D&D Annual 2021

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I saw the D&D Annual for sale on Amazon. I guess something a bit more like Pelgrane or Goodman’s collections of the year’s publications and articles.

Instead this is a bit of a jumble of material resulting something between a Christmas annual aimed at children with puzzles and games, summaries of published materials and the different D&D worlds, listings of podcasts and game shops and most strangely, introductory material for D&D. The reason I find this last bit a bit odd is that 5e already has a starter box and as a Christmas present it would be a bit of gutter to have this and not that if you were D&D curious.

On the other hand the explanations of things like the Forgotten Realms and its convoluted lore and the list of podcast/streaming groups and their material seems sensible intermediate material but then I’m not sure where the puzzles fit in because surely you’d prefer to have more crunch or even pretty artwork here.

It’s an interesting piece of evidence of how mainstream D&D is in 2020 and how the semi-pro world of content creators orbits the main corporate world of the core games and licensed spin-offs.

I’d definitely be interested in some kind of annual collection of the best bits of D&D culture but this isn’t it.