D&D: Mystery Products on the Horizon
Wellp, we know there are going to be four new products coming out later this year…
But that’s about it. According to the folks over at Nerds on Earth, four new product listings have appeared on Amazon, much like the Labyrinth / Tales from the Yawning Portal mystery from earlier this year.
That was basically my reaction.
Here’s a quick glance at the products:
- RPG Accessory #1: Release date of October 17, 2017 with a price of $24.95
- RPG Accessory #2: Release date of September 19, 2017 with a price of $19.95
- RPG Accessory #3: Release date of July 18, 2017 with a price of $14.95
- RPG Accessory #4: Release date of June 20, 2017 with a price of $9.95
So let’s take stock of what we do know. The most expensive of these is $24.95, which seems a little cheap for a whole new rulebook. I can’t imagine that 24.95 product being the thing that all the Unearthed Arcana columns have been gearing up for (I’m still guessing like a Volo’s Guide to Adventures), but if anything was going to be a “collected works of UA” this might be it. Or maybe it could be a book of maps/dungeons? My blue-sky hope is that it’s some kind of digital boxed-set to accompany D&D Beyond (even e-books and laserdiscs get ISBNs, after all, and these do have ISBNs). But, who knows, maybe it’s Beyond itself, though I highly doubt it.
And given the philosophy of narrative + mechanics that Wizards is going with in their books right now, I highly doubt it’s something like an equipment/magic item guide–and anyway that’ll probably go with whatever title ends up holding the traps and mass combat rules they’ve been playtesting lately.
If I had to guess, I’d say at least one of those is a pack of map tiles. Spell Card Decks is a tempting guess, but we know that Gale Force 9 is already releasing Spell/resource cards for every archetype. And they’re also the ones who have been releasing the Icons of the Realm Minis… that’s why I think map tiles (especially if they’re the tiles to be used with Tales from the Yawning Portal or the like) could be a strong contender. After all you’d wanna have some place to use those minis and not everyone’s going to have a battlemat.
As always, the only way to know anything for certain is to let time and entropy do their terrible-yet-inevitable work and trust that we aren’t in a simulation of a reality (although even if we are, then we’ll still know what these products were in the simulation, so there). Until then…
What do you think these products are? What are you hoping they’ll be? Let us know!
