One of Dungeons & Dragons’ partners has seemingly accidentally leaked a major announcement ahead of a Gen Con panel planned for next week. Roll20 briefly posted a blog post on their website, which has since been removed, stating that pre-orders for a planned official Dungeons & Dragons crossover with World of Warcraft were “live”. While the post was removed, a preview link and imagery was still available on its web page as of a few minutes ago. Given that D&D is hyping a panel to take place Thursday evening at Gen Con, our guess is that this will be officially announced next week.
Assuming the leak is accurate (and we have no reason to believe it’s not), this would mark a major crossover for Dungeons & Dragons, marking one of its largest crossovers in its 50 year history. World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs majorly impacted the development of D&D 4th Edition, which saw various class abilities and spells changed to “at will,” “per encounter” and “per day” abilities. Of course, World of Warcraft also drew inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons. World of Warcraft previously had a tabletop RPG published by Sword & Sorcery Studios that was compatible with D&D 3.5E. Although World of Warcraft no longer has its peak player count of 12 million players, it still has roughly 2 million active players according to recent estimates.
The other major takeaway from this leak is that Dungeons & Dragons seems to be leaning a bit more heavily into the crossover model popularized by its sister game, Magic: The Gathering. D&D has had several crossover products during 5th Edition, including Stranger Things, Minecraft and Rick and Morty tie-ins, but we haven’t really seen a true crossover product that leaned into bespoke rules and subclasses. That will assumably change with this new product. We’ll note that Hasbro recently received a toy license for The Legend of Zelda, so don’t be surprised if that crossover product is teased for the future of D&D.
Additionally, folks are speculating that the book which appeared on Barnes & Noble codenamed "GOLLY" might just be this book--World of Warcraft is often abbreviated to "WoW", and 'wow' is a synonym for 'golly'. This, however, is no more than speculation at this stage.
We reached out to Wizards of the Coast for comment and will update this article if/when we hear back.
