The New D&D Adventure Storyline Will Be Announced On June 2nd-3rd

WotC is holding an event, which they're calling the Stream of Annihilation, on June 2nd and 3rd to announce the new D&D storyline. Various D&D Twitch steamers have been invited to participate in the upcoming campaign, which will be live streamed along with interviews, and so on. "We’ll have folks from Misscliks, Maze Arcana, Critical Role, and Dice, Camera, Action! with Chris Perkins, not to mention international gaming groups like Yogscast's HighRollers (U.K.) and Dragon Friends (Australia)." You'll be able to watch it all live on Twitch at the time. Is this where we'll discover the identity of the mysterious Dust and Midway? Speculate away!

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Here's the announcement in full. There's more info about the hosts and the guests here.

Dungeons & Dragons loves the amazing video streams produced by our fans. This community-generated live-play highlights what’s fantastic about D&D—sitting down together with your friends to tell a grand story!


To celebrate, we’ve invited a bunch of D&D streamers and luminaries to Seattle, Washington to hang out and roll some dice on June 2nd and 3rd! This two-day event is called the Stream of Annihilation and it’s two full days of streaming that D&D fans won’t want to miss. We’ll have folks from Misscliks, Maze Arcana, Critical Role, and Dice, Camera, Action! with Chris Perkins, not to mention international gaming groups like Yogscast's HighRollers (U.K.) and Dragon Friends (Australia).
[h=3]PROGRAMMING[/h]Kicking off at 10am on both June 2nd and 3rd, hosts Anna Prosser Robinson and Kelly Link will talk to the Wizards of the Coast D&D team and learn all about our next exciting storyline coming in September. Then each group of streamers will play or share a sample of what to expect from the campaigns they’ll be running over the summer that preview the new D&D story. There will be multiple live games, interviews, new product unveils and improvised hilarity each day, starting at 10am PT and ending at 10pm each night. You’ll get introduced to the High Rollers crew delving into uncharted territory DMed by Mark Hulmes, a new Misscliks show investigating rumors called Risen, two weekly groups from our friends Satine Phoenix and Ruty Rutenberg at Maze Arcana, a new group of L.A. actors called Girls Guts Glory, and more!


Throughout the Stream of Annihilation, we’ll drop details on our expanded D&D Twitch programming, new accessories fans have been clamoring for coming later this year, and amazing board games and products from our partners. You’ll hear from Cryptic Studios about plans for Neverwinter, Curse Media for D&D Beyond, as well as WizKids, Gale Force 9, Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, and more. Plus, like any Dungeon Master worth their salt, we have a few exciting surprises to pull from our bags of holding!
[h=3]FURTHER DETAILS[/h]You’ll have to watch the Stream of Annihilation to catch it all live! Follow twitch.tv/DnD to get all the updates, then mark your calendars for Friday, June 2nd and Saturday, June 3rd to make sure you don’t miss a thing!


A full schedule, group bios and some more of the celebrities attending the Stream of Annihilation will be announced over the next few weeks. We’ll also be talking about the event on our official Twitter account (@Wizards_DnD) as well as interviewing some of the groups this month on Dragon Talk, the official D&D podcast.

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[Mercurius]

Without saying it more direct like you did. That's what I'm saying. Do a book for each realm, not a continuous line of products specific to the world in question. Tough an adventure or something that ties them all together would be interesting. Create non-specific adventures tied maybe to the creators own world. I have no problem, like many others, tying it into to my own world(s). I still use Greyhawk (heavily modified) because it was the first and longest running of my group (40 years). I use Forgotten Realms too, and my own. Wotc just should not throw all their eggs in one basket. Just create good non specific supplements and adventures that people can bring into their own worlds with guidelines for newbies to do so. Because if we get a peak into other creators worlds, maybe new ideas will come of it. This includes creating new and non-standard worlds for people to play in, not lines of crap tied to a specific world or barely different from the others.

[MENTION=6779504]rooneg[/MENTION]'s response was really good, but to add a bit. I like your plan and wish WotC would do that, but don't see it as at all realistic. What you describe implies a much larger staff than what they have.

Further, I don't see setting adventures in the Realms as being "throwing all eggs in one basket" as much as giving context to their stories. They've decided that the Realms is the best option, and I can't say that they are wrong, from an economic stand-point.

@Mercurius - I'm not a fan of FR because it's incoherent. The ecologies don't make sense (yuan-it in the Mere of Dead Men?!), many of the place names are ridiculous and there's just too much going on - vampires in cloud castles?. It's a hot mess it challenges my suspension of disbelief at every turn. That's why I'd like a change to a setting that isn't everything but the kitchen sink.

I hear you and agree, but only from an aesthetic perspective. Kitchen sink settings work for D&D, both from the perspective of playing but, more importantly, publishing. Kitchen sink settings allow for diversity and cohesion. While a Dark Sun might be be more interesting from a design perspective, you're going to get more miles if you set your desert story arc in, say, Raurin or Anauroch. A lot of folks like the idea of a shared world and related storylines. Maybe some want to do one campaign in Krynn and then the next in Athas, but most folks--I would guess--like the idea of building a campaign, a series of connected stories. For that a kitchen sink works really well.

I don't mind yuan-ti in the Mere of Dead Men, in fact it is rather charming. Just as I don't mind imagining a dungeon in which you have orcs in one room and lizard folk just down the hall (well, maybe not just down the hall), and just a few hundred feet below all of that is an entombed lich, and not far away lives a black dragon in an underground lake. It is all gloriously silly and D&D is built on such silliness. In fact, imagining a world in which every creature in the Monster Manual exists is just ludicrous.

But there is a long tradition of "more realistic" RPGs. Look at Harn, for instance. Or there are settings that are more cohesive, like Dark Sun. But if we're talking about the default setting for D&D, well, there's a reason it has been Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, or for Pathfinder, Golarion.

I don't quite consider myself a grognard (never really understood that term, anyway, as english is not my first language)...

Actually, and ironically enough considering you are from France, the word "grognard" is French in origin. It refers back to the "Old Guard" of Napoleon's imperial guard. It became a term for "old school" D&D players because of D&D's roots in wargaming, of which Napoleonic wars was a popular genre. Meaning, "grognards" are RPG players who have been around since the wargaming days of the 60s and early 70s - the original generation of Gygax, his friends, and others who started playing in the halcyon days of the 70s, before the Boom of the early 80s. More generally it has become a term for folks who tend to be older, prefer "old school" style D&D...but even this becomes a sliding scale, as some think of AD&D players as grognards, but some grognards think of only OD&D purists are true grognards.

 

[rooneg]

[MENTION=6779504]rooneg[/MENTION]'s response was really good, but to add a bit. I like your plan and wish WotC would do that, but don't see it as at all realistic. What you describe implies a much larger staff than what they have.

It's not just that it would require a larger staff, it's that precisely this sort of splitting the player base's attention between multiple settings was a big part of why TSR eventually had to sell itself to WotC to survive. It's not the only thing, another chunk of the blame goes to the fact that many of their products were literally unable to be sold at a profit, but the fact that they split their attention between a huge number of settings was a huge problem back in the day.

 

[Morrus]

It's not just that it would require a larger staff, it's that precisely this sort of splitting the player base's attention between multiple settings was a big part of why TSR eventually had to sell itself to WotC to survive. It's not the only thing, another chunk of the blame goes to the fact that many of their products were literally unable to be sold at a profit, but the fact that they split their attention between a huge number of settings was a huge problem back in the day.

There's a huge difference between simultaneously maintaining 12 different setting lines and sequentially releasing the occasional adventure for a setting other than the FR. So different that that the comparison isn't really relevant.

The main reason for the current focus is branding and IP content. Movies and video games and stuff don't care about the ruleset, they need storylines and a setting. So take the D&D brand name (for branding) and merge it with the FR setting (for content), you have your package. D&D isn't just a tabletop RPG now; that just happens to be the portion of D&D we're interested in on this site.

 

[rooneg]

There's a huge difference between simultaneously maintaining 12 different setting lines and sequentially releasing the occasional adventure for a setting other than the FR. So different that that the comparison isn't really relevant.

Sure, but if you stick to the same 2 big adventure releases per year and make 1 of them into a non-realms release you're talking about 50% of your total content for the year being outside that core shared setting you're trying to get people to buy into. I expect the Curse of Strahd style releases to be way rarer than that. Think one out of every 4 HCs or so, maybe every 3 if we're lucky. That puts them at once every two years. Anyone who's expecting non-realms stuff to come more often than that seems likely to be unpleasantly surprised, partly because they want to avoid the "12 different setting lines" and partly because there are just so few storylines to go around in the current release schedule, so every time you do a non-realms one it's actually a really big percentage of your total output for the year.

 

[robus]

There's a huge difference between simultaneously maintaining 12 different setting lines and sequentially releasing the occasional adventure for a setting other than the FR. So different that that the comparison isn't really relevant.

The main reason for the current focus is branding and IP content. Movies and video games and stuff don't care about the ruleset, they need storylines and a setting. So take the D&D brand name (for branding) and merge it with the FR setting (for content), you have your package. D&D isn't just a tabletop RPG now; that just happens to be the portion of D&D we're interested in on this site.

I have to say I find the desire to make D&D a multimedia mega hit is puzzling. M:tG is much more valuable property - where are the Magic movies, board games etc? Really their planes walkers are totally set up for a movie series!

I'm not saying I want this, I'm just confused as to why d&d gets the push to be master of all media and not Magic?

 

[SkidAce]

I have to say I find the desire to make D&D a multimedia mega hit is puzzling. M:tG is much more valuable property - where are the Magic movies, board games etc? Really their planes walkers are totally set up for a movie series!

I'm not saying I want this, I'm just confused as to why d&d gets the push to be master of all media and not Magic?

That's actually an interesting question.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

It's Acererak in Chult. C'mon everybody knows already.

Sent from my LG-D852 using EN World mobile app

 

[Azzy]

I have to say I find the desire to make D&D a multimedia mega hit is puzzling. M:tG is much more valuable property - where are the Magic movies, board games etc? Really their planes walkers are totally set up for a movie series!

I'm not saying I want this, I'm just confused as to why d&d gets the push to be master of all media and not Magic?

Because Magic makes enough filthy luchre to justify its continued existence, whereas D&D is far more niche and needs other avenues in which to line the pockets of shareholders.

 

[robus]

Because Magic makes enough filthy luchre to justify its continued existence, whereas D&D is far more niche and needs other avenues in which to line the pockets of shareholders.

Perhaps but that seems a bit of a stretch FFG's Star Wars RPG doesn't seem to be benefitting much from mega movie tie-ins, despite excellent production values and a large effort to maximize revenue via multiple books. I really don't understand why WotC think it'll work the other way?!

 

[Staffan]

I have to say I find the desire to make D&D a multimedia mega hit is puzzling. M:tG is much more valuable property - where are the Magic movies, board games etc? Really their planes walkers are totally set up for a movie series!

Movie: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/fox-bring-magic-gathering-big-670529
Board game: http://magic.wizards.com/en/content/arena-planeswalkers