Future D&D Books Will Be Outsourced to Third-Party Publishers
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Recently, Wizards of the Coast quietly listed a job post on LinkedIn that may herald a surprising new approach for how the company publishes official Dungeons & Dragons products. The role is listed as TRPG Publishing Lead – D&D and chief responsibilities include to “Serve as the creative lead for externally developed D&D content, including adventures, campaign materials, guides, and artwork.”
In other words, this person would be responsible for overseeing the development of new official D&D material that isn’t actually being created by Wizards of the Coast. If this is the case, it represents a massive strategic shift for new D&D content, which over the past ten years has largely been developed internally by a design team at WotC.
Below, we take a closer look at what this could mean for fans and the future of Dungeons & Dragons.
Why is D&D moving to a third-party publishing model?
It’s not entirely clear why this change in publishing is taking place, but there are likely a few good reasons:
Team restructuring
In the past few years, the internal D&D team has undergone some dramatic changes, including the high-profile departure of Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford. And while there have been some new recent hires and promotions of internal staff like Justice Arman, for the most part the team is running fairly lean.
Franchise Model
Last year, Wizards of the Coast promoted VP Dan Ayoub, ushering in a new franchise model that would see Dungeons & Dragons managed as a complete brand, rather than segmented between the game itself and licensing through video games, novels, film and television. This new holistic model likely also makes the concept of working with third-party publishers much more attractive.
More Third-Party Collaborations
After purchasing D&D Beyond in 2022 for a whopping $149 million USD, Wizards of the Coast carefully guarded its new acquisition, featuring only official D&D products and ignoring the slew of popular third-party D&D 5E products. That’s changed in recent years, however, with WotC now actively featuring third-party products on the D&D Beyond marketplace. These types of relationships naturally open the door to using outside designers for future D&D products.
Precedence
The idea of outsourcing official D&D products to third-party publishers isn’t actually a new one. In fact, in the early days of D&D 5E, WotC actively relied on third-party publishers to create their content. Hoard of the Dragon Queen for example, was released in 2014 as the very first supplement for D&D 5E. It was, however, was actually designed by Kobold Press. This is also the case with Princes of the Apocalypse in 2015 (which was designed by Sasquatch Game Studio) and Out of the Abyss and the Sword Coast Adventure’s Guide (both of which were released in 2015 and designed by Green Ronin).
This practice of outsourcing was abandoned in 2016 (with subsequent D&D campaigns and sourcebooks being developed in-house), but WotC has undoubtedly learned some lessons from the process.
Final Thoughts
Wizards of the Coast has had an on-again-off-again relationship with D&D third-party publishers. From actively working with them in the early days of D&D 5E, to alienating many of them during the OGL controversy, to more recently welcoming them onto D&D Beyond. Now, it seems a new chapter is about to begin in this complicated history.
Of course, there are still many unanswered questions and it’s not yet clear when this new strategy will be implemented and what books will remain in-house and what will be outsourced. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story in the days ahead and will update this page with new information as it’s made available. In the meantime, you can learn more about the new D&D Publishing Lead role on LinkedIn.
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Jason Volk is the Publisher of Dungeons & Dragons Fanatics and lives in the wilds of Western Canada. He has been playing D&D for over 25 years and is a huge fan of Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms. His favorite character of all time was a Necromancer named Neek who spent most of his adventuring career resurrecting the corpses of slain monsters. When he’s not playing TTRPGs, Jason enjoys video games, Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer 40K, watching football and spending time with his wife and adorably nerdy children.
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