Yes, it's an announcement-heavy week for the nerdy things I care about. After WoW's Dragonflight expansion reveal yesterday, I'm getting psyched up for tomorrow's D&D Direct, where Wizards of the Coast is going to announce various new stuff for Dungeons & Dragons.
I don't know how much they plan to announce here, but there are at least a few things that I'm fairly certain will be part of it.
Rather than just listing what I'm expecting, I wanted to get into what I really hope to see with these new books and other things.
Spelljammer:
Ever since the Travelers of the Multiverse Unearthed Arcana, it's seemed pretty inevitable that we'd be getting a Spelljammer campaign setting sourcebook. Spelljammer is one of those things that players have been begging for for years - almost like jokes about Half-Life 3, the phrase "Spelljammer Confirmed" has been something of a meme in the online D&D community.
In its original outings, Spelljammer was actually kind of an unpopular setting - for reasons I can't say for certain, having been 3 when it first came out. Naturally, the 80s were when Star Wars exploded into the collective consciousness. Along with Star Wars, there were also the Star Trek films (Wrath of Khan in 1982) that led into the birth of what I grew up thinking of as the "regular" Star Trek, meaning Next Generation (which didn't really become great until a couple seasons in, to be fair).
Space exploration also became a somewhat more routine thing with the development of the Space Shuttle, which first launched in 1981.
So it was not really that crazy to think that D&D would try out a space-faring, science fantasy setting. Still, for some reason, it didn't do too well. It was intentionally silly, and kind of self-deprecating, at a time when nerd culture was still considered very niche, and nerds were certainly quite defensive about their interests.
I also suspect that there were more purists in those days. As sci-fi and fantasy have grown in popularity, I think the genres have also gotten more flexible, telling new kinds of stories that subvert tropes and mix genre influences.
Anyway, the time is ripe for Spelljammer. 5th Edition is fun to play, and I think looking at other genres is something a lot of players are up for. We'll get into this later in the post, but I even wonder if WotC might be going a little farther than just Spelljammer in terms of bending 5E's genre.
Now, in terms of the structure for the book: Spelljammer is one of the "transitive settings" much as the Astral Plane and Ethereal Plane are transitive planes - they're the settings/planes that let you go between other settings/planes.
In the case of Planescape, the setting technically encompasses the entirety of the D&D multiverse, meaning that really every D&D game is a Planescape game. Spelljammer, historically, has been more limited to "merely" the prime material plane, but it's famous for allowing you to hop in a space ship on Toril (the Forgotten Realms) and fly to Oerth (Greyhawk). Even if each of these traditional D&D settings is literally designed to allow for a full campaign story to take place on it, Spelljammer lets you do a big crossover.
Simultaneously, though, Spelljammer is also a setting in and of itself, because while all the stuff happening on these (mostly pseudo-medieval) fantasy worlds is going on, there are also plenty of space-opera things happening up among space stations, alien planets, and on massive star ships.
So, there's a question of what to focus on.
I think we should absolutely get some background on what the various space-like regions around canonical settings look like, similar to how Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft gives us five or six pages each for some established Domains of Dread. But I also think that most people who buy campaign setting sourcebooks and not just published adventures are into homebrewing, and thus I think a more important tool in the book I want to see is guidance on creating a solar system for your own homebrew world.
Let's move on, though, as there's a lot to cover here, and it'll all be old news come tomorrow morning (if this publishes after midnight, it's currently 11:51 pm).
Dragonlance:
This one's a freebie: the "Heroes of Krynn" UA basically confirms that we'll also be getting a Dragonlance campaign setting sourcebook. Unlike Spelljammer, Dragonlance was super-popular in D&D's early days. I also think it makes sense as a counterbalance to Spelljammer's weirdness to go with a far more traditional medieval fantasy setting.
I know very little about Dragonlance, other than there are a lot of dragons and there are weapons called Dragonlances (which you can find in Fizban's!)
So I really can't say much about what I really want out of this book. I'm even sort of at a loss for what cool monsters we might see, given that Fizban's gave us things like Draconians and all kinds of dragon-adjacent monsters, along with gem dragons and other unconventional dragon types.
DnD Beyond:
Well, they've got to talk about this, right? WotC just bought DnD Beyond, which, while the "official toolset" for Dungeons & Dragons, was still a third party.
DnD Beyond works pretty well (with a few spots that I think still need work, like infusing multiple parts of an armorer's armor,) but I think the huge question on everyone's minds is how the pricing model will work.
DnD Beyond has a subscription that will allow you to make as many characters as you want, and a higher tier that lets you share any content you have unlocked with people in your campaigns. However, if you want to have anything outside of the free basic rules (which includes, like, Paladins,) you need to buy DnD Beyond's version of the book that contains it. While cheaper than physical books, it's still 30 bucks. As someone who has nearly all the 5th Edition books in physical form, if I wanted to get everything I already own but for DnDBeyond, I'd need to spend almost a thousand bucks. Again, for stuff that I already own, just not in the same form.
And yet, on a business side of things, this makes total sense - DnD Beyond is its own company that licenses these books for digital sale. I may have purchased my D&D books from Wizards of the Coast (albeit through intermediaries like Amazon or my local game stores) but DnD Beyond never got anything from me for me to use these things in their service. And given that my only evidence that I own these books is that I physically have them - something that, ironically, in our digital age is pretty flimsy evidence - there's not a really good way for them to "know" that I "should" have access to them.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I hate this, but the problem is more commerce and capitalism than DnD Beyond's own policies.
So, the great hope, now that DnD Beyond is owned by Wizards of the Coast, is that, at least moving forward, there can be some integration between one's physical book and the digital version in DnD Beyond.
How you do this is something I don't really know how to do - ideally, each copy of a new D&D book would have an alphanumeric code in it that you just type into DnD Beyond and it unlocks the book's content. Naturally, you'd need to have some kind of copy protection so that someone can't go into a game store and just peek at the code in the book and walk out of the store with access to it and screwing whoever actually buys that copy of the book. But this seems like a solvable problem.
Honestly, I think even a slight up-charge for the digital version wouldn't be totally objectionable - maybe you even just give people a code at checkout when they buy the book. 5 dollars more wouldn't be totally painful, but 30 is unacceptable. Good thing my Sunday DM has all the books on her account and lets me make all my characters in her "campaign." (And sorry that I have like 60 of them. See the name of the blog).
5th Edition Beyond D&D:
I realize using "beyond" in the title could be confusing, but oh well.
My source for this rumor is "some tweet I saw, and I don't even remember who tweeted it" so take it with a massive grain of salt.
But, the rumor goes that, with the success of 5th Edition, WotC wants to try building more TTRPGs that use 5th Edition as a basis for their rules. Essentially, given how many people are now familiar with how 5th Edition rules work, you could build games in other genres that work similarly - things like ability scores and modifiers, proficiencies, concepts like AC and HP, and attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks, could easily apply to other genres of RPG.
And, of course, Paizo, the makers of Pathfinder, did just this when they made Starfinder. So there's precedent.
This would be a huge new frontier, and could be amazing, but I also want to remind you that my source is "some tweet," so don't get your hopes up too high.
Anyway, it's now 12:32, so in less than 9 hours D&D Direct is going to start, and we'll see what we actually find out.
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