Spiders. Tentacles. Very little that anyone would call welcoming.
That is the greeting waiting in the lowest levels of the Dungeons & Dragons world, and it has been ten years since Wizards of the Coast last sent players down there in an official release. The most recent was Out of the Abyss, the 2015 campaign for 5th edition, in which the party has to flee the drow while a demon invasion tears through the Underdark all around them.
A decade is a long stretch to leave a location that popular sitting unused.
A slip in the playtest material
The newest batch of Unearthed Arcana playtest content hinted that an Underdark-centred product may surface in D&D’s lineup before long. The dead giveaway is the set of subclasses labelled “Underdark Options.”
There is a second clue, though, and it is the more intriguing of the two. It slipped out with little fanfare during the D&D Vision Keynote at Gen Con 2026.
Joe Manganiello, the actor and producer, has signed on with the D&D team to head up a new venture called D&D Icons, gathering creators from across the game’s past to build original products. On the roster: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, who created Dragonlance; Luke Gygax, son of Gary Gygax and a loremaster of Greyhawk; and R.A. Salvatore, the writer behind The Legend of Drizzt series.
Work out who is unaccounted for
A Dragonlance book is in the hands of Weis and Hickman. Greyhawk falls to Gygax. Salvatore’s project has not been revealed, and the resulting blank is not a difficult one to fill in.
He has written 40 novels, the majority of them starring the ranger Drizzt Do’Urden, and along the way he made the Underdark and the drow familiar names to just about anyone who has picked up a d20. An Underdark release with Salvatore’s design work on it would hit precisely the longtime fans who appear to be the intended audience for the D&D Icons line.
The origins of the name
In the Forgotten Realms, “Underdark” is what the enormous territories beneath the world’s surface are called, though other settings use their own labels for the same concept. Greyhawk refers to Underoerth, or Deepearth. Eberron calls it Khyber.
The concept debuted in Hall of the Fire Giant King (1978), among the earliest of Gygax’s adventures, before becoming the central setting of his D-series modules within the wider Queen of the Spiders series. It was Douglas Niles who fleshed it out in detail and gave it its name in the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide in 1986.
No taverns, no rumours, no mercy
What makes the setting so appealing is that it strands adventurers somewhere completely hostile. Down there, no quiet village offers a night’s rest and no cheerful innkeeper passes along the latest gossip. The surroundings themselves want you dead.
Its ecology also produces an odd twin sensation of alienation and awe that tends to linger with players well after a campaign has ended. Beholders and Mind Flayers call the place home, as do the drow and the duergar — the dwarven counterpart — all of them compelling and, as a rule, hostile.
Reader demand is what earned Drizzt a prequel
The Icewind Dale Trilogy, Salvatore’s first, is not an Underdark story. It is, however, where Drizzt first appeared, in The Crystal Shard in 1988, initially cast as a companion to the barbarian Wulfgar.
Readers saw it differently. The character’s popularity won him a prequel covering his origins, and The Dark Elf Trilogy became the first literary portrait of the Underdark, establishing a benchmark that stuck.
For his take on drow society, Salvatore drew heavily on how Gygax had described the creatures in the original Monster Manual and in his Greyhawk adventure series. A council of competing noble Houses governs Menzoberranzan, each one headed by a high priestess serving the evil goddess Lolth, the Queen of Spiders, whose authority over the drow is absolute. Later retcons have softened her role somewhat in order to give dark elves more nuance.
What such a book would probably be
The design direction of the D&D 5.5e releases suggests a sprawling Underdark adventure along the lines of Out of the Abyss is improbable. What squares better with the recent books is a dedicated campaign setting, complete with fresh character options and a gazetteer of places and residents, possibly bundled with a brief adventure.
All of which presumes D&D Icons sticks to mainline rules. Manganiello has hinted that the imprint will enjoy considerable creative latitude, and so far nobody has spelled out what that entails.
The unlight clue
It is entirely possible that this hypothetical product leads with story. The Underdark Options playtest text builds around Deep Imaskar, a spot that has gone largely unexamined.
The material also brings in a new kind of magic named “unlight,” which began in Deep Imaskar and which the city’s original settlers used to establish a refuge in the depths. The lore already contained the Great Seal that shields the city, but never before has the magic underpinning it been given that name.
Nobody renames a thing without cause. The change is hard to justify unless the D&D team is preparing something involving Deep Imaskar, and because the city lies in the deepest part of the Underdark, it offers a way into a stretch of the setting that remains a blank slate.
Speculation, and labelled as such
Gen Con is where Wizards of the Coast stages its yearly Dungeons & Dragons announcements, which is exactly why what was said in the keynote carries weight.
Should a story-driven Underdark book be on the way, Salvatore is the obvious candidate to write it. That, to be clear, is speculation. How the D&D Icons team will mesh with established mainline projects is still an open question.
Whoever ends up with the pen, though, there is no shortage of players prepared to grab the spelunking kit and the anti-spider repellent and descend into the dark once more.