Critical Role’s game studio Darington Press has been making their first forray into TTRPGs over the last year or so, and now the much anticipated playtest of their fantasy game Daggerheart is live. As some of the most famous Dungeons & Dragons players in the world it’s interesting to see the company perhaps stepping away from the RPG giant. However, when sitting down to read through the playtest material myself and Wheels were left feeling a little lost, asking ourselves why we struggled to click with the game. Does the world really need another fantasy TTRPG? And is this the best one if it does?

Currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, Adventures in the Household transmutes the Ennie Award-nominated Household RPG into 5E rules but keeps the regency eraed-flavoured world of the House, an abandoned mansion in the woods full of wee people called Littlings. Cities and entire cultures have developed around the crumbling walls and overgrown gardens, and players’ adventures revolve around exploring its borders, interacting with different Littling societies and fending off threats such as rats, spiders and (relatively) huge geese.

Original designers Riccardo Sirignano and Simone Formicola will publish the 5E translation via their Italian studio Two Little Mice, and they’ve brought on Jacob Rodgers as their conversion ringer – he was responsible for adapting Ruins of Symbaroum and The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying for Free League, so he knows his way around Dungeons & Dragons’ modern ruleset.

Player characters will hail from one of four Littling backgrounds that compose the various communities inhabiting the House and its environs. The Faeries bear both dragonfly wings and a courtly nobility, while the Boggarts represent strong communal ties and strong physiques. The Slaugh hail from the Farbeyond and boast incredible regenerative abilities, while Sprites draw their power from ancestral connections to Fire, Air and Water elements within the House.

Classes are redefined as professions and sub-categorical vocations, and the core book offers six of each: burly Soldiers, academic-minded Scholars, Hunters who protect towns from carnivorous beats, opportunistic Criminals, Duelists who view warfare through a romantic lens and Animal Handlers who specialise in the domestication of helpful fauna. You can see clear parallels to the well known 5E classes here, but there’s a fun and flavourful tie to how the Littlings navigate the House that feels like a high fantasy recasting of Mary Norton’s book, The Borrowers.

Since this is a 5E tabletop RPG, players should expect to encounter no end of traps, challenges and potentially deadly combat as they push through the walls and carpets of the House. The core rulebook details five different rooms of the House – the Living Room, Bedroom, Basement, Bathroom and Dining Hall – each with different cities, characters and storylines to pursue. What’s not included are the previous full-sized residents, as they have vanished and not returned in living memory.

The 300-page core rulebook will be accompanied by a slightly smaller Household Guide that expands the house, offers more character options and new mysteries that form the foundations of campaign-long questlines. Such Small Matters provides game masters with 24 pregenerated Littlings and six authored adventures, along with quest hooks and other material to support homebrewed material.

The Kickstarter campaign for Adventures in the Household runs through April 4th to crowdfund both a digital and physical edition of the three sourcebooks. There’s also a reprint of the original RPG on offer. The development team includes Two Little Mice and Rodgers, artist Daniela Giubellini. Shipping to backers should begin in September of this year. If you’re interested in peeking at the rules before buying, there’s a free quickstart PDF on DrivethruRPG.

The Fallout streaming series is only a few weeks away. And it looks like it could actually be pretty good! We’re always a little wary when it comes to live-action adaptations of video games or animation. But it looks like Fallout may be one of the shows that make the leap from game to series and sticks the landing. And if not, it sounds like they’re at least going to nail the soundtrack. In the meantime, let’s wait for Fallout to premiere together and play some D&D with a…

Fallout Vault Dweller

Something that’s fun about Fallout is how open-ended gameplay and character creation are. What does your character look like? What kind of weapons do they prefer? What about their moral compass? It’s all up to you, the player. This means that there are a bunch of directions you could take a Vault-Dweller-inspired character for a D&D setting.

Personally, I pinpointed Dogmeat, tracking and survival skills, and shooting skills to be the most important. But if you played more of a melee character, another subclass of Fighter may be a better pick for your character. If you leaned hard into the power armor, Artificer may be the Vault-Dweller for you.

For this character though, I went for a Ranger-Gunslinger duel-class. Ranger gives us access to things hunters mark, some healing spells, and, perhaps most importantly, an animal companion. Which we will of course use to make sure out Vault Dweller has Dogmeat by their side.

via Amazon

Gunslinger isn’t an official class, but it is a Matt Mercer class, which is close enough. And those trick shots will nicely approximate the Vault Dweller’s ability to slow down time and take aim against enemies.

We also took a few feats and spells. The feats are all very focused on making sure that the character is a little extra tough and aware of their surroundings. Generally, they’re somewhat capable of surviving in a radiation-poisoned world full of horrible monsters. While the spells are a mixture of healing and danger detection.

Finally, while you leave the vault in the signature blue jumpsuit, you can pick up all sorts of armor along the way, up to and including power armor. And this is a character with proficiency in any armor… so we sort of had our pick of anything. I opted for half plate as a sort of middle ground between leather and full power armor. But your Vault Dweller can wear whatever armor they come across out there in the radiation wastes.

Remember in Fallout 4 when you have to go to Lake Quannapowitt? It’s a real place and I used to live in the town where it is! You shouldn’t go swimming in the real Lake Quannapowitt, either, but it’s a very nice 5K run.

How would you make a Fallout Vault Dweller for a D&D setting? Are you looking forward to the upcoming series? What movie, show, game, book, or comic should we make sheets from next time? Let us know in the comments!

Happy adventuring!

She/Her/They/Them | Writer, Cosplayer, Podcaster, Tapletop RPGer, Opossum Enthusiast, Mediocre Ukulele Player, & Coffee Addict. To find Meaghan elsewhere on the internet, check out her LinkTree at https://linktr.ee/habie_cosplays
Any emails regarding articles or potential game or accessory spotlights can be sent to [email protected].

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After D&D, Daggerheart lists various inspirations as disparate as Borderlands, Earthsea and Slugblaster: Kickflip Over a Quantum Centipede, but its general tone is summed up quite nicely at the start of the player principles: “Be a fan of your character and their journey.” This lofty urging to experience the game both as an onlooker who demands healthy party dynamics and dangerous adversaries that never quite stop the group in their tracks is quite illuminating, and is essentially what sits at the heart of Daggerheart’s echoes of Fifth Edition: the desire to replicate the features that have made D&D not simply a lasting game, but an enduring cinematic baseline for the production of RPG games that fulfil not only a handful of players, but thousands of fans.

The first way that Daggerheart tries to get this across is its central action resolution system: the Hope and Fear dice. All actions are resolved with two colour-coded d12s, one for ‘Hope’ and one for ‘Fear’; dice are rolled and totalled to come up with a final score to beat checks, noting whether the Hope or Fear die rolls higher. If Hope rolls higher, players take a hope. If fear rolls higher, the GM takes a fear. Both are points that can be later spent to either help or hinder the players. The system seems highly reminiscent of the Chaos/Momentum dynamic that existed in Modiphius’ Dishonored RPG (also listed among the game’s inspirations), providing a stockpile of resources that builds as the game progresses; hope is spent by players to help them, fear is spent by the GM against them.

Daggerheart works very well at being a cinematic system in which player cohesion and satisfaction comes first and foremost.

Fear, like Dishonored’s Chaos, presents a great solution to the challenges of fail-forward systems. ‘Fail-forward’ refers to a style of play in which, instead of simply failing to achieve a desired result, low dice rolls still succeed but add additional complications to a scene. An issue that this often runs into is that the requirement to constantly add complications can feel like needless contrivance, adding complications way beyond the initial scope of the scene. Fear still encourages on-the-fly complications, but also provides a reservoir of karmic backlash that the GM can redeploy into play at any time.

This system kills two birds with one stone – GMs can delay consequences for somewhere that makes more narrative sense, and players feel less hard done by when a left-field complication is drawn from a measurable resource. All of this manifests in what feels like Daggerheart’s biggest draw; it works very well at being a cinematic system in which player cohesion and satisfaction comes first and foremost.

In fact, Daggerheart in its roleplay stage basically feels like it’s playing the hits. We have clocks from Blades in the Dark, partial successes from Powered by the Apocalypse, chaos from Dishonored, talents from Lancer. But the game’s most left-field decisions come in its departure from D&D combat, moving from 5E’s turn-based system to a completely freeform combat environment.I can’t say that I don’t see the vision here. Turn-based combat systems restrict play to a tiny area within combat, where the experience of waiting for your turn to come around can turn into a torturous waiting game, so recommending player engagement with combat as and when it works narratively is a good fix. Particularly, Daggerheart places great emphasis on party dynamics; playing fast and loose with turn orders means that parties can set up synergistic moves between members, encouraged by tag-team rolls in which players combine hope to act in tandem.

Daggerheart feels like it should be a game about combat but, as things currently stand, it’s massively underdeveloped.

But the solution here opens up more problems. A well-run fight still involves all the players and enemies getting regular chances to show off their abilities – so the requirements that lead to turn-based systems are still there, but all the work of running it has just been shifted from the rule system to the GM, who is forced to wrest control away from outgoing players in order to ensure everyone is getting their time in the sun.

All of this might be fine in a system where combat is less important, but Daggerheart retains a clear vestigial focus on combat in its character builds and abilities from its crunchy D&D forebears. So, in order for character choices to be realised, combat has to be regularly visited – despite the fact that running it often turns into a massive headache where constant GM supervision is required to stop players from oscillating between brazen temerity and self-conscious timorousness. Essentially, Daggerheart feels like it should be a game about combat, given the amount of rules devoted to it (particularly in character creation), but, as things currently stand, combat feels like it’s massively underdeveloped.

There are a few other things here that follow the same critique; changes made in the name of time-saving that ultimately feel as though they create more work. For example, money and range are both abstracted into generalised bands like ‘a hoard’ and ‘very close’, both of which sound fine until you find yourself completely dumbstruck by questions like “How far can this enemy run?” and “How much does this sword cost?” (both things usually resolved by performing a slapdash recreation of the numerical systems that they were designed to replace).

Daggerheart works surprisingly well in small doses, but fundamentally it’s not much more than a concatenation of D&D holdovers and recognisable mechanics collected around a bright, sanitary epic-fantasy aesthetic.

The main area in which Daggerheart wants to retain some of D&D’s typical crunch is character creation. Players choose ancestries, classes and subclasses, but swap in and out abilities on ‘cards’, similar to a perk loadout system in a video game. The approach generally works quite well – character creation has been surprisingly easy, although the actual tactile experience of moving cards in and out of play seems needlessly complex. Additionally, I can’t help but ascribe a cynical view to Daggerheart’s focus on decks of ability cards and colour-coded dice. I will be wholly unsurprised if, once Daggerheart hits the market in its final iteration, it does so accompanied by a host of branded paraphernalia intended to goad die-hard fans and inexperienced marks into overspending on a game that, fundamentally, should only require pencil, paper and some bog-standard polyhedrals.

The final result is that Daggerheart works surprisingly well in small doses. The game seems effectively set up for established groups – but, fundamentally, it’s not much more than a concatenation of D&D holdovers and recognisable mechanics collected around a bright, sanitary epic-fantasy aesthetic. Daggerheart is certainly recommendable in its current state for the right type of session, but there is still a long way to go before the game will be able to create an identity for itself away from the industry titans that formented its creation.

WotC consulted with celebrities including True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll and Critical Role’s Matt Mercer when revising the upcoming 2024 edition of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Apparently another (unnamed) consultant provided advice on running game for kids.

That’s it; that’s the news.

Past a certain point, money is no object in D&D. But when every single gold piece matters, here are some items that won’t break your bank.

As adventurers grow in power, so too, do they grow in wealth. It’s one of the biggest power fantasies D&D has to offer: that your efforts will be commensurately rewarded again and again, and you even get to keep most, if not all of it.

But at some point, you end up with so much money that you have to really work to try and spend it all. And so much power that the DM doesn’t know how to handle it. Of course, that all comes after getting through the grueling lower levels. There, every hit point matters, and every gold piece doubly so.

One need only look at the first few episodes of a Critical Role campaign to see adventurers scrounging to try and turn up even ten gold pieces. When every gold piece matters, here are some of the best-starting items money can buy.

Ball Bearings

An individual ball bearing will run you 1/10th of a copper piece. You can get a bag of a thousand for a single gold piece, which comes with a free bag for your troubles. And for a single action, you can spread them over an area. These can potentially knock down opponents if they fail a DC 10 saving throw, or slow them down if they want to avoid it—even a giant, four-legged creature runs the risk of being knocked over.

Now, there’s no rule that specifically says how many ball bearings you need to use to knock someone over. But even if you buy the bag of a thousand of them, or half a bag, you’re spending no more than a single gold piece.

Chicken

Have you ever seen a chicken? They are basically dinosaurs parading around today as little six-piece nuggets to-be. And you can get one for a mere 2 copper pieces. Or a grand total of 50 for a single gold piece. These are the ultimate helpers. Sure, one chicken might not have more than a couple of hit points. But 50 of them? Especially if you have a spell like Speak with Animals or Animal Friendship or even Animal Messenger to better communicate what you need them to do.

If you want to see an example of what kind of mischief birds can get up to, just take a look at the end of Home Alone 2, where a bunch of birdseed is all it takes to defeat the Wet Bandits, thanks to the indomitable might of pigeons.

And then recall that chickens are bigger, and carry the genetic memory of T. Rexes, probably.

Torch

Fire solves many problems. It sheds light, ignites flammable objects, and you can even cook with it if you need to. And the humble torch is one of the best ways to carry around fire where you need it. This 2 copper piece item grants vision in the dark: up to 20 feet of bright light, and 20 more of dim light, so it benefits even creatures with darkvision.

And that’s before you light something on fire and swing it at your foes like a burning club.

Ink Pen

Is a pen truly mightier than the sword? Well, they’re certainly cheaper, coming in at 2 copper pieces, the humble ink pen is one of the most important pieces of gear a Wizard can own. Because for 2 copper pieces (plus the cost of rare inks and materials), you’ll be able to scribe spells into your spellbook or onto a scroll where they can be used without the need of a spell slot.

That’s why they’re everywhere in Baldur’s Gate 3.

10-foot Pole

And finally, the humble 10-foot pole. This item has been a part of D&D since the beginning because it gives you a way to open doors without having to be right in front of them. Or to push open latches or chests, or even to press on the floor to try and see if a square is trapped. All this, for just 5 copper pieces.

Of course, for those times when you wouldn’t even touch things with a ten-foot pole, you’ll need to upgrade with 50 feet of rope, but that takes a bit more money.

Bell of Lost Souls Staff Writer and DM, J.R. covers RPGs of all stripes and on occasion eats sandwiches. You can ask him about either at [email protected]

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Critical Role is an actual play series in which a cast of actors play tabletop roleplaying games in front of a camera. Vox Machina is the party of characters from the show’s first campaign, which includes the barbarian Grog, druid Keyleth, human gunslinger Percy, gnomish bard Scanlan, gnomish cleric Pike, and half-elf twins Vex and Vax – who are a ranger and a rogue, respectively.

These characters are played by actors Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Liam O’Brian, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegal and Travis Willingham, with the dungeon master role being played by Mathew Mercer, who is also the mastermind behind the setting of Critical Role, Campaign One: Exandria.

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Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins IV is a new comic book that takes place within Exandria and follows the adventuring party embarking on a quest that has not appeared in episodes of Critical Role before. The group have been tasked with investigating the whereabouts of Sir Fince, who has disappeared recently. Following the potential clues, the gang enter a mysterious basement underneath the manor house of the aristocrat. Vox Machina now faces a new collection of threats that they’ll have to navigate through in the dark lower levels of this house.

Dicebreaker has been granted an exclusive look at a variant cover featuring Keyleth, for the upcoming comic book by David Mack – an artist who has previously illustrated covers for the likes of Neil Gaiman and Stan Sakai – for the retail store Things From Another World. Two pages from inside the book itself have also been included in this exclusive reveal, with words yet to be added to the illustrations.

Attribution

Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins IV was written by Jody Houser – who has previously worked on the sci-fi TV show Stranger Things and other issues of Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins – with artwork from Noah Hayes (Goldie Vance, The Avant-Guards), colours by Diana Sousa and letters from Arianna Maher. The Critical Role team, including DM Matthew Mercer, have also acted as consultants on the comic.

Dark Horse Comics is the publisher behind Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins IV, with the company previously releasing the other entries in the series as well as comic books in the Mighty Nein Origins series, which is based on the characters of Campaign Two of Critical Role. Otherwise, Dark Horse Comics is best known for releasing various comic books based on licences such as Star Wars and Avatar: The Last Airbender, as well as original series like Sin City, 300, Hell Boy and Usagi Yojimbo.

The first issue of Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins IV will be released on store shelves on May 29th.

This partnership made in brand-loving millennial heaven first solicited plans for a Dungeons & Dragons-themed set through the LEGO Ideas website. The eventual winner, Lucas “Boltbuildz” Bolt, imagined a fantasy inn with a crumbling tower where a massive dragon perched, its tail snaking down the parapet. It also featured a small dungeon full of traps, treasure and one angry Beholder.

Most of those elements survived into the final Red Dragon’s Tale that LEGO will stock on shelves – the fundamental structure has been slightly refined, a wicked displacer beast and gelatinous cube now stalk the dungeon alongside the more brand-fitting Beholder, and you can find an owlbear in the enchanted woods behind the cheekily named Inn Plain Sight. Oh, and the massive dragon obviously survived and has been made over into a menacing red lizard looming over the entire scene.

A classic adventuring party of five minifigures sit drinking and singing alongside the innkeeper, either returning from a successful raid or hyping themselves up to face the dragon’s lair. LEGO and D&D’s owner Wizards of the Coast have literalized the fantasy of this set by planning a promotional actual play video starring actor and DesiQuest regular Anjali Bhimani, Luis Carazo from NCIS, Exandria Unlimited and Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!, YouTube creator and singer Ginny D, Jordan Scott, and featuring Bolt himself at the table.

The crew will likely use the D&D LEGO adventure book with the same name as the set, a special release that players can also access if they join the LEGO Insiders subscription service. Promotional shots show the booklet at the gaming table, and it probably consists of enough pages to run five characters through some skill challenges, roleplay at the inn, facing down some beasties and ultimately confronting the dragon and its hoard of treasure.

Dungeons & Dragons: Red Dragon’s Tale will be available to purchase on April 4th and run you a whopping $350 in the US. The LEGO Ideas Dungeons & Dragons Epic Game Night stream (phew, what a mouthful) airs on April 6th at 12 p.m. EDT, ostensibly on the LEGO YouTube channel.

This brand crossover is one of several that D&D’s owner Hasbro planned for the near future. This one makes a lot of sense and has resulted in a genuinely cool set that will impress fans of either hobby, but I’m not sure if the same level of enthusiasm will meet the tabletop RPG’s impending deals with Converse shoes and Pop-Tarts.

Come watch the cast of Critical Role take their new game, Daggerheart, for a spin with talking frogs, sexy deer ladies, and more.

With Critical Role’s new RPG, Daggerheart, out in the wild for open playtesting, the cast of Critical Role took the game for a spin in a four-hour live-play one-shot adventure that showcases the system’s highlights.

Of course, for a game meant for campaign play, this is only scratching the surface. But if you’ve been curious as to how the game works when being played, or if you just can’t get enough of the Critical Role gang making dick jokes, you can see it all as Critical Role plays Daggerheart.

Critical Role Plays Daggerheart

Daggerheart, not to be confused with The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, is a new RPG still in open beta from Darrington Press, Critical Role’s publishing imprint. Hailing itself as a fantasy RPG with a strong focus on narrative and character expression over the course of longer, campaign-focused gameplay, the game borrows a bit of the mechanics from both Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark rulesets, putting its own unique spin on the idea of advancing as a character.

Create a character in Daggerfall, and you’ll find yourself pulling abilities from your class and two different Domains. But, more importantly, you’ll also find yourself with a swath of interesting fantasy folk to choose from. Whether the frog-like Ribbet, the deer-like Faun, or the turtle-like Galapa, there are plenty of new things to play with.

Of particular note, these three names also appear in Campaign 3 of Critical Role as renamed races from WotC. Followers of the stream will also note how the world of Tal’Dorei has taken steps away from more strongly D&D associated names, like Vecna and Pelor, replaced with titles. Does this mean that one day, Critical Role will replace D&D with Daggerheart entirely on their live stream? Probably not.

The appeal of D&D runs deep. But it is interesting to see the stakes being laid in the ground to mark off material that might be copyrightable. As Darrington Press moves forward with the release, they come at an important inflection point for D&D. With the 2024 ruleset coming, many players may be looking to jump ship.

For now, though, Daggerheart is still in development. And while it may have its roots in D&D, it’s interesting to see where it branches out away from that.

Daggerheart releases in 2025!

Bell of Lost Souls Staff Writer and DM, J.R. covers RPGs of all stripes and on occasion eats sandwiches. You can ask him about either at [email protected]

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However, it doesn’t feel especially momentous. Instead, it seems like the recent cultural steam for D&D we’ve seen spewing out across the mainstream has been dissipating in the last couple of years. To the point that it feels like the 2024 edition of the RPG could turn out to be a sad flop, rather than the triumphant evolution of Dungeons & Dragons 5E into a digitally-focused roleplaying game.

Though it makes a lot of sense to time the release of the new rulebooks to coincide with the 50th anniversary of D&D, the buzz surrounding the next iteration roleplaying game is a lot quieter than you’d expect it to be considering that, 1) it’s been ten years since the release of Fifth Edition and 2) this is the newest version of the biggest tabletop RPG in the Western world.

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This feels partly the fault of Wizards of the Coast itself. Since One D&D – now called Dungeons & Dragons 2024 – was first announced in mid-2022, there have been regular updates to its work-in-progress playtest rules, which could only be found on the Unearthed Arcana website. Eventually, announcements for the release dates of the new Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual were made earlier this year. However, the company’s overall approach to marketing has been decidedly minimal so far. No official documentary, no word on the previously announced D&D TV show, no glamorous event celebrating the anniversary – which was this February and was acknowledged with a small video – and no tie-in with Wizards of the Coast’s other big game, Magic: The Gathering. Not even a ridiculously overhyped campaign featured some ludicrously overpriced piece of merchandise.

This approach could be leading D&D 5E to stagnate, with less loyal players looking elsewhere for new experiences.

Since the release of D&D 5E, which is easily the game’s most successful edition – Wizards claimed that it had over 50 million players by 2020 – Dungeons & Dragons has become a lot more accessible, meaning that there are more people willing to give it a try. After its initial release in 2014, there have been no major changes to the 5E formula and it looks unlikely there will be in the near future, with the upcoming rulebooks looking to refine rather than reinvent. This approach could be leading D&D 5E to stagnate, with less loyal players looking elsewhere for new experiences.

One factor that aided in Dungeons & Dragons becoming more popular was its role in Netflix’s hit 1980s-themed series Stranger Things, with aspects of the RPG’s lore appearing, almost wholesale, within multiple seasons. Wizards even released an official Stranger Things-themed starter set for D&D 5E. However, with critical acclaim for the series declining with every subsequent season, a two-year gap since the release of its last season, and a fifth and final season yet to be seen, Stranger Things and D&D alike don’t have as much of a stranglehold on popular culture as they once did.

Critical Role’s gradual move away from D&D has further added to the feeling that Dungeons & Dragons has crested over a hill of cultural relevance.

The rise of actual play series – shows in which the cast are filmed playing tabletop roleplaying games, often D&D – have also played a large part in the increased interest in Dungeons & Dragons. The most popular actual play series is easily Critical Role, reportedly one of the top earners on Twitch in October 2021, which was also arguably the show’s high point in terms of quality. More recent numbers for Critical Role’s Twitch channel reportedly show that their yearly viewership was down from around 10 million viewers in 2021 to around five million viewers in 2023.

Critical Role itself appears to be exploring other tabletop RPGs outside of Dungeons & Dragons, both on-screen and via its own publishing label Darrington Press, including recent horror RPG Candela Obscura and upcoming fantasy RPG Daggerheart. Critical Role’s gradual move away from D&D has further added to the feeling that Dungeons & Dragons has crested over a hill of cultural relevance in the last year or so.

This feeling was reflected in the performance of last year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, the latest attempt from Wizards of the Coast to bring the RPG to the big screen after its critically disastrous noughties movie. Though Honor Among Thieves was critically well-received, it fared a lot worse financially. The film cost $150 million to make and only brought in $208m worldwide, likely putting it under its total production and marketing budget. It’s no surprise that Wizards of the Coast owner Hasbro has since offloaded its television and movie studio Entertainment One to Lionsgate.

Even the release of video game Baldur’s Gate 3 last year, which has turned out to be a surprise hit, both critically and commercially, feels like it hasn’t been capitalised on by Wizards of the Coast. Its only major tie-ins were a Magic: The Gathering set released in 2022, Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate, and a prequel D&D 5E adventure book released years earlier, 2019’s Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus. Despite the D&D video game reaching the kinds of players who probably haven’t ever played the original tabletop roleplaying game, but might do now they’ve fallen in love with Baldur’s Gate 3, it seems Wizards hasn’t attempted to court them further.

It’s clear that Wizards has already rocked the D&D boat with its OGL shenanigans and hasn’t done enough to court the interests of people outside its usual fanbase.

D&D fans’ loyalty has also been tested by last year’s debacle around the Open Game License, which saw Wizards attempting to tighten its grip on any supplements and games based on the OGL 5E gameplay system. The OGL gives third-party creators the legal right to use gameplay mechanics and other elements from Dungeons & Dragons in their own releases, which has since led to a thriving community of expansions and spin-offs, as well as D&D-descended RPGs such as Pathfinder. Wizards had initially planned to scrap all previous versions of the OGL System Reference Document and force creators to agree to a new OGL – which could have seen some publishers paying a 25% royalty cost if their materials made enough money. The outcry from publishers, creators and fans eventually saw Wizards pivot away from its plans to change the OGL, but the damage was already done.

Which brings us back to this year and the imminent release of the next series of core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons despite the fires stoked by the release of D&D 5E, Stranger Things, Critical Role and Baldur’s Gate 3 seeming to have burned out before their arrival – with the OGL debacle pouring cold water on the once red-hot RPG.

We can’t yet predict how well these books will sell and how many people will come onboard for the digital-first approach Wizards of the Coast is pushing for D&D 2024. However, it’s clear that Wizards has already rocked the D&D boat with its OGL shenanigans and hasn’t done enough to court the interests of people outside its usual fanbase, with much of the world remaining completely unaware that a new version of the roleplaying game is arriving in the same year as its 50th anniversary. Wizards’ apparent lack of enthusiasm towards promoting the next big step for its biggest game could be reflective of the tabletop industry’s current aversion to costly campaigns and tendency to button down the hatches in response to the cost-of-living crisis.

Perhaps if the company had released the new version of D&D a couple of years ago, it might have arrived into a better environment – both in terms of the global situation and people’s perception of D&D. For now, the arrival of Dungeons & Dragons 2024 could be too little, too late.