D&D 5E (2014) New D&D Hardcover To Be Announced On The 23rd (Tomorrow)?

According to this page on Amazon.com, a new Dungeon & Dragons hardcover title for May will be announced tomorrow. Users in the US see the product below (those in the UK are seeing a Wizkids miniatures set instead).

So far signs look like Ravenloft, but we’ll know for sure tomorrow.

[Update -- also mentioned by Todd Kendrick, recently of D&D Beyond].

WotC has posted the below animation, which says “The Mist Beckons”.

 

[JEB]

Rundown of some of the content in the book:


Sounds like pretty much all the classic domains have been changed in some way, some fundamentally. There's room for this to be the old domains evolving rather than a reboot, so I'm hoping for the former.

 

[TheSword]

I did not play much in 2E, but I should have realized it was made more of a thing with Planescape, as it's very Planescapey, at least as far as inner planes go.

And yes, Shadowfell and the Feywild, even if I still don't love those names, getting elevated to core status was a great change for 4E, especially as they made low level planar adventures a mainstream possibility, rather than something relegated to a single setting/product line.

I don’t think it was referenced much in Planescape. Just a nod to it really.

I know it gained a lot of prominence when The Shadovar became a big thing in FR and Shadow Weave was launched with 3e. There was an adventure path that used it a fair bit IIRC.

Birthright also made it a bigger part of their cosmology with it being an almost perfect analogue. They made it pretty cool to be fair. The Warlock of the Stonecrowns adventure (the only good module from Birthright) had a fortress that was part in this other world and part in the material.

I think the Great Wheel setting isn’t as fixed as people think. The wheel is just an abstract way of thinking about the planes. They aren’t physically laid out in a wheel. If you want a planar conjunction then fill your boots. To be honest I don’t see why interplanar libraries and interplanar gardens can’t exist there too. There is an interplanar staircase, and interplanar river and an interplanar tree. Are these all just metaphors for the same idea, just manifesting differently and not detailed yet.

Stygian Library looks so discworld, I just have to get it!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That Haaretz article's facts are entirely in agreement with my statement about what the standard interpretation has been. It says that one recent British scholar disagrees with the standard interpretation of the word's root, has a hypothesis about what the translation should be if you accept his alternate root, and that the historical Koine Greek translation doesn't contradict his hypothesis. If we somehow discovered that he was in fact right about the original meaning, it still wouldn't change what the standard interpretation has been for the last 1,600 years.

You should finish reading the article rather than stopping halfway through next time - it is easy to mistake the over-large advert break for the end of the article though - I did and was like "that's it?" like you seem to be saying. But that's not the end of the argument they're making. It certainly has not been "the standard interpretation for the last 1600 years", that's a ludicrous claim. Especially in the context of a translation that made a large number of odd changes for the sake of zeitgeist or pleasing the rulership of the time.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Rundown of some of the content in the book:


Sounds like pretty much all the classic domains have been changed in some way, some fundamentally. There's room for this to be the old domains evolving rather than a reboot, so I'm hoping for the former.

Certainly sounds pretty solid so far! Having a zombie apocalypse domain is a good example of the kind of update to account for modern horror, rather than just sticking to the Hammer/Universal classics. And zombies can certainly be extremely Gothic, as Resident Evil shows (RE4, for example, is extremely Gothic - I mean the whole series is but that's a particularly Gothic one - looks like RE8 will be too).

 

[tetrasodium]

It definitely makes sense that the powers that be in Ravenloft seem to be working at cross purposes. I would be disappointed if it was as neat and simple as "mists good, Dark Powers evil." I would want there to be multiple entities using the mists and multiple competing entities who are lumped together as the "Dark Powers." Has TSR/WotC ever given any indication that there's a "right" answer?

I once used the mists & Dark Powers as a malfunctioning rescue eldritch machine for an advanced civilization (dhakaani) who created a domain(or more) as a safe room kind of thing that is powered by the dread/despair/etc of the poor schlebs on the surface & of course they treated the surface folk there like a particularly immoral reality show producer/voting audience might treat contestants complete with a darklord just as helpless as the new arrivals trying to fix up the place . I don't think there's ever been a concrete answer on what is good & evil but they are at least probably more evil than not.

Codifying the Dark Powers and what they wanted/who they were was something all editions of Ravenloft have steered very well clear of, which was probably a smart move.

I don't think they were ever defined in any "I can touch them" state either, more like knowing a black hole exists because of the ways it affects the surrounding universe About the most concrete description of the Dark Powers is from exploring eberron & is talking about mabar's Dark Powers but still doesn't get very concrete

For the most part that could largely apply to the Ravenloft ones too & in a way knowing it is even worse for a PC.

And when it comes to a place like Ravenloft, which is apparently both a prison and has someone actively trying to trap people there, it ought to not be reachable in any sort of reliable fashion, given the schizophrenic nature of the place. (Also, the 2E idea that there are "scholars" who have lots of ideas about the Dark Powers and the nature of Ravenloft itself is eye-rolling. Something awful should happen to those scholars, whether it's a monster popping out of the mists to behead them or them suddenly waking up in Ravenloft itself, unable to share their smartypants theories with TSR writers.)

People escape from Ravenloft from time to time, often more than once only to be pulled back each time things are going right for them again in some cases Those "scholars" could be as simple as a legitimate scholar like a psychiatrist who tries to help that poor 30 year old guy they found in the asylum on & off for the last several hundred years... "Unfortunately it seems like his room is empty.. again.. but why are the first few pages of this completely filled journal from his room identical to my notes from that session yesterday?... aged yes... but even the coffee stain is the same... how could this be?!"

 

[Paul Farquhar]

And zombies can certainly be extremely Gothic

The Plague of the Zombies

I Walked with a Zombie

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The Plague of the Zombies

I Walked with a Zombie

Yeah I love I Walked With a Zombie! I'd forgotten it even existed!

I think the main modern difference is the breaking of the link to voodoo specifically, replacing it with other causes. But yeah Plague of Zombies is narrowly the first "zombie apocalypse"-type movie, with Night of the Living Dead not actually being intended to be about zombies - they were actually conceived of and referred to internally as "ghouls", before generally being called "zombies", probably as a result of those Universal and Hammer movies (I am NOT an expert in the history of zombie movies though, totally prepared to be corrected on this!).

 

[TheSword]

I do like the idea that if Dark Lords domain lasts without changing, it becomes more and more fixed as time goes on. Eventually over thousands of years it eventually solidifies and contracts into an amber sarcophagus. Strahd avoids this fate with a constant cycle of death and rebirth, which is why he so enjoys the dalliance with adventurers.

That’s my homebrew resolution.

 

[TheSword]

The purpose of Ravenloft should definitely stay mysterious... a prison, a recruiting ground, a massive battery of evil, a crucible.

Perhaps it’s like the Black Mirror episode White Bear.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I do like the idea that if Dark Lords domain lasts without changing, it becomes more and more fixed as time goes on. Eventually over thousands of years it eventually solidifies and contracts into an amber sarcophagus. Strahd avoids this fate with a constant cycle of death and rebirth, which is why he so enjoys the dalliance with adventurers.

That’s my homebrew resolution.

This is fun, I like it a lot - it gives a reason for the domain lords to keep mixing it up a bit. Also the possibility of accidentally "re-awakening" an entire domain if those amber sarcophagi end up somewhere.