Tag Archives: Tracy Hickman

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.

Curse of Strahd (2016): Greatest D&D Adventures Since 1985—Number 4

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Curse of Strahd (2016) is a fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure for levels 1-10 by Chris Perkins with Adam Lee, Richard Whitters, and Jeremy Crawford.

Fifth-edition hardcover adventures like Tomb of Annihilation pull inspiration from a catalog of classic modules. Curse of Strahd just draws from just one: Ravenloft (1983) by Tracy and Laura Hickman. Ravenloft’s 32 pages spawned a campaign setting, so it easily brings enough inspiration to fill a hardcover. Ravenloft ranked second on Dungeon magazine’s list of the 30 greatest adventures, beaten only by a compilation of 7 adventures.

“Curse of Strahd captures everything we loved in I6 Ravenloft, and expands it into a full campaign,” writes Mike “Sly Fourish” Shea. “Of all of the published campaigns, this one is the most solid, with a clear motivation and excellent locations.”

While Ravenloft mainly stayed in a castle, Curse of Strahd gives players the freedom to roam the cursed land of Barovia. Most of the fifth-edition hardcovers aspire to play as a sandbox, but only Curse really succeeds as one. Credit a foundation borrowed from Ravenloft. To defeat Strahd, characters must collect 3 artifacts. Early on, the party gains clues to the items’ locations. This structure gives players a goal and a sense of direction.

Curse of Strahd borrows another brilliant device from Ravenloft. A card reading from Barovia’s version of a tarot deck reveals the location of the magic items and the roles of key non-player characters. This gives the story a random element that feels vital.

Although Curse of Strahd features a strong design, the vampire Strahd and the fearful gloom of his domain make the adventure’s best parts.

Strahd’s history sometimes makes him seem relatable—or even capable of redemption. But that lie just makes him more horrifying. Tracy Hickman calls Strahd “a selfish beast forever lurking behind the mask of tragic romance, the illusion of redemption that was only ever camouflage for his prey.”

The adventure never lets characters forget Strahd’s threat. “Stahd isn’t a villain who remains out of sight until the final scene. Far from it—he travels as he desires to any place in his realm. The characters can and should meet him multiple times before the final encounter,” the text explains. “When Strahd wants to terrorize the characters, he pays them a visit, either under cloak of night or beneath overcast skies. If they’re indoors, he tries to charm or goad a character into inviting him inside.”

Strahd’s presence taints his land with dread. “Many of the locations and towns seem to be quite ordinary or mundane at first glance…until you dig deeper,” explains Tyler Biddle. “The imagery is at times hauntingly beautiful and tragically grotesque. Barovia’s characters as well as its horrors will stay with you long after you’ve left the table.”

Wary of making the adventure too gloomy, the authors added notes of twisted humor. No player will forget Blinsky’s toys.

“Creepiness abounds, with locations and characters who just drip gothic horror,” Chris Stevenson writes. “Groups that hate being ‘railroaded’ will love the sandbox nature of Barovia. Curse of Strahd is the best 5E campaign book yet.”

After playing the adventure, the author of the Mindlands blog summarizes the experience. “Curse of Strahd is the best published adventure that I’ve ever played in. The atmosphere is fantastic, the locations, non-player characters, and villains are interesting, tragic and funny.”

Next: Number 3

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Madness at Gardmore Abbey (2011): Greatest D&D Adventures Since 1985—Number 6

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Madness at Gardmore Abbey (2011) is a fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure by James Wyatt with Creighton Broadhurst and Steve Townshend for levels 6-8.

Fourth edition’s early scenarios lavished attention on combat encounters strung into linear adventures designed to ensure no one missed a battle. But towards the end of the edition’s run, the D&D team wanted to grant players more freedom.

Madness at Gardmore Abbey combines the best qualities of fourth edition’s encounter design with a sandbox. “Gardmore Abbey is all about choices,” writes Mike “Sly Flourish” Shea. “It’s a large sandbox of adventure locations, villains, and a single powerful thread that binds them all together.”

That thread comes from the scattered cards of a Deck of Many Things, perhaps the most irresistible artifact in D&D. The adventure includes a real deck. “The Deck is interesting both in real life and in game, and one of the biggest reasons why Madness at Gardmore Abbey is awesome,” writes the Learning DM. Madness borrows the brilliant trick of drawing cards to determine aspects of the adventure from Ravenloft by Tracy and Laura Hickman, .

The adventure encourages choices by focusing on patrons, rivals, and the layout of the abbey. By scattering patrons who offer quests, the adventure gives the characters a steady sense of purpose.

The encounter design shines too. In a product history, Shannon Appelcline writes, “When Wyatt wrote out his order for the encounters, he told his designers that he didn’t want a ‘combat slog,’ but instead a ‘mix of combat, roleplaying, and skill challenges.’ Thus, Madness is one of the most varied of all the fourth-edtion adventures, even within the constraints of individual encounters.

“Steve Townshend says that after he wrote up an encounter, he’d then go back and apply the ‘Lowell Kempf’ test, named after the longest-running player in his D&D campaign—who would often ignore the ‘direct’ solutions to problems, and instead look for the ‘interesting’ ones. Thus, Gardmore Abbey is filled with encounters that could be solved in many ways—not just with combat.”

Madness at Gardmore Abbey comes in a box packed with goodies, including the deck, battlemaps, tokens, and 4 adventure booklets.

Mike Shea calls Gardmore Abbey a “wonderful sandbox.” The Learning DM writes, “As it stands, Madness at Gardmore Abbey is the final pinnacle of adventure design in fourth edition, and I believe it deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest adventures in D&D’s rich history. Easily the best fourth-edition adventure.”

Next: Number 5

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Why Dungeons & Dragons Players Don’t Love Sandboxes as Much as They Think

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Many role-playing gamers set sandbox adventures as an ideal. We all agree that railroads make bad adventures, so do sandboxes offer all the virtues that railroads lack?

In role-playing adventures, sandboxes and railroads fall on ends of a spectrum. Railroads offer players no options. Sandboxes allow complete freedom, including freedom to choose a goal. If a character favors a bartending in Barovia over vampire hunting, they still get a place in the campaign.

Boxes of sand let kids choose their own goals. They can make sand castles, bake sand cakes, anything. And when they grow up, they can stage miniature battles.

Some games deliver all the freedom of a box of sand. Minecraft lets you play a survival game, but it owes its success to all the other things you can do: Some players build forts or replicas of the seven wonders. Some create a circuits from redstone. Players make their own goal.

D&D used to force a goal on characters

Original Dungeons & Dragons never started as pure sandbox, because the rules included a goal: Take treasure from dungeons and the wilderness. By rule, characters who won treasure gained experience and power. They won D&D. See The fun and realism of unrealistically awarding experience points for gold.

When the original D&D characters reached high, name level, the game turned into a sandbox where players chose a new goal for their characters. Stronghold building offered fighting men an obvious goal, but some other classes lacked anything as clear. What do you want for your bard or druid? Should a wizard build a tower or start a school? Apparently, many high-level wizards go mad and build dungeons. Where else could the living-chess puzzles and reverse-gravity rooms come from? Endless possibilities await!

Instead of embracing the freedom of a high-level sandbox, players returned to dungeons.

Sandboxes can overwhelm players with choices

In Why Dungeons & Dragons (and Role Playing) Took Years to Leave the Dungeon and How the dungeon crawl’s advantages propelled Dungeons & Dragons to success, I described the attraction of dungeons. Among other advantages, dungeons limit the characters’ options. This doesn’t just help dungeon masters prepare, it helps players.

Common wisdom suggests there is no such thing as too many choices, but psychologists conclude that people flooded with options become paralyzed by them.

When dungeon masters offer a true sandbox and come willing to improvise any course their players choose, they confound players. Once the players stop wondering what they’re supposed to do, they struggle to choose from boundless possibilities. Whatever they finally decide, they leave the table with a nagging feeling that they chose wrong.

The value of limited options

In D&D, dungeons, patrons, and hooks all limit the options that players’ face. Such tropes give players direction. A little direction improves the game.

Make no mistake. Players still want options. Every game session should leave players wondering what might have happened if they followed a different course. Mike “Sly Flourish” Shea recommends that giving players three plus infinite choices. DMs should offer three known options that take characters closer to their goal, while being open to anything players want to try.

Many sources of DM advice suggest seeding a sandbox setting with hooks—opportunities for players to land in stories of their choosing. Exactly. Those hooks help players narrow all the options of an open world to a sweet spot of three plus infinite choices. They nudge the game a bit closer to the railroad end of the dial. Some railroad-phobics might even argue that such hooks show a DM working too hard to push players through a story. Their ideal game only works with perfectly spherical, frictionless players. The real players at your table want hooks.

The sandbox dungeon

D&D’s mega-dungeons limited players’ choices, but many fans still tout multi-level dungeons as sandboxes. Sure, characters need to adopt the goal of seeking treasure, but they never need to dutifully follow a story arc planned by a DM. Plus, players could chose a difficulty level by deciding how deep they dared to delve. A few D&D players still favor that style of play.

Embracing story and fewer options

Despite the freedom of a dungeon sandbox, most D&D players craved story and deeper motivations. The D&D game changed to provide. When Tracy and Laura Hickman penned a series of classic modules including Ravenloft and the Desert of Desolation trilogy, they led the change. Their introduction to a self-published version of Pharoah gives D&D adventures four, new requirements:

  1. A player objective more worthwhile than pillaging and killing.
  2. An intriguing story that is intricately woven into the play itself.
  3. Dungeons with some sort of architectural sense.
  4. An attainable and honorable end within one or two sessions of playing time.

When characters explore Castle Ravenloft, they quest for more than loot. They aim to free the land from the menace of Lord Strahd. Adopting the goal of a story takes a measure of freedom from players. Now the their options narrow to the choices that lead to the magic items that will help defeat Strahd. Few players mind. They see clear options that take them closer to achieving their characters’ aims. As the adventure progresses, the players’ paths narrow to a railroad that leads to a final confrontation.

Of course, at any time, the characters could leave the railroad and open a tavern in Barovia, but that never happens. Partly because D&D players like doing D&D things such as smiting evil and winning treasure. Partly because players follow D&D’s social contract by honoring the DM’s preparation. Mostly because players enjoy stories in D&D and they willingly abandon the freedom of a sandbox to foster them.

Too often, D&D fans tout sandboxes as the pinnacle of adventure design. Dungeon masters and adventure authors aim for the freedom of a sandbox, but just leave players feeling adrift. Players enjoy D&D most when they see a few, clear options that take them closer to achieving their characters’ aims.