Dungeons & Dragons Goes Full Metal for New Online Supplement

Wizards of the Coast has released a gnarly new digital supplement available only on D&D Beyond. This week, Wizards of the Coast released Adventure Vault: The Mortuary, a new digital tie-in to the just released Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse boxed set. This new supplement takes a look at the Heralds of Dust, one of the factions of Sigil. Originally known as the Dustmen, the Heralds of Dust make their home in the Mortuary, a large necropolis where the faction’s leader, a lich known as Factol Skall, investigates the nature of True Death. 

The Adventure Vault is a new kind of digital supplement, which does a deep dive into an already established D&D location with various tools for DMs ranging from a small adventure to maps that can be used in D&D Beyond’s new Maps feature to new statblocks for creatures that can be found in the Mortuary. And while the price tag is a bit pricy ($9.99), the amount of content appears to be akin to a DM Guild’s supplement, complete with maps and original artwork. 

The surprising thing about Adventure Vault: The Mortuary is that the supplement has a decidedly….more metal aesthetic to it, one that we don’t usually see from Dungeons & Dragons material released by Wizards of the Coast. In addition to focusing on one of the cooler Planescape factions, the maps of the supplement by Jared Brando look more like something you’d see in an OSR or Mork BORG adventure. Just look at the map below – it’s amazing that this is an “official” Wizards of the Coast product and it’s even more amazing that it somehow didn’t end up in the Planescape book.  

Wizards of the Coast has been using D&D Beyond as a way to release smaller supplements that often tie into their most recent physical releases. While it’s a shame that this material is functionally gatekept within D&D Beyond as there’s no PDFs or way to use the material offline save for the D&D Beyond app, it’s clear that things like Adventure Vault: The Mortuary are much more than cash grabs.