Arcadia is a fantastic resource for Dungeons & Dragons fans, with new subclasses, adventures, monsters and more crafted by some of the best designers in the business. The first issue of Arcadia, a new Dungeons & Dragons 5E-focused magazine published by MCDM Productions, comes out today and immediately steps in to fill the gap left behind by the loss of Dragon Magazine back in 2013. The magazine’s managing editor is James Introcaso, one of today’s premier TTRPG designers who has worked on a variety of official and third-party Dungeons & Dragons magazines, and features work by well-known TTRPG creators like Willy Abeel, Leon Barillaro, Gabe Hicks, and Sadie Lowry. Arcadia #1 is a strong debut that focuses on providing unique player subclasses and game tools that can be implemented into any game.
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The debut 40-page issue of Arcadia contains four features. The magazine opens with “The Workshop Watches,” an adventure for 5th-level characters by Leon Barillaro featuring a sentient workshop gone amok. Gabe Hick provides a new Titan Heart sorcerer subclass that provides players with primordial powers, complete with a Titan NPC that can be integrated into a character’s backstory. Willy Abeel’s contribution is a fantastic rules section on exotic mounts, with options for riding creatures like a basilisk, a giant toad, an owlbear, or nightmare, along with an adventure hook to integrate these new rules into a fun one-off session. Arcadia then wraps up with a Sadie Lowry article on two new celestial villains, providing DMs with fantastically complex villains to capstone a campaign.
Two things immediately jumped out while leafing through the first issue of Arcadia. The first is the fantastic artwork found throughout the magazine, which both compliment the individual features and are of equal quality to the art found in many of the best Dungeons & Dragons products. The other is that Arcadia focuses on being a resource for all 5E players. My biggest concern about Arcadia is that it would be geared mainly towards readers of MCDM Productions’ other projects (MCDM is headed by Matt Colville, whose Strongholds & Followers book provides rules for castle and army building), so I was pleasantly surprised that Arcadia only had one real reference to Colville’s optional rules.
Assuming that future issues of Arcadia match the first issue’s quality, it looks like Dungeons & Dragons fans finally have the Dragon Magazine successor they’ve been waiting for. This looks to be a fantastic publication that focuses on building out 5E and providing players and DMs alike with inspiration for their games.
Arcadia is available to Patreon backers of MCDM Productions. Copies will also be available at MCDM’s website for $7 per issue at 11 AM PST today.
For those looking for more Dungeons & Dragons content, be sure to check out the upcoming Candlekeep Mysteries, an upcoming adventure anthology published by Wizards of the Coast featuring 17 standalone mystery adventures. The Dragonlance campaign setting is also poised for a revival, with a new novel by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman seemingly on the release schedule for later this year in addition to teases that more Dragonlance content is on the way.
