D&D 5E D&D Beyond Offers A Free Baldur's Gate Gazetteer

In Baldur’s Gate, thievery, blackmail, and illegal trade runs rampant. Now you can journey to this dangerous city of the Sword Coast with the Baldur’s Gate Gazetteer. Learn about each of the city’s districts and key locations and people, and unlock backgrounds for your next Baldurian character!

The Gazetter includes:

• History of Baldur's Gate
• Baldur's Gate Today
• Government
• Citizenry
• Economy and Trade
• Religion
• Dangers in Baldur's Gate
• City Landmarks
• Upper City
• Lower City
• Outer City
• Beyond Baldur's Gate
• Baldur's Gate Character Backgrounds
• Dark Secrets

The Gazetteer is quite sizable, and mainly lore-based, with two new NPC stat blocks (Nine-Fingers Keene, and Rilasa Real), some random encounter tables, and information on how the regular D&D character backgrounds fit in. There's also a new background, the Faceless. Finally there are some rules about 'Dark Secrets' which are a background element which the party shares.

Claim Baldur’s Gate Gazetteer now! - D&D Beyond

www.dndbeyond.com

 

[Parmandur]

This may be the most low effort marketing tie-in I have ever seen. It's the BG chapter of Avernus, with, like, 2 extra NPCs. It is wierd that people are cheering about this.

A D&D game is going to likely be the biggest game of the year, and probably man sites' Game of the Year, and the best they can do is to give away an already produced gazeteer from a module published 4 years ago. This strongly suggests to me that they did not have ANY tie-in marketing planned and only after BG3 was a break out did they think to try.

Between this and the severely lackluster HAT tie-in marketing, what is happening over there? Who is in charge?

They also have the whole book, which was always meant to be a tie-in, on sale for a print/digital combo. You can also buy the book in stores.

 

[Parmandur]

I am not sure how this is related.

SCAG was a video game cross merchandising tie-in. The book lasted way longer than Sword Coast Legends, though, so it's easy to forget that.

 

[Reynard]

SCAG was a video game cross merchandising tie-in. The book lasted way longer than Sword Coast Legends, though, so it's easy to forget that.

I did not know that!

And boy did that game disappoint.

 

[bedir than]

I do. I want an adventure book for it. The writing is way better than what WotC offers.

You shouldn't be surprised that the company with hundreds of more people than the D&D studio and a budget in 9 figures that spent a half-decade+ developing a single video game does a good job when compared to the the dozen people who get 18 months to work on a book together and some of those are freelancers

 

[Parmandur]

It certainly suggests whoever it was who was yelling about lack of monetization last winter got pushed out of a window or something, as they are routinely leaving money on the table, even now.

It would have been comically easy to hire a decent freelancer, have them compile and tighten up previous Baldur's Gate (or Neverwinter, for a DADHAT tie-in) lore and then develop new content for it, and have it ready to go for when BG3 finally dropped. The amount that they pay freelancers is, unfortunately, a drop in the bucket compared to most marketing budgets, so it would have been easy enough to afford, especially amortized over the extremely long span of time that BG3 was in early access.

Even if one didn't want to sell it in hard copy, say as a bundle with the videogame at Gamestop or via Amazon, they could have put it up as a POD on DMs Guild and charged $10 for and plenty of people would have been happy to buy it.

They released the tie-in four years ago, this is just putting out part of it for free to catch the current wave.

 

[Reynard]

You shouldn't be surprised that the company with hundreds of more people than the D&D studio and a budget in 9 figures that spent a half-decade+ developing a single video game does a good job when compared to the the dozen people who get 18 months to work on a book together and some of those are freelancers

I'm not surprised. I am saying that a joint production of a tabletop adaptation could have been done. WotC is more profitable than it has ever been, and still severely understaffed. I mean, unless you count the team hired to monetize the VTT and DNDB.

 

[Zaukrie]

They released the tie-in four years ago, this is just putting out part of it for free to catch the current wave.

Also, the movie was delayed....they didn't delay the book.....

It's a good reminder that not everything in the world is perfect, any more than things are perfect in fiction.....and expecting perfection is just setting oneself up for disappointment.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

They couldn’t have seen it before it existed.

Everyone needs to stop saying this. Baldur's Gate 3 was in early access for years. Go look at the Steam reviews. It was clearly going to be a monster hit.

WotC should have absolutely known what was coming, and given the low effort required to get something like this lined up, there's no excuse for them not to have done so.

WotC is not a bunch of kindergarteners who've never worked in publishing before. They are grown adults who are paid to do all of this. They do not need everyone making excuses for them being completely hapless with tie-ins.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

To what end? What does this add, pointing it out over and over?

If they really did get off their rear ends and put this out in response to complaints about their lack of tie-ins, that suggests we haven't been complaining enough.

 

[Reynard]

They released the tie-in four years ago, this is just putting out part of it for free to catch the current wave.

"Tie in" is not really accurate here. "Prequel" is, sure, but tie-ins are, by definition, temporally related.