Dungeons & Dragons Will Announce New Products at Gen Con, Modules Returning to Game

Wizards of the Coast plans to use Gen Con as a launching point for future products. During a press briefing at Gary Con on Thursday, Head of D&D Franchise Dan Ayoub said that they would be announcing the product tied to the Season of Champions at Gen Con this year. Additionally, starting at Gen Con in 2026, D&D will also announce the roadmap for the upcoming year at the convention, which will include announcements of upcoming Seasons, announcement of new products, and other "stuff" tied to the season.

Ayoub told the press briefing that early feedback for the seasons have been "fantastic," so it appears that this will be the standard moving forward.

Later in the press briefing, Ayoub noted that the lengthy delay in announcements was due to a combination of internal reorganization for the D&D team and a shift in which products would be released in 2026. He also said that adventure modules will be returning to Dungeons & Dragons as part of the new Season models, although it's unclear whether this will be through the D&D Encounters program, Adventurer's League, or through some other kind of unannounced product.

 

[Scott Christian]

Uhh... You've never made spaghetti sauce from scratch have you?

That reads kinda like a totally bewildered painter having serious problems mixing red & yellow get orange

No, that is literally how they came up with chunky sauce. Prior to that, all commercially made sauces were blended to a puree. This is the story of Prego sauce, not my own.

 

[MostlyHarmless42]

Eh, use your money how you like.

Paying for a service isnt BS. Ranting about it like they're trying to trick you is, though.

Agree to disagree. Though for the record you've yet to see me rant. That's not an option on these forums because politics are explicitly banned as a topic despite them quite obviously impacted the entire industry to an increasing amount each day.

 

[Flying Toaster]

A lot of current D&D adventure books take up a lot of room to thoroughly and tediously explain the details of an adventure site. It was refreshing to see the abbreviated examples in the 2024 DMG and a book of this sort of stuff would be a breath of fresh air (and treat DMs as being intelligent and pressed for time, not a bunch of noobs too green to make their own stuff).

Unfortunately published D&D modules have long had a problem with excessive description and general verbosity. The old TSR classics of the late 70s and early 80s were full of big thick slabs of Gygaxian purple prose. Sometimes it was evocative and entertaining, but other times there would be huge unwieldy paragraphs describing room dimensions, architectural features, and furnishings in almost excruciating detail. DMs would often rattle off these paragraphs in a dull monotone, and players had to try to listen carefully and decode them to see what was actually important or useful.

When I was in seventh grade in the late 80s, a friend who had helped get me interested in D&D (and was two years older than me) ran a casual campaign of sorts for me, his younger brother (my age), and whoever else we could get. He ran us through most of the iconic early AD&D modules, which I believe he had already experienced as a player.

Play could slow to a crawl as we listened to the lengthy room text and tried to figure out what we could do. Sometimes the DM would realize that he had not done quite enough prep, and thus did not entirely understand the room description himself! So we would have to wait while he read it silently to himself, and then read it out to us again with more clarity. GM experience can help mitigate these problems somewhat, but it should not have been so difficult in the first place.

I cannot remember if the B/X and BECMI modules had the same issues. OSR adventure writers seem to have realized that dense room descriptions were not something they wanted to revive or emulate, and many have embraced a much more terse and utilitarian style, leaving the GM to supply the flair and atmosphere as needed.

 

[tetrasodium]

Unfortunately published D&D modules have long had a problem with excessive description and general verbosity. The old TSR classics of the late 70s and early 80s were full of big thick slabs of Gygaxian purple prose. Sometimes it was evocative and entertaining, but other times there would be huge unwieldy paragraphs describing room dimensions, architectural features, and furnishings in almost excruciating detail. DMs would often rattle off these paragraphs in a dull monotone, and players had to try to listen carefully and decode them to see what was actually important or useful.

When I was in seventh grade in the late 80s, a friend who had helped get me interested in D&D (and was two years older than me) ran a casual campaign of sorts for me, his younger brother (my age), and whoever else we could get. He ran us through most of the iconic early AD&D modules, which I believe he had already experienced as a player.

Play could slow to a crawl as we listened to the lengthy room text and tried to figure out what we could do. Sometimes the DM would realize that he had not done quite enough prep, and thus did not entirely understand the room description himself! So we would have to wait while he read it silently to himself, and then read it out to us again with more clarity. GM experience can help mitigate these problems somewhat, but it should not have been so difficult in the first place.

I cannot remember if the B/X and BECMI modules had the same issues. OSR adventure writers seem to have realized that dense room descriptions were not something they wanted to revive or emulate, and many have embraced a much more terse and utilitarian style, leaving the GM to supply the flair and atmosphere as needed.

I think that somewhere along the line some games started using strategic [bracketed words] or a visually distinct different font) markup to make key details pop at first glance for the GM. Fate is particularly good about it with rules for those kinds of scene aspects but I've occasionally seen similar in adventures for other games. D&d just never seemed to make use of those kinda of QoL elements to streamline box text for the gm.

 

[Scott Christian]

Unfortunately published D&D modules have long had a problem with excessive description and general verbosity. The old TSR classics of the late 70s and early 80s were full of big thick slabs of Gygaxian purple prose. Sometimes it was evocative and entertaining, but other times there would be huge unwieldy paragraphs describing room dimensions, architectural features, and furnishings in almost excruciating detail. DMs would often rattle off these paragraphs in a dull monotone, and players had to try to listen carefully and decode them to see what was actually important or useful.

I actually think this brings up a good point I really didn't think about. I lot of the way those modules were written were almost teaching guides. a "Here is how you lay describe a room," or "Here is how you build an encounter." But with the plethora of online play today, it is not nearly as necessary. That said, I think there are a lot of DMs that would like some plug and play modules. The key for WotC is to not have a team of thirty people making these, but a team of three or four. Sure, put some weight behind it with advertising and product promotion, but just crank out a bunch of adventures that are fun and can be plugged into one of their campaign worlds.

When I was in seventh grade in the late 80s, a friend who had helped get me interested in D&D (and was two years older than me) ran a casual campaign of sorts for me, his younger brother (my age), and whoever else we could get. He ran us through most of the iconic early AD&D modules, which I believe he had already experienced as a player.

Play could slow to a crawl as we listened to the lengthy room text and tried to figure out what we could do. Sometimes the DM would realize that he had not done quite enough prep, and thus did not entirely understand the room description himself! So we would have to wait while he read it silently to himself, and then read it out to us again with more clarity. GM experience can help mitigate these problems somewhat, but it should not have been so difficult in the first place.

Not to disagree, but I loved the text descriptions. I relished them when I read them as a DM, and when I was a player, I appreciated them even more. Even today, when our GM ready a text block, I thoroughly enjoy it.

 

[Flying Toaster]

I actually think this brings up a good point I really didn't think about. I lot of the way those modules were written were almost teaching guides. a "Here is how you lay describe a room," or "Here is how you build an encounter." But with the plethora of online play today, it is not nearly as necessary. That said, I think there are a lot of DMs that would like some plug and play modules. The key for WotC is to not have a team of thirty people making these, but a team of three or four. Sure, put some weight behind it with advertising and product promotion, but just crank out a bunch of adventures that are fun and can be plugged into one of their campaign worlds.

Not to disagree, but I loved the text descriptions. I relished them when I read them as a DM, and when I was a player, I appreciated them even more. Even today, when our GM ready a text block, I thoroughly enjoy it.

When people are discussing the 5E adventure books, one issue that keeps coming up is the fact that the work gets broken up piecemeal among so many writers that it is very difficult for them all to coordinate. The books have plot holes and other disjointed features because people are rowing in different directions. I have seen similar complaints about Pathfinder APs on the Paizo forums. Having smaller teams working together might solve that problem.

The early B series and X series modules definitely had a teaching aid element to them. They would often include extra caverns, deep dungeon levels, or wilderness areas that DMs could fill in as desired. B1 expected the DM to stock the Caverns of Casqueton, B2 let the DM choose the names of the NPCs at the Keep on the Borderlands, B4 had catacombs below the Lost City for the DM to detail for themselves, and X1 left some blank areas on the map of the Isle of Dread. This made sense when RPGs were brand new and nobody knew how to play or run them. There is still a need for DM instruction, but maybe not in every adventure.

I think it is also interesting to note that at first TSR did not think there was any market for premade adventures or settings, because surely any DM worth their salt would want to homebrew their own. So they let Judges Guild publish some of the first AD&D adventures and settings, before realizing that there was definitely a market and TSR needed to supply it or else others would.

Gygax definitely had talent as a writer. You can see it in things like his description of the great underground cavern that players visit in the D series modules, with its enormous vaulted ceiling studded with exotic minerals, lit with the eerie glow of mysterious Underdark energies. But even the best writers need an editor, and Gygax never had one, so he never learned “kill your darlings” and such.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I have been listening to the “When We Were Wizards” podcast, and it emphasizes that after his friend Don Kaye died young of a sudden heart attack, Gygax had no one who could tell him “no” and that caused big problems at TSR right from the beginning. One could say that other creators like Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas let success go to their heads and lost touch with what made their work matter in the first place, but Gary Gygax seems to have jealously guarded his prerogatives even before he became successful.