WotC D&D Beyond Reveals 'Partnered Content' Schedule

D&D Beyond has published a release schedule for partnered content in the first quarter of 2026. This includes products from Eberron creator Keith Baker, Beadle & Grimm's, and Kickstarter favourites Loot Tavern and The Griffon's Saddlebag.

Partnered content is existing D&D books from third-party publishers on D&D Beyond.

• Exploring Eberron (Visionary Production & Design)
• The Pugilist Class (Benjamin Huffman)
• Faster, Purple Worm! Everybody Dies, Vol. 1 (Beadle & Grimm’s Pandemonium Warehouse)
• Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting: Part 2 (Loot Tavern)
• The Griffon’s Saddlebag: Book One (The Griffon’s Saddlebag)

 

[Remathilis]

Many creators I talked to said that they had a much more vibrant marketplace on the DM's Guild for newer creators. I won't say they're wrong, but I think the price for that was higher than they took into account. 50% royalties is pretty bad for a digital product and not ever being able to publish it anywhere else is very restrictive. It's necessary if you're using WOTC's IP, but there are several Guild products that didn't use WOTC's IP, were still published to the Guild, and now are locked there forever.

Now that the Guild seems to be much less popular than it was, those products are still stuck there. You can't use them in Kickstarter back catalogs or as lead generators for a newsletter or as Patreon products or anything else. @M.T. Black and I have talked about this a lot. I believe that he believes it was still a good platform even with those limitations.

Yeah, you paid 50% of your royalties for access to use wizards IP and access to rules not in the SRD. If you don't care about either of those things, the DM guild isn't worth as much. For a product like Exploring Eberron, it's vital. If you're making your own setting and don't care about having the stats for mind flayers, it's a loss. It's the entry fee you pay to play with Wizard's toys.

 

[Morrus]

The main value proposition seemed to be freelancers who wanted to build a resume and take advantage of the IP while doing it. .

Sure. I was talking about from the perspective of an established publisher, not a freelancer about, specifically, what the issues with the Adept program were.

 

[mamba]

I wonder if DMs Guild stuff sells better.

from what I hear it used to be a good place to get visibility earlier in its life, people like MT Black and JVC Parry got their start there, but over the years it lost that ability as stuff got swamped in a ton of new releases which made it harder to get noticed and they both moved on from DMsGuild.

I am not sure it offers much of an advantage over DTRPG these days, let alone one worth the additional restrictions. All the bigger names seem to not think so…

 

[SlyFlourish]

from what I hear it used to be a good place to get visibility earlier in its life, people like MT Black and JVC Parry got their start there, but over the years it lost that ability as stuff got swamped in a ton of new releases which made it harder to get noticed and they both moved on from DMsGuild.

I am not sure it offers much of an advantage over DTRPG these days, let alone one worth the additional restrictions. All the bigger names seem to not think so…

It was also hard to transfer your audience over from DMs Guild to any other platform. You really didn't have access to your customers. It was much more like you were a writer and WOTC / DTRPG were the publishers instead of you being a publisher and them owning the platform.

 

[M.T. Black]

Many creators I talked to said that they had a much more vibrant marketplace on the DM's Guild for newer creators. I won't say they're wrong, but I think the price for that was higher than they took into account. 50% royalties is pretty bad for a digital product and not ever being able to publish it anywhere else is very restrictive. It's necessary if you're using WOTC's IP, but there are several Guild products that didn't use WOTC's IP, were still published to the Guild, and now are locked there forever.

Now that the Guild seems to be much less popular than it was, those products are still stuck there. You can't use them in Kickstarter back catalogs or as lead generators for a newsletter or as Patreon products or anything else. @M.T. Black and I have talked about this a lot. I believe that he believes it was still a good platform even with those limitations.

“A good place to start” is how I’d describe it. I think it’s notable that all the recent D&D hires have at least a few DMs Guild credits

 

[...m...]

“A good place to start” is how I’d describe it. I think it’s notable that all the recent D&D hires have at least a few DMs Guild credits

...i think APAs are a good analogy: the content ranges from rank amateur to semi-professional, the latter of which sometimes blur the line as they transition away from the `guild to general marketplace publishers...

...by virtue of professional curation, DnDbeyond enjoys a signal-to-noise ratio the DMsguild hasn't seen since its early days, if ever...

 

[M.T. Black]

...i think APAs are a good analogy: the content ranges from rank amateur to semi-professional, the latter of which sometimes blur the line as they transition away from the `guild to general marketplace publishers...

...by virtue of professional curation, DnDbeyond enjoys a signal-to-noise ratio the DMsguild hasn't seen since its early days, if ever...

The DMs Guild never had a good signal to noise ratio - it was always full of a lot of very amateurish material. Some of my early products were dreadful!

That was the nature of the platform, and a strength of it, really. It allowed a generation of designers to learn their craft, get some feedback, and sometimes earn a few $$$.

 

[Morrus]

The DMs Guild never had a good signal to noise ratio - it was always full of a lot of very amateurish material. Some of my early products were dreadful!

I've never really used or interacted with it, so it's not really on my radar--but I hear (anecdotally) that it's currently suffering from an AI slop deluge. I don't know how true that is.

 

[M.T. Black]

I've never really used or interacted with it, so it's not really on my radar--but I hear (anecdotally) that it's currently suffering from an AI slop deluge. I don't know how true that is.

AI generated text is not permitted on either DMs Guild or DTRPG. But that is not really possible to police. The Guild has always been full of slop, whether human or AI produced. But AI means it can be generated at industrial scale.

AI art is permitted on the platform, however, and there seems to be a lot of it now - just look at the new release strip to see.

 

[Morrus]

AI art is permitted on the platform, however, and there seems to be a lot of it now - just look at the new release strip to see.

I don't know why people are willing to pay for mediocre content produced for free when they can just do the same themselves with ChatGPT. I guess the added value is... layout? But ChatGPT will do that for you too soon. At which point what is the human adding? Won't places like DMsG be better off at that point just automating the content creation with a thousand new PDFs a day and cutting out the creators and not paying out 50% per book? All these generative AI content creation proponents will find out pretty soon that their part of the process is unnecessary--there's a reason using AI to make stuff is so easy, and that means the 'AI Creator' isn't really needed. There's only a step or two between "Hey, ChatGPT, generate a stat block for this monster for D&D 5E" to "{code}use AI to automatically generate a book of 100 monsters every day and make it available for purchase on the platform{/code}" to "{code}use AI to generate 1000 different books of various types every day and make them available for purchase on the platform{/code}" to '{code}Do that but print-on-demand{/code}".