D&D 5E Is there a secret lore book WotC is hiding?

[R_J_K75]

Oh, I would also absolutely believe that it's a single 3-ring binder that contains several documents that now no longer exist anywhere else. Even some so old that they're typewritten on a TSR letterhead. Yes, even for an IP as valuable as D&D.

I hope it's a Word document or series of Word documents in a shared folder called D&D Internal Setting Continuity. It's virtually inconceivable that it's a wiki. It should not need to change that often, the number of editors is not high enough to warrant a system to manage the content modifications, and nobody should be spending that much time managing the hyperlinks between articles. Plus it's another system to buy -- corporations avoid FOSS -- and another system to manage and train new staff on. That means it's expensive, while you're already paying for Word. It's trivial to get people to take ownership of Word documents. It's significantly harder to do the same for a system like a wiki. That means your team is less likely to actually reference the content.

That's why I say that Word is the epitome of "good enough". It does the lion's share of the work, doesn't intimidate the people who have to learn and use it, and the features it lacks are things that most users won't complain about having to manage themselves because they naturally think in terms of personal document management.

OTOH, there will absolutely be some who complain that the wiki interface isn't as friendly or familiar as Word or that they don't want to use one tool for authoring and another to document lore. We know that WotC uses Word; every playtest and UA document they've released since 2014 clearly uses the default Word template class formatting. All they've done is enabled is two column mode.

Id guess with TSR being around since the mid-70s and WotC buying the in the late 90s this book, document, binder is most likely hard copies, email chains, scanned pdfs, word files, and probably a few other odds and ends. Just because they use word now doesnt mean they always did. Id be hard pressed that regardless of what they want, enforcing a rule requiring an employee, temp, or freelancer to use word is probably next to impossible. Then if you have 12 employees who are supposed to use 1 document off a server there is a pretty good chance that theres 12 other copies on everyones desktop. My opinion is this thing is a mess if it really does contain 45 years of D&D lore. If its not searchable either then doubt its much good trying to find what youre looking for.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

This is found near the beginning of how many Lich / Archmage / other BBEG origin stories? Beware the call of temptation !

Haha, as I was writing that I was wondering if I'd be a Vecna worshiper in a D&D setting.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

For those unaware, Nintendo has been having a number of previously unrevealed details regarding their older games (primarily entries in big name franchises like Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda, and Pokémon) getting leaked by anonymous sources for the last year or so (one individual was actually caught and arrested, for example).

In the last week, a so-called "Gigaleak" has been released by an anonymous source. It reveals an enormous number of surprising details regarding various games that otherwise would have never been revealed. The "Gigaleak" is presumed legit 1) because a programmer on one of these old games included in the leak, Star Fox 2, expressed astonishment on Twitter at seeing code he'd written for the game over twenty-five years ago among the leaks, and 2) because of the sheer amount of data, which also includes records of e-mails and such that the various game designers had sent each other during development of their games.

People are still combing through the massive amount of data included in the leak and posting discoveries on Twitter, which are being reported on via various video game news sites.

As an example for those interested, one of these leaks reveals the original Super Mario World design of the now classic Super Mario Bros character, Yoshi:

Compare to the from the finalized game:

Pokémon fans reading this: urns out there are a LOT of Pokémon that were cut from the final games or had their designs radically changed during development.

This whole situation reminded me of this thread. There would absolutely be people obsessively combing through any leaked secret D&D lorebook and posting their findings to Twitter.