IDW Publishing announced it will be returning to the Forgotten Realms with Dungeons & Dragons: Mindbreaker, a five-issue monthly comic book series that takes place before the events of Baldur’s Gate III, the highly-anticipated video game. IDW D&D writer Jim Zub is back, joining artist Eduardo Mello in a tale of familiar Dungeons & Dragons adventurers Krydle, Shandie, Delina, Nerys, Minsc, and Boo, as they discover that something insidious has taken root in their homeland. Dungeons & Dragons: Mindbreaker #1 will be available with multiple cover variants, including artwork by Max Dunbar (Legends of Baldur’s Gate, Infernal Tides), Max Davenport, and Celia Lowenthal. Continue reading →
The Forgotten Realms have never been more fun, as the familiar setting continues to expand and flesh out fun characters like warrior Minsc and miniature giant space hamster Boo, half-elf/thief/poet Krydle, cleric Nerys Kathon, halfling rogue Shandie Freefoot, and Delina, the young moon elf wild magesorcerer, all in the pages of IDW comics. Writer Jim Zub is back partnering with artist Max Dunbar in Dungeons & Dragons: Infernal Tides. IDW Publishing and Wizards of the Coast have brought forward the best from the D&D game books and card games, and combined good fantasy storytelling with classic artwork like you’d find in D&D manuals and great humor fantasy like Mike Wieringo’s Tellos. It’s also the closest thing to Don Bluth’s video game Dragon’s Lair since Dragon’s Lair. The latest D&D graphic novel and next adventure in Baldur’s Gate arrives in comic shops and online stores this week.
Come, let us be quick. The crumbling world will not wait for heroes who pause.
Returning with a story at the very foundations of Dungeons & Dragons today is fantasy author R.A. Salvatore with the final novel in his latest Drizzt Do’Urden trilogy and his 34th Drizzt novel overall, Relentless. In this third act everything is at stake for the friends of the dark elf ranger, especially for his mother, his father, and his wife, as Salvatore takes readers back to the very circumstances of Drizzt’s birth–and reaches far into his future. The plot switches from skirmishes and battles to the careful ministrations of dark influences in the matriarchal society of Menzoberranzan and the reactions and responses of everyone to them. Available here at Amazon today, the release is also nicely timed to the forthcoming 5th edition of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden–Salvatore first presented Drizzt in the Ten Towns of that realm three decades ago.
The Forgotten Realms have never been more fun. Writer Jim Zub has partnered with artists Max Dunbar & John-Paul Bove, Nelson Daniel, Thiago Ribeiro, Milen Parvanov, and Glauber Matos in a huge compilation book, Dungeons & Dragons: Days of Endless Adventure. IDW Publishing and Wizards of the Coast have brought forward the best from the D&D game books and card games, and combined good fantasy storytelling with classic artwork like you’d find in both D&D manuals or J.R.R. Tolkien’s magical worlds, with humor similar to Mike Wieringo’s Tellos. Best yet, it features the Dungeon Mayhem’s Minsc and his trusty partner hamster Boo, meaning lots of bravery (and laughs) await you.
With most of the nation moving to more at-home time because of the coronavirus/COVID-19, there’s never been a better time to join an online campaign or begin with your family at home your own Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition roleplaying game campaign. Wizards of the Coast is here to jumpstart your campaign fun with two new products this month. First is a set of D&D trademark “dice and miscellany,” this time tied to the Forgotten Realms’ own Laeral Silverhand, Open Lord of Waterdeep, centuries-old archmage, and daughter of the goddess of magic. She’s here to guide you on your path to adventure with Laeral Silverhand’s Explorer’s Kit, a shiny new eleven dice set (two d20s, one d12, two d10s, one d8, four d6s, one d4), twenty illustrated, double-sided cards detailing Laeral’s expert insights on key characters, locations, and lore from across the Forgotten Realms, and an attractive foldout double-sided map of the Sword Coast and the city of Waterdeep–all housed in a sturdy felt-lined box that functions as two dice trays. If you’ve played for years and haven’t picked up one of these add-on kits in a while, this set of gorgeous dice and materials would be a great place to start. It’s now available here at Amazon.
Also available for the first time this month is a sourcebook springing out of the second campaign of the popular D&D liveplay show, Critical Role. It’s the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, a hefty, 300+ page guidebook to the world created by Matthew Mercer, DM to Critical Role. Although it promises new surprises for fans of the show, it is also made for gamers at any level, regardless of their familiarity with the show, and provides new characters that can be incorporated into any campaign. Wildemount is a continent in the world of Exandria, with varied cultures, locales, peoples, and monsters. The guide introduces four adventures: Tide of Retribution, Dangerous Designs, Frozen Sick, and Unwelcome Spirits.
DMs can set the adventure in one of four regions–the Menagerie Coast, Marrow Valley and the Zemni Fields, the Greying Wildlands and Eiselcross, the Wastes of Xhorhas and Blightshore–or incorporate any or all of them. Adventures range from level one to 20. Players are invited to jump the rails–change any aspect of an adventure to suit the type of game players enjoy the most. In the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, improvisation is your friend. If a DM isn’t sure how to proceed he/she is encouraged to do whatever is the most fun for the players, characters, and journey.
Next week fans of Dungeons & Dragons will see the re-release of two Forgotten Realms adventures that started off the 5th Edition renaissance of D&D back in 2014. Both the thinner adventure modules Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat have been combined and repackaged into one volume, Tyranny of Dragons. This extra-thick compilation book, the first like it in the 5th Edition, is available in a single exclusive edition with artwork by artist Hydro74–featuring what may be his best cover design yet. The release is part of Wizards of the Coast’s celebration of five years of 5th Edition adventures.
In addition to the Forgotten Realms module Hoard of the Dragon Queen, the Tyranny of Dragons storyline has pulled in at least fifteen D&D Adventurer’s League “Expedition” tie-in adventures since 2014, when players first encountered the Cult of the Dragon and its plans to free Tiamat, the goddess of chromatic dragons, from the Nine Hells. The storyline was continued in The Rise of Tiamat module later that year. Don’t look for a specific errata section in this new edition–Wizards of the Coast says it has updated the adventure within by incorporating feedback to “smooth out the curve” for new players. The two campaigns are fused into 17 chapters (as many fans wanted in the beginning), and a new appendix provides some never-before-published concept artwork.
The biggest feature is that all-new appendix containing 32-pages of double-page poster-worthy art showcasing scenes from the storyline, plus concept artwork, including sketches and trial pieces. These were not previously included in prior fifth edition volumes.
Steeped in the Dungeons & Dragons foundations of R.A. Salvatore′s new novel, the adventure becomes so much a journey of a thousand skirmishes inside the stories of Waterdeep and the Forgotten Realms that the biggest surprise is no D&D branding graces the cover. Although it’s accessible for anyone without reference toTimeless (last year’s first book in the series), Boundless is the next chapter in Salvatore’s trilogy of novels following his well-known hero of the genre Drizzt Do’Urden. Boundless has everything you’d expect from the character and his world, from demogorgons to psionics, armored dwarves to unicorns–and humans. It’s now available for pre-order here at Amazon and arriving in bookstores September 10.
Boundless′s breakneck pace is why fans of Salvatore will find themselves jumping in and holding on tight for the entire novel. The only time it comes up for air is in a series of diary-like entries by Drizzt that begin the novel’s four sections. As it turns out, the leads of the story aren’t really Drizzt himself but his father, the resurrected weapon master Zaknafein, and the wise mercenary Jarlaxle, both swashbuckling schemers with skills and political connections–characters that make you want to skip over the subplots to see what they do next. Despite a few subordinate heroes, like Arathis Hune, the giant Wulfgar, the psionicist Kimmuriel, and the dwarf Thibbledorf Pwent, shifting the stakes from the shadows are the story’s female characters, with the priestess Dab-nay and the elf Dahlia as key players.
All the good fantasy tropes are here, a very Tolkien journey that may have readers plugging actors from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies into key roles, with the kind of twisty but grounded machinations you’d find in The Godfather, Part II and Amadeus, and dramatic evil queen-types as in The Huntsman. Readers will find as much of the more comical-aside conversations of The Princess Bride school here as dead-serious high fantasy despite plenty of darkness. The novel provides a favorable dice role for its heroes more often than not, but despite seemingly endless triumphs and last-second getaways by a half a dozen heroes, Salvatore leaves room for some real jeopardy for its characters, including serious carnage before book’s end.
Premiering today, the next adventure sourcebook for Dungeons & Dragons is entitledGhosts of Saltmarsh, a title that evokes both the haunted nature of many of the adventures contained within it, including the titular Saltmarsh trilogy from D&D’s 1st Edition. Saltmarsh is the first D&D adventure book to be officially set in the world of Greyhawk, the original D&D Fantasy world setting used in 1st and 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons before Ed Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms captured the roleplaying community’s imagination, a fact sure to delight many long-time fans of the setting. It includes a brief introduction of Greyhawk and provides some background information about the Kingdom of Keoland, where the coastal town of Saltmarsh is set.
The book also provides three alternate “factions”, in place of the standard five factions of the Forgotten Realms: The Traditionalists, the Loyalists, and the Scarlet Brotherhood. Included are NPCs, motivations, and background information enough to provide players with the ability to use them in place of the standard factions. Of course, the Realms factions can easily still be used with a little work on the DM’s part.
Similar to Tales from the Yawning Portal,Ghosts of Saltmarsh is primarily a collection of seven adventures set in a maritime area, rather than a full campaign in and of itself as with other hardcover books (such as Tomb of Annihilation andDungeon of the Mad Mage). The Saltmarsh adventures are designed to be inserted into an ongoing campaign and ran as independent adventures. However, unlike with Yawning Portal, there is an outline provided in Saltmarsh which allows them to be stitched together into a campaign, with room for other published adventures or excursions of the DM’s design to be inserted in between.
Three of the adventures are based on the Saltmarsh Trilogy of D&D modules, first published in the early 1980s by TSR’s United Kingdom office (hence “U” in the original module designations “U1” through “U3”). The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Danger at Dunwater, and The Final Enemy presented players with an in-depth plot, multiple twists in story and characters, and a deeper roleplaying experience than was available at the time from most other published adventures. In fact, one entire adventure is designed to be roleplayed almost entriely through, with very few combat opportunities (unless the party started fighting with their potential allies), something rarely seen at the time.
Today the roleplaying populace at large demands a heavy, story-driven narrative for their gaming dollars, and the popularity of Twitch, YouTube and other streaming platforms have brought awareness to how enjoyable and accessible the roleplaying experience can be. But 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons was dominated by the likes ofThe Keep on the Borderlands, the Slavers and Giants series, and the penultimate Tomb of Horrors, most of which were based around the same general idea: “Hey, there’s a hole in the ground and it’s full of monsters and treasure; see how far you can get without dying.”
