Dungeons & Dragons Teases New Campaign Settings

Dungeons & Dragons seems to be preparing to explore brand new campaign settings. Last week, EN World had the opportunity to visit Wizards of the Coast headquarters and get new details about D&D's 2025 slate. While much of the focus was on the newly announced Eberron: Forge of the Artificer book or the upcoming pair of Forgotten Realms book, the D&D design team is also looking at expanding their official multiverse to include brand new worlds.

When asked about the decision to return to Eberron in 2025, the D&D design team noted that keeping the Fifth Edition ruleset allowed them to grow the game instead of rehash it. "One of the opportunities that we have by revising the game, as opposed blowing it up and starting over, is we can actually move forward," said Jeremy Crawford, game director . "And I can't wait until we can tell you about 2026 and 2027."

"With Jeremy Crawford taking on the game director role and then Chris Perkins taking on the creative director role is that we were able to really reestablish a world building environment," added Jess Lanzillo, VP of D&D Franchise at Wizards of the Coast. "What does that mean? We can really establish our worlds and settings like the Forgotten Realms and also look to creating new ones again. That's something that we are working on and we don't have anything to really discuss today other than to tell you like we are re-establishing everything that we have and we are going to make some new stuff too."

While Wizards of the Coast has integrated Magic: The Gathering worlds and Critical Role's Exandria as campaign settings for 5th Edition, D&D's last truly new campaign setting was Nentir Vale, a 'points of light' setting that established small bastions of civilization in an otherwise dark world. In 2023, D&D introduced the Radiant Citadel, a new city within the Ethereal Plane that was connected to numerous new civilizations and worlds briefly touched on in anthology books.

 

[Professor Murder]

I’ve been thinking about Domain play for Birthright and I think it could be a lot simpler than one would think to implement for a few reasons.

- Domain Actions could be repurposed as Down Time activities. Players have the choice to research that Magic item, train in a temple, or expand their guild holdings in a province or two, perhaps agitate a nearby province or conduct diplomacy. Twenty new downtime activities would be relatively easy to introduce without adding too much complexity or new subsystems.

- VTT and other online tools could make the administration of a kingdom a simple click of button. Calculating taxes, totally expenditure dealing with loyalty changes etc. I can definitely see a simple Domain sheet for Foundry or Beyond in the same way we have vehicle sheets and mounts.

- VTT could also make the visual aspect of the game easy - with the province map modifiable, able to click borders to change a provinces loyalty. Some really clever work could be done with this.

- The new origin feats and higher level feats are a natural fit for bloodline powers. An origin option and a two feat options would be plenty to represent the divine right of kings, while still giving a few options.

In essence, expanding on the Bastion rules, with some sort of political frameworks and systems.

 

[Yaarel]

Personally, I would love a modern near-future setting.

With Paladins as cops, and Wizards as tech.

 

[Yaarel]

If WotC does an honest to goodness new setting, I would like to see them do something radically different from other D&D settings.

Heh, radically different.

Give me a world of flying islands and airship pirates.

Flying islands and airship pirates: Spelljammer.

give me a aquatic setting.

Aquatic setting: astral sea? Spelljammer.

Give me super far future science fantasy.

Far future science fantasy: Spelljammer.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Personally, I would love a modern near-future setting.

With Paladins as cops, and Wizards as tech.

Paladins as cops would be an incredibly different universe to the one we're in damn. Hard to think of a class more likely to come into hard conflict with police (of really any era or locale) than one which has a very strict and unshakeable moral and ethical code, and desire to get involved in other people's business.

 

[Epic Meepo]

That is the part that gets people mad.
/Spelljammer, Planescape and Ravenloft enter the chat.

hides file containing homebrew Spelljammer-Planescape-Ravenloft mashup/reboot

Nothing to see here. Carry on, folks.

 

[Yaarel]

Paladins as cops would be an incredibly different universe to the one we're in damn. Hard to think of a class more likely to come into hard conflict with police (of really any era or locale) than one which has a very strict and unshakeable moral and ethical code, and desire to get involved in other people's business.

One cop can be so different from an other.

Hopefully most of them are professional, at least.

A few are heroic and ethical.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Heh, radically different.


Flying islands and airship pirates: Spelljammer.


Aquatic setting: astral sea? Spelljammer.


Far future science fantasy: Spelljammer.

The trouble is here that Spelljammer is maybe the single least-developed actual "setting" book WotC D&D has ever put out. It's genuinely incredible how little there is to it. It could have been so good, but WotC had insane ideas about the format.

 

[Yaarel]

The trouble is here that Spelljammer is maybe the single least-developed actual "setting" book WotC D&D has ever put out. It's genuinely incredible how little there is to it. It could have been so good, but WotC had insane ideas about the format.

A future product can present Spelljammer as a way to hop between alignment Outer Planes, each one having various inner planes appearing as a flying island in the Astral Sea, that is larger within its interior than the approach to it from the exterior.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

One cop can be so different from an other.

Hopefully most of them are professional, at least.

A few are heroic and ethical.

Intuitional issues are very big with police forces through history and across national boundaries so the whole "Oh one cop can be different from another!" is a bit of a canard, isn't it? Because a good cop in a compromised organisation (which is basically most police forces, worldwide, and again, through history) is functionally a bad cop or a cop who gets fired.

And Paladins of the same faith/type have to ALL subscribe to the same exact values and code, which go, far, far beyond mere "professionalism". Paladins don't just let things go either, and the way we choose to have police operates means the vast majority of crimes just get written down and then have no action whatsoever taken to deal with them, or absolutely de minimis action. That's not politics or opinion - that's just demonstrable hard cold fact about how police operate, and I can back it up with statistics.

Having a bunch of religious-mandated guys who are literally bound to a code of rules that they can't violate without dire consequences doing this would have wildly different outcomes.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

A future product can present Spelljammer as a way to hop between alignment Outer Planes, each one having various inner planes appearing as a flying island that is larger within its interior than the approach to it from the exterior.

It could, but it won't. Modern WotC aren't going to loop back in the way TSR would have, or even 3E WotC might have.