What do you think Wizards Presents will reveal about the future of Dungeons and Dragons?

On August 18, Wizards Presents will reveal upcoming products for both Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering that Wizards of the Coast have in store. And that has me thinking about the direction of D&D and what’s coming down the road. What are we going to see at the event, and what’s it going to mean for D&D?

With the recent releases of Journeys through the Radiant Citadel and Spelljammer: Adventures in Space as well as this year’s release of books like Monsters of the Multiverse and Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons, Wizards of the Coast has been releasing a host of books that shake up and expand the way Dungeons and Dragons deals with its vast array of material from previous editions of the game while simultaneously pushing into new and not previously seen ideas and settings. In a real way, this feels very much like stage setting for the 50th Anniversary of D&D, coming in 2024.

The Dragonlance setting of Krynn is also getting a release in 2022, although not exactly when as yet, but I’m really curious about what we’re going to find out at Wizards Presents and how it ties into the increasingly cosmic scope of the current D&D releases. I feel that the genesis for this current direction of the game has been a long time coming — settings like Theros and character options from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything did a lot to start the rock rolling towards rethinking certain basic assumptions of D&D, and in a real way a book as important as Journeys through the Radiant Citadel with its diverse collection of creators and its non-western inspirations is a realization of that design philosophy. It’s important to realize that we’re two years from Tasha’s release in 2020, and that the upcoming 50th Anniversary edition of D&D — whether it’s going to be a new edition entirely, or just a collection and refinement of 5th Edition — is only two years away itself.

The D&D multiverse approach has always been in the background — as far back as second edition AD&D, we saw books like the original Spelljammer tie together worlds like Krynn, Aber-Toril and Oerth and meetings between characters like Raistlin, Mordenkainen and Elminster. In a way, seeing it codified in current books like Monsters of the Multiverse and Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons feels very much like seeing a resurgence of where D&D was going before the bad times in the 90’s and the collapse of TSR, the company that owned the rights before Wizards bought them.

I expect that Wizards Presents will have release information for the upcoming Dragonlance adventure Shadow of the Dragon Queen and battle game Heroes of Krynn, at the minimum. But what else? Are we getting any news about new adventures, settings, or anything else? Previous editions of D&D have had books come out that set the stage for the upcoming next version of the game — Die Vecna Die for example, alongside The Apocalypse Stone. Are we going to see a similar product that clears the way for a new edition? Or, if the 50th Anniversary edition is less a 6e and more a 5.5, codifying and clarifying the rules and staying mostly the same, will we get more new settings to fit alongside the concept of the First World we’ve seen mentioned in books like Fizban’s or Journeys? Perhaps another Magic the Gathering plane brought to D&D — like, say, Dominaria, the original setting for the card game that put Wizards on the path to acquiring D&D in the first place?

We don’t know yet. But it’s fair to say that 2020 – 2022 have been some of the best years for D&D in a long, long time, with excellent products touching upon D&D’s past and making waves for its future. I’m very excited to see if D&D can expand on its new multiversal cosmic approach. What do you think we’ll find out this week? A new campaign setting, a roadmap to the 5oth Anniversary, or something else?