I had to unearth this column for this one.

I don’t know if it’s the heat or the overworking that made me decide to write about the D&D direct that took place a few hours ago. You can watch it here, by the way.

It’s just 19 minutes with a bit of filler time, but there are a few things to digest.

First of all, here’s the release schedule for up until late 2025.

I haven’t been following the announcements closely, so I just knew about the core rulebooks and I’ll start with them.

The Player’s Handbook gets about 3 minutes of time, with the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual getting around 60 seconds each, give or take. Regarding the PHB, there are 4 main things that they focused on, at least that’s what I thought.

1. The Player’s Handbook has been rewritten. I am not sure why this had to be mentioned.
2. There is a section that teaches how to play that’s located before character creation, for the first time.
3. There has been a lot of work on martial characters so they don’t feel underpowered compared to spellcasters.
4. There is an appendix Glossary.

Now, I don’t have the book and, based on some news I got, I won’t be getting it any time soon because the alternate cover versions will be delayed (please correct me on this if I’m wrong). So, regarding points 2, 3, and 4 I can’t really say much. If any of you have it and would like to share their opinion, I’d love to hear it.

For the DMG the main two points are the it has been rewritten top to bottom from the 2014 DMG and that there are about 100 pages of magic items. That’s a lot of magic items. I don’t know the number of pages but I do hope there will be space for other things as well.

As for the MM, it was just mentioned that there will be a ton of monsters.

Also, the books will be translated in French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

The Dragon Anthology is a collection of 10 short adventures about dragons in dungeons. It will be released in the summer of 2025.

The Starter Set will be released in the fall of 2025. It will feature “components to teach people how to play”, which every starter set that respects itself should have. Moreover, it will be set in the Borderlands. Yes, those Borderlands with the keep and all. I didn’t quite understand if it will be a remake or just feature the Keep on the Borderlands, the wilderness around it, and the Caves of Chaos. My only question is why not have the Starter Set be the first product after the core rulebooks?

A very interesting thing for me was the mention of LGS support. This will be achieved through giving them early access to the books and more, in order for them to run events. I need to talk to my LGS owner about this, because, if I got it right, they might be giving stores extra content. I really hope they provide support to LGS and overhaul the Adventurers League into something better.

Secret Lair and D&D. I wish Secret Lair was not done how it’s done because I don’t know if I will be able to get the cards, or if I want them at this point. I tried only once to get something from Secret Lair and it was a trainwreck. I didn’t manage to get it and now the deck costs double the price at the least. Oh, and it’s already running by the way.

LEGO D&D minifigures. There will be 12 minifigures coming out on the 1st of September. I wonder how much panic that will cause to the lego communities and how much chaos the scalpers will cause.

D&D Beyond and third parties. There will be more third party creators coming to D&D Beyond. I really wonder if and how the DMs Guild is going to fit into the whole system.

Then we’re back to books with the Forgotten Realms Guide, which is so big that it will be split into two books. The player-oriented book will contain character options and a chapter featuring the various factions of the Forgotten Realms. It’s meant to be used by GMs as well. Now the GM-oriented book will feature various parts of the realms, each one focusing on a different play style. Splitting it in two is something I am curious though. I really do hope it’s because they really have a ton of content for the Realms and not just to sell two books.

• Baldur’s Gate is meant for urban fantasy
• Icewind Dale will focus on survival horror
• Do you want an elvish megadungeon? Sure, there’s one in the Dalelands.
• Moonshae Isles will be about conflicts to resolve without violent
• Calimshan was just mentioned without a specific theme. Who knows?

This is about 2/3 of the video. The rest is about the VTT, or Project Sigil. And they’re marketing quite smartly by saying “You’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3. Now you can play in a similar way in Project Sigil”. It will feature a ton of integration with D&D Beyond so you can move character sheets in and out, as well as 2D maps which was quite surprising.

They also mentioned something called a module, which is a “D&D mini adventure that lasts a few hours”. It has a premade story and other content, like creatures and NPCs but the way I understood it is that you’ll be able to move things around. The first adventure in Project Sigil is called Danger in Dunbarrow.

They also showed off and talked about the level builder, noting that the GM can create something fast, or just spend a few hours in it.

Now, regarding the technical stuff, they first want to release this for PC but they are planning to cover as many devices as possible. There was a joke about running it on a fridge, but after seeing people run Doom on a fridge, anything’s possible. Just don’t make the thing 100GBs and require 16GB of RAM.

If you want, you can join the closed beta that begins around September.

Oh, and there’s also Drizzt fighting Optimus Prime for some reason, but for me that was the peak of the VTT segment.

And that’s all about the D&D Direct for August 2024. Some things I liked, for others I’m sceptical, and for some, I really hope they actually manage to pull it off without having another cycle of scandal, public outcry, and taking back the decision.

Anyway, I may come back to this but now it’s 1am and I have 10 hours of work tomorrow so I’m stopping here. I’ll be having fun tomorrow reading comments online about the direct during my breaks.

And until next time, have fun!

P.S.: Who would win? Drizzt or Optimus?