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

 

[Zaukrie]

A thread about free stuff turns into "WotC stupid". Least shocking ENWorld thing ever.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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.

No one is asking for perfection. An average marketing team at most companies would have had something on shelves for DADHAT. It's not a wild creative leap to think of doing so, and it simply isn't nearly as hard as everyone defending WotC makes it out to be to create a few extra pieces of art for Golden Vault featuring the DADHAT characters and have swapped them in (which can be done very late in the publishing process, assuming they're the same size as the art that ended up being used, which can certainly be dictated to the artists) once the early test screenings showed -- as they did -- that the movie would be well-liked.

Likewise, Stormwreck Isle, which featured the cartoon characters that didn't actually appear in the adventure could have easily instead have featured the DADHAT characters in the art. Heck, they could have re-released the exact same box in a "DADHAT Special Edition." (Although I would have gone the extra mile and written up both the cartoon characters and DADHAT characters as level 1 premades to include in the box, myself.)

Honestly, people act like creating D&D content is like splitting the atom. It's not that hard, and it's super-weird that so many people want to insist that no one could do it better than WotC, despite them stepping on rakes on a monthly basis for the past year.

This goes double for the people furious about Spelljammer, who clearly don't believe that WotC are infallible, except strangely when it comes to marketing.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A thread about free stuff turns into "WotC stupid". Least shocking ENWorld thing ever.

Least shocking WotC thing ever.

 

[Zaukrie]

No one is asking for perfection. An average marketing team at most companies would have had something on shelves for DADHAT. It's not a wild creative leap to think of doing so, and it simply isn't nearly as hard as everyone defending WotC makes it out to be to create a few extra pieces of art for Golden Vault featuring the DADHAT characters and have swapped them in (which can be done very late in the publishing process, assuming they're the same size as the art that ended up being used, which can certainly be dictated to the artists) once the early test screenings showed -- as they did -- that the movie would be well-liked.

Likewise, Stormwreck Isle, which featured the cartoon characters that didn't actually appear in the adventure could have easily instead have featured the DADHAT characters in the art. Heck, they could have re-released the exact same box in a "DADHAT Special Edition." (Although I would have gone the extra mile and written up both the cartoon characters and DADHAT characters as level 1 premades to include in the box, myself.)

Honestly, people act like creating D&D content is like splitting the atom. It's not that hard, and it's super-weird that so many people want to insist that no one could do it better than WotC, despite them stepping on rakes on a monthly basis for the past year.

This goes double for the people furious about Spelljammer, who clearly don't believe that WotC are infallible, except strangely when it comes to marketing.

The point of that post is that this thread is NOT about Wotc and their marketing, but, again, is turned into that instead of talking about the cool free stuff we just got......but, posting WotC stupid in every thread seems to be a hobby for some.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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

Descent into Avernus is absolutely not a BG3 tie-in, unless there are a whole lot more mind flayers and githyanki in it than I think.

And even if it were the tie-in, releasing it three years in advance makes it a failure as a tie-in.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Descent into Avernus is absolutely not a BG3 tie-in, unless there are a whole lot more mind flayers and githyanki in it than I think.

And even if it were the tie-in, releasing it three years in advance makes it a failure as a tie-in.

Descent Into Avernus is definitely a BG3 tie-in.

Go talk to anyone at the druid grove, especially the tieflings. They are there as a direct result of the events of DIA. Two of the origin characters have direct ties to Zariel and events in DIA.

And as for when it was released, I guess we have to blame WotC for not planning ahead for Covid and its effects on the game's production.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

And boy did that game disappoint.

That makes SCAG the perfect tie in product.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The point of that post is that this thread is NOT about Wotc and their marketing, but, again, is turned into that instead of talking about the cool free stuff we just got......but, posting WotC stupid in every thread seems to be a hobby for some.

We absolutely have threads that have 40 pages of the same three people complaining about the same few things, even when it has nothing to do with the nominal topic, but discussing a videogame tie-in in the context of how one would prefer videogame tie-ins to work is obviously a topic that's going to be raised.

 

[darjr]

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.

I was talking about the feed back after launch. I didn’t see much of it before launch.

I don’t disagree that they could have considered a tie in before that but post launch feedback would still have had nothing to do with it.

 

[Reynard]

Descent Into Avernus is definitely a BG3 tie-in.

Go talk to anyone at the druid grove, especially the tieflings. They are there as a direct result of the events of DIA. Two of the origin characters have direct ties to Zariel and events in DIA.

That makes it a prequel. I don't understand how no one knows what the word "prequel" means.