D&D General Dungeons & Dragons-Inspired Musical Announced For This Summer

[Ralif Redhammer]

Harry Potter was absolutely a cultural explosion that also helped bring about the current D&D golden age, whatever mess JKR has made of its legacy otherwise. Heck, without it we likely wouldn't have Strixhaven.

I think that's pretty much spot-on. Harry Potter contributed too, because frankly it was impossible to pretend to be "cool" and to like Harry Potter (unlike, say, Anne Rice's vampire stuff, which was big in the earlier '90s and a lot of people who wouldn't be seen dead with a d20 were keen on). If you're an adult reading a children's novel about a boy wizard playing magic sports with golden flying balls you're just admitting you no longer get to pull the "too cool" card lol.

 

[Thunderfoot]

As someone that lived through the Satanic Panic in the 80s. I would say it was somewhere dur8ng the 3e/3.5 rebirth. I watched attendance at GenCon go from roughly 15k in 2007 to roughly 40k in 2014.. I believe the attendance in 2017 was close to 58k. THAT's an incedible amount of growth. And just to bring that into sharper focus, the Indy Convention Center's complete reno and expansion was due almost entirely due to GenCon. The hotels were driven by the NFL but their insistence on expanding conference rooms was strictly gaming related. Soon after Indy Comic Con built on that. It would be kind of silly to ignore that barometer. So while 5e may be building on the lull created by 4e, the nerd revolution was already in full bloom.