D&D (2024) New D&D Edition's Player’s Handbook Cover Reveal

Game Informer has revealed the cover to the 2024 Player’s Handbook.

The cover features a gold dragon behind the old-school D&D characters Strongheart the paladin, Mercion the cleric, Elkhorn the dwarf fighter, and Molliver the thief. Ringlerun the wizard is absent (then again he got his showcase on one of the 1E AD&D Player's Handbooks), but a drow mage appears to have joined the party!

 

[Chaosmancer]

LitRPGs make me.feel old and cranky.

Fair, but I am an unabashed massive fan of the genre. It combines things I love like DnD the Game with storytelling, and it tends to be both funny and epic at the same time. There are a lot of poorly written schlock stories out there, but at its best? At its best these stories hit a need in me.

 

[Parmandur]

Fair, but I am an unabashed massive fan of the genre. It combines things I love like DnD the Game with storytelling, and it tends to be both funny and epic at the same time. There are a lot of poorly written schlock stories out there, but at its best? At its best these stories hit a need in me.

I am sure you are right, I just find it...very confusing?

 

[Parmandur]

@Chaosmancer and to be clear, not in a "I don't get it, so it must be bad" way. Just trying to follow along when I've tried it is befeddling and leave me wondering at what I'm missing.

 

[occam]

It never was.

It's Space Opera, a different field than Science Fiction.

It's not differentiated out from the Science Fiction section all that often though, but then, why would it be when retailers places groupings like Fantasy and Science fiction together.

Space Opera is basically fantasy in a Space Like Setting, rather than using any science as a basis or even keeping to the laws of physics and reality.

Other examples would be things like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and others.

Star Wars is space opera, but the fantasy elements aren't what make it that:

Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, with use of melodramatic, risk-taking space adventures, relationships, and chivalric romance. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it features technological and social advancements (or lack thereof) in faster-than-light travel, futuristic weapons, and sophisticated technology, on a backdrop of galactic empires and interstellar wars with fictional aliens, often in fictional galaxies.

There's plenty of straight-up science fiction that counts as space opera. Star Trek is space opera. The Foundation series is space opera, as is the Dune series, Niven's Known Space, Saberhagen's Berserker series, Pournelle's CoDominium stories, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, etc. At least some of that is considered hard SF.

 

[Chaosmancer]

@Chaosmancer and to be clear, not in a "I don't get it, so it must be bad" way. Just trying to follow along when I've tried it is befeddling and leave me wondering at what I'm missing.

Nah, I get you.

I know a lot of the ones I read early on were based in MMORPGs so I was lost... quite a few times, since I'm just not up on the lingo. In many ways, I think it is a genre still finding its legs.