Dungeons & Dragons is synonymous with roleplaying. Few names carry so much weight and can claim to have such reach as that of Wizards of the Coast’s game. For good reason. After so many decades creating and shaping a particular form of entertainment, even if it has evolved beyond what Dungeons & Dragons is, it remains the king. Synonymous with its medium. That’s why it shouldn’t surprise us that it’s the most played roleplaying game. And that it has shaped many other media.
Video games owe a great deal to Dungeons & Dragons. Not only because RPGs wouldn’t exist without it, but because perhaps video games as we know them wouldn’t exist without it either. A large part of their origins came from imitating it, and the number of games that have gone on to license it is enormous. Which is why its influence is impossible to ignore. And it’s also inevitable that it’s a two-way street, especially now that video games are the biggest entertainment industry in the world. Bringing World of Warcraft to Dungeons & Dragons.
World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons at once
In a glossy 256-page hardcover book, the World of Warcraft game expansion lets us set our Dungeons & Dragons adventures in the universe of Azeroth. To do so the book includes all the things we might expect from this kind of expansion. 11 species, 6 subclasses, 30 new magic items, 60 monsters fresh out of the game, along with mounts and companions. But that isn’t the most surprising thing. The most surprising thing is the care they’ve put into recreating the setting.
Lavishly illustrated, the book is full of evocative images of iconic or memorable places, moments, and characters. Helping us glimpse the world of the game in the aesthetics of Dungeons & Dragons, this book’s greatest strength is showing that this isn’t World of Warcraft by way of Dungeons & Dragons, but a perfect marriage between the two. It’s the meeting of both worlds, and the charm lies in seeing how both adapt to each other’s differences to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
That means the dungeons here are a bit more linear and more focused on fights against huge bosses that change over time. Like the game’s raids. But it also means that abilities and spells have charges based on uses, not on a recharge time, as in Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a perfect balance in making things feel natural and logical within what we already know and enjoy about Dungeons & Dragons while adapting others to make them true to World of Warcraft in a way that feels vibrant and exciting. Something that shows the care they’ve put into the book.
Azeroth, but nothing more
Perhaps the biggest problem with this expansion is that it takes place, indeed, in Azeroth. That means we won’t leave the planet itself at all and that nothing outside it is described. If you were hoping for information on Argus, Draenor, or the Shadowlands, you’re out of luck: there’s nothing about them in the book. This gives Wizards of the Coast the chance to expand the content in the future with expansions devoted to those places, if in the future they decide that’s interesting.
But in fairness, it doesn’t pose a serious problem for the inventive DM who really wants to explore it. The bestiary is so extensive and the list of items and spells so carefully put together, that it’s easy to create everything we might need to set any kind of campaign outside Azeroth with the information they give us and a bit of work. That shows how versatile this book is.
Do you need to be a World of Warcraft fan to enjoy it? No, though it certainly helps. The attention to detail, all the references on every page, will delight fans. But those who aren’t will find here a very interesting and lived-in setting in which to place their campaigns and develop their own stories. Even ignoring everything that has happened so far in Blizzard’s games.
