This summer, Dungeons and Dragons launches its new, seasonal business model. The goal? Turn single dates in the DnD release schedule into weeks-long, unmissable events. New books get companion products, multimedia promotions, and extensive organized play adventures.
From a marketing standpoint, it must seem pretty exciting to Wizards of the Coast. But as a player? I'm non-plussed. As other Wargamers have pointed out, all this live service language feels soulless without actual books, settings, and stories to get excited about.
D&D needs to give me more reason to care about all these side dishes, and there's one easy way to do that. Give me the one thing I've craved for years, the one thing D&D titles no longer seem to care about - lore.
Another tabletop RPG is currently knocking it out of the park on the lore front, and that's Pathfinder. D&D could do with learning a few lessons from the Hellfire Crisis, a sprawling metaplot Paizo has set up to play out over the next year.
Pretty much every book in the release slate advances the narrative. The setting of Golarion is alive and actively changing in response to these events. Players will get the chance to take part in organized play adventures that feel like they matter.
Take, for example, Pathfinder's most recent release, Lost Omens: Hellfire Dispatches. This is primarily a setting guide, providing updates on the ongoing Andoran-Cheliax war, with perspectives from multiple key fronts of the crisis. It shows the situation that evolves directly after Pathfinder's last book, the Hellbreakers adventure path.
Players can come straight from that campaign to Hellfire Dispatches and see the fallout of their choices. Plus, they can tinker with the archetype's tied to each location to craft a new character to impact the world.
Take to the frontlines (on either side) as hardy, intimidating Hellknights, with seven key orders to join. Focus instead on espionage as a deceptive Twilight Talon or a schmoozing Absalom Dandy (who can literally spend an action to stupefy an enemy by recalling a past love affair with them). Begin a quest for divine power as a Starstone Aspirant, or spit in the face of the gods as a Pure Legion Enforcer.
There are archetypes for mounted combat, underwater skirmishes, or careful scouting - almost every aspect of a fantasy war imaginable. The player options in this book may be limited, but they still manage to be varied and interesting.
GMs, meanwhile, can get an in-depth lay of the land, and tug on one of the book's incomplete story threads to set up their table's next adventure. While the actual GM tools are few - you'll get a few troop stat blocks, but not much else - the book offers a lot of storyline suggestions, key NPCs, and fleshed-out locations. Hellbreakers was a complete, out-of-the-box campaign, and this is the do-it-yourself alternative.
Hellfire Dispatches has an overarching narrator, a journalist gathering as many details as they can on the ongoing Hellfire Crisis. Each chapter features the letters and interviews they've picked up, so we get on-the-ground perspectives from a range of Golarion citizens.
The stories these characters weave are actually quite affecting. We get a glimpse of ordinary people dragged into conflict, from driven freedom fighters to humble hairdressers. We watch friends from either side of the border wrestle their torn loyalties. We see how much the people of Golarion have lost - and stand to lose.
This makes the book immense fun to read, before you've even gotten to the adventure hooks and character options. The hooks weaved into the text didn't thrill me quite as much as the ones from previous Lost Omens books (the Tian Xia World Guide, for example), but that's mainly down to the narrow scope of the book. Hellfire Dispatches' 130 pages is firmly entrenched in the war story genre, which somewhat limits chances for varied adventuring.
The book's many perspectives offer an extra bonus, too: unreliable narrators. Hellfire Dispatches acknowledges the biases these people have and the propaganda they may be subject to. Basically, anything you don't feel like using in your game can be written off, making this a flexible grab-bag of goodies.
And, again, it's a grab-bag with impact. Many of the conflicts hinted at in Hellfire Dispatches receive greater attention in encounters for the Pathfinder Society, Paizo's organized play system. Pathfinder has offered three different ways to explore the metaplot - through pre-written adventures, organized play, or your own creations.
Each caters to a slightly different playstyle, and, crucially, it puts actually playing the tabletop RPG front-and-center of its strategy. That's something I'm not convinced D&D 'seasons', as they've been pitched to us, are going to achieve. If D&D wanted its own Hellfire Crisis, it'd have to start caring about its lore and advancing the narrative of its own settings.
I understand (to an extent) why Wizards of the Coast has moved away from this. In Hasbro's eyes, D&D has a profitability problem that's mainly caused by the narrow scope of RPG books as a product.
RPG books are mainly bought by DMs, who make up perhaps ⅙ of the entire player base. If you want more players to invest in your books, you need more player options inside - and all those rules leave less room for fluff.
Plus, when so many D&D players homebrew their own worlds, dedicated setting guides are even less of a safe bet. Beyond decades-old, tried-and-tested settings like Ravenloft (which happens to be the subject of the first 'seasons' D&D book), Wizards is hesitant to build its world. 2022's Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel was the most original bit of worldbuilding Wizards had done in forever, but it hasn't repeated the exercise since.
Which, as someone who loves game lore, is a huge shame. D&D is trying its damndest to cater to the widest audience possible, but in doing so, it leaves players like me behind. And no amount of map packs or unrelated encounter PDFs released during your new book's 'season' is going to change that.
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