The new Dungeons & Dragons “fighting game,” announced during Thursday’s D&D Direct, is a full-fledged board game, Wizards of the Coast says, and will feature plastic miniatures. Titled Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn, the board game will function as a standalone experience. But it’s also fully integrated into the accompanying tabletop RPG campaign titled Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragonqueen. The designers on this project? None other than Stephen Baker and Rob Daviau. I can’t think of a better pair for this project.
Also announced Thursday was a reboot of the Spelljammer setting, but Wizards says these new Dragonlance products will have a very different tone and feel.
“We’re focusing on the idea that Dragonlance is a war story,” said Ray Winninger, Wizards’ head of D&D. “Classic Dragonlance is set against the backdrop of this massive conflict, and this type of massive military battle is an important part of Dragonlance. One of the original 12 Dragonlance modules [published by TSR] was a war game [called Dragons of Glory
Winner continued:
With that in mind, we’re releasing at the same time Shadow of the Dragon Queenthis is the roleplaying experience, let’s release this fighting game. [It] allows you to play massive military battles in the world of Krynn. But one of the interesting things about this game is that it has a lot of narrative elements, just like an RPG. It’s a board game, but you’re asked to tell what happens and what doesn’t. If you wish, while playing the RPG campaign, when major battles break out in the story, you can break out of the board game and start playing the board game. Your characters from the role-playing game will be imported into the board game. You keep playing your characters in the board game and you can learn what amazing, unbelievable and heroic things they do in these battles. But this experience is completely optional.
If you are playing the tabletop roleplaying game, Winner’s board game will be added completely optional as the campaign book will contain rules for solving the same battles. Conversely, players can pick up on the board game without delving into the larger RPG experience. But this is the first time Wizards directly integrates its 5th Edition TTRPG products and its 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 a lot of experience working in the wargames genre. For example, they share excellent design credits for the Risk franchise. Baker, on the other hand, is the designer behind it battlemaster, a sprawling tabletop wargame featuring 28mm miniatures and a solid plastic playmat. Daviau is of course the creator of the Legacy system, which creates board games that change every time you play them.
But Daviau is also one of the co-founders of Restoration Games, a company that specializes in reviving older games and breathing new life into them. Expect him to return to the original source material to bring forth as much of this excellent TSR design work as possible.
But why didn’t Hasbro just hire its hobby board game division, Avalon Hill, to do this project?
“Avalon Hill was in house at Wizards of the Coast […] until recently,” Winninger said. Recently, however, this studio has created its own dedicated design and production team outside of the Wizards organization. This team has been busy rebooting HeroQuest brought to life, and on a spiritual successor to the original risk legacy. As a result, Wizards needed outside help.
“Avalon Hill and Hasbro weren’t really involved in the development of the board game,” continued Winninger. “We at D&D Studio oversaw the creation, but that means the board game’s designers, Rob Daviau and Stephen Baker, are well-known board game designers. [they] have worked on many games for Hasbro – most recently [Return to Dark Tower] was one of their efforts.”
Both Shadow of the Dragon Queen and the Warriors of Krynn Board games represent a “whole new story,” Winner said. Also, the events depicted in both products take place around the same time as the original Dragonlance novels, a popular and best-selling series by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis. He also added that neither Laura nor Tracy Hickman, the creators of the Dragonlance setting, nor their collaborator Weis were directly involved in any of the products mentioned Thursday.
A new series of novels, also written by Tracy Hickman and Weis, will be released this August and will carry the Dragonlance timeline into the future.
