Kariotis
Explorer
Breaking news from Ikol, our trusted insider source at WotC! The upcoming installment of D&D will supposedly feature a new game mechanic that could forever change the landscape of Dungeons & Dragons gameplay. Let me give you a quick rundown:
According to Ikol, OneD&D will introduce a never-before-seen mechanic called "Edition Rifts". Those are planned to be tears in the fabric of reality to allow players to transport their characters between different campaign worlds, scrambling their stats and spanning across various editions of D&D.
In a leaked internal email supposedly from none other than Mick Mearls, the man himself, it says: "Don't want this to be your typical crossover event." Sounds great!
"Players should have the chance to interact with iconic characters and creatures from different D&D universes all at the same time. There's so much untapped potential! If a player remains in the same setting or edition all the time, they won't see 99,9% of the content we made over the years. That's why campaigns fizzle out so quickly. So we should have Githyanki in Castle Ravenloft, Midnight run in BECMI, and Blackmoor should be full of portals everywhere, just like Sigil. Even Paizo has chimed with an adventure where chainsaw-wielding Knights of Lastwall fight Drizzt on a Spelljammer."
So that's the news Of course, what followed was a frenzy of speculation and anticipation among the denizens of Wizard Leaks, the Discord where the news first dropped. Fans there are eagerly theorizing about which realms and characters they might encounter first, what happens when your thief is thrown into ODD, and whether a Geforce RTX 5090 will be enough to run all instances and rulesets of the game on the Unreal VTT simultaneously, especially if they start to loop into another in an infinite regress. Now, in a first reaction, WotC shot down all rumors but at the same time dropped that they were working with none other than Valve's Grape Newell to prep their VTT for some unspecified "additional load". "Well, that's an understatement if I ever heard one," Ikol commented in an encoded email that was tracked to Bitopia City on the Cayman Islands. "Last year they borrowed multiple Zeutschel book scanners from Google to digitize their archive of rule books all the way back to 1974 at high speed, including all third party content, and let Elon Musk set up a custom-made LLM pipeline to synthesize all of it for VTT use. Artificial GMs (called "WizCons") will adjudicate in-game situations on a whim based on whichever ruleset the machine recognizes as most appropriate. It's supposed to outperform human GMs by 77%." That would correspond to WotC internal messages where it says: "It'll be Tasha's on Athas, Al Qadim featuring the cast of Vox Machina, and The Book of Erotic Fantasy to explain how player interactions with Mind Flayers and Beholders work. It's not D&D5.5, not D&D6 or even OneD&D, in the future it'll be AllD&D, everything at the same time. It's all ours, anyway."
An exclusive setting book seems to be in the works, too Details are still meager, but if we can trust those in the know, we will encounter gelatinous cubes of various flavours in an infinite realm of cream, negotiate peace treaties between warring factions of time-traveling tinkergnomes called "Terminixes", and escape from a terrifying ancient contraption called the "Kobold Press". The setting, tentatively named "Criss-Crossover" is supposedly already better balanced than 5e was on release day and will also be playable with 43 new MTG sets cross-promoted with Yu-Gi-Oh that interlock to a living card game and an encyclopedia. Cross-media rounds where players can choose to arrive at the table with their character sheet, their deck of cards, or their encyclopedia are being tested.
If nothing else, the designers sure sound optimistic. "I've always believed that the true magic of Dungeons & Dragons lies in the limitless potential of our imagination," executive designer Brian Blume supposedly wrote only yesterday. "And what better way to celebrate that spirit of creativity than by throwing caution to the wind and embracing the contradictions inherent in all the settings and editions. Mick, let's be on the safe side - could you get Luke Gygax on board as sensitivity consultant?"
Critical minds like us are of course speculating this could all be a clever ruse by Mearls to keep players on their toes, given the timing of the leak
"I can't believe Mick is actually doing this!" I heard from a friend and longtime co-player, Carl Glittergold. After pondering it for a while, he went on: "If this is real, it's going to be the most epic edition ever, though. It'll be a living meta-edition, only ever growing. But part of me can't shake the feeling that this might just be an elaborate prank. Either way, I'm definitely tuning in to find out! Finally I get to use all the splatbooks I bought and never opened. And I get to play MTG again and don't have to split my time between both hobbies anymore. Can't wait to hunt for Pokémon in Waterdeep, too."
Personally, I'm undecided. Sure, we all eagerly await further details and confirmation from Mick Mearls himself, and it's about time the world of D&D develop a bit of complexity, but it could devolve into fourth wall breaking navel gazing quickly (but that's just IMO). But you have to give it to them: they can still innovate.
The Edition Rifts will be introduced via an in-universe event called the "Edition Wars".
According to Ikol, OneD&D will introduce a never-before-seen mechanic called "Edition Rifts". Those are planned to be tears in the fabric of reality to allow players to transport their characters between different campaign worlds, scrambling their stats and spanning across various editions of D&D.
In a leaked internal email supposedly from none other than Mick Mearls, the man himself, it says: "Don't want this to be your typical crossover event." Sounds great!
"Players should have the chance to interact with iconic characters and creatures from different D&D universes all at the same time. There's so much untapped potential! If a player remains in the same setting or edition all the time, they won't see 99,9% of the content we made over the years. That's why campaigns fizzle out so quickly. So we should have Githyanki in Castle Ravenloft, Midnight run in BECMI, and Blackmoor should be full of portals everywhere, just like Sigil. Even Paizo has chimed with an adventure where chainsaw-wielding Knights of Lastwall fight Drizzt on a Spelljammer."So that's the news
Of course, what followed was a frenzy of speculation and anticipation among the denizens of Wizard Leaks, the Discord where the news first dropped. Fans there are eagerly theorizing about which realms and characters they might encounter first, what happens when your thief is thrown into ODD, and whether a Geforce RTX 5090 will be enough to run all instances and rulesets of the game on the Unreal VTT simultaneously, especially if they start to loop into another in an infinite regress. Now, in a first reaction, WotC shot down all rumors but at the same time dropped that they were working with none other than Valve's Grape Newell to prep their VTT for some unspecified "additional load". "Well, that's an understatement if I ever heard one," Ikol commented in an encoded email that was tracked to Bitopia City on the Cayman Islands. "Last year they borrowed multiple Zeutschel book scanners from Google to digitize their archive of rule books all the way back to 1974 at high speed, including all third party content, and let Elon Musk set up a custom-made LLM pipeline to synthesize all of it for VTT use. Artificial GMs (called "WizCons") will adjudicate in-game situations on a whim based on whichever ruleset the machine recognizes as most appropriate. It's supposed to outperform human GMs by 77%." That would correspond to WotC internal messages where it says: "It'll be Tasha's on Athas, Al Qadim featuring the cast of Vox Machina, and The Book of Erotic Fantasy to explain how player interactions with Mind Flayers and Beholders work. It's not D&D5.5, not D&D6 or even OneD&D, in the future it'll be AllD&D, everything at the same time. It's all ours, anyway."An exclusive setting book seems to be in the works, too
Details are still meager, but if we can trust those in the know, we will encounter gelatinous cubes of various flavours in an infinite realm of cream, negotiate peace treaties between warring factions of time-traveling tinkergnomes called "Terminixes", and escape from a terrifying ancient contraption called the "Kobold Press". The setting, tentatively named "Criss-Crossover" is supposedly already better balanced than 5e was on release day and will also be playable with 43 new MTG sets cross-promoted with Yu-Gi-Oh that interlock to a living card game and an encyclopedia. Cross-media rounds where players can choose to arrive at the table with their character sheet, their deck of cards, or their encyclopedia are being tested.If nothing else, the designers sure sound optimistic. "I've always believed that the true magic of Dungeons & Dragons lies in the limitless potential of our imagination," executive designer Brian Blume supposedly wrote only yesterday. "And what better way to celebrate that spirit of creativity than by throwing caution to the wind and embracing the contradictions inherent in all the settings and editions. Mick, let's be on the safe side - could you get Luke Gygax on board as sensitivity consultant?"
Critical minds like us are of course speculating this could all be a clever ruse by Mearls to keep players on their toes, given the timing of the leak
"I can't believe Mick is actually doing this!" I heard from a friend and longtime co-player, Carl Glittergold. After pondering it for a while, he went on: "If this is real, it's going to be the most epic edition ever, though. It'll be a living meta-edition, only ever growing. But part of me can't shake the feeling that this might just be an elaborate prank. Either way, I'm definitely tuning in to find out! Finally I get to use all the splatbooks I bought and never opened. And I get to play MTG again and don't have to split my time between both hobbies anymore. Can't wait to hunt for Pokémon in Waterdeep, too."
Personally, I'm undecided. Sure, we all eagerly await further details and confirmation from Mick Mearls himself, and it's about time the world of D&D develop a bit of complexity, but it could devolve into fourth wall breaking navel gazing quickly (but that's just IMO). But you have to give it to them: they can still innovate.
The Edition Rifts will be introduced via an in-universe event called the "Edition Wars".
