New Dungeons & Dragons book is out, but physical copies will have to wait a while longer The release of The Deck of Many Things core rulebook has been delayed thanks to a string of bad luck (or manufacturing defects). On October 28, the official D&D Twitter account posted the following:

The digital release will not be affected. According to a further post from D&D Beyond, "After an internal investigation, we have discovered that the product does not meet our manufacturing standards." We apologize to those who have already placed pre-orders and were scheduled to receive the book on November 14."

The book promises to expand on one of D&D's most infamous items, the eponymous "deck of all things." This is like giving a player a grenade, which can blow them up or give them free candy. For example, drawing the "Gem" card would give the player 50,000 gold worth of gems or shiny stones. Or if you draw the "ruin" card, you will be stripped of all your valuables, possessions, and even the clothes on your back. And this is one of the better bad cards.

Polygon spoke to Kyle Brink, executive producer of D&D, about this: "[The Deck of Many Things'] bad card rate is too high. I can't in good conscience ship this inventory. I cannot in good conscience ship this inventory. According to Polygon, which obtained a pre-release copy, this seems to be the major problem:

The site writes: "The cards in the shipment were in conflicting shapes, some were concave and some were convex: ...... The paper band used to secure the cards in the shipment was so tight that removing it damaged the foil on the edges of the cards: ...... Not all cards were the same size and could not be easily shuffled"

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Brink believes that these problems may be due in part to Hasbro's recent shift away from using waste materials such as cello wrap.

"We inspected very closely throughout the entire production process to make sure that everything was working well.

Hooray for the environment, but boo-hoo for the teething problems. But Brink says he hopes to have these issues resolved by the end of the year: "We are hopeful that the study will meet our expectations. Until then, we have to let DM's dreams and hopes go haywire with a new 66 strong deck in digital format.