D&D YouTubers have started to reveal details from the upcoming World of Warcraft crossover book, courtesy of a preview by Wizards of the Coast. The core of the reveals focus on the way WoW’s iconic dungeons are being adapted to D&D, with Dire Maul – once an end-game dungeon in the original vanilla version of WoW – being the star of the show.
Sadly Wargamer wasn’t at the preview event, so I owe a big debt to all the content creators making videos about what they’ve seen – I’ll link out to their coverage throughout this interview, as is only polite. While we’d love to have been invited to that preview, we don’t feel too snubbed – we did get to interview Dan Ayoub, Wizard of the Coast’s new head of D&D, recently.
GameMasters provides some great information about the dungeons populating the book, particularly the fact that they’re split up into a variety of level bands. Here’s the dungeons he named, and their suggested level ranges:
- 1-4, The Deadmines
- 1-4, Shadowfang Keep
- 5-10, Blackfathom Deeps
- 5-10, Scarlet Monastery
- 11-16, Scarlet Monastery second wing
- 11-16, Dire Maul
- 17-20, Azjol Nerub
- 17-20, Onyxia’s Lair
This isn’t a single adventure chain, but rather a sequence of locations that you might return to more than once. Bonus Reactions adds some useful context, that you’re likely to go through the same location more than once with different objectives.
That brings us to Dire Maul. Crit Hit the Giant gives a helpful deep read for each of the pages of the preview content. There are three key sections. The first and most obvious is a massive keyed map for the dungeon, lightly adapted from the original WoW map. The information for the dungeon is split up into smaller sections, and it looks like they’ll correspond to the instanced zones of the WoW original.
In place of NPCs with exclamation marks over their heads, the dungeon has a table of potential plot hooks. Two have been revealed so far: Furgus Warpwood wants you to slay his corrupted kin, Tendris, while Orhan Ogreblade has a new plot to conquer the Stonemaul clan, which involves installing one of the players as their new ruler. As far as I can tell these aren’t actual WoW quests that Furgus or Orhan ever gave out, but they sure feel like they could have been.
There’s also information for the unique characters you’ll find in each subsection of the dungeon. The Warpwood Quarter characters have been revealed, all of them bosses and NPCs you’ll have encountered if you’ve played through the main Dire Maul quests; the runaway Fel Imp Pusillin, Felsworn Satyr Zevrim Thornhoof, and the petrified Old Ironbark. Dialogue-skipping WoW players may discover that there’s more backstory here than they realised.
The impression I’m getting is that this will be a playground that does need some effort from the dungeon master to animate – but that’s not inherently a bad thing. The major bosses from the most famous WoW quests are in place, and there are some suggested motivations that could bring characters to the zone. But the information so far suggests these dungeons won’t be exhaustively-keyed and location-based dungeon, but more like a stage. That should make it easier to tell your own story with them, and port them into other settings, but may leave you having to do more of the work.
Which WoW dungeons do you most want to play through in D&D? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
