When the upcoming World of Warcraft book for D&D was announced, it seemed like a no-brainer: WoW is a game all about heroic fantasy, and is already built on the race/class character-building system that D&D pioneered. There's even been precedent for Warcraft-based books released for D&D, though I believe the 3rd edition (or 3.5) books were based on the original RTS games. WoW released in 2004, about halfway through 3rd edition (counting both 3.0 and 3.5,) and of course, the MMO became a far bigger, denser, and long-lived property than the RTS precedent. Way more story has been told through the MMO than the original games ever told, and the world has been expanded profoundly.
Indeed, if there's one thing I'm skeptical about with this book, it's the attempt to cram such a profound amount of lore into a single volume. There's no way that it's going to have the space to go into the intricacies of Zandalari politics, the threat of the Botani on Draenor, and the story of the Tol'vir when trying to give us the core fundamentals of the Alliance and Horde. It'll be a massive effort in judicious editing and selecting the things that are most necessary to translate into D&D terms.
Warcraft has its own cosmos with its own cosmic rules. While there are some elements very clearly inspired by aspects of D&D, like the Emerald Dream, a reality that sits to the side of the mundane world as a realm of pristine nature never adulterated by humanoid civilization, which could be argued as its equivalent of the Feywild. But making Azeroth just another world of the Prime Material Plane would probably not really work, especially if we tried to situate all the cosmic forces at play within D&D's Great Wheel cosmology. The demonic Burning Legion, for example, doesn't really fit into a clear "lawful evil" or "chaotic evil" alignment, as while demons are embodiments of the primal force of "disorder," they're also basically all members of the extremely regimented regime headed by the Dark Titan Sargeras, whose mission is to save the universe from the chaos of the Void (by destroying it before the Void can claim it).
Now, when it comes to setting sourcebooks, I'm always eager to "plunder" them for my own uses. Even though I've wound up running a Ravnica-based campaign for now most of my D&D career, I've always thought of myself as being more inclined toward homebrew settings (I've put a lot of work into fleshing out my own, which is kind of a pleasure in and of itself).
So, a big question I have is whether I can take elements from the Warcraft book and incorporate them into my own setting.
I actually think I can in many cases. For example, in my world, the continent-spanning Lupinian Empire has a corps of knights who answer directly to the Emperor (in an empire that is generally more modern and whose government is really mostly run by semi-democratically-elected Parliament). This corps of knights is called The Reapers, and are basically the "in case of emergency, break glass" option when the Emperor needs something handled swiftly and ruthlessly. Assuming it's mechanically sound, I think the Ebon Blade Paladin might be a really good fit for this.
But yeah, Warcraft is already pretty D&D-like as it stands, so it shouldn't be too hard to incorporate monsters and character options into an established world.
Star Wars might be a bit different.
There's no release date for that set just yet, and I suspect that it'll probably be a late 2027 book if not even further out. Star Wars is still, I argue, a fantasy setting, but it's also about 50% sci-fi.
Now, the good news is that I actually think this could solve some of the problems I had with Spelljammer. There's certainly something whimsical about sailing a tall ship across the stars, but I far prefer the Star Wars-style rusted spaceship aesthetic. Truthfully, you could argue that Star Wars is really a sci-fi setting with fantasy elements (maybe that's even the more popular stance). Funnily enough, Warcraft also has a lot of sci-fi elements, where there's a wide mix of technologies at play: from rough stone tools favored by the Tauren to more modern-style technology used by Goblins, and then far-future crystal spaceships employed by the Draenei.
But the presence of technology in a D&D game doesn't seem too game-breaking if you just keep it balanced (like Warcraft does - that stone-bladed axe might be a better piece of gear than that sword made out of hard light if you got it in a later expansion). Instead, where I'm curious to see things go with Star Wars is how Jedi and Sith are handled.
See, the idea of a mystic knight isn't that hard to accomplish in D&D: a Paladin, Bladesinger Wizard, Eldritch Knight, Psi Warrior, etc., might all fit. But are Jedi/Sith going to be their own separate full class? Or is this going to be bolted onto an existing one. (On an aesthetic level, you never see Jedi wearing armor, though armor in Star Wars generally seems to be pretty ineffective, as famously demonstrated by Storm Troopers).
I wonder here if the cultural ubiquity of Star Wars might be the main impediment: while WoW is certainly popular (especially among fantasy RPG nerds,) it's not nearly as universal a set of cultural reference points the way Star Wars is.
All that being said: I really hope that this will give us a good space-faring way of playing D&D. I briefly ran a Spelljammer campaign for my friends (only hit level 5,) using my homebrew world as the basis for a futuristic setting taking place about a thousand years later, and I certainly imagined far more of a Used Future aesthetic to the place, which made the party's Living Ship stick out a little awkwardly.
I might file off some of the serial numbers: maybe that Corellian Light Freighter the party gets will be instead called an ISC Civilian Transport Freighter (one of the forces in my future space setting is the giantocratic Garvox Imperium, which has a real 1970s Soviet utilitarian aesthetic). We'll have to wait and see how extensive character options really push us deep into Star Wars lore, and to what extent we can kind of extract those mechanical ideas for our own original, homebrewed "IPs."
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