The build-up to the new Core Rulebooks has been a years-long process. I believe they were announced in a D&D Direct event in 2022, and with the new PHB coming in less than a month (and obviously already being out in the wild,) there has been a question: what comes next?
The safe bet is that the general cadence of D&D releases is going to be similar to what it has been - usually a big adventure and some kind of adventure anthology, with maybe a campaign setting and a supplement in the vein of Bigby's Glory of the Giants.
I'm sure they'll keep publishing adventures - this is the most "consumable" content that WotC can put out, so they're incentivized to keep publishing them and DMs at least are incentivized to keep buying them (even if, if you're like me, you have only ever used them for inspiration, rather than actually running them).
But what kind of adventures might we see?
As I understand it, many of 5th Editions earlier adventures were kind of reboots of classic modules from the early days of the game. Curse of Strahd was obviously the updated version of the original Ravenloft module, but also Princes of the Apocalypse was kind of a new take on the Temple of Elemental Evil. I think Strom King's Thunder was kind of a take on Against the Giants, and Tomb of Annihilation made an actual adventure out of Tomb of Horrors.
There are, of course, 5 decades of content to pull from (well, we might exclude the fifth of those decades as that was also 5th Edition) but I also think we're going to be seeing more original stuff, with the anthologies letting us touch on the older adventures like we got with Infinite Staircase.
The big shift, I think, is that we're probably not going to be as focused on the Forgotten Realms. The campaign setting presented in the new DMG is Greyhawk, and while I don't know that we're just going to exclusively have adventures set there, I imagine we might see adventures in a number of different settings. D&D wants to push the idea of the Multiverse (though on a personal level, I think that thanks largely to Marvel, the notion of a "Multiverse" is now more associated with alternate versions of the same settings and characters, whereas I think D&D is trying to push for the idea of multiple worlds and planes - a concept I find far more interesting) and that might mean that we're going to have adventures set in Greyhawk, Eberron, and if we're lucky, possibly Ravenloft, Spelljammer, and Planescape (we do, after all, have a Ravenloft adventure already, and it's one of the most popular adventures WotC has published).
Next, let's move on to rules books.
To me, the most important books to add to your collection after you have the Core Rulebooks are the rules-expansion books, Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. While not strictly necessary (and surely we'll have a period where players might gravitate toward the PHB options for their characters given that it's the newest thing).
There is some speculation on how D&D moving forward will address the addition of new classes. In the 10 years of 5E, only a single new class was added to the game (though thanks to its free presence on D&D Beyond, Matt Mercer's Blood Hunter is almost a semi-canonical class as well, but not one that I've ever seen at my tables outside of my own playing one for a one-shot).
The Artificer is recent enough that there aren't really many books that could have expanded upon it by adding new subclasses or infusions, but at least so far in 5E, the rule has basically been that any book outside of the core rulebooks must be entirely usable with only the core rulebooks. Thus, if an adventure uses monsters previously published in Volo's or Mordenkainen's, they need to reprint those monsters in the adventure rather than telling DMs to refer to a book they might not have.
The problem is that if we apply this principle to Artificers, it means that any time they want to add something to the class, they need to basically reprint the entire class again. We saw this in Tasha's, where the class, originally introduced in Eberron: Rising From the Last War, was reprinted and had the Armorer subclass added.
Here's my proposal:
I would like to see a rules-expansion book that inaugurates the return of "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons." Books in the vein of Xanathar's Guide to Everything or Tasha's Cauldron of Everything would then be, essentially, the Advanced Core Rulebooks (basically, the three books from the rules expansion box set, which also included Monsters of the Multiverse).
Then, you'd essentially have the "Basic D&D" releases, which might be primarily adventure books, and would stick with the idea that the only thing you need to use them are the three core rulebooks. Then, you would have an "Advanced D&D" line that would require the Advanced Core books. New Advanced Core books could come out when a new class got added to the mix, but maybe campaign settings that might want to have an Artificer subclass (or a whatever subclass) would simply be Advanced - you don't need to have the Dark Sun campaign setting book to use other AD&D products, but you'll want The Tinkerer's Workshop of Everything book in order to have the revised Artificer to use with Dark Sun's Waste Scrapper subclass.
Now, they could also just quietly not call attention to this idea - have a new book full of subclasses that just happens to have a section on Artificers, with maybe a little box text that lets readers know where they can find the base class. Actually, this is almost certainly a better approach to it than this whole separate product line thing.
Next, let's talk campaign settings.
I think the box-set approach used with Spelljammer and Planescape was a bust. As a customer, I resented the fact that I was paying more for what amounted to fewer pages of content, and in the case of Spelljammer, a particularly thinly-sketched campaign setting that wasted pages upon pages on ship deck plans.
While the Planescape set did it better - I particularly liked getting a write-up of each of the Gate Towns in the Outlands (the original box set from 2E didn't actually cover all of them) - I think that the setting was ill-served by the format. If you read the 2nd Edition stuff (which was an entire product line with adventures and further lore documents - the Planes of Law, Planes of Conflict, and Planes of Chaos ones being very cool) there's an immense amount of really cool stuff here that I'd love to see with a modern coat of paint. But I think even within 5th Edition, earlier setting books like those for Eberron and Ravnica really gave people more meat to chew on.
I still think that the gold standard for campaign setting books is Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which really felt like it thoughtfully took its time not only to give you a sense of each of its featured Domains of Dread, but even suggested how an adventure in each location could feel and function differently.
I don't like to take a cynical perspective on things, but I wonder if the box sets were pushed by the corporate side of things, which wanted to produce smaller products that looked bigger so they could justify charging more money for them.
And when I get a campaign setting book, I don't want a full-length adventure. These are books for DMs who like creating their own stories, so the older format of just having a quick level-1 one-shot adventure is all you need. Planescape, for example, felt like it was putting a lot of details into its location descriptions purely to set up things for the adventure, whereas I really want a more general overview with hooks that I can be the one to figure out how to use in a fun way.
We'll see, of course - it's just a shame to me that two settings that were more off-beat and weird (and thus, in my mind, more interesting) got this kind of half-baked presentation.
However, if there's one thing I really want to see it's a truly new setting - every 5th Edition campaign setting book with one exception was something that was already established as either a D&D property or something else already established by Wizards of the Coast (the latter being Ravnica, Theros, and Strixhaven).
The sole exception here was Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, a collaboration with Critical Role (prior to the creation of Darrington Press) that, in all honesty, might actually be a more effective campaign setting book than any other in the edition (I think I just like Ravenloft more because I'm the fantasy fan who is ready to move on from classic medieval fantasy).
Now, on WotC's end, they had very little work to do, creatively, because the setting had been established already by Matt Mercer and his collaborators, and he already had the setting in a place where he had been running Critical Role's second campaign on that continent, and the world was already established in their first campaign (there was also already a 3rd party campaign guide for Tal'dorei, which they'd essentially reboot and revamp with their Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn, one of Darrington Press' first releases).
5E has introduced some new locations - the Radiant Citadel has a lot of potential going forward to be a fantastic adventure hub with interesting lore - but I'd be really curious to see what they might come up with as a truly new and unique setting. Eberron is now about 20 years old, but it really brought a new look, feel, and aesthetic to the game (I haven't actually played a game set there, but I'd be very happy to do so). Surely the game could use another infusion of originality.
Last, speculation-wise, I'm sure we're also going to get a lot of announcements of tie-in stuff I couldn't give the least shit about, but are important for shareholders to know about.
Anyway, I suspect that the announcement will probably just lay out the next year or two of releases - probably with greater specificity for the stuff coming in 2025 and then maybe just title announcements for books coming out in 2026.
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