D&D's latest physical book has been delayed due to bad luck of the draw: 'The defect rate is too high. I cannot in good conscience ship this stock'

30.10.2023 - 14:29 / pcgamer.com

Dungeons & Dragons has a new book coming out—but you'll have to wait a while longer for the physical copy. The release of The Deck of Many Things core rulebook has been delayed thanks to a streak of bad luck (or poor manufacturing, depending on how charitable you're willing to be). On October 28, the official D&D Twitter account made the following post: 

The digital release won't be impacted, which tracks—you'd have to try real hard to get manufacturing defects in a PDF. «After an internal review we found the product didn’t meet our manufacturing standards,» a further post on D&D Beyond states. «We are sorry to those of you who have put in your preorders already or planned on picking up your copy on November 14.»

The book promises to expand one of D&D's most infamous items: the titular Deck of Many Things. This thing's like giving your players a bandolier of grenades that'll either blow them up or give them free candy. For example, you could draw the Gem card, which gives you around 50,000 gold's worth of jewellery or shiny rocks. Or you could get the Ruin card, which strips you of all valuables, any property you own, and the very clothes on your back. And that's one of the nicer bad cards.

Polygon spoke with D&D's Executive Producer Kyle Brink on the subject: «The defect rate [of The Deck of Many Things] is too high. I cannot in good conscience ship this stock. We need to fully inspect it, understand exactly how many units are defective—all that.» The full release was planned to include a set of physical cards, which seem to be the major issue according to Polygon, who received a pre-release copy.

The website writes: «The cards as shipped had conflicting shapes, with some cards concave and others convex …  the paper bands used to secure the cards for shipment were so tight that removing them damaged the foil on the edge of the cards … not all the cards were the same size, meaning that they could not be easily shuffled.»

Brink believes these issues could be due in part to Hasbro's recent shift away from using waste products like cello wrap. «We inspected very closely everything throughout the production process to make sure everything was going fine with that, and yet some of the problems that we are seeing here are specifically because of some of the paper packaging that we use.»

So—yay for the environment, boo to teething issues. Brink does, however, say they're hoping to get these issues solved before the end of the year: «We hope that our investigation will meet our expectations [and] that we will be able to get the product out to people this year.» Until then, you'll just have to derail your DM's hopes and dreams with the new 66-card strong deck in digital format.