Going Wild for Wildemount
Wizards of the Coast just announced their next book for Dungeons & Dragons 5e and it has some sections of the fandom wailing in lamentations, but the vast majority excited about it.
Explorer's Guide to Wildemount will be out in Spring 2020 and it covers the part of the world from the highly successful Critical Role webseries. Now I can already hear the older crowd bitching and moaning about it and all I can say is "typical".
There are people out there complaining that "Wizards has pissed off half their fans". I would argue that "half" is really exaggerating it by quite a bit, but even so then they are at least pleasing the other half.
There are others that are also talking about how they won't be buying this. Ok. That's fine you don't need to buy every D&D book. I enjoy 5e and I don't even have every book. I have most, but I don't have them all.
But even then, these people are often the same ones that will claim never to have bought a WotC D&D book ever anyway, so they were never the audience.
Personally, I think this is a really intelligent move on Wizard's part.
Critical Role is hugely successful.
The Kickstarter for just the animated series brought in $11,385,449. And this book, announced just 48 hours or so ago, has all the relevant #1 spots on Amazon.
Note that's not just #1 in the D&D categories, that is #1 in Books. All of them.
Would I, as an old-school gamer, love to have seen Greyhawk or Mystara? Of course! Do I *need* them? No, not really. I have everything I need for those worlds now. I have MORE than what I need for my home-brew world now. New worlds are always fun to read and maybe I can use some things from that book in my world. Or maybe not. Who knows yet.
I do know that some sections of our hobby need to lighten the hell up and let people enjoy things.
Explorer's Guide to Wildemount will be out in Spring 2020 and it covers the part of the world from the highly successful Critical Role webseries. Now I can already hear the older crowd bitching and moaning about it and all I can say is "typical".
There are people out there complaining that "Wizards has pissed off half their fans". I would argue that "half" is really exaggerating it by quite a bit, but even so then they are at least pleasing the other half.
There are others that are also talking about how they won't be buying this. Ok. That's fine you don't need to buy every D&D book. I enjoy 5e and I don't even have every book. I have most, but I don't have them all.
But even then, these people are often the same ones that will claim never to have bought a WotC D&D book ever anyway, so they were never the audience.
Personally, I think this is a really intelligent move on Wizard's part.
Critical Role is hugely successful.
The Kickstarter for just the animated series brought in $11,385,449. And this book, announced just 48 hours or so ago, has all the relevant #1 spots on Amazon.
Note that's not just #1 in the D&D categories, that is #1 in Books. All of them.
Would I, as an old-school gamer, love to have seen Greyhawk or Mystara? Of course! Do I *need* them? No, not really. I have everything I need for those worlds now. I have MORE than what I need for my home-brew world now. New worlds are always fun to read and maybe I can use some things from that book in my world. Or maybe not. Who knows yet.
I do know that some sections of our hobby need to lighten the hell up and let people enjoy things.