Dungeons and Dragons is setting itself up to be a multiverse in a major way, with Wizards of the Coast really emphasising this aspect of its adventures and upcoming stories during the DnD livestream on Tuesday.
In this presentation, designers Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford said they set the foundations for the DnD multiverse back in 2014, and promised more world-hopping adventures to come.
For starters, Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse revives a popular DnD setting focused on multiple worlds, and the DnD release schedule for 2023 closes with an adventure based on the Deck of Many Things, described as the “multiverse-spanning story behind this bedlam-causing campaign-rocking” 5e magic item. I was going to say take a shot every time Perkins and Crawford say multiverse, but this would be legitimately unsafe.
Multiverse’s are hot properties right now. One of the all time best multiverse stories – Everything, Everywhere, All at Once dominated at the Oscars, the upcoming Spiderverse movie looks great, Magic: The Gathering’s latest set March of the Machine is a pitched battle across the multiverse, and of course there’s Marvel doing such a fantastic job with the concept. It seems Wizards of the Coast is keen to cash in on the multiverse hype in DnD as well as in Magic.
Technically, Dungeons and Dragons always had a multiverse, as there are numerous official DnD settings and DnD planes of existence, and these are all technically connected. In the past few years Wizards has upped the ante, however, publishing tons of multiverse-adjacent books and adventures.
For instance, Monsters of the Multiverse sets the scene for the DnD multiverse, Spelljammer provides a means of traversing multiple worlds (the upcoming Planescape will do the same), and Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is a compilation of adventures spanning multiple worlds.
Now it seems this is the direction DnD is destined to continue. With references to ‘The D&D Multiverse’ becoming more and more frequent, we can expect more and more DnD books, campaigns, and adventures to span numerous worlds and explore a connected multiverse.
Source: Wargamer
