Dungeons & Dragons’ first post-revamp adventure book says hey, let’s put some dungeons and some dragons in this thing

For a game called Dungeons & Dragons, it sure seems like homebrew games (and even a lot of pre-written campaigns) skimp on both—which is something I’m guilty of myself. Give me a rulebook for anything, and I’ll find a way to plonk it in a city and have players doing political intrigue in a sea of proper nouns. If I want them to actually go to an ancient ruin and slay a monster, I have to basically force my itching hand to avoid making any factions for my whole prep session. It’s a real problem.

While dragons might be an iconic monster to hurl at your players, and there’s certainly quite a few of them in the revamped Monster Manual, I’ve run my tables into dragons basically once in my decade of DMing experience. Well, good news for us people who are bad at appreciating dragons—D&D’s first post-revamp adventure set’ll be about, uh, D&D.

Specifically, dragons and dungeons. Dubbed Dragon Delve, and revealed at MagicCon: Chicago over the weekend, this supplement has “10 short adventures centered around each of the 10 iconic chromatic and metallic dragons within the game”, as per a press release (via Gizmodo).

Slated to release July 8, the thing that really intrigues me about this book is how it’s apparently pre-bragging about being easier to run than the adventure books before it—with that same press release boasting it’ll “showcase how easy your prep can be as a Dungeon Master.”

It seems to be conventional wisdom that adventure books haven’t done a great job up until this point when it comes to setup—clogged up with hefty exposition dumps and a confusing prioritization of information. I’m a homebrewer by trade, so I like to personally bore my players to death with my worldbuilding, but I’m glad to see WoTC is shaping up its language to make my prefab campaign brethren have an easier time with it.

This retooled way of presenting information does seem to grok with the new Dungeon Master’s Guide, too, which has a commendable amount of resources and planning techniques for early DMs—I’m deeply curious to see how these new strategies pan out in future adventure materials.

I will say, though, that from this early look—WoTC is continuing to kill it with the quality and variety of its book artwork. These are some stunningly-rendered dragons, and I’m all for the company wielding its Hasbro money to let talented illustrators go hog wild on making their pages pretty.

So—hey, if you’ve never fought a dragon in D&D, as so many players weirdly haven’t, this anthology of adventures comes out July 8. That way you can have your own little Chroma Conclave arc, though I can’t promise you’ll have an incredibly successful actual play career and animated series off the back of it, sorry.