Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne discusses some of the Dungeons & Dragons news from Gen Con 2026.
Although I haven’t attended Gen Con since before the pandemic, I always expect to see major announcements coming out of it. This year certainly didn’t disappoint with major announcements for Dungeons & Dragons and a new board game series from Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton.
Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards of the Coast finally announced the third hardback release for Dungeons & Dragons this fall. For Season of Champions, WotC will release the first in what the company calls D&D Gameplay Expansions (see “‘Universes Beyond’“). The first will be Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft, following it up in 2027 with Dark Sun (revised for 2024 D&D); Dungeons & Dragons: Greyhawk and most surprising, at least to me, Dungeons & Dragons: Star Wars.
I do not play video games, so I have no idea how much popularity World of Warcraft still has. However, according to my much younger and video game playing staff, currently the game is playing on the nostalgia of players from 15 to 20 years ago by re-releasing classic WoW adventures targeted at those older players but updated to take advantage of the technology available today.
This, of course, is not the first time a tabletop RPG version of WoW has released. Sword & Sorcery Studios, an imprint of White Wolf Publishing, released 3.5 edition versions of both under WotC’s OGL. They sold well, but not well enough for Sword & Sorcery to keep them in print for more than a few years. Prices on them now range from cover price to well over $100 a book so there is current demand.
However, the store will order far fewer copies than it will of the Arcana Unleashed books. Unverses Beyond works as a collectible card product for Magic: The Gathering and pulls in a lot more collectors for the sets than they do players. With a book, you can get the most important item with one purchase and it does not generate any subsequent sales like TCGs do.
Choosing to publish a Star Wars version of D&D is an interesting choice to put it mildly. Although WotC had significant success with its D20 Star Wars RPG and later the Saga Edition, both have been out of print for well over a decade, with the gap filled by Edge Studio’s set of Star Wars RPGs. In the tabletop gaming field, with the exception of the Star Wars Unlimited trading card game, Star Wars has seen a marked decline in interest over the past five or so years.
Going up against an existing product line using a brand that has seen a significant drop in engagement in recent years does not make a lot of sense, so I hope WotC has done its research on this. I do have high hopes for the Dark Sun and Greyhawk launches in 2027 though.
Conludo. This is a strange choice for the name of a new board gaming streaming series, but I am already seeing a lot of interest from tabletop gamers for the return of Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton to a tabletop gaming streaming series. I consider the pair’s TableTop series of a decade ago one of the most important events to happen to the games industry in the past 50 years (see “Talking About TableTop“), and while a lot of tabletop web series have launched since then, thousands of people credit TableTop with introducing them to the fun of board gaming. Currently, it looks as if 10 episodes are planned and Wheaton and Day have the name recognition from Geek & Sundry, the Guild and TableTop to get people to watch.
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The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
