New Dragonlance board game was designed by Rob Daviau and Stephen Baker

Wizards of the Coast says the new Dungeons & Dragons “fighting game” announced on Thursday during the D&D Direct program is an official board game, Wizards of the Coast said, and will include sub-divisions. plastic scene. Title Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn, the board game will act as a standalone experience. But it’s also fully integrated into the companion tabletop RPG campaign, titled Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. The designer in this project? None other than Stephen Baker and Rob Daviau. I couldn’t imagine a better pair to collaborate on this project.

Also announced on Thursday was a reboot of the Spelljammer installation, but Wizards says these new Dragonlance products will have a very different tone and feel.

“We do not accept this view that Dragonlance is a war story,” said Ray Winer, head of D&D at Wizards. “Classic Dragonlance is set in the context of this great conflict, and major military battles like this are an important part of Dragonlance. One of the original 12 Dragonlance Modules [published by TSR] is a war game [called Dragons of Glory]. They ask you to stop your role-playing game experience and start playing war games for a bit.”

The winner continued:

With that in mind, at the same time we are releasing Shadow of the Dragon Queenit’s immersive experience, we are releasing this fighting game. [It] allows you to play various types of major military battles in the world of Krynn. But one of the interesting things about that game is that it has a lot of narrative elements, like a role-playing game. This is a board game, but you are asked to tell what is happening and what is happening. If you choose, while you’re playing the role-playing campaign as major battles break out in the story, you can break the board game and start playing the board game. Your characters from the RPG enter the board game. You keep playing your characters in the board game and you get to learn the amazing, amazing, heroic things they do in these battles. But that experience is completely optional.

When playing tabletop RPGs, the board game will be purely Optional Winners added, as the campaign book will include rules for dealing with similar battles. In contrast, players can pick up board games without diving into a larger immersive experience. But this is the first time Wizards has directly integrated its 5th Edition TTRPG and board game products in this very specific way.

So why are Baker and Daviau the perfect designers for this project? Well, both of them have had a lot of experience working in the war game genre. For instance, they share excellent design credits on the Risk franchise. On the other hand, Baker is the designer behind Combat Master, a brightly colored tabletop war game that uses 28 mm miniatures and a large plastic game. Of course, Daviau is the creator of the legacy system, making board games that change every time you play them.

But Daviau is also one of the co-founders of Restoration Games, a company dedicated to restoring older games and giving them new life. Hopefully he’ll go back to the original source material to deliver as much of the excellent TSR design work as possible.

But why didn’t Hasbro task its hobby board games division, Avalon Hill, with that project?

“Avalon Hill is in the same house as Wizards of the Coast […] until very recently,” said Winer. However, that studio recently established its own dedicated design and production team outside the Wizards organization. That group has been busy with reboots HeroQuest for life, and a spiritual successor to the original Risky legacy. That left the Mage in need of some outside help.

“Avalon Hill and Hasbro were not really involved in creating the board game,” continued Winer. “We in the D&D studio oversaw its creation, but that said board game designers Rob Daviau and Stephen Baker are very well known board game designers, [they] worked on a lot of games for Hasbro – most recently, [Return to Dark Tower] one of their efforts. “

Both Shadow of the Dragon Queen and Warriors of Krynn The board game represents a “whole new story,” said the winner. Additionally, the events depicted in both productions take place at the same time as the original Dragonlance novel, a beloved and best-selling series by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis. He also added that neither Laura nor Tracy Hickman, the creators of the Dragonlance scene, nor their collaborator Weis were directly involved in any of the productions mentioned on Thursday.

A similar, new series of novels written by Tracy Hickman and Weis, is coming out this August and will carry Dragonlance’s timeline in the future.