D&D 5E New D&D Hardcover To Be Announced On The 23rd (Tomorrow)?

According to this page on Amazon.com, a new Dungeon & Dragons hardcover title for May will be announced tomorrow. Users in the US see the product below (those in the UK are seeing a Wizkids miniatures set instead).

So far signs look like Ravenloft, but we’ll know for sure tomorrow.

[Update -- also mentioned by Todd Kendrick, recently of D&D Beyond].

WotC has posted the below animation, which says “The Mist Beckons”.

 

[Mistwell]

It's extremely well-established as a general point

Any claim about being "extremely" knowledgeable about a segment of the dark ages of history of the continent of Europe concerning those who are considered witches is an exaggeration. First, the dark ages themselves we are lacking in knowledge relative to the eras which came before and after it. Second, the subset of that history about witches is even less well known now. There is a distinct lack of records and artifacts from that era, particularly that subset of study, relative to the eras which came before and after it. These circumstances do not lend themselves to anyone claiming our level of knowledge is certain enough to claim anything about it is "extremely well established".

I notice there's a total lack of sources for your claims, too

You didn't ask for any but I was quoting from good sources. If you'd like to start discussing sources I can do that - googling those quotes will get you to them. But If we're going to go down that route, you will need to produce "extraordinary" levels of evidence that it's "well established" across Europe in the dark ages. Which is the claim you made. I strongly suspect you don't want to go down that route. But, here's the opportunity.

If we want more nuance, we could say that fairly reliably in Britain at least, up until the later middle ages, people make some kind of distinction between "evil magic" and "good or neutral magic". This tends to be true in antiquity as well, where we have sources. What changes later on is that all magic becomes regarded as evil. That's what I'm calling an aberration. It's rarely the case in human history that that approach is taken.

None of that new "nuanced" claim bares even a vague resemblance to the claims you made earlier. I find it far more compelling, but it would have been a heck of a lot more appreciated if you had started there rather than with the claims of certainty that everyone was wrong for daring to imply your prior extreme claim was anything but pure and accurate.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

House on Gryphon Hill had me up until the ending, where you pretty much just watch someone else fight the end boss.

Hopefully, if it is a sequel, it's better than House on Gryphon Hill. I mostly consider it Strahd's fever dream.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Which is why the Dark Powers start toying with the adventurers; groups they meet ARE friendly farmers and whispers start reaching towns that the PCs are vile murderers and cannot be trusted. The towns close the doors to the PCs and getting food, warm beds and supplies becomes difficult without threat, theft, or violence. Meanwhile, every person they meet has a 50% chance of being an innocent the DP use to toy with the PCs until they have wallowed in innocent blood and become like the monsters they fight or learn to not shoot first and all questions later...

But you do you.

I'm pretty sure my players would have great fun being monsters...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Another weird post. If you're point is that all gamers are different we got that loud and clear. Are you now trying to say that your game method is better or something?

No, I'm just explaining why horror don't work at my table.

 

[Remathilis]

I'm pretty sure my players would have great fun being monsters...

Ravenloft isn't the setting for them; it has no room for murderhobos (well, it does, but that's typically the lord of thier own pocket domains).

 

[Charlaquin]

Also, the key approach should be "let's make D&D in gothic costume" and definitely not "lets try if we can bend D&D enough to be kinda like realistic horror game".

I agree. I love gothic horror, but I don’t think D&D is a great vehicle for horror. However, I did find Curse of Strahd to do a fantastic job of injecting a gothic horror aesthetic into what was very much a D&D adventure. And that’s what I hope to see more of from this book. D&D doesn’t need to be Call of Cthulhu or World of Darkness. Better to let it be D&D, but to play with some gothic horror trappings within that space.

I believe the implication is that cynical, bordering on comic, opportunism and paranoia is pretty much the default for D&D parties, which makes invoking horror tropes difficult.

For what it's worth, that matches my experience. Obviously not every group is the same, but I've heard plenty of anecdotes of people not being able to pull off horror games for the same reasons.

I tend to see more heroism than cynicism and opportunism being the default in D&D. Like you say though, I guess every group is different, and I don’t suppose Ravenloft would work well for a party like that.

 

[hopeless]

Depends on the group, does this make the session zero much more important and vital with games like these?

 

[TwoSix]

I tend to see more heroism than cynicism and opportunism being the default in D&D. Like you say though, I guess every group is different, and I don’t suppose Ravenloft would work well for a party like that.

Yea, we must play with different parties. I generally need to bait the hook with something they can earn, a general call of "we need to save the village from X" is generally met with shrugs.

 

[tetrasodium]

Okay. I suspect you and your players don’t play in a way that’s conducive to Ravenloft.

My players wouldn’t fireball a group of farmers on a hunch. They just don’t play that way. Therefore that very cynical outcome wouldn’t work. The fear that any group could be bestial murderers wouldn’t cause them to fireball everyone - though it might cause them to suspect everyone. The scene also followed on from a relatively secure scene in the Blue Water inn with Van Richten, which may have contributed to them taking the scene at face value.

If your only fear of Strahd is that he might kill you, then you need to work harder. My female bard player was mainly concerned that she would be dominated and bitten.

Zombies are fine. Ravenloft zombies that don’t stop moving even after you’ve chopped them up are a different matter. When the zombie’s arm you just chopped off crawls along the floor and starts inching up the door towards the latch to let the others in then it may be different.

Ravenloft is NOT for everyone. Then again neither is Darksun or Planescape. It’s just one them of campaign that resonates with a lot of people.

The problem is, if everyone complains that it’s not their favourite setting that gets published then it just generates a lot of negativity... and guess what, campaign settings become less likely to happen.

Everyone will get their flavor eventually. I just understand why they chose Ravenloft first.

My players also wouldn't fireball a bunch of farmers like that. As an example one once said "I'm going to aim those scorching rays at that pillar not what I now see is a kid with a sling because we are in the middle of a parade in sharn & I bet vaporizing a child is a crime" in the middle of a very inept assassination attempt by a bunch of commoners forced into it by way of kidnapped relatives. They went on to look at the notes hoping for clues & spend a session or two tracking down the kidnappers who had a grudge with them. That same group later went to ravenloft after fleeing the mists for months of weekly sessions & spent a few months Working with a collecion of to dragonmarked heirs/engineer types to fix up/modernize ravenloft for profit while the Dark Powers pulled strings for extra fun.

edit:am ->aim

 

[Charlaquin]

Yea, we must play with different parties. I generally need to bait the hook with something they can earn, a general call of "we need to save the village from X" is generally met with shrugs.

It depends on the campaign and player buy-in, I suppose. I’ve run games where the premise was that the characters were primarily self-interested and motivated by personal gain, and I’ve run games where the premise was that the characters were heroes, saving people/villages/maybe eventually the world with little expectation of reward. Usually I run games somewhere in-between. One thing I like about Curse of Strahd is that the personal gain motive and the heroic motive overlap - whether you want to escape Barovia or save it from its evil master, either way you’ve got to find the relics and use them to kill Strahd. It pretty much works as long as the players don’t want to replace Strahd as all-powerful dictator for eternity.