D&D Beyond Conjures An Epic Expanding Library To Enhance Your Gaming Experience
by Anton Kromoff
Welcome to the table,
Wizards of the Coast has launched a new virtual tabletop initiative on D&D Beyond.com titled D&D Beyond Drops. Let’s get into it.
Available for both Hero and Master Tier subscribers, this drop has kicked off with 500+ content listings, including 125 maps, 250 image reveals, 10 stickers, 11 player options, and a slew of other stuff.
This new content delivery method will continue weekly for the foreseeable future and will include pre-made encounters that can slot into ongoing campaigns. Monthly, there will be drops from artists and game designers that add more game content, like monsters, maps, and more.
What is really intriguing is that they are saying some of these drops will be experimental and unexpected, not necessarily fitting into the settings of recent sourcebooks. Others, of course, will be syncing up with the Season of published content we learned about at the beginning of the year.
Another really cool feature is that the full library of drops is always available to all subscribers. Additionally, if you start subscribing later in the life cycle of the program, you don’t miss out on the Drops that came before.
I’ve had a pretty solid experience with D&D Beyond up and to this point, and I like the map system they have on there a ton. So the fact that we would be getting more things to play with in that environment really does speak to me.
I’ve also published a number of Dungeons & Dragons 5/5.5 materials over the years, so I would be lying to you if I said “I was not excited” about what possibilities this can open up from the publishing side as well.
D&D Beyond continues to evolve, and what was once a means to build some test characters has become a really valuable digital resource as both a storyteller and someone trying to keep up with the latest material the game designers are putting out, so this feels like a really rad way to get bite-sized pieces of material that could, in turn, be expanded upon based on audience reaction.
It reminds me of my favorite publication, Dragon Magazine, and the way each month, you could get all sorts of little tidbits that could be part of a core setting like Dark Sun, Spelljammer, or DragonLance, or you could get totally off-the-wall things like Game of Thrones, or Gama World and the systems would work but the settings and material could come from all over the pop-culture space.
There is also something intriguing about what settings and IP could be played with, and who could be asked to craft said content. I have Conan, The Keep, and a handful of other random licensed pop-culture D&D pieces in my collection, and while I don’t know that they are tentpole examples of the systems they were crafted for, but they are still cool to have on the shelf. So new material in the same vein could be very exciting and eventually nostalgic to the group of players growing up in the hobby, as I did.
Until next time, keep an eye on Comicon.com as I will always do my best to keep you up to date on all the latest D&D and D&D accessory news.
