Day 2 began with a brief stop at Starbucks on the way to the D&D 4th Edition Q&A Seminar! Lots and lots of information here, including a ton of pictures, so this seminar gets a whole post to itself.
I'm afraid I lost track of exactly who was giving the seminar, as I didn't have a chance to note their names down. Plus, I had my camera set wrong, so the first few pictures came out too blurry to keep. Once things settled down, they started talking about developing 4e and things that had recently come out & were coming out. The FRCS was mentioned as being on sale at the con (and sold out later that day), and they talked about the upcoming FR Player's Guide...
... and they had a copy to show!
After that, they started into the slide show presentation, discussing things that would be coming out over the next year:
Scepter Tower of the Spellguard is an adventure coming out in September, which will be made to work in a Forgotten Realms campaign or a basic D&D campaign.
October is going to be a busy month for D&D!
Martial Power will be out. No real surprises here, except that there will be more racial feats in this book.
King of the Trollhaunt Warrens, the first adventure in the P-series of Paragon-level adventures. Maybe featuring trolls? ;)
Streets of Shadow Dungeon Tiles, for your city-based adventuring needs. Also has some spell-effect tiles.
November brings us the new Draconomicon! Of course, it has new dragons and dragon-monsters; plus treasure, rituals and other player-goodies.
D&D Starter Set also comes out in November. This will have the usual stuff: pregen characters, adventure, tiles... but will not have plastic minis. Instead, Wizards is using tokens for the PCs and monsters, to cut down on production costs and keep the price down.
Manual of the Planes 4e comes out in December. Note that this is not the final cover art, just a mock-up with some filler art. Not much else to say, here. It's a MotP, you know pretty much what it's going to focus on.
We'll also get P2: Demon Queen's Enclave in December. Again, not the final cover, but expect to deal with a lot of drow in this one.
January 2009 will bring us a book I'm really looking forward to, Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead. Obviously, not the final cover. I always love these undead splatbooks, no matter what system they're for.
February will begin the Dungeon Delve. I'll go into this in more detail in a later post but, basically, this is an RPGA function where a DM can run a single encounter for players. It's designed to be like the "Friday Night Magic" leagues, where people can just drop in once a week and play for a couple hours. If you want, you can save them up to do bi-weekly or monthly games, but it's a great set-up for folks with less time to play.
Also, another set of Dungeon Tiles: Caves of Carnage. Lots of natural underground terrain. They specifically mentioned working on more non-linear features, like an underground stream that winds around on one side, with a natural winding tunnel on the opposite side.
March of 2009 is when we finally get to see the Player's Handbook 2! As the speakers were talking, they let slip that Bards are in, as well as Sorcerers (and that Sorcerers are Arcane, not Primal). They also said that we could tell what some of the new races are by the cover, so I got a closer shot:
Unfortunately, I don't recognize them a bit. The big guy looks giant-ish, while the druid gal looks fey/elvish.
There's a ton more stuff coming in March:
- P3: Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress finishes out the P-series of adventures.
- Player's Handbook Power Cards and Martial Power Cards: Wizards said they've heard people's requests for power cards. While you can print them out from the DDI Character Creator app, these are going to be nice, heavy cardstock prints of powers from the PHB and Martial Power books.
- Feywild miniatures set.
Arcane Power comes out in April 2009, with all sorts of extra stuff for magic-types to play with. This will include the Arcane classes from PHB2! A question came up later about how they'll support the Martial PHB2 classes, since Martial Power comes out before PHB2. There wasn't a solid answer, just that they do plan to offer more things for each class in future products "as it makes sense," ie they're not going to put out an "extra" product or delay another one to add extra features for classes; but, they're not going to leave them hanging either. Most likely, this will become Dragon magazine content, and show up in other products.
Also, E1: Death's Reach becomes the first Epic-tier adventure published this month.
Monster Manual 2 debuts in May 2009, along with PHB2 Power Cards.
June 2009 brings us the next campaign setting, with the publication of the Eberron Campaign Setting book. Note that this is proposed art for the cover, but nothing's final yet.
We'll also see the Arcane Towers Dungeon Tiles, said to feature the first round terrain available in Dungeon Tiles.
Finally, we get E2: Kingdom of the Ghouls. Hopefully we'll find out why Yeenoghu no longer has control of this realm!
The Eberron Player's Guide comes out in July, and the proposed cover art matches up nicely beside the ECS4e cover.
Also out that month, Divine Power for the cleric-y/paladin-ly types; Seekers of the Ashen Crown adventure (which I'm guessing is E3); and an untitled Huge set of D&D Minis.
And that brings us to August 2009. Here we'll see Adventurer's Vault 2, for even more treasure!
The big news this month is the "super adventure" Revenge of the Giants. This is going to be a "boxed set," featuring tokens instead of minis, just like the Starter box.
Finally, we get Arcane Power Cards to go along with the other power card sets published so far.
Note that there was no DMG2 mentioned anywhere in this. I'm guessing that they either don't feel it's necessary, or plan to wait until they have enough new stuff to talk about to publish one.
At the end of the presentation, they talked a bit about their online DDI stuff, and showed off from stills from the gameplay app. No pictures, as there didn't seem to be anything new to that. However, we did get a special treat: we got to watch (after some audio troubles) the upcoming new D&D animation video! Without spoiling too much, folks should enjoy this shot:
The second half of the day will be written up and posted either tonight or tomorrow!
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