‘World of Warcraft’ meets ‘Dungeons & Dragons,’ and more from Wizards of the Coast at Gen Con

This year’s Gen Con is being held in Indianapolis July 30 through Aug. 2. In advance of the show, one of the biggest events on the calendar for North America’s tabletop gaming community, Wizards of the Coast invited press to take an early look at its scheduled announcements for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.

Wizards, headquartered in Renton, Wash., has published D&D since 1997, and has presided over the game’s meteoric rise in the last decade. Despite renewed competition and several unforced errors, D&D remains the single most popular game in the tabletop roleplaying space, to the point where it’s still often considered synonymous with the hobby as a whole.

In the next year, Wizards’ plans for D&D include a major brand revival, a substantial overhaul to its D&D Beyond online toolset, and a new publishing initiative that promises new and upcoming projects from several of D&D’s classic creators.

What might get the most attention from outside the hobby, however, is a new series of expansions for D&D that will be published under the banner of “Universes Beyond.” The first book for UB, coming on Nov. 17, is a D&D sourcebook based on Blizzard Entertainment’s long-running MMORPG World of Warcraft.

Co-created by long-time D&D designer (and WoW player) James Wyatt, the WoW sourcebook is designed to let players bring the characters, factions, and setting of WoW directly into D&D’s mechanics, with material that spans everything from the earliest days of the MMO to its most recent expansion, Midnight.

Warcraft began in 1994 as a real-time strategy franchise, built around a fantasy kingdom of humans and elves that was abruptly invaded by orcs from another world. The original Warcraft was essentially a fan production for the Warhammer Fantasy universe, but ended up becoming its own original IP.

Warcraft eventually branched out into the nascent MMORPG genre with 2004’s World of Warcraft, which rapidly became a smash hit and is still one of the most popular online games in the current market. WoW has evolved from its original dark fantasy roots into a sort of interplanetary space opera. Its current story arc, the “Worldsoul Saga,” involves the struggle to protect the world of Azeroth from the void priestess who’s out to corrupt it.

This includes D&D versions of trademark WoW species like tauren, dracthyr, earthen, and pandaren; multiple instances from WoW that have been translated into D&D-style dungeon crawls, including a high-level campaign set in Icecrown Citadel; and new D&D subclasses based on character options from WoW, such as death knights, shadow priests, and demon hunters.

This is technically the second time someone’s made Warcraft into a tabletop game, following Sword & Sorcery Studios’ 2003 Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game. According to Wyatt, Wizards’ 2026 book has little to do with that previous publication.

The Warcraft RPG was compatible with 3rd edition D&D but was meant as a standalone product, so it had to spend a lot of its word count on setting up the game’s rules. Wizards’ 2026 World of Warcraft book is an official release for D&D, so it can refer players to the core D&D books for its rules and save its space for more setting details.

The World of Warcraft Universes Beyond book is the first planned entry in what’s intended as an ongoing series of expansions. In the words of D&D franchise head Dan Ayoub, this will extend “Dungeons & Dragons into even more worlds we love.” Exactly which worlds those might be, however, has yet to be announced.

Other D&D announcements from Gen Con 2026 include:

One of D&D’s classic settings is coming back in 2027. Dark Sun was originally published in 1991 as a dark, post-apocalyptic take on D&D, taking place on a dying desert world ruled by crazed sorcerer-kings. Wizards’ revival of the setting will be the first official Dark Sun material since 2010, and will be the first Wizards of the Coast product to ship with a mature content warning.

D&D executive producer Greg Bilsland introduced a new initiative he called “Annual Setting Support,” where Wizards will partner with other publishers for yearly new releases to provide additional material for D&D‘s various ongoing campaign settings. 2027 will see a new Ravenloft book made by the Australian company Ghostfire Gaming (Grim Hollow); more Eberron material from Visionary Productions in Canada; and a Forgotten Realms sourcebook by Kirkland, Wash.-based Kobold Press.

Wizards has hired actor and high-profile D&D fan Joe Manganiello (Justice League, Magic Mike) as the creative director for D&D Icons. This new “content program” marks the return of several classic creators to D&D, such as Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, and R.A. Salvatore. (Not that Salvatore’s ever exactly left, since he’s been putting out new Drizzt Do’Urden novels almost annually since the 1980s, but you get the idea.)

Luke Gygax is working to finish a project left behind by his late father, Gary Gygax, one of the original co-creators of D&D. The result will be published under the Icons banner, and promises that Luke will “complete an adventure through his father’s eyes.” The result is tentatively planned for publication next year.

2027 will see the release of a new adventure in D&D’s original setting of Greyhawk. Crown of the Witch Queen pits players against the vampire warrior Drelnza, last seen in the classic adventure The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, as “she seeks to claim her birthright.”

The forthcoming video game Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons features a vocal performance from Maggie Robertson (Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil Village). Robertson voices one of the oldest signature characters in D&D, the archmage Tasha. A first look at Warlock’s gameplay is planned for Aug. 25 as part of the Gamescom conference in Germany.

D&D Beyond plans to revise its mobile experience, which will make it “easier and more intuitive to play D&D your way,” with your phone or tablet as an unobtrusive tool. It can be helpful to keep a browser window open while you play D&D, to look up rules on the fly, and the goal of this new Beyond is to make that process as painless as possible.

Beyond also has a new “Looking for Group” feature in the works, which is designed to help D&D players find people to play the game with, whether it’s locally, virtually, or by hiring professionals to run D&D for them. (The “paid Dungeon Master” has become a genuine thing in recent years. I know. It feels weird to me, too.)