Azeroth comes to the tabletop on 17 November

Dungeons and Dragons: World of Warcraft is out on 17 November. It is a 256-page book with a great deal of new art, and it carries 16 playable races across from the game. Five of them were in Dungeons and Dragons already — dwarf, elf, goblin, human and orc — and 11 are being added for this: dracthyr, draenei, earthen, forsaken, haranir, mechagnome, pandaren, tauren, troll, vulpera and worgen.

There is more than races in it. New subclasses arrive, among them a paladin oath meant to play like a death knight, a demon hunter ranger, a barbarian path built on the elements and two new cleric domains; several existing subclasses have been reworked to fit. Around 60 new spells come with it, and crafting has been adjusted so that professions exist at the table at all.

The whole of Azeroth is in scope, expansions included, up to Midnight — the book opens by having Chromie wave the question of when away. Familiar dungeons are mostly intact: the Deadmines keeps its shape but gains alternative routes for a party that would rather slip past a boss than fight it, and Dire Maul still rewards a group that can finish it without waking every boss in the place. Some are taken from the earliest version of the game, others use the layouts and rewards they picked up later. Illidan, Arthas and Sylvanas are all in the book to be used as a table sees fit.

What it is not is the game copied over. The project lead told a press briefing that the aim was to paraphrase the game inside the rules of the tabletop rather than to imitate how it works, because half of the game is fighting the same boss until the loot drops, and that does not survive the move: translating the two directly, he said, leads to a really unsatisfying experience.

The details above come from two reports written out of the same briefing, and the book itself is not out yet, so anything in it may still read differently on the day.