Tag Archives: Magic the Gathering

Wizards of the Coast Announces More D&D for Everyone, but Not All of It’s for You

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At Gen Con, Dungeons & Dragons franchise head Dan Ayoub joined various D&D team members and stars connected with D&D to reveal future plans for the game and franchise. They announced more D&D for everyone, but not all of it’s for you.On stage in 2026, D&D Franchise Head Dan Ayob announces the release schedule for the year ahead

D&D Icons

Even though the D&D Icons program looks 40-some years back rather than ahead, it led the announcements. Surely, the presence of Joe Manganiello at the presentation vaulted his program to the top. Joe rates as one of the biggest stars who flaunt a passion for D&D. He serves as chief creative officer of the Icons initiative. The Icons initiative links upcoming, and mostly unspecified, D&D products to creative titans from D&D’s past.

The D&D Icons program starts with four creators :

  • Luke Gygax, son of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax and, of his six children, the biggest contributor to their father’s D&D legacy.
  • Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, authors of the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy of novels, the fiction which introduced D&D’s Dragonlance setting to readers in 1984.
  • R.A. Salvatore, creator of Drizzt Do’Urden, the Forgotten Realms setting’s most popular character. He has written more than 40 books set in the Realms.

If you needed to read those descriptions to identify any of the icons, then the program isn’t for you. Icons aims for the demographic of Dan Ayoub and Joe Manganiello, men who grew up reading Drizzt and Dragonlance books between D&D games. Guys in this generation—guys like me—grew up with every bit of popular culture aimed at us, so now, some of our peers feel confused and threatened when other demographics get attention. When Dan says D&D “lost its way,” and later brings these creators to stage, he hopes to excite gamers who feel puzzled because their 80s favorites seem sidelined. When Wizards of the Coast announced the third edition back in 1999, I watched Gary Gygax brought to the stage and I felt thrilled, so I understand the appeal of the icons. Gygax and the icons serve a similar purpose: They soothe long-time fans of D&D by showing them that the game still includes things they loved.

Despite the consulting contract that Gary signed in 1999, he just gave the third-edition team his blessing and wished them success. Perhaps the creators working as icons will have more input on the projects linked to their names, but except for the novels, newer designers will surely do the heavy lifting on the icons projects. That approach may create better releases. While the team that created the third edition stood on Dave and Gary’s shoulders, the new edition brought design innovations that the original creators could not have matched.

Oddly, the Icons project promises a return to settings that have all appeared recently in major D&D releases. Drizzt’s territory of the Icewind Dale rates as one of the most visited locations in fifth-edition products. Melf’s Guide to Greyhawk from Luke Gygax will appear in the wake of the Greyhawk coverage in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide. The Dragonlance setting gained a hardcover release in 2022.

Universes Beyond

The D&D team announced Universes Beyond, a series of crossovers starting with one between World of Warcraft and D&D, and one between Star Wars and D&D.

Universes Beyond comes from the Magic the Gathering game. In 2025, the Final Fantasy set of Magic cards became the game’s highest-selling release, pushing the game’s Lord of the Rings and Avatar: The Last Airbender sets to second and third place. Such crossovers earn record sales by appealing to fans who don’t play Magic. The pairing works because so many collectors find trading cards irresistible even if they opt not to play the game.

Still, when fans of something like Final Fantasy collect the cards, many feel inspired to try playing Magic, and some become hooked. Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks called the crossover sets “probably the most successful new player adoption program that we’ve ever done.” Fat D&D game books lack the same collectable appeal as cards, so Dungeons & Dragons/Star Wars will never bring more than a fraction of the collectors attracted to a fan-favorite property crossed with Magic the Gathering. Still, D&D’s Universes Beyond crossovers aim to bring new players to D&D rather than to simply coax existing players to spend more.

Partnerships with outside studios

For existing fans of D&D, Wizards announced partnerships that will publish official content for Ravenloft, Eberron, and the Forgotten Realms, all written by outside studios.

The partners all boast experience making quality D&D content, and each brings an affinity for their chosen setting. The Ghostfire Gaming setting of Grim Hollow matches the dark horror tone of Ravenloft. Visionary Production & Design already produces Eberron books stewarded by the setting’s creator, Keith Baker. Starting with Hoard of the Dragon Queen in 2014, Kobold Press wrote the first two hardcover adventures released for fifth edition. Both featured the Forgotten Realms.

Adding so many setting-specific releases to D&D’s publishing schedule shows a daring change to the D&D’s team’s market strategy—a break from a lesson learned when D&D’s original publisher went to the brink of bankruptcy. In the 90s, TSR released a flood of settings and setting-specific products that split fans’ attention and spending. Fans of a setting tended to skip releases for as many as eight other settings, and so many products failed to recoup costs. Former D&D brand manager Jim Butler said, “TSR had too many product lines chasing too few customers.”

In the decades since, Wizards has avoided dividing customers with a flood of products that compete with each other. When they revisited a campaign setting, they published just a book or two for the setting, and they also avoided scheduling other releases that might battle for attention.

Now, the D&D team sees a customer base large enough for four or more settings to fight for fans’ budgets and time. “Players shouldn’t have to wait decades for D&D to return to a setting. We should be making it easier to adventure in those worlds,” D&D Executive Producer Greg Bilsland said. “The problem is, of course, we only have so many people on the D&D team and supporting all of our settings wasn’t feasible.”

Dark Sun

When I started playing D&D, the demons and occasional nudity in the advanced game flattered me by making me feel mature and by making playing seem like a delicious little rebellion. Now, with a new Dark Sun release scheduled for release as two books with a mature rating, I wonder how the rating will enhance the setting. The animated trailer revels in blood splatters and costumes that could fit in a catalog for fetish wear.

I suspect the D&D team opted for the mature rating for two reasons:

  • The Heavy Metal style adds spice and contrasts with the other fifth-edition settings.
  • The setting includes elements that now fit uncomfortably in a typical D&D game.

In early D&D, scenes where characters tortured their foes for information and slaughtered their foes’ babies seemed common. Now virtually all D&D games steer clear of such horrors and I welcome the change. The Dark Sun setting includes some of its own horrors that many gamers choose to avoid in a fun pastime. One example stands out. Dark Sun included slavery in the foundation of its world building. Chris S. Sims, one of the designers who worked on the setting for fourth edition, writes, “Slavery in Dark Sun isn’t like it is in the A series [of adventures], where it’s clearly villainy. In Dark Sun, it’s a cultural norm with a (spoiler) horrid, secret reason for keeping it. It can be an evil you fight, but presenting it as a cultural norm, baking it into some mechanics, implies it’s acceptable.”

D&D players enjoy battling evil, and many players see slavers as a good target for heroes. Other players find the subject of slavery too troubling for game sessions that should provide a fun escape. Either outlook is fine. The Dark Sun designers face the challenge of deciding how to accommodate the different perspectives. Perhaps, the mature rating helps.

Greyhawk: Crown of the Witch Queen

Of all the products announced for the coming year, Greyhawk: Crown of the Witch Queen seems like the one for me. Wizards touts the book as a full-length adventure, which suggests that the campaign starts at first level. The last campaign hardcover to start at level 1, Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, released three years ago and revisited content from 2014. The upcoming adventure comes from the design team of Will Doyle, Stacey Allan, and Justice Arman. All three have worked on favorite adventures. The prospect of a new full-length campaign to play or run excites me.

5 Ways Magic the Gathering Changed the Rules of D&D

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Magic the Gathering designer Richard Garfield rates Dungeons & Dragons as the most innovative game of all time. Nonetheless, in any ranking of influential games, Magic’s revolutionary design surely vies for a top spot. You might suppose that a card game like Magic would differ too much from a roleplaying game to have any influence on D&D’s rules, but Magic’s design shaped the D&D editions to follow. Today, innovations from Magic extend to the roots of fifth-edition D&D.

5. Templated text changed how rules get written—and the 3rd-edition design team.

When Magic’s designers faced the problem of bringing order to countless cards, they used templated text: they described similar game rules with consistent wording imposed by fill-in-the-blank templates. Today, the patterns of templated text appear throughout modern D&D’s rules.
But the move to templated text also lifted a D&D-outsider to lead the game’s third-edition team. Ben Riggs tells this story in a convention seminar.

Early in the development of third-edition D&D, Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR. Skaff Elias had served as a designer on several early Magic sets and ranked as Senior Vice President of Research and Development. Skaff felt that the upcoming D&D edition could fix “sloppiness in the rules” by using templated text. Skaff and Wizard’s CEO Peter Adkison told the D&D design team to switch the spell descriptions to templated text, but the team kept resisting his directives.

Eventually, the D&D team readied the release of a playtest document that still lacked templated text. They claimed rewriting all the spell descriptions according to formula would prove impossible because hundreds of spells would need templating in 48 hours to meet their delivery deadline. Nonetheless, Adkison and Skaff took the challenge themselves, working through the night to rewrite the spells and meet the deadline. Even after that heroic effort, the rules document that reached playtesters lacked the templated descriptions from the CEO and the Design VP. The design team had simply ignored their bosses’ hard work.

The failure infuriated Adkison. He lifted Jonathan Tweet to the head of the third-edition team. Designer Monte Cook remembers Adkison’s new directive: “If Jonathan says something it’s as though I said it.” Unlike the TSR veterans on the rest of the team, Tweet had started his career by designing the indie roleplaying game Ars Magica and the experimental Over the Edge. As a member of the D&D team, he convinced the team to adopt some of the more daring changes in the new edition.

4. Keywords now get careful use throughout the rules.

Much like Magic, D&D uses keywords to describe many elements in the game. Often the keywords bring few rules of their own, but other things in the game interact with the keywords. So Magic has no rules specifically for “white” or “green,” but cards with “protection from white” work in a special way.

In D&D, conditions like “charmed,” creature types like “beast,” and descriptors like “melee” work as keywords. Such keywords power templated descriptions like, “While charmed by this spell, the creature is…” and, “The next time you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack…” In early editions of D&D some words got treatment that resembled keywords. But before Magic proved the technique’s power, keywords in D&D hardly saw the pervasive, rigorous treatment they do now.

3. Specific beats general came from Magic, but started in a hugely-influential board game nearly as old as D&D.

In Magic, the text on any card can change the rules of the game, so a card like Platinum Angel can say, “You can’t lose the game and your opponents can’t win the game.” Among traditional games where all the rules fit on the underside of a box lid or in a slim pamphlet, this made Magic revolutionary. The original Magic rules explain, “If a card contradicts the rules, the card takes precedence.” In other words, specific beats general. Similarly, page 3 of the Player’s Handbook explains how when a game element breaks the general rules in some way, it creates an exception to how the rest of the game works.

Earlier editions of D&D included game elements that broke general rules, but the unwritten principle left new players to struggle with the apparent inconsistencies. Judging by how frequently D&D lead Jeremy Crawford restates the principle, players still struggle with it.

The principle of specific beats general dates to the revolutionary 1977 game that inspired Magic the Gathering and countless others. Bored with the familiar patterns of their Risk games, the designers of Cosmic Encounter wanted a game where every play felt different from the last. In Cosmic Encounter, each player controls a different alien species able to break the general rules of the game in some specific way. With more than 150 rule-breaking alien species in the game and its expansions, Cosmic Encounter offers endless, disruptive combinations.

2. With more reliance on rulings, D&D does less to separate flavor from rules.

Magic the Gathering cards typically fill any space left after their rules text with italicized flavor text. So, Platinum Angel might say, “She is the apex of the artificer’s craft, the spirit of the divine called out of base metal.” Other Platinum Angels share the same rules, but different flavor text.

Traditionally, D&D mingled rules and flavor text, but fourth edition fully adopted such separation. The power descriptions even duplicate the practice of putting flavor in italics. This practice fit fourth edition, which defined combat powers as tightly as cards. The designers aspired to create a game where flavor never bent the rules, so a DM never needed to decide if, for example, you can take ongoing damage from cold and fire at the same time.

In fifth edition, the separation mainly appears in the monster books, where rules appear in formal boxes while flavor comes between the rectangles.

1. Reactions came from Magic’s instants and interrupts by way of D&D miniatures.

In Magic the Gathering, players can act at any time, stopping another player with cards originally called interrupts. The constant activity helps make the game so compelling, but it forced the designers to develop rules to make sense of the actions and reactions.

In early editions of D&D, players might interrupt another turn for an improvised action, but such acts needed a DM’s ruling. By third edition these actions counted as free and still mainly relied on a DM. Counterspells used the system’s only means of interrupting—the readied action.

When Wizards planned a line of D&D miniatures in 2003, the company aimed to expand sales beyond roleplayers to gamers who favored competitive wargaming. The Miniatures Handbook turned third edition’s combat rules into “a head-to-head skirmish system for fighting fast, tactical battles.” The book’s authors included D&D designers Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo along with Magic designers Skaff Elias and Mike Donais. The new miniatures would come boxed in randomized assortments complete with cards describing rules for each figure, so in ways, the package resembled Magic. The competitive skirmish game could no longer rely on a DM’s rulings to resolve interruptions, but the team wanted some of the richer play suggested by a game like Magic.

The design collaboration worked. Elias and Donais brought experience from a competitive game with strict rules for timing interrupts and reactions. “While designing Miniatures Handbook, we realized that free actions hid a potential smorgasbord of cool new mechanics,” wrote designer Bruce R. Cordell. “We subdivided the free actions into immediate actions (a free action you can take when it isn’t your turn), and swift actions (a free action you can take when it’s your turn).”

Swift and immediate actions entered the D&D roleplaying game through Cordell’s Expanded Psionics Handbook (2004). “The concept that swift and immediate actions could serve as one more resource available to a player opened up new vistas of possibility, expanding options in the game.”

In fifth edition, swift and immediate actions evolve into bonus actions and reactions.

The Threat that Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons—Twice

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Despite the alarmists warning that things like ascending armor classes, women, or fourth edition would ruin Dungeons & Dragons, the game has only faced one serious threat. Ascending ACs are just easier, woman have been improving the game at least since Lee Gold, and fourth edition once seemed like exactly the savior D&D needed. The real threat to D&D came from the way the game combined cheap entertainment with a valuable brand.

For a sample of D&D’s potential demise, witness the fate of another successful role-playing game: Vampire: The Masquerade. In the 90s, the popularity of Vampire seemed ready to eclipse D&D.

On its introduction by White Wolf Publishing in 1991, Vampire surged in popularity, attracting a new generation of players and more women. The game spawned a franchise of World of Darkness games.

But once the player community peaked, White Wolf saw its income slow until books barely broke even.

The low cost of role playing makes selling RPGs a tough business. Players can only spend so much time at the game table, and a few purchases will fill all those hours. Even if a game master buys an adventure to run, five other people get hours of fun from the purchase. And those hours come from a slim packet of pages. A hardcover adventure will sustain a campaign for a year. A few bucks spent on dice and maybe on a core book can sustain a player for years. Role-playing gaming rates as the cheapest entertainment around. See How the End of Lonely Fun Leads to Today’s Trickle of D&D Books.

By 1998, White Wolf was canceling games in the World of Darkness franchise. The company rode the d20 boom with D&D-related supplements, but that boon went bust too.

In 2006, CCP Games, the Icelandic company behind EVE Online, acquired White Wolf just to gain rights for a potential online game. White Wolf’s tabletop publishing schedule slowed a few PDF and print-on-demand products. When CCP’s plans for an MMO fizzled, White Wolf sold to another computer game company, Paradox Interactive. Now, the White Wolf web site calls the outfit a licensing company. In an interview, Martin Elricsson, the company’s Brand Architect explained the publisher’s status. “The economic center of the company will be computer games. As things are now, tabletop publishing hardly breaks even.”

Vampire: The Masquerade now rates as an entry in an IP portfolio, a brand to license or to apply to an online game. Paradox Interactive stands as the accidental owner of a tabletop RPG. If they bother to publish it, the action will hardly affect the corporate bottom line and stockholders will call tabletop a distraction.

At two points in D&D’s history, D&D could easily have met a similar fate.

The first threat came in 1997, when TSR neared bankruptcy. TSR sold itself to Wizards of the Coast, a company run by Peter Adkison, a D&D fan with big dreams for the game. A few years earlier, Adkison had asked designer Richard Garfield for a portable game suitable for passing time in a convention line. Garfield’s game, Magic the Gathering, captured lightning in the bottle, landing Wizards enough cash to buy TSR. Without this happenstance, TSRs assets could have been picked over and sold piecemeal to companies looking for intellectual property for computer games and movie licenses.

In 1999, Hasbro bought WotC for Magic the Gathering and the Pokémon card game. The waning profits from D&D’s second edition certainly didn’t help the acquisition. Like many folks in 1999, Hasbro executives probably wondered if people had to dress up to play D&D. Would remnants of the satanic panic stain Hasbro?

When Hasbro acquired WotC, they brought a big corporate cost structure and return on investment expectations set by Magic and Pokémon. If D&D failed to meet those expectations, imagine a D&D product line like the one today—but without any tabletop products—just an assortment of licensed video games, a D&D-themed Monopoly game, some t-shirts, and a movie a few years out. Maybe they would license the tabletop game to third party, where, like other high-profile licenses, a barely break-even business could struggle under oppressive license fees and stifling brand oversight. For a Hasbro executive cutting such a tabletop license, the deal offers little upside. A modest success barely registers; a runaway success embarrasses the exec who let a valuable asset leave the company.

In 2000, D&D proved a temporary asset to Hasbro. The new, third edition sparked a boom in sales, mainly by inspiring the same players who found the game in the 80s.

By 2005, D&D settled into a familiar pattern for a mature edition. After a big debut, players embrace character options, creatures, and adventures. Game companies have employees to pay, and only a steady income keeps the lights on, so they publish to meet demand. Before long, even the most passionate customers own more supplements than they can play. Players stop adding to the unused volumes already on their shelves. Meanwhile, the wealth of volumes on game store shelves overwhelms and scares away newcomers. Potential new customers wonder if they need to fill a bookshelf to play. Is the Player’s Handbook 2 required or is it an updated version of the original book?

The D&D team started enduring annual, Christmas-season layoffs as management expected slowing sales in each coming fiscal year.

Hasbro’s experience in the toy business made them familiar with such booms and busts. Except for a few core toy lines, they would roll out a toy like G.I. Joe, ride a surge in sales, and then sideline the toy for 15 or so years until a new generation of children seemed ready for it. Perhaps Hasbro execs wondered if a similar strategy suited D&D. Instead of losing money between generational releases, why not just retire the tabletop product during those 15-year lulls?

Peter Adkison had left Wizards, so no guardian angel would save the game this time.

For D&D to qualify as a core game brand, the game needed to match its best-ever year of sales in 2000, but this time the game needed sustained sales at that level.

Without a new edition, the game could never approach such numbers. A new edition could be easy, but it had to bring a profitable, sustainable strategy that would meet stockholder’s expectations for profit. So far, no tabletop publisher had found such a strategy.

As sales withered, the D&D team searched a way to save the tabletop game they loved. By 2008, they thought they found a way.

Next: Why Fourth Edition Seemed Like the Savior Dungeons & Dragons Needed