Critical Role The New D&D Book Is 'The Explorer's Guide to [Critical Role's] Wildemount!' By Matt Mercer

It looks like Amazon has leaked the title and description of the new D&D book a day early (unless it's all a fake-out by WotC) -- and it's a new D&D setting book called The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount; it's the Critical Role campaign setting, penned by Matt Mercer!

image from Critical Role wiki​

There's no cover image yet, so we're stuck with the "Coming Soon" image.

This book appeared without a title on Amazon last week, and a 'reveal' date of January 9th, which was then later delayed until January 13th. Amazon appears to have jumped the gun a day early.

Here's some information about Wildemount, which is a continent in the same world as Critical Role's other setting, Tal'Dorei. It is described by the official wiki has having "real-world Eastern European influence.... The Dwendalian Empire takes inspiration from 15th century Russia as well as Germanic nations in Central Europe (e.g., Prussia). Xhorhas has a more 13th-century Romanian flair. Outside of Wynandir, on the edges of the Dwendalian Empire, the cultures and peoples of those regions display a distinctly 14th-century Spanish flavor."

HOW DO YOU WANT TO DO THIS?

A war brews on a continent that has withstood more than its fair share of conflict. The Dwendalian Empire and the Kryn Dynasty are carving up the lands around them, and only the greatest heroes would dare stand between them. Somewhere in the far corners of this war-torn landscape are secrets that could end this conflict and usher in a new age of peace—or burn the world to a cinder.

Create a band of heroes and embark on a journey across the continent of Wildemount, the setting for Campaign 2 of the hit Dungeons & Dragons series Critical Role. Within this book, you’ll find new character options, a heroic chronicle to help you craft your character’s backstory, four different starting adventures, and everything a Dungeon Master needs to breathe life into a Wildemount-based D&D campaign…

• Delve through the first Dungeons & Dragons book to let players experience the game as played within the world of Critical Role, the world’s most popular livestreaming D&D show.
• Uncover a trove of options usable in any D&D game, featuring subclasses, spells, magic items, monsters, and more, rooted in the adventures of Exandria—such as Vestiges of Divergence and the possibility manipulating magic of Dunamancy.
• Start a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in any of Wildemount’s regions using a variety of introductory adventures, dozens of regional plot seeds, and the heroic chronicle system—a way to create character backstories rooted in Wildemount.

Explore every corner of Wildemount and discover mysteries revealed for the first time by Critical Role Dungeon Master, Matthew Mercer.

Critical Role's other setting, Tal'Dorei, was published a couple of years ago by Green Ronin. This brings the list of settings in official D&D books to five: Forgotten Realms, Ravnica, Ravenloft, Eberron, and Wildemount.

UPDATE! Barnes & Noble has the cover (but not the title or description).

 

[Reynard]

Kids today. Sadly, Champions, in print since 1982 or so, is only barely still in print.


The speed chart is not complex in play? I've played with gamers who played champions for a decade and they still needed help to figure out who goes next on the speed chart.

And the complexity of D&D is also in character gen: Just because the complexity of chargen is more "ongoing" in D&D doesn't change the idea that spell selection is just a facet of chargen.

That sentence sucks.... In Champions, you generally build a complete (superhero) character from scratch and rarely improve it in any significant manner afterward. In D&D terms, the start out at level 10 or 12 or so and you might gain a level or two after a game of a few years time. D&D spreads that chargen activity over levels so you learn all you can do over time, growing organically. That makes it, IMO, much simpler than the Champion style since you have nigh-infinite choice (it's a point buy system for everything all at once). Wrapping one's head around 200 pages of choice to spend 400+ "points" is not easy to explain quickly.

I think the complexity in D&D is in its exception based design principles, which HERO explicitly does not utilize.

But yeah, that speed chart can be a bear.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I didn't bold that section of my post, that was done by another poster replying to me. So thanks for reigning in the sarcasm; it was neither needed nor warranted.

I am only discussing 5e in this tangent to the thread. Not boardgames, not Dread, not any other game. Yes there are simpler RPGs and I run those too - I particularly enjoy Beyond The Wall - but when it comes to my experience teaching 5e to both newbies AND veterans then I can say it has been easy for both types of players.

Not to say that some new players don't find 5e complicated, I'm sure they do. This is why WoTC have produced an Essentials Kit to make starting 5e as easy as possible.

I'm the one who bolded it.

And, I am very curious how you plan to consider the complexity of the game if you never compare it to any other RPG.

I mean, the entire point of the discussion has seemed to be that DnD 5e is complex compared to other simpler RPGs, which you denied because it is simpler than more complex RPGs.... which no one disagreed with, but that didn't negate the point that in terms of relative complexity, 5e is a complex game.

That has been the entire point. DnD 5e is relatively complex. Not the most complex, but certainly not simple either. And, if your argument stems from "players from 3.5 seem to find it simple) your argument is invalid, because they are coming from a far more complex game.

Maybe this is true, but in this case I wonder why those people are not represented in this forum... I mean: why so many complains about this new book if "the majority of the fun base is enthusiast about it"? The only logic answer I find is that that majority doesn't stay in this forum. And this conclusion seems to me a little bit odd and denied by facts.
So it must exist another answer. But I cannot find it. Ideas?

Which facts do you think deny it? I've seen maybe 2 dozen posters in this thread. There might be a few hundred people on the site at any one time.

DnD has sold tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of books.

We are a sliver.

 

[JeffB]

Th
There's a distinct difference in design principles between Eberron and Dark Sun. The principal behind Eberron is that everything in the core books exists in the setting. This makes Eberron an ideal candidate for a 5e release; you can use everything if you want to; it's a type of more modern magitech setting which makes it different from vanilla D&D; and it's a popular setting.

Dark Sun in contrast is actually quite limiting in it's concept - yes it's distinctiveness makes it way outside the D&D norm and the apocalyptic scope is very appealing to a segment of the D&D audience. However, the setting would limit the material you could use with it and the scope of adventures would also be limited in contrast to Eberron. Dark Sun is therefore more 'niche' than Eberron, especially as you need an additional subset of rules - psionics - to do it justice. I would like to see 5e Dark Sun as well but I can see that Eberron is the smarter choice.

All true. Sadly- after WOTC's buyout of TSR* there was a decided shift to the Rules informing the Game World, instead of The Game World informing the Rules- which just gives us a whole lot of samey-settings because we wouldn't want to anger any players whose character race/class desire doesn't fit in with an old setting. Can't have any of that

*Sure we can say that it happened with the ToT in FR and all it's dumb changes because of 2E. But all the settings that came after in 2E were highly specialized and had a great many core elements removed/eliminated/not available in order to make the setting unique RL, BR, DS, SJ, PS, etc. 3E backpedaled, and so did 4E- and now with 5E , gotta make everything in the PHB canon for every bit of WOTC IP- it's all a part of the " shared experience"

Boring.

 

[3catcircus]

All true. Sadly- after WOTC's buyout of TSR* there was a decided shift to the Rules informing the Game World, instead of The Game World informing the Rules- which just gives us a whole lot of samey-settings because we wouldn't want to anger any players whose character race/class desire doesn't fit in with an old setting. Can't have any of that

*Sure we can say that it happened with the ToT in FR and all it's dumb changes because of 2E. But all the settings that came after in 2E were highly specialized and had a great many core elements removed/eliminated/not available in order to make the setting unique RL, BR, DS, SJ, PS, etc. 3E backpedaled, and so did 4E- and now with 5E , gotta make everything in the PHB canon for every bit of WOTC IP- it's all a part of the " shared experience"

Boring.

And I consider "the rules informing the game world" to definitely be a problem. In previous editions, they tried and failed to link all of the different settings together - it isn't hard to understand the idea that each campaign setting (Oerth, Faerun, Eberron, Krynn, Athas) could all be handled together using Spelljammer within a single universe while Planescape could tie them all across. The problem was that they just produced way too much content rather than a single all-in-one setting book - even during the 3e days when WotC was smarter about market research than TSR. Part of the problem is trying to bolt-on different rules in different campaign settings rather than expanding or modifying the existing rules. But that isn't the fault of the campaign setting - it's the fault of a core that doesn't particular work all that well to begin with - its always been primarily designed to work in an idealized western european medieval fantasy setting with very well-define PC and NPC "roles." At its basis, it can't actually even emulate a high-fantasy Lord of the Rings. For example, going back to the earliest iterations of D&D there is no way you could emulate Gandalf wielding Glamdring and it wasn't until 5e that you can come close to doing it. Just about any class-less skill-based RPG rules can emulate this easily.

So - in every D&D edition, when they try to use the rules to force the campaign setting they're going to be fairly unsuccessful. 2e was a little easier in this regard because of the large emphasis on story rather than rules, but 3e and 4e are exceptionally bad - everything gets bolted on in an ever-increasing set of rules. 5e has (rules-wise) been a breath of fresh air, going back to a streamlined set of rules that allows a DM to hand-wave or make up a rule on the spot to emulate a particular effect.

 

[dave2008]

Maybe this is true, but in this case I wonder why those people are not represented in this forum... I mean: why so many complains about this new book if "the majority of the fun base is enthusiast about it"? The only logic answer I find is that that majority doesn't stay in this forum. And this conclusion seems to me a little bit odd and denied by facts.
So it must exist another answer. But I cannot find it. Ideas?

Not really, just about every poll of the forum users here at EnWorld differs, often significantly from the polls / surveys of the General D&D playing populace. Just check out the recent surveys and forum polls on high level play. A lot more people on these forums play into high levels than what the global surveys / stats indicate.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I love this forum. It's my home away from home on the Internet. But message board forums went out of style many years ago. Most conversations moved to social media platforms long ago. The population here is disproportionately represented by older fans who were here before the shift to social media happened and stayed here.

Heh... yeah, come August I will be hitting Year 18 in my membership here on the boards. Started while Eric Noah was still previewing the run-up to 3E and have now remained through 3.5, 4E, and now 5E.

 

[generic]

Heh... yeah, come August I will be hitting Year 18 in my membership here on the boards. Started while Eric Noah was still previewing the run-up to 3E and have now remained through 3.5, 4E, and now 5E.

Completely off-topic, but has anyone ever told you that you have an excellent username?

 

[JeffB]

Started while Eric Noah was still previewing the run-up to 3E and have now remained through 3.5, 4E, and now 5E.

Same.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Completely off-topic, but has anyone ever told you that you have an excellent username?

Here? No. But I used it as my tag team name back when I did message board fantasy pro wrestling back in the early 2000s and people said they liked it then. But thank you! D.E.F. are my initials, so the word 'Defcon' has held a particular soft-spot in my heart since seeing in the movie Wargames.

And yes, Def Leppard is one of my favorite bands of all time too. LOL. Mos Def? Not so much though.

 

[gyor]

Wildemount at 304 pages is almost as big as E: RftLW which had 310 pages, even though Wildemount having only four major regions, no artificer class. This compares to E: RftLW which had feats, 8 races, 5 human kingdom, a Dwarf kingdom, halfling lands, Elf lands, a group of city states, and a Kingdom of monsters, and a Tiefling city state, its own set of special planes, other continents, Dragon Marked houses, Party Patrons, ect...

So I find myself wondering what is going to be in this book to fill up the difference. Dunamancy is unlikely to take up more space then all the Artificer stuff. The Heriic Background system is unlikely to be bigger then Party Patrons. Both have magic items. Cosmology is mentioned, but its mostly Exandia corner of the regular 5e cosmology.