RPG World of Warcraft,Gen Con 2026,Cosmere
Three stories are driving tabletop RPG conversation this week, and all three point the same direction: the industry is betting big on licensed crossovers while also opening up its rules engines to outside designers. Here’s what actually happened, what it means for players, and what’s landing on shelves before the end of the year.
D&D: World of Warcraft Goes Live November 17
Wizards of the Coast’s first Universes Beyond release for Dungeons & Dragons D&D: World of Warcraft, gets its wide release on November 17, 2026. D&D Beyond Master Tier subscribers already got early access starting November 3.
The expansion takes all 13 World of Warcraft classes and rebuilds them as nine new or reworked D&D subclasses, split across more than 40 specializations. Rather than trying to port WoW’s cooldown-based combat into a six-second D&D round (which doesn’t translate cleanly), the designers routed everything through the subclass system D&D already has. A Death Knight’s presence, a Demon Hunter’s mobility, and a Shaman’s totems all show up as table-ready features instead of timers.
On top of the new subclasses, the book adds 16 species, more than 60 spells, over 50 monsters, and seven Azeroth dungeons converted for tabletop play, plus a renown system covering more than 20 factions. A separate Icecrown Citadel Map Pack handles levels 16 through 20.
This isn’t a one-off. Wizards has already confirmed a D&D and Star Wars crossover for 2027, along with Dark Sun, the post-apocalyptic Athas setting returning for the first time since 1991, this time as D&D’s first mature-rated product line. Not everyone’s thrilled. Longtime players are raising the same worry Magic: The Gathering fans raised when Universes Beyond crossovers started there: that outside IP crowds out the game’s own identity. Given that the Magic crossovers have consistently been Hasbro’s top sellers, that argument is going to be a hard one to win on the business side.
Gen Con 2026 Reshapes Next Year’s Release Slate
Gen Con 2026 wrapped in Indianapolis with roughly 72,000 attendees and three announcements that are going to shape 2027 across the industry, not just at Wizards.
Paizo confirmed Invaders from the Dark, a Pathfinder adventure path arriving June 2027 that lets Starfinder content sit at a Pathfinder table without conversion work. That’s possible because Paizo built both games on the same three-action economy: every character gets three actions per turn, every activity costs one, two, or three of them, and a Starfinder monster’s stat block just works in a Pathfinder fight as written.
Brotherwise Games made the bigger structural move. Plotweaver, the d20-based engine behind the $14.7 million Cosmere RPG Kickstarter (the most-funded tabletop game ever crowdfunded), is going fully open license. The System Reference Document lands ahead of a Q2 2027 crowdfunding push, with an open alpha for an original setting called Erstwild starting in August. Keith Baker, the designer behind D&D’s Eberron setting, is already building a project on it.
Gen Con also wasn’t without drama. A tornado warning hit central Indianapolis on Saturday evening, and part of the convention’s Hall B ceiling had already given way under heavy rain, flooding part of the show floor for roughly 20 minutes before the warning even sounded. The convention resumed as scheduled the next day.
D&D Icons Brings Back the Original Architects
Alongside the Universes Beyond announcement, Wizards introduced D&D Icons, a creative initiative that puts actor Joe Manganiello in the role of Chief Creative Officer and brings several of the game’s founding names back into active development. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman are returning to Dragonlance. Luke Gygax is working from his father Gary’s previously unreleased notes to build new Greyhawk content for 2027. R.A. Salvatore is continuing the Drizzt Do’Urden story in the Forgotten Realms.
Wizards also handed off three settings to outside studios rather than developing them in-house: Ghostfire Gaming takes Ravenloft in 2027, Visionary Productions and Design takes Eberron in 2028, and Kobold Press gets a Forgotten Realms project also landing in 2028. It’s a notable shift for a company that’s generally kept its core settings close.
Paizo used its own Gen Con keynote to add a few more 2027 releases to the pile. Lost Omens: Sagalands, arriving spring 2027, is a deep-dive sourcebook covering the regions where Pathfinder’s world originally began, including Varisia and the Lands of the Linnorm Kings. Tome of Dungeons, planned for Gen Con 2027, introduces two new classes (the Daredevil and the Slayer) and some genuinely odd new ancestries, including a playable Awakened Ooze.
Cosmere RPG Adds Mistborn on November 4
Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere RPG, published by Brotherwise Games, expanded into Mistborn territory on November 4 with three new hardcover books: the Mistborn Handbook, the Mistborn World Guide, and the Mistborn Legacy adventure. Both Mistborn Era 1 and Era 2 are supported, so a group can run a campaign set during the original trilogy or the sequel era.
Character options are split into six Heroic Paths (Agent, Envoy, Hunter, Leader, Scholar, Warrior) and five Metalborn Paths (Misting, Mistborn, Feruchemist, Ferring, Twinborn), covering the Allomancy and Feruchemy systems the books are built around. The Demiplane digital version adds a searchable rules builder alongside the character sheet tools. Physical and digital copies are available now through local game stores, Demiplane, and Roll20.
Discord’s Discoverability Change Is a Real Risk for TTRPG Communities
Here’s one that isn’t about a new rulebook. Discord rolled out web discoverability for public, non-adult servers with at least 1,000 members, meaning conversation history in some of the biggest TTRPG communities can now be indexed by search engines, and by extension, picked up by the same crawlers that feed AI training data.
The opt-out only covers future messages. Anything posted while discoverability was active stays visible and searchable unless someone goes back and deletes it message by message. There’s no bulk removal tool. For a server like the official D&D Discord, which sits around 325,000 members, that’s years of homebrew rules, playtest feedback, and story content now sitting in a historical gray zone.
If you’re active in a large TTRPG server, the toggle is in User Settings, then Data & Privacy, under “Show my message content from Discoverable channels on web pages.” Turning it off stops new messages from showing up on the web. It won’t touch anything already posted.
Crowdfunding Watch: 13 Omens and More
Paizo stepped outside fantasy entirely with 13 Omens, a rules-lite modern supernatural horror RPG designed by Jason Bulmahn and Joe Pasini. Its Kickstarter runs through November 13, and it’s a notable swing for a publisher best known for Pathfinder’s crunchier fantasy rules.
Smaller publishers are active too. Antiquarian Games launched a Kickstarter for L.O.R.E., a tactical tabletop RPG built around squad-level combat and terrain-heavy encounters, aimed at players who want more battlefield complexity than a typical fantasy adventure delivers. Crowdfunding activity across the space has stayed heavy heading into the holiday buying season, with campaigns spanning horror, tactical combat, and licensed properties all competing for backer attention at the same time.
Darrington Press, Critical Role’s publishing arm, also used Gen Con to lock in an aggressive production schedule for Daggerheart: two major rulebooks a year through 2030, on top of a steady stream of one-shots and digital releases. The first of those, Daggerheart: Hope & Fear, sold out its projected one-year print supply in about two weeks after its August release. An adventure anthology from former D&D lead designer Chris Perkins and a new official setting book are both already in the pipeline.
What to Watch Next
The pattern across all of this is consistent. Big publishers are leaning on recognizable IP to pull in new players (World of Warcraft, Star Wars, eventually whatever comes after Dark Sun), while the same publishers are simultaneously opening up their core rules so independent designers can build on top of them. Those two strategies sound like they’d pull in opposite directions. They don’t. One grows the audience at the front door. The other keeps the people already at the table building new things with it.
Expect November 17 (D&D: World of Warcraft’s wide release) and November 13 (the 13 Omens Kickstarter close) to be the two dates worth watching most closely over the next two weeks.
