Thursday, July 30, 2026

Dark Sun, Universes Beyond, and More D&D News out of GenCon

 Well, Universes Beyond is coming to D&D.

If you're unfamiliar, this terminology was established for Magic the Gathering, where they started making card sets in licensed IPs from other companies. Recently, those Universes Beyond sets have been coming out as Standard-legal (the most up-to-date, "current" format for the game, comprised of sets that have come out in the past few annual seasons).

As was leaked a few days ago, D&D will be getting its first of these UB materials set in the world of Warcraft. That's naturally a franchise I'm pretty intimately familiar with (nearly half my life playing WoW,) and certainly makes sense for a game like D&D, as it's also a broad fantasy setting.

The remarkable thing about it is that they plan to have 16 playable species (let's see, that'd be what, core 6 on each side makes 12, and then Pandaren and Dracthyr, maybe a few of the allied races?) as well as all 13 playable classes, with "specializations" for each... presumably these will just be other subclasses (though surely a Retribution Paladin would be a Oath of Vengeance Paladin?) I'm very curious to see how classes like the Demon Hunter or Death Knight are expressed in D&D terms. (EDIT: I got this wrong - it's just subclasses, which honestly seems way more feasible)

The "mic drop" at the end of the presentation was that the next UB setting they're going to do is Star Wars. Given the existence of SW5E, I imagine it'll also work fairly well. Personally, I'm less interested in actually setting a campaign/adventure there and more just drawing from it to help make a more science-fantasy version of Spelljammer (with used-future spaceships instead of sailing vessels in space).

I've had sort of mixed feelings about Universes Beyond - at this point, every other standard MTG set is a UB one. But unlike Magic, you aren't strong pressured to buy into each product in D&D, and tables can establish how much they want to allow or limit various content.

Anyway, moving on:

Dark Sun is official, and it's certainly being marketed as the ultimate brutal edgelord setting (evidently the books will have to be shrink-wrapped as it's meant for 18+ audiences only). The animated trailer they played was grisly, with bodies being torn apart. There was one shot in which a person seemed to send a pulse of psionic energy into a group of foes, whose heads then exploded, which I'm taking to mean that the Psion class is in (given that the Unearthed Arcana version was pretty well-received, I'm not surprised).

Greyhawk: Crown of the Witch-Queen is a new full-length adventure book coming next year, centered around Drelza, the vampiric daughter of Iggwilv/Tasha/Zibilna.

In the interest of supporting existing settings, they're going to third party companies to make books for the Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, and Eberron. Kobold Press will be working on the Forgotten Realms book, Ghostfire Gaming will work on the Ravenloft one (they have some background with Dark Fantasy after all) and Visionary Production and Design (which did Exploring Eberron) will work on Eberron.

There are also some updates planned for D&D Beyond, though I haven't really looked into that as much.

Anyway, given the leak about the Warcraft book(s), I don't think we got any really big shocks here - maybe Star Wars, though it's also kind of an obvious one to go for with Universes Beyond.

But I'm very curious about Dark Sun, a setting I've heard about a lot but am not super-familiar with. No news on the "villain" book just yet, though it could come later in 2027 - the Warcraft book is coming in November of this year.

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