Review by C.J. Bunce
We’ve reviewed several fictional travel guides here at borg, including the New Universe Travel Guide series documenting key travel spots featured in the science fiction worlds of Star Trek and Firefly. The next travel guide coming your way this week takes on fifty years of the fantasy worlds of Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons: Worlds & Realms is a Herculean effort by familiar D&D creator Adam Lee, 360 pages of in-universe commentary and artwork condensing many places, peoples, races, and things. It’s available for pre-order now here at Amazon, arriving in bookstores tomorrow.
All of these stories have been told before. The author selected one narrator to combine them all. That’s the mage Mordenkainen who takes readers in three large sections through the Material Plane, the Inner and Parallel Planes, and ending with everything Beyond, providing a sum-up of his life-time of wizarding travels and recollections. This is a bit like having a friend who has visited every continent providing you a slide show of his voyages.
Mordenkainen at times uses second-hand accounts to describe the highlights of settings in the realms, all toward defining what makes each place special or unique. He’s a storyteller who sticks to the high points, adding in tidbits and “personal” stories as the book moves forward.
Other contributors, Jasmine Bhullar, Geoffrey Golden, Jody Houser, and Eric Campbell provide a half dozen two-page stories to help supplement Mordenkainen’s tour. The book attempts to cover so much content that each section only provides brief highlights from each world. It’s a bit like a travel guide to Earth with only a few pages to cover the planet.
The layout is not like an encyclopedia or chronology, so that doesn’t make for a prime quick-reference resource. Thankfully it includes an index, providing the opportunity for anyone who hears about a new place or setting to pull this book from their shelf to get a brief understanding about where it fits in D&D. Again this is in-universe, so it doesn’t reference supplements specifically, but it will help get players started. It also doesn’t feature maps of each location, which would have been a nice bonus.
The best feature is the hundreds of pieces of selected artwork from previous Wizards of the Coast and earlier publisher publications spanning the entirety of D&D’s fifty years. Each of the creators and a citation to the book that artwork was acquired from can be found in a useful appendix. These images truly provide a wide digest of people (and monsters, etc.) and places.
Dungeons & Dragons: Worlds & Realms isn’t going to be required reading for most long-time or new players, but it will be fun for old-timers looking to continue this year’s celebration of 50 years of all things D&D. It’s a gorgeous hardcover book, with more than an inch thick in full-color fantasy content. Pre-order Dungeons & Dragons: Worlds & Realms now here at Amazon, with a street date of tomorrow, October 29, 2024, published by Ten Speed Press.
