When Wizards of the Coast first announced that D&D Universes Beyond will start with World Of Warcraft, I didn’t have an interest in it, personally. As someone who has never played World of Warcraft and wasn’t thrilled with the idea of pulling in IPs into D&D, this would have been the first book since 5.5 released that I was going to skip out on. Their only saving grace for me at the time – they were going to include updated Barbarian subclasses in the book (my eternal weakness).

With that said, I did read through Dungeons & Dragons: World Of Warcraft. A seven chapter, 256 page book with player options and dungeon master tools for running a game inside Azeroth, the setting of the popular MMORPG. As someone who has no knowledge of the lore or the mechanics of this game, I read through this from the lens of “Is this something I can use in my D&D game as a player or dungeon master?” Most of the games I run or play are in the traditional D&D settings such as Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or a Domain of Dread, so if this book wasn’t going to provide something of value for those settings, this probably wouldn’t be the book for me.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s in each chapter as well as my thoughts on them.

DISCLAIMER: Wizards of the Coast sent me a copy of Dungeons & Dragons: World Of Warcraft. Other than receiving the book for free, I was not compensated for my review, nor was I expected to give a review of the book for receiving it.

Video Review With GameMasters

I was fortunate enough to do a collaboration video review of the book with Brian from GameMasters. GameMasters is a Dungeons & Dragons focused YouTube channel covering D&D rules, Forgotten Realms lore, homebrew adventures, tabletop RPG strategy, and deep dive analysis. He’s also a long time World Of Warcraft player, which makes his insight very valuable for this book from that perspective.

You can watch the video below.

Character Classes

As in usual form for D&D books from Wizards Of The Coast, the first two chapters of this source book is dedicated to player options. Chapter 1, “Character Classes”, gives us 13 “classes”. I put this in parentheses because they’re not new classes but rather guides on how to make a World of Warcraft (WoW) class in Dungeons & Dragons using the options available in the Player’s Handbook as well as this one. The caveat is that each of these classes also have “specializations”, which prescribes what options you choose to build your WoW class at a very granular level (such as what weapons and feats you should choose). For example, a Death Knight is a Paladin with the Oath of the Ebon Blade subclass and Evokers Sorcerers with the Draconic subclass with a few changes. Although these are built for WoW setting, you could follow this prescription and play this class in other settings if your Dungeon Master allows for it.

The way these classes are written is that if you want to play this specific class in the book, it’s an all or nothing approach. For example, Shamans uses the Barbarian class and replaces its level 3 Primal Knowledge Feature with Totems. Shamans also has three specializations that relies on using either the Elements, World Tree, or Spiritual Guardians subclass. However, I wouldn’t be able to play a Barbarian Berserker and take the Totem feature in place of Primal Knowledge since that is only reserved for Shamans. (I can, however, play a Barbarian Path of the Elements or Path of Spiritual Guardians since those are specifically listed as Barbarian subclasses).

This chapter is also where you will find Feats and Spells, whereas in previous books they would be in a different chapter for either Character Origins or its own chapter for spells. What’s interesting with the spells and feats that are in here is that some of them will say they are “intended for this class” (meaning the WoW class listed, such as Evoker or Mage), but when you read the feat or spell, many of them do not list that class as a requirement (some do, however; For example, some spells are strictly for the Ebon Blade subclass or Demon Hunter class). So “intended” is more like “suggested” in that regard.

There is also a bit of a language departure in this chapter as well. Usually when you read feature or spell descriptions, it’ll use specific words such as “each creature” or “target”. However, I noticed that some of the descriptions may say words like “enemy”. Is it a big deal? Does it function differently? Not really, or at least not one I can think of. Just an interesting observation I’m making and have no idea if this was intentional or just a random oversight.

Honestly, there wasn’t a lot I didn’t like about this chapter. In fact, I think the specializations are a great way to give someone prescriptive guidance on how to build a character for a specific flavor or experience, so having guides like that could really be useful. As a Barbarian main, I absolutely love the updated subclasses for Spiritual Guardians (formerly Ancestral Guardians) and Elements (formerly Storm Herald). I’ve been looking to playing the updated Spiritual Guardians subclass as someone who enjoys playing a more protective tank in their fantasy games. And I never had any interest in playing a Paladin, but the Oath of the Ebon Blade, essentially a necrotic version of Paladin, has made me want to take a look at playing that now. As a Dungeon Master, I can see this being a suitable substitute for a 5.5 Oathbreaker as a tool I can use.

Overall, I don’t think I’d allow the WoW classes, feats, or spells to be used in one of my non-WoW D&D campaigns. However, I would definitely let my players use the new subclasses, and as a Dungeon Master I can see using the spells as a reward for a spell scroll or supernatural blessing that makes it truly unique instead of an extra use of an existing spell.

Character Origins

Traditionally with 5.5E sourcebooks, the Character Origins chapters have included new Backgrounds, Species, and Feats. This book is a departure from that for a number of reasons. First, there are no new Backgrounds. The book suggests picking a Background from the Player’s Handbook. This honestly surprised me until someone explained that in the World of Warcraft, Backgrounds aren’t really a component of making a character in the game, so it does make sense why they don’t offer new Backgrounds. With that said, however, I still encourage players and dungeon masters to use the best background option in the game – Custom Backgrounds (pg. 55 in your Dungeon Master’s Guide). Although backgrounds aren’t a critical piece, Tool Proficiency is (which we will talk about more in the next chapter), so to make sure you have the Tool Proficiency you want without feeling like you’re locked into a certain Background with stats and origin feats you don’t want, Custom Background is the way to go.

So what’s in this chapter? Species with the World of Warcraft lore. It’s a great chapter if you want to know the history of Azeroth, the species you can find in that world, and what their history is within it. There are brand new species with some really cool features, such as Pandaren (a humanoid Panda) who can avoid provoking opportunity attacks after hitting them with an Unarmed Strike, and Trolls who get Advantage on attacks when they become Bloodied and can regain maximum Hit Points when expending Hit Dice for healing after a Short Rest (ideal for Barbarians and Rogues). We do get the Goblin species for the first time in 5.5E, which remains relatively unchanged, and other species that already exist in the world of D&D for the most part are just given the lore in this chapter and refers players to picking the species of the same name in the Player’s Handbook.

Although there are interesting options here, this is by and large probably only beneficial for people who are WoW players or those who will play in Azeroth. These may be options you could use in your D&D game but you could also exclude these options and still have a great game experience (and again, Goblins you can still use the version we have in Monsters Of The Multiverse and it still generally works the same way with the only change in ancestry being Fey instead of Humanoid).

Professions And Gear

Chapter 3 covers a role that WoW players are familiar with – Professions. In Azeroth, characters has a Profession that allows them to be able to create both mundane and magic items. What you can craft depends on a few factors, such as your Tool Proficiency (which is consistent with the rules in the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide), your Proficiency Bonus (determines the rarity of magic items you can create), and the raw materials you own. A major departure in the world of Azeroth from the game of Dungeons & Dragons is that you do not need proficiency in the Arcana skill or the spell prepared in order to craft these magic items. Oh, and apparently everyone can also fish and if you roll a natural 20 on a Survival check, you could pull out a fun loot item (that should excite some Fortnite players out there).

What I think is probably most valuable about Professions is that it gives us a more formalized to do material gathering for crafting that we haven’t received before (currently, everything is based on the priced value of the materials). This chapter contains a very generalized way on how a character can gather materials to craft magic items, which is a table that lists Region Levels, Gathering/Foraging DC, and Resource value for a Common and Rare material (you can gain a Rare material if you beat the Gathering DC by a certain value). This section also provides some general guidance on how you can make crafting even more complexed by having players find/earn recipes that they need to follow in order to create these items (similar to creating potions in Baldur’s Gate 3). My main criticism for this though is that they don’t provide any recipes for you to use other than “you can find them online at WoW wikis”. I think I would have preferred having at least a roll table of some sort, but I also understand that may be hard to generalize as well. (Dungeon Masters – you can ask your players if they want to come up with the recipe themselves!)

This section also helped me understand better why scribing a spell scroll takes time and money as well. Previously I always wondered why it took so much time and money/resources to “write a spell on a scroll”. But this chapter actually explains it pretty well that you have to find special ingredients to create the ink and that takes time to create the correct mixture for ink to channel arcane magic to transfer to the scroll itself. I can’t believe I never thought about this before!

Now to the Gears section of the chapter. This includes some new mounts, such as motorcycles and helicopter-type vehicles (apparently goblins in WoW really love to tinker with machinery). They also have rules on how you can gain an Animal Companion that has a Loyalty rating with you. And once you get a rating of 10 or higher with that Companion, they can give you a Supernatural gift, too.

Lastly – Magic Items. We all love cool magic items and this book is no exception. There are Legendary/Artifact magic items that are known in World of Warcraft that are listed here, such as Ashbringer, Frostmourne, Shalamayne, and Sulfuras. There are some really neat ones like Potion of Mana that allows you to restore one spell slot after drinking it (level of spell slot depends on its rarity) and Potion of Rejuvenation which is a kind of combination between Potion of Mana and Potion of Healing, and my absolute favorite is the Doomhammer, a Mjolnir-like weapon that can only be attuned by Barbarians (FINALLY!)

The weirdest magic item though? Crown of the Ogre King, a cursed Very Rare item that requires attunement. What does it do? It allows you as a Magic action to belch very loudly (can be heard 300 feet away), forcing every creature in a 20 foot cone to make a Strength Saving Throw or be pushed back 20 feet and go Prone. Weird why it’s Very Rare with attunement. Even weirder that this item is not how it works in WoW (but apparently the way it works in WoW is that it increases your chance of making a Critical Hit by 1%. So… I guess this makes sense?)

Factions And Renown & The World Of Warcraft

These next two chapters, “Factions And Renown” and “The World Of Warcraft” is more interesting to those who enjoy the setting of WoW or enjoy world building details in general. Although this was probably the least useful and interesting chapters for me personally, there is still some value in it.

First of all, the Factions And Renown chapter introduces us to the Factions that one could be associated with in Azeroth. This is also the first time in 5.5 that we get this idea of subfactions (factions inside of factions). Although in D&D you can always interact with unlimited factions and gain renown, this is the first time we see how your experience with one faction can actually improve your renown with another faction. Personally, I do use renown but I adjust it to be based on number of quests/favors a party does for that faction rather than an arbitrary score. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see how these relationships can actually improve your relationship with other factions as well.

Renown here also impact the kinds of Bastion experiences you can have as well as what kind of training you can get access to. Another departure in WoW from D&D lore is that not everyone knows Common. So you may need to get training to learn Common and/or Common Sign Language.

Lastly, I think this is the first time I’ve seen mentioned where if your Renown score goes lower than 0 with a faction (yes, apparently that is a thing), then that means that faction is Hostile towards you. So I could theoretically use the Factions Relationship tables in my Forgotten Realms book and use that as a factor to determine if a faction would be Hostile towards the party or not. So again, this was probably the least interesting, but not useless, chapter for me.

Adventures in Azeroth

This Dungeon Master focused chapter introduces a lot of things I really enjoy about the book. First of all, it does explicitly state that you are encouraged to use any timeline or create your own for this world. Something that I think should always be stated in a sourcebook that’s based on an official setting. There’s also a section “Adapting Azeroth” at the very beginning of the chapter, which actually contains a lot of great advice for both new and long-time Dungeon Masters, like don’t be a jerk (my words). Having a universal, consistent message about these things helps ensure that the expectations at the table start at a common place.

The chapter goes into six different conflicts in Azeroth, from the classic conflict between the Alliance and the Horde to conflicts with The Scourge and Dragonflights. But the most exciting part of this chapter are the six dungeons and the enemies within.

These dungeons are based off of actual iconic dungeons found in the game of World of Warcraft: Azjol-Nerub, Blackfathom Deeps, Deadmines, Dire Maul, Onyxia’s Lair, Scarlet Monastery, and Shadowfang Deep. Each dungeon consisted of the lore behind the dungeon, a map, major areas in the dungeon and what can be encountered/experienced there (some with event triggers baked into it and how to determine safe resting), roll tables for adventure hooks, encounters, and treasure tables, and stat blocks of the major enemies in there.

At first glance, I didn’t like this structure. I thought it was really thin for a Dungeon location. But the more I read through it, the more I realized I had a lot of tools at my disposal that I could easily pull this into another setting without needing to pull apart the lore and story/adventures to make it work. I have the freedom to add in the details I want and to reskin the dungeon and monster to fit my campaign as a dungeon master, and that was an exciting idea. Moving forward, I really hope Wizards of the Coast start to use this format for future adventures because I think this has a lot more versatility than what we have had up to this point (and I love the adventure outlines we’ve had so far in previous books like Forgotten Realms: Adventures In Faerun and Ravenloft: The Horrors Within).

And let me tell you – the monsters in this chapter are so frighteningly exciting. I could probably do a whole post about these monsters alone – that’s how great they are! But instead, I’ll give you a snippet of a few that I really love:

• Krik’Thir The Gatewatcher can sacrifice an Undead ally to regain Hit Points (which grants it resistance to all damage until the start of its next turn) and can curse characters if they fail a saving throw, which means that the characters can only take an Action or Bonus Action (not both) on their turn and can’t take Reactions. This lasts until Krik’Thir dies.
• Aku’mai is a three-headed monster that has a Reaction for each head and when it goes to 0 Hit Points, it instead regains all of its Hit Points and loses a head, which then will allow it to regain its Recharge ability and Legendary Actions it had expended up to that point, and also gives it access to Mythic Actions, which are additional Legendary Action options it gets when it triggers.
• Sneed’s Shredder is basically a Hulkbuster but for a Goblin (seriously, really cool to have)
• Edwin VanCleef can make 3 Scimitar Attacks against a target, and if the target fails a Constitution Saving Throw against any of them, it gains a rending wound, which means the target 2d6 Hit Points at the start of each of its turn until they are healed through a spell or someone succeeds on a Medicine check on it.
• When Prince Tortheldrin is within 300 feet of Immol’thar, he has immunity to all damage.

Seriously – let’s run this NOW! I can easily use these stat blocks for a campaign in Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms to make it an epic encounter my table will remember.

My biggest complaint about the chapter is the maps. They are gridded to be 10 feet per square, which makes it unusable as a battle map. To have a dungeon map that you can’t use is a bit infuriating, and as much as I am an avid user and fan of D&D Beyond and Maps VTT, I can’t help but think this may be a tactic to encourage people to use Maps because then it’ll be more usable within their own ecosystem. But we will have to wait and see.

I also wish the monster stat blocks in this chapter had a habitat listed for it. It makes sense why it doesn’t – they’re only found in that dungeon in the World of Warcraft, but if I want to put it in another setting, I want to know what kind of habitat would make the most sense for it (so I can freely ignore it later if I want).

Bestiary Of Azeroth

The final chapter of the book – Bestiary of Azeroth. Now recall that some stat blocks are in the previous chapter for Adventures in Azeroth since those characters/monsters are specifically tied to a location so they won’t show up in this chapter. But a lot of monsters in this chapter also hits really hard, too. With 45+ monsters in this chapter, there’s definitely a lot of great options here.

I’ll start with my biggest disappointment. There are some monsters, like the Fel Imp, where they’re essentially the D&D version with slight changes. One can understand why they made it in this book, but at the same time I’d much rather have stat blocks that are uniquely put together in a new way rather than something that seems like it was a quick one-and-done attempt. One would think there are more monsters out there they could have picked from that would have been interesting.

There’s also a monster in this book called Furbolgs that are druidic humanoid bears. Which is different than Firbolgs, the humanoids that have giant ancestry. They sound the same. That won’t get confusing ever.

Okay, the GOOD stuff!

The dragons in this book (called Dragonflights) are amazing. Blue Dragonflights have Spellfreeze Breath that does Cold damage and if the character fails its Saving Throw, can’t take the Magic Action until the start of the Dragon’s next turn. Bronze Dragonflights’ Sands Of Time Legendary Action deals out slashing damage and can cause the character to gain 1 level of Exhaustion, making them look 3d10 years older. Green Dragonflights’ Dream Banishment Legendary Action can essentially cause someone to fall asleep and go to a different plane of existence until the start of the Dragon’s next turn. Very cool dragons to pull into your setting!

Ancient of War is great for druidic/nature themed campaigns. A huge tree with some major bludgeoning and lightning damage that you can easily reskin into a kind of idol or statue as part of a ritual to use in an encounter.

Got some cocky spellcasters? Let me introduce you to Felhounds, a demonic hound who can sniff out magic! They have Magic Resistance and can sense the presence and location of magic within 120 feet of itself. They gain Advantage on attack rolls against creatures who cast a spell or taken the Magic Action since the end of the Felhound’s last turn. And as a Bonus Action, if a character is grappled by the Felhound, they need to make a Constitution Saving Throw. If they fail, they take Necrotic damage and cannot take the Magic action until the start of the Felhound’s next turn.

Want a monster that’s a muscular Mind Flayer? Check out the N’Raqis in this book! They’re here to pump iron, then to pump your brain with Psychic damage!

Illidan Stormrage, a famous character in the world of Azeroth, can be a terrifying foe in battle. When Stormrage gets bloodied, he turns into his Demonic Form, which gives him 100 Hit Points and new, powerful attacks that can also result in instant death for the characters. I love having combat encounters where characters need to resolve something in the moment beyond “dash and slash until it dies and go bye bye”. But seeing these monster triggers where now they’re doing something the party hasn’t seen them do yet can be just as equally memorable and exciting!

And if you know me, you know that I love owlbears. They’re my favorite creature in D&D lore. So I was really excited to see the Moonkin in this book, which is an antlered, intelligent owlbear that can cast Moonbeam. A lot of the kids that I run D&D for loves to rescue mystical, mythical creatures, so this will be a good one to bring into that campaign. I know they’ll love it.

Overall Thoughts: Who Is This For?

Although I wanted nothing to do with this book, I am glad I checked it out. This is really well done for the most part, being a net positive overall. It’s a great book for those who love the World Of Warcraft game, and if you run D&D 5.5 edition, this is a great book that gives you a lot of tools and options to use.

Personally I wouldn’t let players use the players options in this book other than the subclass options, only because thematically I like to keep my games more consistent in terms of experience and don’t want it to start getting too “goofy” (my term). With the addition of more sourcebooks like these, I’ve learned that I need to normalize restricting sources for my players and so far I haven’t had any complaints from my players. But this book will also give me a lot of tools and resources to use for my games that will make campaigns and adventures memorable and exciting, which is the kinds of stories we all want to tell.