is the Feywild. I believe 4th edition (which, if I recall correctly, codified the Feywild as opposed to the "land of faerie") had a Feywild book, so this might not count as brand new, but I do think you could do a lot with this setting (I'm eager to see the Wild Beyond the Witchlight - I'll have to see if my friend who ran the Descent into Avernus game is running it and if I should play through it before I buy the book).

I realize this might overlap a little with Spelljammer, but I'd love to see an official science-fantasy setting. Given that Star Wars was one of my (and many others') formative fantasy influences, I love the idea of a world that can include starships and demons, ray guns and wizards.

And then, of course, there's my personal favorite, the modern high fantasy - a fictional world of magic and monsters, but where you have cars and pizzerias. Think Final Fantasy VII as maybe the most popular example of such a world. The setting of Dimension 20's Fantasy High is another good example. I actually wonder if this could even be one of the projects in development. Dimension 20 is, at least from my algorithm-biased corner of the internet, probably the most popular D&D show other than Critical Role, and we saw CR release an official setting book with Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, so I wouldn't be totally shocked if Fantasy High were to get an official release.

Now, moving on to the final question: which setting are they returning to?

Well, the first question is what kind of book we're talking about. If it's a campaign setting book, that would, I think, rule out almost all the settings that have gotten dedicated books. The one exception there, I think, would be the Forgotten Realms. Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide is... well, it's not the best book to come out of 5th Edition. It's thin, only a couple of the subclasses in it are worth looking at, and it's just kind of underwhelming. So it might be a good idea to have a big book to really flesh out the Forgotten Realms, perhaps taking us beyond the Sword Coast, even.

Now, that being said, the Forgotten Realms have gotten plenty of fleshing-out in the various adventure books. We have gazetteers for Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, a big write-up on Candlekeep, a lot of background on Chult and Icewind Dale - you could argue that the 5th Edition adventure books have collectively made for a big Forgotten Realms sourcebook.

To be fair, I could also imagine seeing another Exandria book. Critical Role's second campaign ended recently, and I suspect that the third one will probably take place on a different continent of that world. The first was set on Tal'dorei (which got its own 3rd party setting book) and the second was on Wildemount, so perhaps with the third campaign we'll also get a book fleshing out another continent (Marquet strikes me as a possibility - the first campaign was a bit more globe-trotting, so they spent significant time in both Issylra and Marquet, though most of the action was on Tal'dorei, whereas the second campaign was almost entirely on Wildemount.)

However, it's also possible they would be working on an adventure book set somewhere other than the Forgotten Realms (Curse of Strahd, of course, was a Ravenloft adventure several years before the Ravenloft campaign setting book came out). I actually think an Eberron adventure would be really cool, as that's a setting I wouldn't mind seeing more of.

Anyway, this is mostly speculation for 2022 at the earliest. And while we're nearly halfway through this year (holy crap) we've still got some big releases coming in 2021.