In a passage from R.A. Salvatore’s forthcoming Dungeons & Dragons novel, The Finest Edge of Twilight, a monk observes that “teleporting,” “dimension stepping,” and “misty stepping” are simply different names for rapidly relocating by moving between planes. The line acknowledges the many shifting labels the tabletop game has used for comparable effects over the years, and hints at how taxing it has been for Salvatore to track the evolving game mechanics across editions.
“That’s been one of the toughest parts,” Salvatore told Polygon over Zoom. “4th Edition D&D almost broke me — not because I disliked it, but because the changes were so sweeping. I’m not passing judgment on any edition, positive or negative, but the revisions were enormous.”
The 2008 arrival of 4th Edition stirred controversy by overhauling class structures and introducing sets of powers usable a limited number of times per day or per encounter. Wizards of the Coast also advanced the Forgotten Realms timeline by a century in an event called The Sundering, a move that took both Salvatore and Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood by surprise.
“Ed looked at me and said, ‘Bob, what are we going to do?’ I replied that we’d find a way to fix it, because in a few years they’d come back and say, ‘Bob, we need to fix this,’” Salvatore recalled.
To bridge the transition from 4th Edition to 5th Edition, Wizards later introduced the Second Sundering; 5th Edition launched in 2014. Salvatore had already prepared narrative groundwork by gravely wounding his protagonist Drizzt Do’Urden in the 2013 novel The Last Threshold, then restoring him in The Companions, where several close allies are reincarnated to save him and rejoin the updated timeline.
Salvatore says he exercises discretion when deciding how closely to mirror a current edition’s mechanics in his novels; sometimes characters invoke spells whose names trace back to 1st Edition. He still refers to the energy fueling a monk’s abilities as ki rather than the 2024 ruleset’s term focus. Likewise, his new story centers on a half-elf — a lineage not included in the most recent Player’s Handbook.
“They don’t argue with me because they know I’m doing something different than playing the game when I’m writing the books, and as long as the two things feed off each other, everybody’s happy,” he said.
There have been eras when Salvatore pushed back more forcefully. He remembers clashing with TSR — D&D’s original publisher — when the company began releasing supplemental rulebooks for 2nd Edition in the late 1980s that added new classes and races.
“I told them I thought they were steering the game toward trouble,” Salvatore said. “D&D’s beauty is its accessibility: you can hand someone a few pages of the Player’s Handbook and they can play. Now features get layered onto players instead of equipping dungeon masters with the tools they need. I don’t think they listened — and they eventually went bankrupt, so maybe that was telling.”
Salvatore still enjoys playing. He and friends rotate as dungeon master for a Sunday-night D&D 2024 game, and he also plays with his children and grandchildren. He hopes Wizards focuses on releasing well-crafted, easy-to-run adventures; his favorite remains Gary Gygax’s The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, which was revisited in the 2024 anthology Quests from the Infinite Staircase. He also appreciates Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, even though it drew little from his novels set in the same region.
“I want Dungeons & Dragons I can drop into any table — plug-and-play adventures — because my group often builds its own worlds,” he said. “I just hope all the publishers keep putting out games that are fun to play.”
Source: Polygon
