Marathon, Broadway, and Catacomb: Upcoming D&D Products?

DEFCON 1 · Dec 18, 2017

My prediction (updated):

Marathon will still be a planar gazeteer, talking about the Feywild, Shadowfell, Astral, Elemental Planes (and E Chaos), and the Outer Planes. It will include a whole mass of races and racial variants, many of which are geared towards the various planes and/or the various campaign settings. We've already gotten a bunch of Tieflings (which align to the nine layers of hell), the Eladrin (connected to the Feywild) various Elves (including one specifically called out as Greyhawkian, and the Shadar-Kai listed as Shadowfellian), and both Gith (identified in the D&D Beyond video with Mearls as Astral based). I also wouldn't be surprised if we get some info on Shifters and Warforged, maybe a wild halfling variant from Dark Sun, maybe the Thri-kreen, maybe the Minotaur gets his official book debut etc. There also may or may not be specific information about the other campaign settings (although I tend to doubt it). It'll probably be identified as something like 'Primus' Guide To The Planes', where it's all about the Modron walkabout across the multiverse (with the added pun of races being the primary player-geared information.

With both Broadway and Catacomb being listed as "Adventures"... I think these might actually be a pair of APs that are both thematically similar, but cover different functions that WotC's been hinting at as wanting to do-- other settings *and* high-level adventures.

I still think Broadway could be referencing Sigil-- bright lights, big city. It would be a planar-hopping adventure, most likely high-level. Maybe starting at 10 and getting up to 17 to 20. Obviously it would make use of a lot of the planar information we would have received both in Xanathar's (Horizon Walker, anyone?) and the Marathon book. Then for Catacomb (aka 'Dungeon')... they realized they didn't have enough "campaign setting specific" player content from Greyhawk, Eberron, Dark Sun and Dragonlance to fill an entire book. So while yes, we'll get the Mystic; yes we'll get the Artificer; yes, there might be wizard subclasses for the three Dragonlance wizard schools, and rules for Defiling/Preserving, and Dragonmarks... but to use all of this stuff *and* to give players lower-level adventures if they didn't want to do high-level plane-hopping... they give us a dungeon adventure set in each of the four settings (and they open all four settings to the DMsGuild.) Whether these would be "reprints" of revious Greyhawk, Eberron, Dark Sun, and Dragonlance modules, or they'd be newly written by various people, I don't know.

But at the end of 2018... I'm fairly certain we're getting planar information, psionics, artificing, and a high-level adventure somewhere somehow. Because that's everything that's been hinted at by Mearls, Perkins, Stewart, Tito and the rest.

Parmandur · Dec 18, 2017

DEFCON 1 said:
My prediction (updated):

Marathon will still be a planar gazeteer, talking about the Feywild, Shadowfell, Astral, Elemental Planes (and E Chaos), and the Outer Planes. It will include a whole mass of races and racial variants, many of which are geared towards the various planes and/or the various campaign settings. We've already gotten a bunch of Tieflings (which align to the nine layers of hell), the Eladrin (connected to the Feywild) various Elves (including one specifically called out as Greyhawkian, and the Shadar-Kai listed as Shadowfellian), and both Gith (identified in the D&D Beyond video with Mearls as Astral based). I also wouldn't be surprised if we get some info on Shifters and Warforged, maybe a wild halfling variant from Dark Sun, maybe the Thri-kreen, maybe the Minotaur gets his official book debut etc. There also may or may not be specific information about the other campaign settings (although I tend to doubt it). It'll probably be identified as something like 'Primus' Guide To The Planes', where it's all about the Modron walkabout across the multiverse (with the added pun of races being the primary player-geared information.

With both Broadway and Catacomb being listed as "Adventures"... I think these might actually be a pair of APs that are both thematically similar, but cover different functions that WotC's been hinting at as wanting to do-- other settings *and* high-level adventures.

I still think Broadway could be referencing Sigil-- bright lights, big city. It would be a planar-hopping adventure, most likely high-level. Maybe starting at 10 and getting up to 17 to 20. Obviously it would make use of a lot of the planar information we would have received both in Xanathar's (Horizon Walker, anyone?) and the Marathon book. Then for Catacomb (aka 'Dungeon')... they realized they didn't have enough "campaign setting specific" player content from Greyhawk, Eberron, Dark Sun and Dragonlance to fill an entire book. So while yes, we'll get the Mystic; yes we'll get the Artificer; yes, there might be wizard subclasses for the three Dragonlance wizard schools, and rules for Defiling/Preserving, and Dragonmarks... but to use all of this stuff *and* to give players lower-level adventures if they didn't want to do high-level plane-hopping... they give us a dungeon adventure set in each of the four settings (and they open all four settings to the DMsGuild.) Whether these would be "reprints" of revious Greyhawk, Eberron, Dark Sun, and Dragonlance modules, or they'd be newly written by various people, I don't know.

But at the end of 2018... I'm fairly certain we're getting planar information, psionics, artificing, and a high-level adventure somewhere somehow. Because that's everything that's been hinted at by Mearls, Perkins, Stewart, Tito and the rest.

Slight problem with this prediction: based on what Mearls & co. said at Gameholecon, "Marathon" was already basically finished. The Planar test material is probably due for "Catacomb," as I don't believe the"Adventure"/"Accessory" designation from this sourse (it has Out of the Abyss down as an "Accessory," for instance). If we are getting multiple Adventure books, "Marathon" would probably be it. But time will tell.

DEFCON 1 · Dec 18, 2017

Parmandur said:
Slight problem with this prediction: based on what Mearls & co. said at Gameholecon, "Marathon" was already basically finished.

Heh... well, I consider racial mechanics to be so inconsequential to design that they could already have everything written, the Alpha testers having already hammered the mechanics out... that all was left was deciding how many of these racial variants needed to actually appear in the book. So they throw out a UA to let us say "Like this one" / "Don't like this one"... and then they decide which ones to edit out of the completed document.

After all... there were enough small goofs in Xanathar's (like the d8/d6 issue between the chart and the written text, and the unnecessary "magic weapon" phrasing in the Arcane Archer feature) which tell me they still do edits right up until the end... which is why there aren't enough final editing passes to catch these obvious problems.

So the next book could easily be completely written... and now all that's left is layout. And once you do that and you see where your pictures fall on the page, you start editing/removing your text to get it to fit where it needs to go. If that means taking out one of the six elf racial variants... you throw them out to us so we can tell them which one we don't care about.

Quickleaf · Dec 18, 2017

I agree that McNally Robinson misses the boat when it comes to typing the D&D products. For instance, Curse of Strahd is described as "A Dungeons & Dragons Sourcebook."

One interesting thing about McNally Robinson is that when you search for products from "Wizards RPG Team", Tales from the Yawning Portal shows up under its original code name "Labyrinth": see here

[SBLOCK=Screen snapshot]

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While Broadway is definitely an adventure (given that they're releasing dice for it like Tomb of Annihilation), the pricing & page-count of "Catacomb" being the same as "Broadway" ($65.95 Canadian, 256 pgs) suggest it may also be an adventure. Maybe they are bucking the trend and putting out two adventure books just two months apart!

If "Catacomb" is essentially a Tales from the Yawning Portal 2, then I'd wager a guess at what we'd find inside...

If you compare the adventures in TftYP to the 30 Greatest Adventures of All Time (acc. to Dungeon magazine), you see several overlaps...

• G1-3: Against the Giants #1 (as part of "Queen of the Spiders")
• Dead in Thay
• Forge of Fury
• C1: Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan #13
• Sunless Citadel
• S1: Tomb of Horrors #3
• S2: White Plume Mountain #22

So it would make sense to see several other adventures from Dungeon's list appear in a hypothetical Tales from the Yawning Portal 2... But which ones? Let's rule some out first...

Adventures already adapted
I6: Ravenloft was already turned into Curse of Strahd
T1-4: Temple of Elemental Evil/Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil already were adapted to Princes of the Apocalypse
B2: Keep on the Borderlands is being converted by Goodman Games as part of their classic collector’s edition including B1, http://goodman-games.com/blog/2017/03/26/classic-dd-module-collectors-editions/ Seems likely that B4: The Lost City will be also part of their conversions.

Adventures too large for a compilation
Desert of Desolation (I3-5)… 128 pgs
Dead Gods…176 pgs
Gates of Firestorm Peak… 96 pgs
Scourge of the Slave Lords (A1-4)… 128 pgs
The Ruins of Undermountain… 128 pgs + 32 pgs

Tournament Modules that probably don’t translate well to modern gaming
Castle Amber (X2)
Ghost Tower of Inverness (C2)

Setting-specific adventures
Dragons of Despair (DL1)
The City of Skulls (WGR6)

Adventures that aren’t about dungeons (assuming "Catacomb" is a hint)
The Assassin’s Knot (L2)

So what does that leave? I think it would be reasonable to expect to see 3-4 of the following adventures in a hypothetical Tales from the Yawning Portal 2...

Queen of Spiders (GDQ1-7), specifically Descent into the Depths of the Earth (D1), Shrine of the Kuo-toa (D2), and Vault of the Drow (D3), as a logical continuation of the “Against the Giants” conversion that appeared in TftYP.
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (S3)
Dwellers of the Forbidden City (I1)
The Isle of Dread (X1)
Against the Cult of the Reptile God (N1)
Dark Tower
The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (S4)
The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (WG4)
City of the Spider Queen
The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (U1)

Parmandur · Dec 18, 2017

DEFCON 1 said:
Heh... well, I consider racial mechanics to be so inconsequential to design that they could already have everything written, the Alpha testers having already hammered the mechanics out... that all was left was deciding how many of these racial variants needed to actually appear in the book. So they throw out a UA to let us say "Like this one" / "Don't like this one"... and then they decide which ones to edit out of the completed document.

After all... there were enough small goofs in Xanathar's (like the d8/d6 issue between the chart and the written text, and the unnecessary "magic weapon" phrasing in the Arcane Archer feature) which tell me they still do edits right up until the end... which is why there aren't enough final editing passes to catch these obvious problems.

So the next book could easily be completely written... and now all that's left is layout. And once you do that and you see where your pictures fall on the page, you start editing/removing your text to get it to fit where it needs to go. If that means taking out one of the six elf racial variants... you throw them out to us so we can tell them which one we don't care about.

Well, certainly they aren't using the UA for fine-tuning: that's why I doubt that we will the past few months material in "Marathon": these are "do you want this?" articles, which fit better with "Catacomb" timing wise. Whatever "Marathon" might be, they would have passed the "fo people want this?" phase a while back. If it isn't Adventure material, I reckon monster book is a likely guess: they know we want monsters.

Demetrios1453 · Dec 19, 2017

Quickleaf said:
T1-4: Temple of Elemental Evil/Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil already were adapted to Princes of the Apocalypse

I agree with much of what you have said, other than this. If Against the Giants can appear in a compilation even after the release of Storm King's Thunder, then I can't see why ToEE can't appear after PoA. Both pairs are significantly different to merit the original being republished...

Quickleaf · Dec 19, 2017

Demetrios1453 said:
I agree with much of what you have said, other than this. If Against the Giants can appear in a compilation even after the release of Storm King's Thunder, then I can't see why ToEE can't appear after PoA. Both pairs are significantly different to merit the original being republished...

Well, there's a big page count difference there - a very relevant consideration for a compilation like TftYP.

Against the Giants was 32 pages. The whole Temple of Elemental Evil was 128 pages.

I could see just T1 The Village of Hommlet (24 pages) being included in a theoretic TftYP #2, however.

Kretz · Dec 19, 2017

Honestly, I can't see WotC doing something bold or original for a change. They seem to be treading a safe and carefully laid down path, nostalgia-heavy but still easily accessible for new players (not an easy task if you think about it), so I very much doubt we'll get any setting-specific books or brand new material. Rather, I am betting on more classic adventures revisited, loosely set (or retconned) on FR, but with some setting-specific "flavor" added to it, which could be easily shoehorned in any scenario you may like. Tomb of Annihilation was retconned in FR and gave us that tortoise-thing playable race, so I think they could easily revamp some old classic and throw in Warforged and the Artificer class for a "pulp-style" product, or psionics and thri-kreen for a desert adventure. WotC seem to be playing safe - too safe for my tastes, but it probably makes sense business-wise.

Cheers

Parmandur · Dec 19, 2017

Quickleaf said:
Well, there's a big page count difference there - a very relevant consideration for a compilation like TftYP.

Against the Giants was 32 pages. The whole Temple of Elemental Evil was 128 pages.

I could see just T1 The Village of Hommlet (24 pages) being included in a theoretic TftYP #2, however.

Do note the Dark Tower was Judges Guild, though maybe Goodman will do a 5E conversion of old JG material.

You could throw in ToEE in with Tsjocanth & Tharizdun (Hommet, the Temple and Tsjocanhj pulled double duty as WG1-3, apparently), maybe add Castle Maure, and you'd have a solid campaign that is also perfectly modular.

I could also see the following being a good mix of either a straight campaign or series of modular bits:

Against the Cult of the Reptile God
Dwellers of the Forbidden City
Ghost Tower of Iverness (heck, they've said they will be putting our more old school tourney style material based on AL feedback)
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
D1-3
Queen of the Demonweb Pits

They might want to do 2E or 3E material, too. Time will tell if they do another like TftYP.

Parmandur · Dec 19, 2017

Quickleaf said:
Well, there's a big page count difference there - a very relevant consideration for a compilation like TftYP.

Against the Giants was 32 pages. The whole Temple of Elemental Evil was 128 pages.

I could see just T1 The Village of Hommlet (24 pages) being included in a theoretic TftYP #2, however.

To add some more fuel to this speculation, Mearls was asked about TftYP on his Reddit AMA running right now, and said that TftYP was very successful, and he wouldn't be surprised to see something similar done again...

Marathon, Broadway, and Catacomb: Upcoming D&D Products?

DEFCON 1

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Parmandur

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Quickleaf

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Parmandur

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Demetrios1453

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Kretz

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