Update: It’s Official! Read updated news for M:tG’s Ravnica out in November 2018 and Eberron for D&D 5e available now.
The D&D product news blitz continues. According to an exclusive on Comicbook.com, “Dungeons & Dragons plans to announce several additional publications in 2018, which will add new campaign settings for players that don’t take place in the Forgotten Realms.”
In a conversation with Nathan Stewart (D&D’s Brand Director and Executive Producer) at the Stream of Many Eyes, he revealed that the brand still had more surprises for later this year, saying “next month we’re going to talk about a couple of different settings that people can start playing as early as this year“.
What Was Revealed:
- Books will be introductions to worlds of the multiverse versus full storylines
- Stewart did not mention which specific campaign settings would be revisited, but stated “We have two surprises that I think hardcore D&D fans are really going to love coming this summer, and then I think we got one surprise that’s going to release later this year that we’ve not told anyone about. We’re going to announce it in July.”
My Quick Thoughts
- Mike Mearls’ Happy Fun Hour, Player’s Handbook, Unearthed Arcana and Mordenkainen’s have shown us content from many settings including Dark Sun, Greyhawk, Eberron, Planescape, Dragonlance and Spelljammer.
- It will be interesting to see if we get book that bundle settings or books similar to Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide for each campaign setting.
- The books will need to balance the needs of old fans and introducting the settings to newer players. We’ll likely see a balance between player options and DM options with setting specific rules, monsters, spells, magic items, etc.
- It’s fun to look back at my horrible (and not so horrible) predictions from 2014
- A survey was conducted by WotC back in 2015 on which settings people wanted to see and I’d bet seeing Eberron, Dark Sun, and Planescape first, especially with Dragonlance and Greyhawk so close to the default D&D of the PHB. The results showed three distinct clusters and were summarized as follows:
Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, and the Forgotten Realms all proving equally popular. Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Spelljammer all shared a similar level of second-tier popularity, followed by a fairly steep drop-off to the rest of the settings. My sense is that Spelljammer has often lagged behind the broad popularity of other settings, falling into love-it-or-hate-it status depending on personal tastes. Greyhawk and Dragonlance hew fairly close to the assumptions we used in creating the fifth edition rulebooks, making them much easier to run with material from past editions. Of the top five settings, four require significant new material to function and the fifth is by far our most popular world.
Read the Full Story at ComicBook.com.
Which campaign settings do you hope D&D will revisit first? Let us know in the comments below.
