I love Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. I came for the monsters and subclasses and lineages, but what really hooked me has been the overall philosophy of the book, its focus on not just the gameplay mechanics or the lore (though there's plenty of the latter) but instead on how to run a game that puts spookiness center stage, and ideas for how to take existing monsters and make them scary.
As a sidenote: as with much of nerd culture, which has historically been dominated by straight white dudes like me, I've seen people complaining about the "wokeness" or other catch-all terms for the book emphasizing inclusivity. I suppose that I've never really understood the instinct within nerd culture to close off others who are different than you, but the truth is that the whole idea boils down to "don't be a jerk." All the horror stories about bad players or bad DMs I've ever heard has been about people who don't really care to make the game a fun environment for everyone else, and the safety tools detailed in Van Richten's are there for your benefit as a DM - essentially they're a guide for "how to avoid alienating your players," and I think everyone would rather have the table (virtual or real-life) be filled with people who are excited to be there and happy to play the game, rather than feeling deeply uncomfortable. Don't be a dick.
But moving on: if there is one tension I feel in Van Richten's Guide it's that they dedicate a massive chunk of the book to detailing several domains of dread, to the point that it's the bulk of the book, and overflows into a second section for paragraph-long descriptions of other domains... and yet I want more.
In past editions, they've often had separate books released for different campaign settings: you get a supplementary player's guide, and then a guide for the DM in order to run the setting, and then sometimes some published adventures.
One of the governing philosophies of 5th Edition has been quality over quantity. We get one big published adventure per year, like Rime of the Frostmaiden or Descent into Avernus the previous year, and then we've been getting anthologies like Candlekeep Mysteries or Ghosts of Saltmarsh in the "off season."
I think that they've ramped up the other books to come out in recent years - we got our first new campaign setting book in late 2018 with Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica (though that is ignoring the early and... underwhelming Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide) and since then we've gotten several setting books, the latest of which being Van Richten's.
And then, of course, we've had monster books in Volo's and Mordenkainen's, and rules expansions in Xanathar's and Tasha's.
The D&D staff at WotC is actually very small, hence their reliance on contractors. And I also suspect that they're going to be a bit hesitant to change what has been a winning formula.
But I guess I'm just ravenous for new stuff.
Let's take Planescape as an example:
I don't know if we're due to get a Planescape sourcebook any time soon, though I'd love to see one. But Planescape is simultaneously two very different things that could each justify a reasonably heavy tome.
One one hand, you have the entire planar system. While the DMG does take a bit of time to explain the D&D multiverse, it's not terribly in-depth. You get a half-page blurb about most of the Outer Planes (with longer entries for the Nine Hells and the Abyss) but most is left to your imagination.
In earlier editions, there was the Manual of the Planes (and there might have been a 1st and a 2nd edition version, maybe a 3rd?) which went in depth on all of the Outer Planes, and I believe other planes like the Elemental Planes, Astral, Ethereal, etc. In most campaigns, the outer planes play a distant and limited role, but it can be very exciting to visit them, and potentially adventure across them.
For 5th Edition, I could see taking a similar approach to Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica's use of the guilds, or the way that Van Richten's goes through its Domains of Dread. It would be cool to have a big chapter divided into 5-10 page descriptions of the Outer Planes, with key locations, figures, a general vibe to it, and then some suggestions on the sorts of adventures you could run set there.
But Planescape isn't just that.
This hypothetical "5th Edition Manual of the Planes" would be super great to have, but Planescape is also very centrally focused on the city of Sigil and the True Neutral plane of the Outlands. The 2nd Edition Planescape sourcebook is all about these locations, and there's enough complexity in Sigil that you'll want a huge chunk of book to go into detail about the Factols and adventures that could revolve around them (in fact, Sigil and Ravnica share a lot of DNA).
I suspect, thus, that if we were to get a Planescape book, it would be more likely to focus on these elements, much as the 2nd Edition version did.
But that 2nd Edition book also makes frequent reference to the Manual of the Planes, and any adventure that has you hop into those places will need you use that as your primary sourcebook.
So, there are a couple issues at work here:
One is a philosophical choice that I think is noble: 5th Edition's books have always operated under the assumption that the only other books you have are the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual. And it's good that D&D is designed so that you never need any of the other books for the game to work. But it also creates some limitations.
For instance, Eberron is a popular setting, but we haven't gotten any published adventures set there or any supplementary material for it from WotC.
Now, again, the actual D&D staff at WotC is small (I think it's about 20 people) and I absolutely do not know the complexities of what it would mean to expand that team, especially given that it's one team within WotC, which is itself a subsidiary of Hasbro, so there are a lot of corporate cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.
And so I think there's a limit on how much stuff they can expect to produce. The problems inherent in relying on outside contractors, though, are also numerous - for example, the Candlekeep Mysteries adventure "The Book of Cylinders" received some editorial changes that undermined the author's intent (particularly frustrating in that it added colonialist language that undercut one of the major motivations the author had in presenting the new humanoid culture introduced in the adventure as a dynamic and autonomous people in their own right, deeply tied to the Forgotten Realms' lore).
I'm also probably a small minority of D&D customers in that I basically have a standing order to buy every 5th Edition book that comes out. But I, for one, would love to have a bit more interconnected content.
Even if we do wind up getting a Manual of the Planes equivalent as well as a Planescape book, how long could we expect to wait between those two? I suspect that WotC would be hesitant to return to an "Outer Plane" theme so soon after the release of the first.
In fact, I think Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is sort of the first instance of 5th Edition publishing two books in the same non-Forgotten Realms setting, and I think it was 5 years between those two releases.
Perhaps this is less about the sheer volume of releases, but more about how willing they are to let their non-core-set releases connect to one another.
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