D&D General Teased Lorwyn-Shadowmoor Supplement Crosses Magic: the Gathering and D&D

WotC has teased an upcoming Magic: The Gathering / Dungeons & Dragons crossover supplement. No info has been given other than a mention of Lorwyn-Shadowmoor and an art piece by Jesper Ejsing.

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Lorwyn-Shadowmoor is a Magic: the Gathering plane. The official MtG page for it describes it as:

Lorwyn is an idyllic world where races of fable thrive in perpetual midsummer. Its dark reflection, Shadowmoor, exists in perpetual gloom, its citizens bitterly transformed and locked in a desperate battle for survival.

Lorwyn is the land where the sun never set. Covered with dense forests, meandering rivers, and gently rolling meadows, it knows no nights or winters. One of the few planes without humans, it's populated by the short-statured kithkin, hot-tempered flamekin, petty-thief boggarts, territorial treefolk, diplomatic merfolk, iconoclastic giants, and mischievous faeries, all living together in harmony.

Also among them: the elves, Lorwyn's most favored and feared race. In a world of unspoiled nature, they consider themselves the paragons of this beauty. Signs of elvish supremacy are widespread, from their gilded forest palaces to their mercilessness toward "lesser" races. Despite the elves' dominion, Lorwyn's people thrive, respecting community and tradition.

The land itself, ancient and verdant, is locked in a perpetual cycle—and every three centuries, that cycle transforms the plane into Shadowmoor.

The mirror-image of Lorwyn, Shadowmoor is a realm of perpetual dusk and gloom. Here, the plane's races, without knowledge of their previous selves, are locked in a life-and-death struggle for survival. Like the plane itself, its denizens are transformed into darker versions of themselves.

The kithkin, once communal and cooperative, are isolated and xenophobic. The helpful, silver-tongued merfolk are now assassins and saboteurs. The boggarts, once mischievous and hedonistic, are vicious and warlike. The blighted treefolk are murderous. Wrathful giants drag around huge pieces of the land.

The transformations of the flamekin and elves are perhaps the most dramatic. Once bright and seeking transcendence, the flamekin are now smoking skeletons seeking revenge. Meanwhile, the vain elves are humbled and heroic in Shadowmoor, protecting every glimmer of beauty and light.

Only one race and one place remain unchanged: the faeries and their home of Glen Elendra. The fae are the fulcrum of this transforming plane—for it was their queen, Oona, who caused it.


This isn't the first such crossover--Ravnica, Strixhaven, and Theros were all Magic: the Gathering settings. Additionally, over the past few years, WotC has put out PDF D&D supplements for the MtG worlds of Amonkhet, Dominaria, Innistrad, Ixalan, Kaladesh, and Zendikar.
 

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That’s not an unintended reaction. Lorwyn was incredibly twee, very bright and picturesque, representing the soft, storybook interpretation of its Celtic myth inspirations. They even went as far as to keep “removal” (cards that directly destroy your opponent’s creatures) less common and less cost-efficient than in a typical set, and tried to depict such effects as more pranks and trickery than actual murder. The one exception was the elves who were… uhh… well, fascist, frankly. Obsessed with aesthetic perfection, to the point of having a caste system based on their beauty standards, and murdering other creatures under the guise of mercy-killing, because better to be dead than ugly.

Shadowmoor was the dark mirror of Lorwyn, representing the dark aspects of those same myths and fairy tales, and in an ironic twist, the elves who had been the darkest thing in the intentionally hyper-twee Lorwyn were the least changed aspect of the setting, but became the last defenders of what little beauty still remained in the twisted and ugly world of Shadowmoor. The plane switched between the two versions of itself every thousand years or something like that, and the plot of the tie-in novel revolved around the switch coming several centuries early due to the machinations of the Queen of the Fae, and by the end of the story, the cycle was altered such that the switch coincides with the plane’s day/night cycle. So everything is cutesy and fairy tale esque during the day and spooky scary dark fantasy at night.
As someone that has barely played M:tG and doesn’t know much about the game’s history and worlds, Spice8Rack’s video about Lorwyn/Shadowmoor was my first introduction to the setting. I’m definitely interested in seeing how WotC will adapt it to D&D 5e. The Kithkin are one of the few types of “halflings” in fantasy media that actually interest me.
 
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They put almost nothing about Arcavios in the book. I'm all for having lightweight settings, but it feels like they should have either untethered it from its world and say the school can appear in multiple worlds or put in another page of detail.
I figure that most of Arcavios is unremarkable except for its school or those who are really into archaeology with all of those ruins. I get though that the ruins are definitely something that many parties of adventurers in D&D would certainly bother with.
 



Not based on sales
If you mean financially, Ravnica sold extremely well, Theros sold well, Strixhaven struggled a bit.
Well, I will say Alpha Stream's data shows that they didn't fail miserably, but not sure I would see them as smashing successes.

Ravnica, which did the best of them placed 4th out of 9 settings books, and the other two did 7th and 8th. And given that "The top five are true settings and are comparable in sales to adventures." Means that Theros and Strix sold worse than adventures did. Based on the numbers provided, well less than half the sales, and many times below the numbers of the top adventures.

I'm sure they sold enough to turn a profit, but certainly not as much as investing those developer/writer/artist resources on an adventure or sourcebook would have done.

I'm all for new settings books. I'm just not convinced farming MtG for lore is the way to go. The best they have done in the past is mediocre. Maybe that's good enough for building the brand?
 



Very interesting! So those who speculated that the Ictober Surprise would be Magic related, such as @Henadic Theologian , were correct.

Lorwyn is a very curious choice: it is the most "out there" Setting for Magic, so the dabs gave been waiting nearly 20 years for a return to the card game, and the same reasons that made it off the wall for Magic means thst it will be even weirder for D&D. We will definitely get a playable Plant Species, among other things like Goblinoids.

The Lorwyn card set got pushed from the end of 2025 into 2016, and is the first set after the Magic multivrse cosmological reset.

My first thought was Lorwyn from nowhere with the steel chair to the back of Tarkir's head! Seriously everything was pointing to it being Tarkir, everything. Total ambush.

My second thought about this was the timings off, they aren't going to do a Lorwyn setting book this far ahead of the actual coming set, this must be for next year right, when Lorwyn comes out? Then I remembered Lorwyn originally was supposed to released around October.

Feeling the need to stuff Avatar: The Last Airbender MtG set in THIS year clearly completely wrecked the combined schedule the D&D & MtG teams had coordinated, wrecking their plans to release roughly at the same time. You know a greedy executive made this call, caring more about the timing of the new announced Avatar: Last Airbender show, and what will certainly make far more money then Lorwyn then any cool synergistic plans no less then two designed teams had made.

So now in October very likely the next Lorwyn set will get massive story spoilers months ahead of the set instead of roughly at the same time.

Honestly reading the Tarkir Planewalker Guide, I'm left baffled at why it's Lorwyn and not Tarkir.

And is it just mean or does the critter setting on the mount look like they are from Bloomborrow?
 

My first thought was Lorwyn from nowhere with the steel chair to the back of Tarkir's head! Seriously everything was pointing to it being Tarkir, everything. Total ambush.

My second thought about this was the timings off, they aren't going to do a Lorwyn setting book this far ahead of the actual coming set, this must be for next year right, when Lorwyn comes out? Then I remembered Lorwyn originally was supposed to released around October.

Feeling the need to stuff Avatar: The Last Airbender MtG set in THIS year clearly completely wrecked the combined schedule the D&D & MtG teams had coordinated, wrecking their plans to release roughly at the same time. You know a greedy executive made this call, caring more about the timing of the new announced Avatar: Last Airbender show, and what will certainly make far more money then Lorwyn then any cool synergistic plans no less then two designed teams had made.

So now in October very likely the next Lorwyn set will get massive story spoilers months ahead of the set instead of roughly at the same time.

Honestly reading the Tarkir Planewalker Guide, I'm left baffled at why it's Lorwyn and not Tarkir.

And is it just mean or does the critter setting on the mount look like they are from Bloomborrow?
The creature on the mount is a Kithkon, a Lorwyn paionic Halfling.

The card set was originally slated for November 2025, the first set after the new multiverse status quo gets established. Honestly don't think the timing matters too much, but it seems clear now that WotC didn't want the results of the Magic storyline spoiled early.

Lorwyn is a great choice because it is furthest from D&D standard.
 


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