Why Dungeons & Dragons Isn't Putting Out a Campaign Book in 2025

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Wizards of the Coast is not putting out a Dungeons & Dragons campaign book in 2025. Despite adding two more books to its D&D release schedule, there are no plans to release a new full-length campaign book. During a press event at Wizards' headquarters, EN World asked about why the D&D design team had chosen to skip over a campaign book for first time in a decade. "

"This year we have focused on providing, rather than one large adventure, many adventure options because you'll actually see there are more sort of discrete adventure options than we typically do in a year," said Jeremy Crawford, lead rules designer for Dungeons & Dragons. "So you're going to have not only the 10 adventures in Dragon Delves with three possible campaigns, you also have the adventure options in Eberron, you have the adventure options in the Starter Set, and you have a bunch of adventure options in the Forgotten Realms Adventure Guide. So in many ways, we are flooding you with adventure options."

Crawford added that the D&D design team is always experimenting with their releases and that yearly campaign releases didn't always allow players to finish up the previous campaign. "So we're looking at tempos that map to how people actually play," Crawford said. "And we find that often, especially with DMs who like to create their own adventure material, they often have a greater need for sort of micro material that they can swap around. They can build things the way they like. That's what we're doing this year."

Finally, Crawford noted that one of the advantages to continuing Fifth Edition rather than launching a brand new edition meant that players could continue to use existing campaigns. "We have a whole library of epic campaigns that people can play, including last year's Vecna: Eve of Ruin, and those are all playable with the new core books," Crawford said. "And so we've embraced that for 2025, that there's a whole bookshelf of these epic campaigns that people can pick up and play, and we know there are among those campaigns surely one or two that even the most dedicated 5e group hasn't played yet."

However, Crawford noted that the D&D team wasn't moving away from campaigns forever. "For the life of 5th edition, we've never believed in there's like only one way to do it and that's how we do it every year," Crawford said. "Just because there isn't a campaign book this year doesn't mean we're not doing them."
 

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Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer

Despite my snark, while adventure compilations like Quests from the Infinite Staircase and Tales from the Yawning Portal are really useful because you can lift small chunks for a night or three's gaming, it's still a hit to the pocketbook to be buying a book that you might only use 1 out of 5 adventures. I would really like to see the old single adventure paperbacks make a return in some form - maybe one a quarter or two a year. They could build up a stable of new adventures that isn't overwhelming, but might become somewhat revered like the old 1E-2E-3E standalone ones gained. They could, of course, still be (loosely) chained to work together, but could also be mixed or matched or just stopped/started wherever folks wanted, rather than locking them into a commitment for half a year or more that you have with the bigger "campaign adventures".

Realistically, due to how expensive print has become, that sort of product only makes sense to do digitally. Even print-on-demand single-adventure paperbacks would be quite pricy.
 

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Three of those are starter sets and one is not appropriate for all (even most) campaigns (Radiant Citadel).

While my preference would be for individual modules over anthologies, the anthologies are a good thing and should continue.

My only problem with KP's lairs books is they require associated monster books, making them pretty expensive for not being sure you can get use out of them.
Most, if not all, the monsters are available online:


They're also pretty reskinnable.

Starter set adventures, for me, are just as useful as small drop-in adventures. Thousands of campaigns built off of Phandelver.
 

I have nothing against the campaign books, but I hope they publish they less and give more attention to it. I would rather have a Curse of Strahd every two years than an Eve of Ruin every year.

I enjoy the campaign books too, but there has been an undeniable drop in their quality over the past 4 years and for that reason alone I'm glad to see them pumping the breaks for a year. I hope when they do release another one it'll be more coherent than recent stuff like Turn of Fortune's Wheel, Phandelver & Below, and Vecna: Eve of Ruin. I have to go back to 2021 at this point (Witchlight) to find one that I unreservedly think was good (I do kinda like Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen - it's flawed, but WAY better than something like Phandelver & Below).

Having said that, I feel like they had teased that we were getting a campaign adventure involving the Red Wizards of Thay this year, so I guess that's off.
 


Realistically, due to how expensive print has become, that sort of product only makes sense to do digitally. Even print-on-demand single-adventure paperbacks would be quite pricy.
That's fine too. These things don't need to take up space on my shelf, and I can access them at the table through my Kindle Fire anyway.
 

I’m not familiar with adventure league modules but was for Pathfinder Society. For a few bucks probably many free now you got a nice 4 hour adventure. A really good source to mine that is often overlooked imo.
They're up to $8.99 now, though there's other ways to get them. Event organizer get them free from Paizo if your store is a registered participant in the program or you can also get them for free if you have enough product lines being subscribed to directly from them. Or you can find them eventually in a Humble Bundle, like the one a few months ago that had an entire year's worth of them in the $30 tier.
 


lately the quality of the short modules is way better than the campaign books.
Yeah this is absolutely spot-on. And I think it's kind of true generally - it's lot practically easier and more doable to right a really cool and together short module/adventure than it is to construct an entire campaign, especially with page limits. If we look at all the campaigns for all the RPGs out there, and we do so as objectively as humanly possible, without letting nostalgia or "well it's the only campaign for this game, so it's cool on that basis!" bias us too much, then I think we'll find most campaigns for most games are kind... bleh... and that shorter adventures tend to be of a higher standard, particularly post-2010.
 

Yeah this is absolutely spot-on. And I think it's kind of true generally - it's lot practically easier and more doable to right a really cool and together short module/adventure than it is to construct an entire campaign, especially with page limits. If we look at all the campaigns for all the RPGs out there, and we do so as objectively as humanly possible, without letting nostalgia or "well it's the only campaign for this game, so it's cool on that basis!" bias us too much, then I think we'll find most campaigns for most games are kind... bleh... and that shorter adventures tend to be of a higher standard, particularly post-2010.
What is the objective “bleh” scale exactly?
 

What is the objective “bleh” scale exactly?
I don't get what you're asking.

Attempting to be objective isn't the same thing has having an "objective scale" or some nonsense lol. My main point there is that a lot of campaigns people pretend are good for non-D&D games are in fact pretty awful, if we look at the actual design of them, or even just play them without the DM working extremely hard behind the scenes to plaster over the cracks, but a combination of nostalgia and the fact that many games only have one or two campaigns for them (if that) mean people hold them up as better than they are.

I'm looking at you, CoC and oWoD, when I say this.
 

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