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Tabletop Role Playing Games like Dungeons and Dragons are always releasing new products, but how do you know which you should be investing your time and money into? What will these products actually do to benefit your experience at the table? I wanted to write my latest feature to try to showcase the differences between all of the content out there, and provide what I think are a few good examples, and more importantly, what to do with the products once you get them to the table.
First, and maybe most importantly, a lot of these products are written for Game Masters/Dungeon Masters out there, so these products may not provide as much for players as you may hope.
Rules Expansions
Taking Dungeons and Dragons (5E) as an example, most players only really need access to the Players Handbook (soon to be revised in September) and have a willing friend who is going to run sessions and campaigns for you. The exception to this is Rules Expansions. Currently there are two official expansions: Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. These provide additional rules and player options for their characters which can be built into the game (Tip 1: talk to your GM about anything like this). On top of this there are many good third-party options from publishers (Personal recommendation: Tome of Heroes from Kobold Press).
Adventure Modules & Campaign Settings
Dungeons and Dragons started out with Game Masters writing their own worlds, adventures, campaigns stretching out for years, and that is still true for a lot of tables. But (speaking as a GM with a full time job, other passions and relationships with the outside world to keep track of) who always has the time to also be crafting the kind of epic stories which will keep your players engaged for weeks and months and years?
That’s where adventure modules and campaign settings come in. These books offer pre-crafted worlds and events written out with glorious artwork, maps, encounters. The works.
Be careful though, no two tables are the same so I’m afraid this isn’t a perfect world where you can pick these up off the shelf, never prepare a game again and wow your table with your GM prowess. These were written to get you as close to that nirvana as possible, but only you know your players, your house rules and what shenanigans they will get up to. But trust me, that is a good thing! The holes they leave behind are yours to build into, and if you don’t like the direction the story is going, it’s yours to change!
A couple of brilliant examples for you from 5E is The Wild beyond the Witchlight, and Curse of Strahd. Without spoilers, these two take your players off to two very different ends of the spectrum of what role playing games can be. But they can also be tailored to what your players will love.
Venturing into Barovia in Curse of Strahd is a sandbox land of Gothic Horror which you can make feel as haunting as your players can handle. But you could also make it much more like adventures with “those pesky kids” in their “mystery machine” if you wanted to.
Likewise, the Wild beyond the Witchlight brings your players into the lands of fairy tales, carnivals, witches and whimsy. Depending on where you take your inspiration, you could have a Disney Princess Adventure, or Grimm’s original Tales. Or maybe something in between.
It’s all up to you and your players to invent and discover. And if your table goes off on a tangent away from the main story, let me assure you, you are not breaking any rules. This is still your campaign, your story, these books are here to help, that’s all.
Campaign Settings leave even more for you to craft yourself. Whilst some, like Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, provide an introductory adventure within the pages to get you started, others will not. The purpose of a campaign setting is to inspire you. To take away the pressures of creating an entire world from scratch and instead let you jump straight into making an adventure which your friends will want to be immersed in.
But again, like adventure modules, don’t be afraid to make adjustments or only use parts which make sense for your table. In the Ravenloft setting, each Domain is a wildly different flavour of horror, inspired by the pages of Lovecraft, Poe, Stoker and Shelley (to name just a few), but that doesn’t mean I can’t make my version. In fact, the book actively encourages you with tables to help create your own corner of this setting.
Another great example is Eberron: Rising from the last War. Keith Baker is an exceptional writer and lays out details of his own hand-crafted world for us here, providing cities, technology, history and even an entirely new system of abilities which GMs can use to their hearts content. Every page is full of political intrigue, espionage and charm. If Ravenloft is Dungeons and Dragons version of Dracula and Frankenstein, Eberron is the answer to Indiana Jones mixed with “magic-punk”, with magically powered trains and air ships, secrets, spies and MacGuffins.
These books are designed to inspire, and despite my earlier suggestions of these being GM focused, players will find sections useful as it may provide new background options or story hooks for their future characters. But read with caution players (and talk to your GM in advance), you may also find yourself spoiling surprises for yourself if you delve too deeply into the world’s lore before you begin play.
So there you go, a rough guide to some of the resources available to players of the world’s most famous role playing game. Take the parts which serve your fun, ignore the parts which don’t, because that is the most important thing in this hobby; fun for all!