Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne discusses the recent announcement of Luke Gygax’s return to Dungeons & Dragons.
One of the big stories at this past weekend’s Gary Con was the announcement that Luke Gygax, son of Gary Gygax and one of the original players in Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons Greyhawk campaign, will write for the brand (see “Garycon XVIII News“). WotC has a yet untitled release scheduled for Q4 2026, so it might be a Melf’s Guide to Greyhawk, but given the book was just unofficially announced, the Q4 release could be something else and the Greyhawk title may take years to publish.
After the release of the 2024 edition of D&D, I expected to see more material already released pertaining to Greyhawk. During Wizards of the Coast presentations at distributor events surrounding the 2024 edition, WotC representatives indicated the company planned to reduce the amount of material set in the Forgotten Realms and other campaign settings and instead release more material encouraging play in the Greyhawk campaign setting.
However all the material released since then has either been set in the Forgotten Realms or campaign-neutral. Since the release of D&D 5E, we have seen releases for the campaign settings of the Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Eberron, Planescape, Dragonlance and even the first campaign sourcebook for the realms of Magic: the Gathering, but nothing for the original D&D campaign setting. This year, we will see the release of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within in June tied to what WotC is calling the Season of Horror (see “‘D&D’ Roadmap“).
Following that in the summer and fall is the Season of Magic with the release of Arcana Unleashed, which focuses on magic and spellcraft, and the Arcana Unleased: Deadfall adventure book. Releasing between the two will be a set of D&D Reference Cards, which I hope will be very similar to the discontinued D&D Class Spell Cards, which sold extremely well and for which I still have customers asking. They were the most popular D&D supplement that WotC released, save for the Adventure Grids, and I will be happy to see them or something similar return.
Finally, tying in with the as-yet-unnamed D&D sourcebook releasing in Q4, WotC has announced the Season of Champions. I have no idea yet as to what this is, but I can hope it would be a campaign sourcebook tying in to Greyhawk or a sourcebook with player content as well as for the DM that targets more market segments, rather than the much easier-to-produce adventure modules.
On a tangentially related note, the two Hasbro shareholders who filed a lawsuit against Hasbro alleging the company devalued and weakened consumer confidence in the Magic brand by printing too many sets voluntarily dismissed their case against the company only a month after filing it. Possibly Hasbro and WotC’s 2025 results had something to do with it as Magic saw a 59% growth in revenue over 2024, pushing Hasbro’s overall revenue growth to 14% year over year. The lawsuit can be refiled, but it is hard to claim the company’s actions are hurting the brand when Hasbro posts numbers like that.
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The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
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