RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Hasbro, the company that has, through the expenditure of a lot of money raised from Transformers toys and the fitfully successful film franchises based on same, been in control of the Dungeons And Dragons brand for the past 27 years, absolutely loves intellectual property. The toy/ would-be film company pops up every few years to hatch schemes for the various hyper-potent brands it serves as the fiscal steward and primary financial beneficiary for. (Not always disastrously, admittedly: You don’t get either a phenomenally good video game like Baldur’s Gate 3 , or a genuinely fun movie like 2023’s Honor Among Thieves , without that deal-minded thinking.) At the same time, Hasbro has made an absolute killing by importing other people’s IP into its products, most notably with its Universes Beyond branding in Magic: The Gathering , which shoves everything from Final Fantasy characters to The Office ‘s Dwight Schrute into Wizards Of The Coast’s classic game of dueling wizards.
Now, the company is bringing those same mercenary “We’re all stuck living in Ready Player One anyways, so fuck it” impulses to D&D itself, announcing today at Gen Con that it’s bringing both Star Wars and World Of Warcraft into the world of Dungeons And Dragons . Per Variety , both brands will soon be getting official D&D expansions that will allow players to play with versions of the current 5th Edition D&D rule set in either Warcraft ‘s Azeroth or on the hateful, aggressively moisture-farmed sands of Tatooine. The WoW game, made in association with Microsoft subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment, will launch in November, while the Star Wars -themed game will arrive in 2027.
Although an exhaustive rundown would run to about 2,000 words and force both you and us to suffer the indignities of comparing D6 and D20-based roleplaying systems, it’s worth noting that both of these brands have already been covered pretty extensively in the tabletop gaming space. ( Warcraft had a two-edition RPG published in the early 2000s, while Star Wars has burnt its way through three fully distinct RPG universes since the 1990s.) This, though, sounds like a much purer expression of Hasbro’s brand-heavy mindset: A shiny, expensive way to shove a lot of recognizable names and characters into the D&D ecosystem, allowing the company to charge extensively for lightly rewritten content predicated on the promise of getting to play as your favorite Night Elf or Nightsister in the world’s most popular RPG system. Like most of the Universes Beyond material that’s utterly glutted the Magic market in recent years, we’re guessing it’ll look fairly cool, be a little shallow, and cost an enormous amount of money to acquire: The perfect modern Hasbro product!
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