Dungeons & Dragons Gives Tease About First 2022 Book

The lead story designer for Dungeons & Dragons has provided players with a first tease about the game’s first 2022 release. Yesterday at the “Future of D&D” panel at D&D Celebration, principal story designer Chris Perkins revealed that 2022’s first product “goes into a new place we’ve never been before.” Perkins provided a brief description of the setting for the book as well, noting that it was a “wonderful and scary” place. “Players are going to be absolutely terrified when they go into this setting,” Perkins also teased. More details about this product will be revealed in October. 

Wizards of the Coast shined a little new light about the upcoming D&D catalog in 2022 and beyond during the panel. The panel officially revealed Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse, a new rulebook that contains updated versions of races and monsters printed in previous books. D&D design studio head Ray Winninger also revealed that they planned on releasing two products focused on “classic” campaign settings, but in formats never seen before. A third “classic” campaign setting would also receive a cameo appearance in one of these products, and D&D was planning to release a third campaign setting book focused on a different “classic” campaign setting in 2023.

Of course, the biggest news coming out of the Future of D&D panel was confirmation that the design studio was gearing up to release a new set of Core Rulebooks in 2024 for the game’s 50th anniversary. Lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford and Winninger stopped short of stating that the rulebooks would be for a new “edition” of the game, but rather that it represented the latest evolution of D&D and would be backwards compatible with existing Fifth Edition content. This suggests that the new rulebooks would be for a “revised” Fifth Edition, similar to the release of the “3.5” ruleset that tweaked Third Edition rules back in 2003. By the time these rulebooks are released, D&D Fifth Edition would be out for a decade, which matches the approximate publication length of other D&D editions.