The last six months have been an absolute madhouse. We’ve seen SO MUCH new content roll though our collective awareness:

We’ve worked on massive programmatic updates, reworked those updates, reworked those reworked updates, collecting and discussing feedback for both Dungeons & Dragons at-large and the D&D Adventurers League (not quite to the level of creating Venn diagrams, but oh man have I been tempted), and more. We’ve seen piles of content come through from our authors and the CCC (Community Created Content) folks, and we’ve seen new and awesome events take place all over the world.

And you know what?

These tasks could not have been done – nay, even attempted – if we didn’t have the right people in our teams. We’ve been extremely fortunate to have access to James J. Haeck, James Introcaso, Adam Lee, and Matt Sernett for Waterdeep Dragon Heist, and now that we’ve seen Dungeon of the Mad Mage go to the printer I can safely show this list of people from that adventure:

From a designer and program administrator standpoint, Chris Perkins has been awesome to work with. These other yahoos were a hoot, too, and although I didn’t spend much time working directly with Kiel or Ben I did find that my limited interactions were always fruitful. Seeing this credits listing reminds me that it’s not just the dreams that get us places, but it’s the teamwork that takes us there. Granted, our work on Dungeon of the Mad Mage wrapped up almost a year ago but still, it’s well worth mentioning here!

So what’s on the horizon? Honestly, we want to continue to drive the support experience forward.

With the meat of the release schedule behind us we’re gonna be taking some hard looks at what’s happening behind the screen for everyone reading this and playing the game. We want to be the support the team that our Dungeon Masters want and need, and better empower them to run solid, awesome, story-first games. We’ve taken strides there and still have a ways to go, and to be really clear on this: no, we weren’t satisfied with the timing of the documentation rollouts either.

The concepts of “assistant DM”, “organizer”, and other such terms are all things that we’d like to look at. Better ways to deliver DM Quests, adventure aids (like those magic item handouts at the back of the DDAL08 series), and more – anything we can do to smooth out the mechanical experience so that the DM can focus on delivering the narrative experience… these are all on our horizon.

And with that said, what the heck, let’s drop our next task here:

Renown isn’t just for faction members any more. Every character gains renown, even those that aren’t in factions – consider it a measure of fame (or for some, infamy) across the Realms and Eberron. Please read the doc, but here are some highlights:

Leaving a faction resets your renown to 0. Joining a faction does not.

Any reward you select is per adventure, and is removed at the end of that adventure or if you leave that adventure. For example, if you start a hardcover chapter and select Inspiration as your reward, if you and your group leave that chapter to play a DDAL adventure and then return, the Inspiration does not travel with you.

All references to “bonus renown” are ignored. The gaining of renown for Adventurers League play is detailed in the ALDMG (the DM is to award one renown for every four advancement checkpoints a character earns).

We’ll be adding this to the core documentation in the coming days, likely after Gamehole Con.

Finally, an upcoming task that I want to clue you all in to… supplemental information. We have a lot of previous content: 7 seasons of pdf adventures, all with hardcovers, the “season 0” content, and more. The players and DMs across the world have been pretty open about how much they like the card inserts that we’ve been adding to the new season 8 adventures, so I’ll be moving forward with creating these same cards and informational handouts for all of our official previous content. We have a few hurdles to clear with the release plan still, but they’ll be on dmsguild for sure. To be frank, it will probably be December 1 before I can release the full swath of these addons.

Tasks are always going to be with us. We just need to make sure that we have the right people in the right places, yeah?