Everything from Dungeons & Dragons Direct! Spelljammer, Dragonlance, and More Revealed!
Wizards of the Coast, the company behind Dungeons and Dragons, has held its first-ever D&D Direct! This new digital presentation sheds light on things coming to the world’s greatest roleplaying game over the next year or so. Their reveal kicked off with some pretty awesome announcements. You can watch the entire video here. Below we’ve highlighted some of the bigger announcements!
Spelljammer: Adventures in Space!
What Spelljammer?
Spelljammer is a fantasy campaign setting that was created for the old-school Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This unique world focused on traveling on magical ships that sail through space to every local across the multiverse. This makes it a perfect tool for allowing characters to have a mechanical way to traverse between setting locations beyond just powerful magic spells. It takes the feeling of high seas adventure and moves it to the endless reaches of space.
Each ship is equipped with “spelljamming helms” that are key to navigating. I’ve also kinda thought of them as star maps that connect multiple maps. The ships themselves follow a more fantasy design, such as galleons, animals, birds, and other fantastical shapes. I believe this direction is certainly a great step as it provides players with the tools now to experience a wide range of worlds that they may not have considered previously. It also means the Dungeon Master gets to enjoy experimenting with wild concepts and worlds that the players can choose to leave if it gets too dangerous. The sheer amount of options just makes it that much better!
“It's aimed at players and DMs because not only does it have everything that DM needs to know to run campaigns and adventure set in wild space, but it also has options for players in it, including six new playable race options, the Astro elves, these are elves with Starlight in their eyes.”
Spelljammer campaign bundle comes in a slipcase. Inside you will find three books, a DM screen, and a poster map.
The first book is called the Astral Adventurer's Guide. And it's aimed at players and DMs because not only does it have everything that DM needs to know to run campaigns and adventure set in wild space, but it also has options for players in it, including six new playable race options; Astral Elves, Mechanical Gnomes, Hadozee, Giff, Plasmoids, Thri-kreen.
The second book is Boo’s Astral Menagerie. The book is named after the very famous miniature giant space hamster. It’s a bestiary of new monsters for the setting. Inside there are space clowns, vampirates, murder comets, giant space hamsters, solar dragons, lunar dragons, and all kinds of alien creatures.
The third book is Light of Xaryxis, an adventure book! This all-new adventure is set in wild space and the Astral Sea. It contains 12 episodes to fill your navigation across the multiverse!
Baldur’s Gate 3 Update from Laurian Studios
A short video touches on their progress over the last 18 months. Including transformed visuals, new classes, new regions and so much more! The game is in early access and plans to release in 2023!
Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel
This new anthology of Dungeons and Dragons adventures. One of the things I love most about this book is that it is created by over a dozen PoC writers. They together stories based on their lives, their backgrounds, their cultures, and their myths to weave 13 incredible adventures and 15 new locations that players and DMs can really dig into this anthology covers levels 1 through 14, and really highlights the incredible diversity of possibilities and adventures that you can see in Dungeons and dragons.
The Radian Citadel could be a gateway through to all of the 15 planes described in the book, but also there are 12 missing portals or Concord jewels that are transports, and that could be used to make links to their locations in their own home games. The adventures in locations that you can run these.
One-off adventures themselves, or you can set them in any of a host of campaign settings. What is really cool is that all of the writers shared their notes with each other. So we will see seeds of each other's lands and adventures within the other. And you get the sense of like a shared world, the culture.
Dungeons and Dragons movie gets a title Honor Among Thieves!
We got a short update from the directors about the live-action Dungeons & Dragons film. The information is a bit lacking, but they reveal the title to be Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and also announce a release date of March 2023.
New D&D 5e Starter Set
Dragons of the Stormwreck Isle not only does it feature a fresh new adventure, it comes with digital onboarding tools that immediately introduce new players to the game. It's supposed to set itself apart from current starters by being more streamlined and easier to understand. Additionally, the starter set contains everything you need to start playing the world's greatest role-playing game.
Monstrous Compendium: Volume I
This new monster collection will be available to all players with a wizard's account or a DnD Beyond account and comes with 10 monsters from Spelljammer. Both well-known and completely brand new monsters. Grow your collection throughout the year, you can collect more volumes of the monstrous compendium and expand your collection of the monsters from across the multiverse.
Dragonlance Setting Returns!
If you don’t know, Dragonlance is a shared fantasy universe created by Laura and Tracy Hickman and expanded by Tracy and Margaret Weis under the direction of TSR, Inc into a series of novels.
The world setting of Krynn calls out to heroes once again as the Dragonlance campaign is returning once again to Dungeons and Dragons. Krynn was once one of the big three well-known campaign settings of D&D. Standing with Greyhawk’s Oerth and Forgotten Realm’s Faerun. A world that was abandoned by the gods leaving the world to suffer the Cataclysm. The return of the gods sparks the beginning of the War of the Lance.
The Dragonlance adventure book is called Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. In it, we will get to experience a new campaign featuring mass-battle rules and other large-scale conflicts (in addition to the traditional small-scale adventures) opening up an epic adventure rarely seen.
Expect to see Dragonlance launch late 2022!
Other Notes of D&D Direct 2022
In addition to the great stuff already discussed. There will be new bundles of portable maps and creature clings (which is pretty cool) and a new D&D board game called Dungeons & Dragons Onslaught and a few other things. Overall I was really impressed and enjoyed the first-ever Dungeons and Dragons Direct. I can’t wait to see more!
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