My State of Dungeons & Dragons

I wouldn't dare write an article titled "The State of Dungeons & Dragons" for oh so many reasons.  First, I haven't played D&D since January 2021, which isn't my longest drought from playing, but it does kind of feel like it.  Secondly, the only officially licensed D&D product I have after Hasbro went from D&D 5th Edition to D&D 2024, to One D&D to D&D 5.5, while also seemingly trying to funnel people to primarily use D&D Beyond so that Hasbro can infinitely charge their player base outside of physical content, is the newly released Ravenloft: The Horrors Within. However, I'm still annoyed that the maps were packaged separately for $24.95, because of course Hasbro wants to eke every cent out of a single product.  While I might be in Hasbro's demographic for avid D&D player, I am not part of their active target financial audience because I don't have D&D Beyond or Maps installed on any of my devices.

If you were to look at the Dungeons & Dragons bookshelf in my basement, you'll see two main product lines: Ravenloft modules and resource books from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons era, and modules and resource books from 5th Edition.  By this visual alone, you might think that I've played soooooo much D&D from 5E, but you'd be sadly mistaken.  To date, I've only played about half, maybe a third, from Curse of Strahd.  I did DM for two pretty consistent groups of 3-8 people for almost four years, but in all of that time, we only played quests that I wrote after playing through The Lost Mine of Phandelver.  16 modules, and they are all unplayed.  If you combine all of the AD&D Ravenloft books in that, it would be almost the entire shelf, although I did have Dr. Potts and Dellanos play quite a bit of the Castle Forlorn before our playing D&D died off; when was that, '96?  1997?  Did we really only play D&D consistently for four to five years?  I did pick it back up around 2002, though, when I joined GMan's campaign along with Dellanos.  Anyway, we're getting off topic.

What I've realized, along with all of the reading of the Forgotten Realms books that I've done over the past four years, is that I've come to terms with not having played any of the modules on that shelf.  If I think of all of those quests as interactable stories that I could play, then that's an added bonus, because right now, they're no different than the number of books on our two other bookshelves with books that I haven't read yet.  They're just big novels with possible gameplay elements incorporated into them, and I'm okay with that.

But again, the issue I run into mentally is that because all of these 5E quests take place in the 1480s DR, I would like to know as much of the backstory of the world and its inhabitants as possible; I am currently reading Shadows of Doom, which takes place in 1358 DR, so I've got a bit to go before.  Because all of the 5E quests I have all take place somewhere along the Sword Coast regions, I don't need to know everything that happened in Calimshan, or Cormyr, or Halruaa, or The Endless Wastes, so I'm not reading everything that was published by TSR and Wizards of the Coast between 1987 and October 2025.  I will eventually get to.

But since Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast hasn't published a physical copy of a quest that takes place in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting since the (apparently) poorly cobbled together Vecna: Eve of Ruin in May 2024, I might actually have time to catch up by the time Dungeons & Dragons 6th Edition rolls out in 2030.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Something Lost and Something Gained