After an eventful 2024 for Dungeons & Dragons, the “World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game” came to Gen Con with new leadership, new partnerships, and most importantly, new books. Announced at the con and set for a release later this year, Adventures In Faerun and Heroes of Faerun represent perhaps the most extensive exploration of a single setting during Fifth Edition and the first major setting release for the updated ruleset. Ed Greenwood’s nearly 60 year old setting has been the main location for all of Fifth Edition and, perhaps more importantly, was the setting for both the mega hit Baldur’s Gate 3 and the Honor Among Thieves feature film. Dan and Chris sat down with one of the architects of the new edition, Executive Producer Greg Bilsland, to learn what went into the new books and what D&D looks like in 2025.
Dan Arndt: So I’m curious when it’s been like joining back up and being a part of things with this new new “face” for Fifth Edition with the new books.
Greg Bilsland: One of the things I’d say is that I could never have imagined an event like this where all of these publishers were on a slide and that we had exhibitors from all of these third parties. When I was here in 2015 we had started to do some collaboration with Kobold Press and Green Ronin, but the transformation that D&D Beyond has allowed in bringing partners back…it’s been really amazing to see that. It affords us lot of opportunities to see genre explorations and thematic explorations that we may never do as a product, but we have all of these others in the past
DA: I want to know where we decided to give the Forgotten Realms a return and sort of a “facelift” of its own alongside the rules update. Is that something that’s been cooking or did you really want to, what was the thinking behind that?
GB: I think in the last five years, but really for the course of the whole edition, there’s always been a desire to invest more deeply in our world. We see that most recently with the Dungeon Master’s Guide providing this mini-gazetteer for Greyhawk. We saw that with Spelljammer, with Planescape. And as we go forward we are going to continue to make those investments. For Forgotten Realms the only reason I think it really wasn’t done earlier is it’s a big, hard project. Because it is our most popular setting, there are very high expectations for it so being able to dedicate as many pages as we are, I mean, Adventures in Faerun is like 288 pages, which makes it one of our longest books in Fifth Edition. Between the books it’s like 400 pages of content. That’s two core rule books almost.
DA: There’s so much history in these settings, whether it be Spelljammer or Planescape or the Forgotten Realms. How do you approach going back to this and keep keeping it fresh? Adding new stuff, improving the old stuff. How do you approach that?
GB: Especially for something like The Forgotten Realms, it is much more of a curation exercise than it is a reimagining exercise. And I’ll get to re-imagine in a moment. We’ve had novels written over the last 15 years that have advanced the timeline and that have changed what’s happened in The Forgotten Realms, had some other adventure products come out, had Adventurers League that was in the Forgotten Realm. We had to figure out what the most resonant pieces were and how to bring those forward.
I always think about the fact that like tens of millions of people played Baldur’s Gate 3 and that’s like their experience with D&D. Being able to look at what happened in that and bring in elements of that to incorporate it and make it relevant to those folks. It’s a gardening exercise. What seeds are you watering and planting and which hedges are you trimming? That said, there’s always a place for deeper dives like what we talked about with the Netheril PDF, which is more of a time travel yarn where the Netheril is something that is a little bit more niche and more steeped in lore. so just because, for example, we have content covered in this book from popular settings like Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale doesn’t mean we aren’t going to find opportunities to go more deeply into the corners of the realms.
DA: It’s kind of a common joke that the Forgotten Realms got forgotten about. “Those are forgotten parts of the Forgotten Realms”. So it’s very cool seeing these deep dives into some places. How did you know how did you go about picking which ones you wanted to like?
GB: Baldur’s Gate and Icewood Dale we know those those are really well known, they’re really resonant and those are staples to put in so that something is is kind of resonant with people who oh I’ve only ever played the game (Baldur’s Gate). But then having things like the Moonshae Isles and Calimshan, those are places that provide a real thematic delta from the rest of that content. And while I definitely want to see a product coming out that focuses on, say, Cormyr, that area is still kind of similar to the Dale Lands in terms of its location and the types of adventures that you might tell. So that’s really kind of what informed it was making sure that there were like real thematic differences. Where you’ve got your Dale Lands, which is really like classic, grounded D&D adventures, exploring ruins, the wilderness of Icewind Dale. We know people love the Feywild and while we aren’t going there anytime soon, the Moonshae Isles provide a way to support that as well. Yeah. And, you know, was there any thought…
DA: Are there ways for existing Forgotten Realms adventures to fit within this new book? Like if you wanted to tie the previous Feywild work into the Moonshaes?
If you wanted to connect Wilds Beyond the Witchlight to the Moonshae Isles, thematically they’re connected, which is a good event. And I’m not going to rule out us going back to some of those adventures and finding ways to give them blowups and refreshes that bring them into the more recent settings and more recent books that we’re doing.
DA: The DM guide kind of shifted some of the approach of storytelling with quick adventures. Would that something that you’re wanting to further with these books and their micro-adventures? Is that a way that you’re changing how we approach the storytelling?
GB: The ready-play adventures are really an acknowledgement about the way that a lot of people play D&D these days. We’re trying to minimize prep and still provide a way for you to sit down and have a single session and feel like you get something done.
What got me excited is, and I mentioned it in the panel, seeing all of the one-page adventures for Calimshan, I’m like, oh, I don’t need a whole Calimshan product to be able to support setting the campaign I want to run there. I’ve got a couple adventures to get me started, and then I can start connecting the dots between those adventures and re-skinning other adventures to fit within that. So I think that the fact that there’s 50 of those, it’s quite a bit of opportunity for players to tie them together into campaigns.
DA: It does sound like you guys do have an eye towards sort of the very long term for the players, from early to late level. Is that something you guys are really wanting to make sure that everybody has a bit of for?
GB: We are looking at ways to support higher level play down the line with things like those epic boon feats Makenzie mentioned Even though we know that the majority of players are playing under level 10, we still want to make sure that knowing that there’s plenty of campaigns that have been going for years or decades.
Chris Hutton: One thing I was actually really curious about is just how saturated Baldur’s Gate content is. As Baldur’s Gate 3 content is in the new books.
GB: One of the advantages of video games is we know which characters are very popular, we know which settings are very popular. Baldur’s Gate itself gets somewhere between 30 and 40 pages in this book. You’ll see the characters appear in a bunch of the art. And then, of course, Astarion’s Book of Hunger. We have tens of millions of people who have played Baldur’s Gate and we want to make sure that we are creating an inviting environment for those people who join in the hobby. Some of this is making sure that if they pick up this book or they’re checking it out that they feel that there’s stuff there that they recognize and kind of holds them deeper in the hobby.
It’s a balance we want to strike, though. We want to make it welcoming for people who love that game but we also don’t want to push that agenda so hard that then we have folks who are coming in like, why is this all focused on Baldur’s Gate? So there’s also lot of stuff drawing on, for example, in Icewind Dale, that draws on The Rime of the Frostmaiden. There are nods to what was happening previously so that if play that, you do actually feel like this is a world that needs be enhanced. Every player owns part of their own Forgotten Realms experience and part of the challenge of us is how do we make a world that feels like it is your Forgotten Realms and we’re not marginalizing the decisions you try to make.
Images via Wizards of the Coast
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