D&D Rolls a Natural 20 on Nerd Collabs, Announcing World of Warcraft and Star Wars Sets

Today, I can play a game of Dungeons & Dragons around the table with my friends where humans, elves and orcs battle in campaigns of fantasy adventure. But the best-known tabletop roleplaying game in the world is moving beyond its own universe. Soon, dice-rollers all over will be able to play pen-and-paper versions of World of Warcraft and Star Wars with official D&D rules.

On the opening night of GenCon, the massive annual tabletop gaming convention in Indianapolis, D&D creator Wizards of the Coast announced the news during its keynote at the grand Indiana Repertory Theater. These two partnerships are the first in the new Universes Beyond line and, just like the identically named series from Magic: The Gathering, will fold creative universes from other companies into D&D. 

By the end of the year, players can buy the core World of Warcraft rulebook and make their own adventures with features from the popular massively multiplayer online RPG that fit in the D&D system. They’ll be able to build their own characters from species and classes who can meet (and fight) iconic heroes and villains from the online game, each built out in D&D rules to be compatible with adventures in its own or any other setting that uses D&D’s D20 system. The D&D team unveiled a series of books and products that can be preordered now and will debut on store shelves in the fourth quarter of 2026.

“One of the lovely things about D&D is it comes alive with your imagination, and to be able to take some of the world of Azeroth and World of Warcraft and allow players to create their adventures based on a world they’ve loved and known — or maybe they’re just getting introduced to through D&D — that was the focus,” said Holly Longdale, executive producer and vice president of World of Warcraft.

Blizzard’s game is the first crossover foray, and sometime next year, players will be able to run D&D games in the Star Wars universe, too — but Wizards has been far more tight-lipped about what’s coming from a galaxy far, far away. They want to let the Warcraft expansion have its time in the sun as the first release of Universes Beyond, with plans to reveal more about the Star Wars expansion in the months to come.

“The [D&D] team is very excited for all the opportunities that Star Wars has to offer, and we’re really hoping to bring a lot of joy to the fans with the things we’re going to be offering,” said D&D product architect Laura Hohman. 

After 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons, this is a new chapter

The launch of Universes Beyond is just one part of a new direction for D&D, which is looking to the past as well as the future. Dan Ayoub, senior vice president and head of the D&D franchise, opened the keynote with a promise to increase transparency for upcoming projects and releases, including annual roadmaps unveiled at every GenCon. 

Also announced on stage are upcoming collaborations with legends from D&D’s past as part of the franchise’s Icons series. Luke Gygax will assist with new content from Greyhawk (one of D&D’s first settings that was created by his father, Gary Gygax), Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis will come back for Dragonlance and R.A. Salvatore will return for Legends of Drizzt, after the drow ranger from Forgotten Realms.

After 50 years of D&D, comes another first: the return of Dark Sun, a post-magical-apocalypse setting originally released in the early 1990s, now resurrected as the tabletop game’s first mature release. Grim wonder abounds in D&D’s trial run on making a more adult setting full of blood, violence and survival that the presenter on stage claimed is so explicit, they have to shrink-wrap the source book and slap a warning label on it.

A new chapter means new tech, and D&D showed off a couple of updates coming for the company’s online resources. D&D Beyond, the online character-builder and resource portal, will soon get a tool called Look For Group that will work like a Yelp list for games being run by hobby shops and other providers. The D&D Beyond mobile app is also getting an overhaul in the near future, with a revamped interface that lets players run real-life games on their phones, from rolling dice to using skills to casting spells.

With an appearance by the cast of D&D’s official Let’s Play show Dungeon Masters, whose next season will run the World of Warcraft game, the keynote had something for seemingly every player, new or old. It ended with the lights out and the heavy breathing of a certain Sith Lord before a Darth Vader cosplayer showed up on stage, but there was little else shown about the Star Wars set coming next year. But we can look to the World of Warcraft release for clues — I chatted with Blizzard and D&D folks about their collaboration coming later in 2026.

What you’ll get in the World of Warcraft’s D&D set

The World of Warcraft set will have a 256-page sourcebook to introduce the new set, which works with D&D’s 2024 version of 5th edition, also known as D&D 5.5E.

The sourcebook packs a ton of material from the game, detailing 16 species, 11 of which are new to D&D (like the Dracthyr, Earthen and Pandaren). It has nine subclasses, six of which are brand-new (like Demon Hunters and Shadow Priests). Iconic locations like Orgrimmar and Icecrown Citadel are included, as well as stat blocks for famous characters like Arthas Menethil, Jaina Proudmoore, Anduin Lothar, Thrall and Sylvanas Windrunner should you want to befriend (or fight) them. Signature Warcraft items, mounts, bosses — they’re all in the book.

If some of this sounds familiar, you might be as old as I am — two decades ago, there was an official Warcraft crossover book for D&D’s 3.5 edition. When I brought this up to Wizards of the Coast’s folks who worked on the upcoming collaboration, they pointed out that the far older crossover spent a lot of its sourcebook establishing baseline tabletop rules. 

The new Universes Beyond version leaves a lot of that out, relying on the streamlined rules of D&D 5.5 and enjoying the greater popularity of D&D to assume that players will know the basics — leaving more room for monsters, artifacts, areas and other iconic parts of World of Warcraft.

Once the set becomes available for purchase, newcomers can log on to D&D Beyond for a free starting adventure for heroes just starting out from levels one to five. For more advanced players, the set will include a new adventure to Icecrown Citadel for characters of level 16-20. Within, they’ll take on various champions of the undead realm at the northernmost point in Azeroth before confronting the big boss himself, the Lich King. 

Players of the MMORPG may remember taking on the dreaded death knight with two dozen others in massive raids, but the challenges have been scaled down to be undertaken by standard D&D parties of three to five dice-rolling players who fit around a table. Not that the team didn’t think about it — when Hohman brought up the possibility of a 20-person encounter, she was immediately rebuffed.

“If you can get 20 people to align at a D&D table the same night and bring snacks, I think you should run Dungeons & Dragons World of Warcraft with them,” joked Justice Arman, D&D game design director. “If you can get 20, more power to you. If you can get five, we’ve got you covered.”

The team was very thoughtful about how to adapt an MMORPG into a tabletop system, Arman explained: They wanted to be authentic to both, which means not trying to reproduce the mechanics of a digital game, which makes so many decisions for the player that, in a tabletop game, would be managed by its real-time manager, the dungeon master. 

In addition to the main sourcebook, the World of Warcraft set will also include miniatures, a map pack and a dungeon master’s screen with extensive art featuring heroes and villains from the game’s two-decade-plus history. And all you D&D collectors, rest easy: there will be special editions of the set sourcebook that come with a slipcover adorned with the Horde and Alliance faction icons, as well as one covered in Murlocs that’s exclusive to hobby stores.

The overlap between Warcraft and D&D is… a circle?

The Universes Beyond sets are aimed at drawing in new and returning players to D&D using the appeal of the borrowed franchise. With World of Warcraft, there’s a lot of overlap between the fantasy themes, adventurous quests and epic boss showdowns. 

The partnership is coming full circle, said Blizzard’s Longdale, affirming that the company’s online game is one of many RPGs that D&D has spawned. Adapting the MMORPG to pen-and-paper made sense and offers a lot for players who met online to bring their digital game to real-life tables. Moreover, a lot of Blizzard developers on the game have played D&D for years — many of whom discovered just this week that their favorite tabletop system was getting a version based on the very game they work on, Longdale said, indicating the severe secrecy of the collaboration… which had started two years ago.

“I don’t know how many people on our team raised their hand and said, ‘Well, I’ve been a DM, I could have helped,’” Longdale said, laughing.

The same is true for Wizards of the Coast, as the D&D team itself has plenty of World of Warcraft players, said Ayoub. It meant two teams passionate about both games that led to an excitement and a desire that’ll bear out in the quality of the final product.

“Authenticity was really key. A lot of the ways you look at it is, how does the [D&D] system become an operating system, if you will, to bring this world to life?” Ayoub said. “You turn brilliant designers from two teams together to just make it happen.”

Authenticity kept coming up in my chats with both Blizzard and D&D folks involved in bringing the World of Warcraft and Star Wars collaborations to the tabletop game. There’s surely pressure to make a proper adaptation that does justice to the source material, but there’s a lot of potential for these popular works to bring in players who hadn’t tried tabletop gaming before, easing the burden of tabletop complexity with a universe they already love. 

“They have a shared understanding and a shared language,” Hohman said. “As soon as you say, ‘Hey, we’re going to play Star Wars,’ a lot of people understand what that means immediately. They understand the worlds. They understand the sort of characters and stories they might be investing their time into.”

D&D isn’t detailing what’s next for Universes Beyond. The team will see how this year’s worth of content lands, Hohman said, and future partnership announcements will hinge on the timing that works for D&D and its partners — taking it one step at a time. But right now, the team’s ears are open.

“If fans have things they would love to see, worlds they’d love to play in, however close or however far it feels from traditional Dungeons & Dragons, I would definitely love to know that,” Hohman said. “I’m excited to hear what people would be excited about.”