Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Hi there!
Since 5.5 came out, we've only got Dragon Delves, and it's not even an adventure module. In September we're getting Deadfall, but it's just 128 pages in total.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks in advance for answering. 😊
All adventure content is fully backwards compatible with 5e, so I'm assuming their reasoning is that they want to update all the player content that was more strongly impacted by the shift to 5.5 so everyone can use the updated subclasses while they can still play all the classic 5e adventures.
That said, the new Arcana Unleashed book coming out will have an adventure with it that even goes level 1-20, which is a rarity to see an adventure that covers high level play like that.
Overall though, between legacy content and third party media, WOTC makes way more money on player content that their whole fan base will buy, rather than DM content that only a 6th of their fan base will buy. Writing adventures is time-consuming and not the most profitable for selling books, and I get the feeling WOTC is more than happy to leave the bulk of that work to 3rd party publishers while they work on 1 or 2 big adventure titles a year.
Yeah; their polling has apparently pretty consistently come back that the vast majority of tables run homebrew settings and such rather than official, so it wouldn't track for them to spend a lot of their dev time on books that even many DMs will pass on.
The basic problem with publishing adventures is that the market for adventures is smaller (DM only, vs DM+players) and the number of adventures an average DM needs to actually buy is also quite small (as a DM, you can realistically buy a ten or so rulebooks and expect to get some use out of all of them, but you're never going to use ten campaign books).
Just to clarify - Deadfall covers 11-20, though there's small tie-in adventures.
A short Level 1 starter in Arcana Unleashed (Tomb of the Shadow Serpents) and, if you purchase the complete bundle there's a preorder bonus 3-5 adventure (Red Wizards’ Gambit).
I do wish WotC did more adventures. The annual-ish themed anthologies they had been doing in particular were great. As people have said, it largely comes down to sales.
I think they changed some plans and slowed down the pace when there were management changes, and a lot of new hires.
And they are expected to make some big announcements about the upcoming year at gen con. And there is a livestream planned for next Thursday, July 30.