Dungeons and Dragons and Warcraft

 

I admit I was not expecting to see this. Similar things have existed before but it's been awhile ...

The first edition from 2003

The second edition from 2005

It's an interesting concept. Notice the title on the first edition and the lack of "World of" - this was from 2003 and so pre-dates the whole WoW tidal wave of 2004. We had already had 3 games + expansions and there was clearly a lot of lore in and behind these games, then WoW came along and blew things wide open, and that plus the 3.5 D&D update got us to a second edition and a new title for the game. The wiki has much more information on it so I won't bog down here.

If you were there you might remember that this was not the first MMORPG to make the jump to tabletop:

circa 2002

And yes they did an update for it titled Everquest II which had launched in 2004 as well. There were multiple books here and it's probably pretty interesting if you're heavily into EQ lore. There is a wiki for this as well.

I don't own any books for Warcraft (or Everquest). I wasn't into either game when they came out (though I had played a lot of Warcraft and WarCraft II in prior years) and I was busy running and playing third edition Realms, Greyhawk, Kalamar, Scarred Lands, and homebrew stuff so I did not feel like I needed another setting. If someone else had wanted to run it I'm sure I would have given it a whirl but it never came up. 

Since those days I have had some pretty lengthy runs in WoW (and in EQ2 for that matter). As popular as the game got I am a little surprised it took another 20 years to get a tabletop RPG version of it. Even if they hadn't piggybacked on D&D and made their own version or licensed it to some other system - honestly some version of Pathfinder seems like a great candidate for that - I thought years ago that there was enough of a potential player base in the dedicated WoW fandom that it could be viable. Now in 2026 or 2027 here it comes. 

Being a leaked book it's hard to tell what it's going to encompass just yet but I'll speculate a bit. 

• Azeroth has a ridiculous amount of lore built up at this point including various world-ending threats which honestly makes it a pretty good fit for the over the top power levels of modern D&D at even low-medium levels. I don't think we have a system-fit/setting-fit problem here.
• I think there is enough information and enough space in the setting that you could publish a series of books, say one on each of the major continents of the world, and really crank out some great setting detail. A lot of your D&D players would love it, and a lot of WoW fans would love to have a nice big full-color hardback detailing places in the game after 20 years of build-up. 
• There are enough WoW/MMO system quirks you could also put out a supplement of some kind talking through some common MMO concepts for PC's as well as discussing how to do Boss Fights in a tabletop game the way WoW does them. Then you could close it out with a big section of well-known classic WoW bosses and examples of how they would work on the tabletop using those mechanics described earlier. 
• Rather than the geographical approach you could take a timeline approach and after getting a basic Azeroth book out there you could publish a book on say, the Legion Invasion: Timing, impacts on the world, new monsters, and then something like a plot point campaign (from Savage Worlds) to let players deal with the invasion, push back, and then finally defeat it. This would also let you work in some regional details as each expansion like this tends to focus on a specific area of the world. This would be more like the approach MWP was taking with Marvel Heroic doing things like the Civil War and Annihilation events, which I still think would have been a great plan. 

Anyway - there's a lot of what they might or could do. What do I think they will actually do? Probably not much of any of those. Every other campaign setting for D&D during the 5.0 & 5.5 lifespan has gotten 1 or 2 books, period. I don't know that WOTC wants to open up to a multi-book ongoing product line for a licensed setting, even for WoW. A smaller company might see this as a good base to build an entire game line around. I think WOTC will see it as a nice one-time add-on and then get back to the main focus and the next one-off supplement. I don't like it but that seems to be how they operate these days. I'd love to see them do more but I don't think it will get that level of attention or effort. I suspect that it will be one or two books, maybe a slipcase deal like Planescape or Spelljammer, and it will mainly focus on tweaking D&D classes and PC abilities to WoW, mainly through subclasses, plus some lore, plus some monsters. It won't be bad, it will just be way less than what a lot of people would like. That said I would be happy to be completely wrong here.  

So how interested would I be? 

Would I play it? Sure. If one of my crew said they wanted to start up a new D&D WoW campaign I'd be up for that.

Would I run it? Well, I'm not sure I'm the right guy for that, but if my crew all thought it sounded cool and asked me to, well, yes. If you can get most of your players to ask you to run a game that you are even moderately interested in then you have to grab that opportunity.

So I'll be watching this one with some interest. Hopefully it's a solid effort and makes some people happy and adds some interesting things to the game.