Review by C.J. Bunce
Sometimes you need to stop, recognize, and reflect on your successes. Dungeons & Dragons is doing just that in the new mega-sized hardcover book The Fifth Edition of Hasbro and the Wizards of the Coast’s “best roleplaying game ever” sought player input and revitalized a flailing brand, all in time for a pandemic that would shut the world down and need it to keep people together. If you’re only a recent player, this book will take you back through every adventure and tie-in developed to create a new D&D from several–a comprehensive, authoritative, and licensed look back at a decade as it begins to dip its toes into the next iteration of the RPG: One D&D.
Look forward to a hefty volume that will pair well with Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana: A Visual History (reviewed here at borg). It has 416 pages of color images documenting the 5th Edition of the game, showing what came before and what went into its development at each step via discussions with creators and players, compiled by familiar contributors Michael Witwer (D&D historian), Kyle Newman (director of the movie Fanboys), Jon Peterson (game historian) and Sam Witwer (actor, Being Human, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica) pulling together published images and source art from each edition of D&D’s core books and supplements (look for an in-joke about the Art & Arcana authors not being available for comment for Lore & Legends (they are one and the same).
This book is designed so readers can approach it for a quick catalog of the 5th Edition–it’s a lot like someone prepared an annual report to the stockholders of Hasbro highlighting the how the once new and volatile Wizards of the Coast D&D intellectual property saw its turnaround over 10 years into a lucrative profit center. Readers will find everything D&D from the 5th Edition forward, including core rulebooks, adventures, comics, tie-in novels, figures, and game accessories. It also offers some callbacks to vintage D&D content as sources of today’s game, including photographs of all kinds of ephemera.
references pop culture inclusion of the game illustrating an ongoing desire of some to become more accepted by the mainstream and even something for the “cool kids,” with nods to Community, Stephen Colbert, Stranger Things, and this year’s big-screen film, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
From the Starter Kit to this month’s The Deck of Many Things, we’ve covered it at borg and it’s chronicled for your bookshelf in detail from its inception a little over a decade ago. Consider this book required reading for D&D fans who joined the 5th Edition late, and an interesting look at this niche of fantasy, the tabletop game business, and nostalgia for the 20th century versions of the game. Order now here at Amazon.
