Friday, October 23, 2026

Filing Off the Serial Numbers with WoW D&D

 When it comes to D&D, I am a strong advocate of "pillaging." There's nothing you can't take from the game's official books, or third party books, or even other games to build out your campaign, as long as it works for the players at the table.

DMs, of course, are the ultimate arbiters in this matter, but I would broadly encourage you to err on the side of openness toward non-core content. That being said, I also recommend being variably tolerant of such content, depending on its proximity to the core rules. Broadly, I'd say: if it's in the PHB, you should only ban an option if it's extremely disruptive (which I don't think much is). If it's in some rules expansion book like Xanathar's, Tasha's, or Arcana Unleashed, I'd also say that players should be able to assume that they will be able to play with those options. If it's in a setting-specific books, I'd generally say... probably allow it, but review it to go over whether it truly fits, and if not, if there's a way to re-skin the option to make it work in your campaign. For example, can there be something like Dragonmarked houses even if you're not playing in Eberron? Maybe not. But could Artificers exist in your world? Almost certainly (even if you're opposed to a Steampunk/Industrial aesthetic, maybe encourage your Artificer player to flavor their creations in more of Daedelus orLeonardo di Vinci vibe - and if they're playing an Alchemist or Cartographer, you're probably fine already).

So, this brings us to the World of Warcraft book. While Azeroth could pretty easily work as a D&D campaign setting without too many changes (once you start getting into the more cosmic forces, you might have to tweak some things, like the fact that the Twisting Nether is very different from the Abyss,) the book seems largely intent on letting you really re-create WoW classes and characters, going so far as to alter core class features beyond even the prominently-explored hero class subclasses, such as the introduction of what I believe will be scaling Bear and Cat forms for Circle of the Moon Druids to better re-create how they function in WoW (quick preview of my recommendations: this could honestly fix my biggest problems with the Moon Druid, and assuming the actual scaling templates are any good, I'd heartily recommend allowing them.)

So, obviously, the book doesn't actually come out until November 17th, though as a Master-level D&D Beyond subscriber (as a DM, it's very nice to be able to share all this stuff with my players) I believe I'll be getting it earlier. Oh, it's on election day. Cool. Nothing stressful to distract me from reading through it...) I'll get access to it in a little under two weeks. Perhaps this is premature, but oh well.

The crux of this, though, is the following: What here might we be able to rip out of the walls like copper wiring to use for our own homebrew setting?

The broad answer is, basically, that it really depends.

For example, I love the Draenei in WoW. Profoundly ancient people who fled their home world after the majority of their kin accepted a deal to become demons, they spent 25,000 years - many individually, as they seem to be the longest-living peoples in the Warcraft cosmos we've come across, at least among mortals - trying to find a safe harbor to rebuild their civilization, only to barely survive the genocidal origins of the Orcish Horde before finally finding reliable allies amongst the Alliance. They are blue, which is something I've realized has defined both of my longest-running D&D characters (a Blue Dragonborn Eldritch Knight Fighter and a Triton Scribes Wizard) and is pretty strongly my favorite color. But I also think I relate to them as the descendant of people who suffered through the horrors of genocide and fled their home as refugees.

But should I just pop Draenei into a D&D setting? Would that be weird?

See, one advantage I think that fantasy RPGs have over sci-fi ones is that, with perhaps the exception of Greys/Little Green Men, there's no universal trope of a standard type of alien. Indeed, you don't tend to see these classic aliens in space operas like Star Trek or Mass Effect (RIP Bioware) because they're more associated with the more modern-set and horror-adjacent alien abduction subgenre. By the time you get to a future setting where humans are living in some kind of shared society with aliens, there's more of a demand for A: more relatable aliens and B: more originality.

Now, I'd argue that Star Trek in particular actually has a lot of very prominent alien species that exist in an almost perfect one-to-one with fantasy, with your Vulcans as elves, Romulans as dark elves, Klingons as Orcs (Draw Steel's Orcs are explicitly inspired by the Search for Spock-onward era design of Klingons with the boney ridges on their foreheads) and even the Borg as basically space zombies.

But still, I'd say that all in all, there's no standard set of sci-fi species that are as universally iconic as your elves, dwarves, gnomes, and orcs (maybe throw halflings in there, though to me those have always felt more directly taken specifically from Tolkien).

Ok, but to get us out of the weeds: The specific story of the Draenei in WoW requires, I would think, at least a pretty strong kind of anchor point for their connection to the Light (perhaps reconceived as some benevolent deity) and likely their kinship with malevolent demons (I actually think there will be an option to play as a Man'ari Eredar, which is sort of doable simply by playing a Draenei character in WoW and picking different skin and eye colors - the idea that after the Legion was defeated, some of the former demonic Eredar sought out reconciliation with their exiled kin).

But if you're using a homebrew world that mostly tries to stick to official D&D stuff, even if that includes species from other D&D-canonical settings, this might be a step too far.

Ok, but if Draenei are pretty specific, what about, say, Worgen?

Worgen are WoW's take on werewolves. They adhere to most werewolf tropes, even hailing from a dreary, rain-swept kingdom that uses actual English accents. While the Worgen first used local alchemical research, and later guidance from the Night Elf Druids whose culture had accidentally created the Worgen curse in the first place, to retain their human minds, Worgen cannot help but transform into their humanoid wolf-like hybrid form when stressed, and some simply embrace that as their true form even when there's no danger (in-game, you can separately customize your human and worgen appearance, and can swap to your human form, but if you get into combat, you automatically transform back into the worgen version).

I think this would probably be a pretty straightforward way for you to play a werewolf in another D&D setting. We, of course, also got the Lupin in Ravneloft: Horrors Within, though supposedly the Worgen will be more akin to Shifters from Eberron. Most of Eberron's original playable species are already kind of "like this kind of monster, but playable,) such as how the Changeling is a playable Doppelganger or how a Warforged is a playable Golem. In other words, I think this would be something you could easily work into any campaign world that has even a small corner of it that leans into gothic monsters. D&D werewolves aren't even controlled by the phases of the moon in the first place, so there's no need to worry about the fact that Worgen aren't either.

Now, regarding subclasses:

I think for the most part, we're going to be seeing subclasses that are built out to be pretty broadly applicable. Notably, some of the subclasses coming in the WoW book are updates to 5.0 subclasses, and from the descriptions we've gotten, they don't seem to be going out of their way to incorporate mechanics from the WoW specs that they represent. For example, WoW's Outlaw Rogue will be brought in with an updated Swashbuckler. But while Outlaw in WoW mixes the use of swords, axes, maces, and fist weapons (the other two WoW Rogue specs use daggers exclusively) with various abilities that see you pull out a flintlock pistol to shoot at your target (the pistol isn't actually an equipped item, but just a visual part of the animation for these abilities,) there's every indication that the updated Swashbuckler will simply be a tweak to the subclass that appeared in I believe SCAG and Xanathar's, so it really should not have any trouble working into a non-Azeroth campaign.

The Warrior of Mystic Brews is the update for the old Drunken Master Monk, and while it incorporates an actual brewing mechanic that does seem inspired in part by how the Brewmaster Monk in WoW works, I think that this is actually just something that brings the old subclass a bit more oomph that it needed. While purists might want a Monk who just replicates the idea of someone using Drunken Boxing martial arts techniques, the fact is that every 5.5 Monk subclass other than the Open Hand one does have some little bit of magic to it, and the "magic" here is all just mixing brews together. Honestly, I just hope that the subclass winds up better than it had been, because I loved the flavor of it.

Now, as for the original subclasses, I believe we're talking the Path of the Elements Barbarian, Discipline and Shadow Domain Clerics, Oath of the Holy Paladins, and then the "hero class" subclasses, the Oath of the Ebon Blade Paladin and Demon Hunter Ranger.

Let's put a pin in those last two.

Broadly speaking, I don't really think any of the non-hero class subclasses should pose much of a problem. Shadow Clerics will give us a nice opportunity for a darker-themed Cleric subclass, of which there aren't actually a ton of options (the Grave Cleric got a pretty substantial rework in Horrors Within that I do think unfortunately becomes a bit more of a nerf than a buff, though I don't know that it's a bad subclass if you aren't comparing it to its Xanathar's predecessor). Oath of the Holy, depending on how well-implemented it is, might actually fill a cool niche for players who knew that Paladins had inherent healing abilities, but didn't realize how the limitations on being a half-caster would make actually being able to act as a party's primary healer quite difficult (when we hit level 9 in the Wildemount game with my Wizard, we all breathed a sigh of relief now that the still-full Paladin could cast Revivify. I now carry a scroll of Gentle Repose on me at all times to make sure that if anyone goes down, we'll have enough time to get them revived). Path of the Elements will hopefully work as a kind of replacement for the Storm Herald Barbarian - a concept that was very cool but was implemented really poorly. So, here's hoping that it'll be like the Undead Warlock's upgrade over the Undying patron, or how the 5.5 Elements Monk is way better than the Way of the Four Elements.

Ok, but what about Ebon Blade and Demon Hunters?

While I think that, in WoW, Death Knights and Demon Hunters are both really iconic classes, both of which are dark antiheroes (not to say that other classes can't fit that bill, like Warlocks for example). The climactic clash at the end of Warcraft III's Frozen Throne expansion saw Warcraft's most iconic Death Knight, Arthas, fight a duel against its (well, only at the time) Demon Hunter, Illidan, so I have this kind of link between the two.

But Death Knights obviously have tons of precedence in fantasy, and in D&D in particular, with folks like Lord Soth. We've even had a subclass in the 2014 DMG, admittedly meant for NPCs rather than players (back when they expected you to stat out an NPC like a PC, which I don't think actually works well,) the Oathbreaker Paladin, which was meant to represent a kind of nascent Death Knight - someone who was on the path to becoming one.

For this reason, I suspect that the Oath of the Ebon Blade might actually be a reasonable 5.5 update to the Oathbreaker Paladin, only taking it further and actually making them a true death knight. Funnily enough, if we get our "villain" book sometime next year, we'll also have the Death Knight feat path, and I wonder to what degree these will be redundant for one another or fit perfectly together. But the point is, they're already looking for ways to let you be a Death Knight in mainline D&D anyway.

Demon Hunters, though... are much more specific to WoW.

To be clear, there are other things you could call a Demon Hunter that would pretty easily slide into any D&D campaign. Funnily enough, Blizzard themselves made a Demon Hunter class in Diablo III that looks nothing like a WoW Demon Hunter.

WoW's Demon Hunters are not just gothic Van Helsing types, but instead are tattooed elves (still only elves can be them, though I don't know that there's any lore reason telling you that this is a matter of physiology) who have absorbed the essence of a demon into their bodies, causing them to grow horns, and often scaly skin. They also ritually gouge out their own eyes, the fel energy (or, recently, void energy) within them giving them sight beyond sight. Also, and I don't know how and if they are going to implement these in-game, they fight with special weapons called Warglaives, which are giant two-ended slashing blades that they dual-wield and somehow avoid slicing their own legs off (truly one of the great impractical fantasy weapons, but they look cool as hell).

Now, unlike Death Knights, there's nothing quite like a Demon Hunter in just about any other bit of fantasy (though bizarrely, they have a lot of parallels with Daredevil from Marvel Comics, even down to Matt Murdock wrestling with Catholic guilt and the more metaphorical idea that he's got a demon within him).

Thus, it might be a little less simple to implement these into your game world. I will say, though, that we do have monster-hunting guilds, and while Blood Hunters are specific to Critical Role's Exandria setting, they potentially occupy a very similar niche, so making Demon Hunters a branch of the Claret Orders could work. But that's fitting it just into one other setting that might not be where your campaign takes place.

While we might say that at the end of the day, a Demon Hunter in D&D is going to be a type of Ranger, we don't yet know to what extent the subclass will really change how the class works. One thing we do know is that they'll gain I believe always-on blindsight, and to a greater radius than the Blind Fighting fighting style. But, for example, I don't know if the Demon Hunter version of the Ranger will preclude the use of ranged weapons (even the newly-added Devourer specialization in WoW is more of a spellcasting spec - which is likely why you'll be able to take Warlock cantrips as a fighting style option.)

Still, as far as I can tell, the subclasses aren't going out of their way to namedrop specific WoW lore proper nouns. I doubt that the Shadow Domain is going to have abilities tied specifically to the Old Gods, even though the WoW version does have various talents called Idol of Yogg-Saron or Idol of C'thun. Really, that's something I'm eager to see: the extent to which the character options come ready to be incorporated into other campaign settings.

Still, my guess is that, especially given how much WoW leans into the same fantasy tropes that D&D does (some of those tropes, of course, coming from D&D in the first place) I doubt it will be very hard to use the vast majority of what we get in the book. And hey, the book's already going to be asking a bit of re-skinning to work in Azeroth. Liches, for example, are a thing in WoW, but they've got a pretty specific look of being a big (like 15-foot tall) floating skeleton often in vaguely Pharaonic garb (there are some who wear different robes, but the giant floating skeleton thing is pretty universal). Also, WoW's Wyverns are very clearly Manticores, so you'll want to just kind of make that adjustment.

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