The New D&D Adventure Storyline Will Be Announced On June 2nd-3rd

WotC is holding an event, which they're calling the Stream of Annihilation, on June 2nd and 3rd to announce the new D&D storyline. Various D&D Twitch steamers have been invited to participate in the upcoming campaign, which will be live streamed along with interviews, and so on. "We’ll have folks from Misscliks, Maze Arcana, Critical Role, and Dice, Camera, Action! with Chris Perkins, not to mention international gaming groups like Yogscast's HighRollers (U.K.) and Dragon Friends (Australia)." You'll be able to watch it all live on Twitch at the time. Is this where we'll discover the identity of the mysterious Dust and Midway? Speculate away!

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Here's the announcement in full. There's more info about the hosts and the guests here.

Dungeons & Dragons loves the amazing video streams produced by our fans. This community-generated live-play highlights what’s fantastic about D&D—sitting down together with your friends to tell a grand story!


To celebrate, we’ve invited a bunch of D&D streamers and luminaries to Seattle, Washington to hang out and roll some dice on June 2nd and 3rd! This two-day event is called the Stream of Annihilation and it’s two full days of streaming that D&D fans won’t want to miss. We’ll have folks from Misscliks, Maze Arcana, Critical Role, and Dice, Camera, Action! with Chris Perkins, not to mention international gaming groups like Yogscast's HighRollers (U.K.) and Dragon Friends (Australia).
[h=3]PROGRAMMING[/h]Kicking off at 10am on both June 2nd and 3rd, hosts Anna Prosser Robinson and Kelly Link will talk to the Wizards of the Coast D&D team and learn all about our next exciting storyline coming in September. Then each group of streamers will play or share a sample of what to expect from the campaigns they’ll be running over the summer that preview the new D&D story. There will be multiple live games, interviews, new product unveils and improvised hilarity each day, starting at 10am PT and ending at 10pm each night. You’ll get introduced to the High Rollers crew delving into uncharted territory DMed by Mark Hulmes, a new Misscliks show investigating rumors called Risen, two weekly groups from our friends Satine Phoenix and Ruty Rutenberg at Maze Arcana, a new group of L.A. actors called Girls Guts Glory, and more!


Throughout the Stream of Annihilation, we’ll drop details on our expanded D&D Twitch programming, new accessories fans have been clamoring for coming later this year, and amazing board games and products from our partners. You’ll hear from Cryptic Studios about plans for Neverwinter, Curse Media for D&D Beyond, as well as WizKids, Gale Force 9, Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, and more. Plus, like any Dungeon Master worth their salt, we have a few exciting surprises to pull from our bags of holding!
[h=3]FURTHER DETAILS[/h]You’ll have to watch the Stream of Annihilation to catch it all live! Follow twitch.tv/DnD to get all the updates, then mark your calendars for Friday, June 2nd and Saturday, June 3rd to make sure you don’t miss a thing!


A full schedule, group bios and some more of the celebrities attending the Stream of Annihilation will be announced over the next few weeks. We’ll also be talking about the event on our official Twitter account (@Wizards_DnD) as well as interviewing some of the groups this month on Dragon Talk, the official D&D podcast.

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[darjr]

Multiverse. Does that mean planescape?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Multiverse. Does that mean planescape?

Yes it does.

Sent from my LG-D852 using EN World mobile app

 

[Charles Rampant]

I think that I see it more like Comics. At the moment they're focusing heavily on Metropolis, doing Superman stories and Supergirl stories and the like. Metropolis is a useful place, it's got name recognition and a nice pairing of generic vibe with highly specific flavour when you drill deep down. So they can have lots of stories there. But they also have other cities available - Coast City got its own story, and that was well received and had its own flavour. So soon they'll head to Gotham, have some stories there perhaps, and in the process make it clear that, hey, there's a road between Gotham and Metropolis - this isn't a totally different place, it's all connected.

So the multiverse is not Planescape in a narrow sense, though yes Planescape is a part of the multiverse. Instead, it's a sign that they absolutely do want to bring in Dragonlance et al., but in a way that is useful to building a core story. They don't want you to identify as a Dragonlance player who happens to use 5e; they want Dragonlance to be a part of the identity built into 5e. The quotes in the PHB definitely suggest that, also the way that they keep tying the new books into old stories.

To put it another way: saying 'D&D multiverse' is a way of referring to the disparate bits of lore, story, emotional baggage that decades of adventures, rulebooks, and novels have given the game. The goal is to connect those disparate parts together into a single whole, albeit one with different tones in different places. The same shared experience, if you will, rather than ten different experiences that just happen to share a d20 system.

 

[Mortellan]

Two, actually. *cough*

You are correct sir, sorry for that personal slight!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm of the opinion that any 5e AP success has less to to with being in the FR or the inherent quality of the adventure and more the fact that 5e is a good set of rules.

Because it's a good set of rules you can show that off by having a variety of settings and specific rules to accommodate that. But WotC doesn't do that. Always setting an adventure in the Realms and always having the same rules set yields a bland sameness.

Also, Chris Perkins' reason to set everything in the Realms is bogus. Is does not imply ought. Just because the Realms can accommodate all sorts of adventures because it's a kitchen sink doesn't mean you must set them there.

WotC can do what it wants but their strategy seems so narrowly focused and unimaginative.

Also, there are adventure stories that don't work that well in FR, but work great in Eberron or Dark Sun.

Also also, there are no adventure story types that work in FR but not in Eberron.

I'm hopeful, though, with Mearls having said that his two favorite settings are Greyhawk and Eberron.

 

[Mouseferatu]

You are correct sir, sorry for that personal slight!

We shall discuss penance at a later date.

 

[Staffan]

Also also, there are no adventure story types that work in FR but not in Eberron.

IMO, neither Tyranny of Dragons, Out of the Abyss, nor Storm King's Thunder would work well in Eberron. I mean, you could squeeze them in, but they'd be poor fits.

Tyranny of Dragons relies on having a relatively large number of evil/chromatic dragons working together with a cult to summon a deity. In Eberron, dragons are mostly off on a different continent, mainly focused on interpreting the snippets of prophecy that show itself in the world, and are not alignment-coded by color. Sure, there are renegade dragons (which is mostly a nod so you can justify adventures with random dragons in them, like the Sunless Citadel), but rarely organized like this.

Out of the Abyss is heavily based around both drow (which are very different in Eberron, and generally surface-dwelling on a different continent rather than underdark-dwelling) and demon lords. "Traditional" demon lords in Eberron are mostly off on their own planes, not too bothered with the goings-on on the Material Plane, and fiendish Overlords birthed by the primordial dragon Khyber at the dawn of time tend to me more conceptual than physical, like the ones in OotA.

Storm King's Thunder has giants roaming across the land, seeking to rearrange the Ordning. Again, Eberron giants are mostly off on their own continent (the same as the drow), and there's no Ordning to rearrange.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

Also, there are adventure stories that don't work that well in FR, but work great in Eberron or Dark Sun.

Also also, there are no adventure story types that work in FR but not in Eberron.

I'm hopeful, though, with Mearls having said that his two favorite settings are Greyhawk and Eberron.

Nothing says "Eberron" like a bunch of gods running around causing trouble.

 

[xanstin]

Isn't Perkins a self professed Spelljammer fan or am I confusing him with someone else?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Unless they up their release schedule to at least double, or even triple, what they release now, I cannot see them doing anything outside of FR for a long time. Do they really want to see their annual sales drop majorly just to put out a setting book and maybe one or two adventure books for a less popular D&D world, meaning no FR material potentially for a full year? Then there is also the fact that everything released adventure-wise still has to tie in somehow to the Neverwinter MMO and into AL play. With the current release rate, I still see something with Planescape as the only viable non-FR product that could come out soon, and that is only because they can be tied to the Realms much easier than any of their other settings.