Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast held a pre-recorded livestream on Thursday morning to reveal several big upcoming projects for Dungeons & Dragons, including the long-awaited return of the Spelljammer and Dragonlance settings for D&D.
The livestream is the first in what promises to be a series of “D&D Directs,” where Wizards directly briefs its audience on its next projects.
The lead story from the Direct, or at least what was given the most time overall, was the revival of Jeff Grubb’s 1989 D&D campaign setting Spelljammer. A new three-book hardcover set, Adventures in Space, is coming out on Aug. 16, which officially updates the setting to D&D‘s 5th edition.
Spelljammer can be adquately described as “Dungeons & Dragons in space,” where players can sail between worlds with the help of magically-driven ships, and may be best-known to newer D&D players as the series that gave the world the giant space hamster.
In the original version of Spelljammer, its vision of space consisted of crystalline spheres separated by oceans of phlogiston. The remake replaces that cosmology with the Astral Plane, where you can travel between the worlds of D&D‘s particular multiverse.
Adventures in Space includes The Astral Adventurer’s Guide, which contains the details needed for Spelljammer as a 5e campaign setting; Boo’s Astral Menagerie, which introduces “over 60” new creatures that can be found and fought in space; and Light of Xaryxis, a new hardcover adventure set in the Astral Plane for characters of levels 5 to 8.
Notably, the new Spelljammer books contain rules for six new playable races, including the insectoid thri-kreen, astral elves, and a slightly reimagined version of the giff.
The original run of Spelljammer had been discontinued by the time Wizards of the Coast bought the rights to D&D in 1997, and outside of the occasional cameo, had yet to be revisited. This makes Adventures in Space the first new Spelljammer books in over 25 years, and the first official Spelljammer books from Wizards.
According to project lead Chris Perkins, he’s wanted to revisit Spelljammer for years, but there were other things that had higher priority. Perkins previously ran a Spelljammer campaign for five years, starting in 1990.
The new Spelljammer will appear alongside a new set of Icons of the Realms minis from Wizkids, which will include a giant space hamster.
Similarly, Wizards ended the Direct by showing a short animated trailer for an upcoming new game book in the long-dormant Dragonlance setting, narrated by Shoreh Aghdashloo (The Expanse).
This does stop a little short of a full revival like Spelljammer received, however. Instead, late this year, Wizards plans to release Shadow of the Dragon Queen, an adventure book that’s set early in Dragonlance continuity, during the War of the Lance, as well as a new wargame, Warriors of Krynn.
The back half of 2022 is going to be big for Dragonlance fans regardless. Dragonlance creators Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman are returning to the setting with a new trilogy of novels, beginning with Dragons of Deceit in August 2022. Their earlier lawsuit against Wizards of the Coast, which alleged breach of contract, was quietly resolved in January 2021.
Wizards took the Direct as an opportunity to release new official numbers for the D&D franchise, which it claims celebrated its ninth consecutive year of growth in 2021. As D&D‘s fifth edition heads into its 10th year of publication, Wizards reported that “more than 80%” of D&D fans played the game virtually over the course of 2021, via platforms such as Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and the recently-acquired D&D Beyond.
The 2021 sourcebook Fizban’s Treasury of Everything was Wizards’ best-selling D&D release for the year, while The Wild Beyond the Witchlight is now the single fastest-selling pre-made adventure in D&D history. By way of comparison, Wizards claims that Witchlight sold more copies in the month of its release than 2016’s Curse of Strahd did for the first few years it was out.
Other Dungeons & Dragons news from Wizards’ first Direct included:
- Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is scheduled for release in June. This is an anthology of 13 stand-alone adventures set in 16 brand-new locations. According to the project lead, Ajit George, Journeys is the first D&D book “conceived, created, and written entirely by PoCs [people of color],” so many of its locations are inspired by real-world cultures that previously didn’t have a lot of fictional parallels in the D&D multiverse. The included adventure “Wages of Vice,” for example, is set in a new realm that’s evocative of the Caribbean.
- Two new accessories called Campaign Cases will arrive in stores on July 19, aimed at Dungeon Masters who do a lot of gaming on the road or at conventions. The two sets, Creatures and Terrain, provide easy and portable ways to set up gaming boards and maps for your D&D game, featuring reusable plastic “clings” for your monster tokens and hexes.
- The Dungeons & Dragons movie, now officially titled Honor Among Thieves, is still on track for release in March 2023. It stars Chris Pine, Hugh Grant, and Michelle Rodriguez in an adventure set along the Sword Coast in the Forgotten Realms.
- A new live-play series is set to debut on April 27, via the official D&D YouTube and Twitch channels. Legends of the Multiverse will broadcast as a series of 1-hour pre-recorded episodes, starring Deborah Ann Woll, B. Dave Walters, Gina Darling, Meagan Kenreck, and Todd Kenreck. Each story arc in the series features a rotating series of Dungeon Masters, with guest-stars that include Aabria Iyengar, Ginny Di, Anna Prosser, Travis McElroy, and Sungwon Cho.
- A new starter set for D&D, Dragons of Stomwreck Isle, was previously revealed as part of a Hasbro press release in Feb. While it doesn’t have a release date yet, it was briefly shown during the Direct, and has been confirmed to ship at an MSRP of $19.99. It will include a rulebook, dice, character sheets, and a pre-made adventure.
- Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3, the latest sequel in the landmark series of D&D-based computer games,will officially leave Early Access on Steam and Google Stadia in 2023.
- Wizkids also announced a new board game, D&D Onslaught, which pits two rival adventuring parties against one another and a ruined keep full of monsters. It’s scheduled to come out in October, and will include 21 fully-painted miniatures.
