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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[robus]

For D&D, movies increase overall brand awareness, with spillover benefit to the tabletop RPG. Because D&D is a tabletop RPG with a movie (whereas Star Wars is a movie with a tabletop RPG) the effects are somewhat different.

And the stakes a lot higher. But your point is taken.

 

[robus]

OK.

Anecdotally, I do know several folks who discovered the FFG rpg, and roleplaying, and tabletop gaming, via star wars fandom.

Funny thing is many of them have also found D&D and play mostly that, rpg wise.

The TTRPG momentum is definitely behind 5e. If there were celebs playing Star Wars RPG that might make a change. Heck get the cast of the new movies to play a celebrity game livestream and I bet interest would shoot up.

 

[guachi]

And I'm sure they are thankful for the great success and all the money they've been making selling things you are uninterested in to other people.

Rather than pissing on what you don't care for, it might be more constructive (and interesting) to state what you were hoping for.

I liked the idea of Yawning Portal enough that I purchased it. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough of an update (nice maps, though) of the really old stuff to make me excited. I own Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain from the S Series hardcover reprint.

My friend's parents owned G1-3 and Hidden Shrine back in the day and I was always intrigued by it when I read them at his house. In fact, I liked Hidden Shrine enough I bought a copy off of ebay in 2014. I purchased G1-3 from dndclassics as a pdf for $5.

The downside of a 5e conversion I'd label as average is there is little added value to someone who owns these already. The downside of waiting to get Yawning Portal is I went out and bought the really old stuff already and also the old modules that were reprinted aren't modules I'd consider my favorites after reading them, though Tamoachan is fun for all the illustrations it comes with. It's the only one of the four old modules I'd like to run.

On the other hand, I'm happy to see the other three as I almost bought Dead in Thay in 2014 and it's nice to see highly rated 3e adventures I never played.

So I ended up buying Yawning Portal to show WotC I want more like this and because I had yet to buy anything from my FLGS even though I've been playing there for a year. It was (just) worth my $35 for the four adventures I'm ever likely to run. Though it cost me $50 from the FLGS I consider the extra $15 a reasonable cost for using his store for a year to run games.

What I'd like to see from reprints in the future is more effort put into the conversion to 5e rules. That is, it needs to be better than I can do. I know the illustrations and map art will be better, but from what I've read of Yawning Portal there wasn't as much care taken as I'd like to see.

Also, I'd like a B/X/C series module or any 1e module from after 1980. That is, I'd like something that isn't really old. We got a great selection of early TSR years adventures, I'd love something different.

What I'd really like, however, is something explicitly set somewhere other than standard Realms. D&D has so many wonderful settings with their own idiosyncrasies. And if were aren't going to get a setting book, the adventure (like we used to see in so many old adventures) itself provides the setting information and specialized rules.

If WotC is really going to keep everything in print, the only way to distinguish the new product on the shelf is by being different. Planescape, Dark Sun, Mystara, Zakhara (would buy 10 copies in a heartbeat), whatever.

Players who want something different for their next campaign will know what to get if you make it obvious on the cover. In the adventure you can provide a reasonable amount of setting information and direct DMs who want more to specific products on DMsGuild.

Give us a different setting or the books will just end up competing against themselves.

Oh, and I'm game for whatever Unearthed Arcana ends up being. I trust what we get will have enough to interest me in a companion to the PHB/DMG.

 

[Demetrios1453]

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

Sent from my LG-D852 using EN World mobile app

Everyone is speculating that already. And given our track record of speculations vs actual release, it may very well be something different...

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Everyone is speculating that already. And given our track record of speculations vs actual release, it may very well be something different...

I doubt it. Mark my words!

Sent from my LG-D852 using EN World mobile app

 

[Quickleaf]

Everyone is speculating that already. And given our track record of speculations vs actual release, it may very well be something different...

Indeed. It's probably that factol Skall of the Dustmen...

...was actually Acererak all along! Duh duh DUH!

 

[Jester David]

Everyone is speculating that already. And given our track record of speculations vs actual release, it may very well be something different...

A lot of people predicted both Strahd and Shakespearean giants based on far flimsier "evidence" than we've seen for Chult and Acererak...

 

[Demetrios1453]

A lot of people predicted both Strahd and Shakespearean giants based on far flimsier "evidence" than we've seen for Chult and Acererak...

The Shakespeare Giants definitely, but I don't remember much in the way of pre-announcement speculation for Strahd (I may just be misremembering though). Volo's and Yawning Portal were relative surprises, though.

I'm not saying we won't get Acererak and Chult this time, but we certainly don't know it for sure until the actual announcement. Until said announcement is made, it's still just speculation, and not the 100% certainty that a lot of people posting in this thread are treating it like...

 

[darjr]

The TTRPG momentum is definitely behind 5e. If there were celebs playing Star Wars RPG that might make a change. Heck get the cast of the new movies to play a celebrity game livestream and I bet interest would shoot up.

That is such a fantastic idea! They'd never do it. (OK now that I've said it it'll come true, right? Right? *sigh*)

I would absolutely watch that. I might even pay to watch that. Especially live.

 

[Pauper]

Chris Perkins has already answered the 'why is everything set in the Realms' question with a tweet from April 1 of this year:

"The Realms accommodates stories of every flavor, every genre. It's a world of boundless diversity. Nothing & no one is excluded."

On one hand, this makes sense -- if you know your Realms background, then you know that the Realms grew up as your typical 'kitchen sink' campaign setting, almost as if a young boy simply added things to his campaign world as he discovered them in school. "Ooh, let's have an area with a feudal king and aristocracy thing going on. Ooh, the Mongols are cool -- let's put a place for them in here! Whoa, dinosaurs!" And so forth. Sometimes deities from other cultures would just wander in and join the main pantheon, and sometimes there would be a whole new part of the world just so a pantheon could be added to the world.

The weird thing about Perkins's point, though, is that actual fans of the Realms as a setting are fans in spite of this tendency, not because of it -- they (like Dragonlance fans) largely became fans because of TSR's fairly tight marriage of the various adventures and the fiction line put out by their publishing arm. It's the specificity of events in the Realms that makes Realms fans fans -- a Realms fan will have a much different reaction to things like the Time of Troubles, Vangerdahast, or Finder Wyvernspur than those folks who simply appreciate the Realms as a 'kitchen sink' setting.

This is why I see criticism from those who prefer Greyhawk or Planescape as a setting as misguided -- not because WotC is ignoring those settings (as noted, most of the adventures have contained brief conversion notes for those who prefer other settings), but because they're simply using the Realms, not as a storied setting with its own history and 'canon', but as a catch-all for all the cool stuff D&D has done in its history, regardless of whether or not it really fits.

As someone who's been a Ravenloft fan for over a decade, let me say that Greyhawk and Planescape fans do not want their settings given the same treatment as Curse of Strahd.

--
Pauper