Spelljammer D&D Direct Live Report: 9am PDT (5pm BST) SPELLJAMMER CONFIRMED! DRAGONLANCE!

D&D Direct, WotC's new video-format announcement show launches today at 9am PDT (5pm BST). If you aren't able to watch it, I'll be updating this article live. Feel free to comment below! Once it launches, you will need to refresh this page when you want to see new updates. The video is expected to last about 30 minutes.

If you CAN watch it, you'll find it on YouTube or Twitch at the above times. Otherwise, follow along below!

• 45 mins to go. Live updates incoming!
• 30 mins to go!
• 5 minutes to go!
• Here we go! Opens with a sea shanty.
• Forgive typos. They talk fast and I can't type.

• Spelljammer is confirmed!
• They talk REALLY FAST!
• Spelljammer Adventures in Space, project lead Chris Perkins, Trystan Falcone graphic designer
• Cities built on asteroids, dead gods floating in the ether
• 6 races---astral elves, autognomes, hedozi(?), gif, plasmoids, thri-kreen
• 3 hardcovers in a slipcase: Astral Adventurers Guide, Boo's Astral Menagerie, Light of Xaryxis adventure
• Prequel adventure in July
• Wizkids miniatures

Other stuff also discussed!

• Baldur's Gate 3 CRPG preview video (game is in 2023)
• Journeys Through Radiant Citadel intro video -- 3 of the adventures are: Wages of Vice (5th level), Caribbean; Orchids of the Invisible Mountain (14th level), feywild, far realm, Whistler new monster; Fiend of Hollow Mind (4th level), skeletons and spirits

• "Campaign Cases" -- Creature tokens! Terrain tiles! July!

D&D Movie directors now onscreen. The movie in March 2023 is called HONOR AMONG THIEVES.

• New D&D starter set. Comes with 'digital onboarding'. Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. We knew about that one.
• D&D digital monstrous compendium. Available to those with WoTC or D&D Beyond Accounts. Volume 1 has an eldritch lich and the 10 legged asteroid spider. And the starlancer. Might have misheard some of that!

• MMO Neverwinter video. Dragonslayer begins June 2022. (I wonder if they'll need a dragonance for that?)
• New D&D actual play video, Legends of the Multiverse. Lots of 80s cartoon style soft rock music. Boo is in it.

WIzKids skirmish game D&D Onslaught. October

Finally -- DRAGONLANCE WARRIORS OF KRYNN! SHADOW OF THE DRAGON QUEEN!

 

[humble minion]

I love DiTerlizzis' art (his 2e monstrous manual work more than the planescape work, admittedly), but I'm not sure how well it'd fit visually in a modern D&D product. There's a very distinct WotC aesthetic style these days, and that's not really a template DiTerlizzi is best known for working to (not that I'm terribly familar with his wider body of work). It's not like the TSR days when they assigned one artist to an entire campaign setting ("right Brom, you've got Dark Sun; Tony, planescape is yours...") and that artist could define the look and feel of the whole deal. Art is much more a team effort now.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I love DiTerlizzis' art (his 2e monstrous manual work more than the planescape work, admittedly), but I'm not sure how well it'd fit visually in a modern D&D product. There's a very distinct WotC aesthetic style these days, and that's not really a template DiTerlizzi is best known for working to (not that I'm terribly familar with his wider body of work). It's not like the TSR days when they assigned one artist to an entire campaign setting ("right Brom, you've got Dark Sun; Tony, planescape is yours...") and that artist could define the look and feel of the whole deal. Art is much more a team effort now.

With 5e, I feel like the art style is leaning heavily into the "if you can look at two pieces of art, it should be pretty easy to tell that they're from the same game, even if they're from completely different books". Most 5e art looks pretty similar to the art from a different 5e book. There are a few outliers to this - maps have never really had a consistent art style in 5e and their collaboration books (Acq. Inc., their Critical Role books, their Kobold Press books) have pretty different art styles from base 5e - but generally, if you can look at the art from a book like Tasha's and compare it style-wise to the art from Tomb of Annihilation or Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, they're going to look pretty similar.

From what I've seen of art from previous editions, especially the TSR era, this really wasn't what they were aiming for. Planescape looked very different from Dark Sun, which looked very different from Spelljammer, which looked really different from Ravenloft. Some people think this is a good thing, some think that it's a bad thing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Weren't you one of the people complaining about Radiant Citadel because of its cover art? Not that I don't think that art matters (I really didn't like how half of Eberron: Rising from the Last War's art was recycled from previous editions), but this statement just seems contrary to what you've said in recent threads.

I don't care for that art. That being said, I didn't want another adventure anthology, which was my main gripe against the book. Looking at it more closely, in the light that I now know its unlikely to replace Planescape, and certainly not Spelljammer (both concerns i had), i feel better about the book.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I love DiTerlizzis' art (his 2e monstrous manual work more than the planescape work, admittedly), but I'm not sure how well it'd fit visually in a modern D&D product. There's a very distinct WotC aesthetic style these days, and that's not really a template DiTerlizzi is best known for working to (not that I'm terribly familar with his wider body of work). It's not like the TSR days when they assigned one artist to an entire campaign setting ("right Brom, you've got Dark Sun; Tony, planescape is yours...") and that artist could define the look and feel of the whole deal. Art is much more a team effort now.

Everything you're saying is true, but I personally see no need (that would matter to me) to maintain a consistent art style across all of WotC's products. 2nd ed certainly didn't do that, and its still my favorite edition.

 

[teitan]

Failing to commission DiTerlizzi art for a new Planescape book, but employing him to do FR MtG stuff would be a great demonstration that current WotC management:

A) Don't give a single solitary... shake of a lamb's tail... about D&D art, which is something I've repeatedly asserted.

and

B) Particularly don't understand or care about Planescape, and would indicate that if they did do a 5E Planescape, it was purely a cash-grab.

So let's hope they're either not doing Planescape, or DiTerlizzi has also been employed for that, because otherwise we can probably expect a very very very very bad take on Planescape. Probably a variant on the Monte Cooke take on Planescape which is "Sigil is reduced to being basically a small city in the Midwest in terms of personality and function".

Couldn’t the same be said about the lack of Elmore, who was very important to the look of Dragonlance in the TSR era? While D. set the look of Planescape up Robh Ruppel was just as big, if not more so, a contributor to PS art as D. Really the success of Planescape was partially the graphic design though, as much as the art itself. The use of color, as a palette for the artwork and the general appearance of the product in and of itself made it stand out in a crowded market and that’s not really going to be a thing these days with WOTC having a house style. Eberron was defined by Wayne Reynolds’ artwork and design but in 5e is barely there.

 

[Parmandur]

Couldn’t the same be said about the lack of Elmore, who was very important to the look of Dragonlance in the TSR era? While D. set the look of Planescape up Robh Ruppel was just as big, if not more so, a contributor to PS art as D. Really the success of Planescape was partially the graphic design though, as much as the art itself. The use of color, as a palette for the artwork and the general appearance of the product in and of itself made it stand out in a crowded market and that’s not really going to be a thing these days with WOTC having a house style. Eberron was defined by Wayne Reynolds’ artwork and design but in 5e is barely there.

Actually, Rising from the Last War had a fair bit of Reynolds work...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Couldn’t the same be said about the lack of Elmore, who was very important to the look of Dragonlance in the TSR era?

No absolutely not. Elmore was ever-present/unavoidable in '80s fantasy as a whole - if anything his work on DL, whilst skilled, just made it look like "generic '80s fantasy", because he was right of the centre of what was "generic" back then. There are some strong individual pieces but no really differentiated style.

DiTerlizzi did some work for D&D prior to Planescape (notably the MC and Dragon Mountain), but his style was still developing, and he's what made Planescape look shockingly different to other products on the market.

While D. set the look of Planescape up Robh Ruppel was just as big, if not more so, a contributor to PS art as D. Really the success of Planescape was partially the graphic design though, as much as the art itself. The use of color, as a palette for the artwork and the general appearance of the product in and of itself made it stand out in a crowded market and that’s not really going to be a thing these days with WOTC having a house style.

I don't think the graphic design contributed quite as much as the art, but yeah it definitely helped, as did the colour choices - particularly the aged copper patina colour which was common in PS books - it was notable that later PS books deviated both in not having the DiTerlizzi art and not having the Ruppel colour-scheme (retaining the general approach to graphic design though), and looked like ass compared to the earlier ones as a result. So I'd say Ruppel's colour choices are key for his part of the equation. Ruppel's design as also less idiosyncratic for the mid-'90s than DiTerlizzi's art was. There's White Wolf stuff which looks a lot like Ruppel - there's no WW stuff that looks like DiTerlizzi (rather they had their own idiosyncratic artist, who now appears to have totally vanished - Joshua Gabriel Timbrook - no idea if he's dead, changed his name, locked in a mental asylum, or just quietly/happily working at a video game company or something - and losing him cost their books something, albeit his art style had got a bit... broad... by the end).

But you then did a bombing run on your own argument re: Ruppel by pointing out no matter how much he matters, the WotC D&D house style renders him irrelevant. Okay, I agree lol.

But it'd be absolutely bizarre to hire the defining artist of Planescape to do work on the Forgotten Realm MtG cards, but not on a Planescape D&D setting. As a I said, it would utterly confirm my assertion that WotC thinks MtG art matters and D&D art doesn't (which, if true, is only true because they refuse to pay for top-notch D&D art so consistently lol), and would point to an updated Planescape as a cash grab, as I said, not even worth the relatively small amount of money hiring DiTerlizzi to do some art for it would cost (and he still loves Planescape, btw, he's been very clear about it!). Especially when we're basically in a '90s revival (finally, after an ultra-extended '80s one).

 

[nyvinter]

Failing to commission DiTerlizzi art for a new Planescape book, but employing him to do FR MtG stuff would be a great demonstration that current WotC management:

While I do love DiTerlizzi's art, this is quite a misrepresentation. He's the one that doesn't want to go back and do a lot of Plnaescape art* and the reason for accepting to draw a DnD Magic Card was that it was a one-off.

(But I do agree there should be a lot more difference in style between the settings and not try to make everything fit into a particular "house style".)

*) After DiTerlizzi quit doing rpg stuff, it took until 2015 for him to paint a new tiefling, and that was for the Realms book.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

He's the one that doesn't want to go back and do a lot of Plnaescape art* and the reason for accepting to draw a DnD Magic Card was that it was a one-off.

No, that's literally not true AFAICT. He tweeted about how he loved Planescape a while back, and he even showed off some recent Planescape sketches, and had made a Spotify playlist to show people what he listened to when working on the original Planescape. I don't buy this as the actions of a man who "doesn't want to do Planescape art".

If you disagree I'd like to see a recent quote. There was definitely a decade+ period when he was totally burned out on RPG stuff and didn't want to do it, but that ended a long time ago.

I will say that there are other artists today who could do a sufficiently interesting and aligned style (or even something different but also cool), but the odds of WotC using them are approximately zero. I don't know if the problem is the art directors at WotC, but it's so consistent across multiple books that I suspect this is a WotC management-tier thing, above even D&D management, where WotC are given guidance that D&D books do not have expensive or highly original art in them, unless it's just shipped in from MtG and/or D&D art budgets are extremely constrained - but I think the extremely low-risk nature of D&D art in 5E (and 4E for that matter) points to some more intentional directive. What I'm hoping is D&D making bazillions of dollars means they maybe they can move to spending on art like MtG spends on art?

 

[StarFyre]

I love brom's darksun art and DiT planescape. Both my fav fantasy arts overall. Currently (but slowly) making borys of ebe based on brom's cover art for Valley of Dust & Fire. My fav dragon art of all time.

Not a fan of the art for 4e and 5e. While I liked some of the 3e era art, that's where it really started to look generic and bland.

SS