Spiders. Tentacles. A whole lot of nothing you’d call hospitable.
That’s what waits in the deepest reaches of the Dungeons & Dragons world, and Wizards of the Coast hasn’t taken players down there in an official product for a decade. The last one was 2015’s 5th edition campaign Out of the Abyss, which asks players to escape the drow while a demon invasion tears through the Underdark around them.
Ten years is a long time to leave a place that popular sitting empty.
The playtest let something slip
The latest Unearthed Arcana playtest material teased that an Underdark-focused product could be revealed as part of D&D’s lineup in the near future. The “Underdark Options” subclasses are the obvious tell.
But there’s a second clue, and it’s the more interesting one. It surfaced quietly during Gen Con 2026’s D&D Vision Keynote.
Actor and producer Joe Manganiello has joined the D&D team to lead a new initiative called D&D Icons, which brings together creators from the game’s history to work on original products. The lineup: Dragonlance creators Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Gary Gygax’s son and Greyhawk loremaster Luke Gygax, and R.A. Salvatore, author of The Legend of Drizzt series.
Do the math on who’s left
Weis and Hickman are working on a Dragonlance book. Gygax is handling Greyhawk. Salvatore’s assignment hasn’t been announced, which leaves a gap that isn’t hard to fill in.
The man wrote 40 novels, most of them featuring the ranger Drizzt Do’Urden, and in the process turned the Underdark and the drow into household names for anyone who’s ever rolled a d20. An Underdark product designed by Salvatore would land squarely on the longtime fans who look like the target audience for the D&D Icons line.
Where the name came from
“Underdark” is the Forgotten Realms term for the vast regions under the surface of the world, and other settings have their own names for the same idea. Greyhawk calls it Underoerth or Deepearth. In Eberron it’s Khyber.
It first appeared in Hall of the Fire Giant King (1978), one of Gygax’s earliest adventures, then became the main setting for his D-series of modules, part of the larger Queen of the Spiders series. Douglas Niles gave it a detailed description and its name in 1986’s Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide.
No inns, no gossip, no mercy
The pull of the place is that it drops adventurers into an environment that’s entirely hostile. There are no peaceful towns to rest in down there, no friendly innkeeper with the latest rumor. The environment itself is trying to kill you.
And the ecology creates a strange double effect, alienation and wonder at the same time, that tends to stick with players long after the campaign wraps. Beholders and Mind Flayers are natives. So are the drow and the duergar, the dwarven equivalent, both fascinating and usually hostile.
Drizzt got a prequel because readers demanded one
Salvatore’s first trilogy, The Icewind Dale Trilogy, isn’t set in the Underdark. But that’s where he introduced Drizzt, in 1988’s The Crystal Shard, originally as a sidekick to the barbarian Wulfgar.
Readers had other plans. Drizzt’s popularity earned him a prequel about his origins, and The Dark Elf Trilogy delivered the first literary depiction of the Underdark, setting a standard that held.
Salvatore’s version of drow society leaned hard on Gygax’s description of the creatures in the first Monster Manual and his Greyhawk adventure series. Menzoberranzan is run by a council of rival noble Houses, each led by a high priestess of the evil goddess Lolth, the Queen of Spiders, who holds absolute power over the drow. More recent retcons have adjusted her role to make dark elves more nuanced.
What a new book would actually look like
Judging by the design trends in the D&D 5.5e products, a big Underdark adventure in the vein of Out of the Abyss is unlikely. A dedicated campaign setting with new character options and a gazetteer covering locations and inhabitants, maybe with a short adventure attached, fits the recent books better.
That’s assuming D&D Icons plays by mainline rules. Manganiello has teased that Icons will have a lot of creative freedom, and nobody’s said what that means yet.
The unlight clue
There’s a real chance this hypothetical product goes story-first. The Underdark Options playtest material centers on Deep Imaskar, a location that’s stayed mostly unexplored.
It also introduces a new form of magic called “unlight,” which originated in Deep Imaskar and was used by the original settlers to build a safe haven down there. The Great Seal protecting the city was already in the lore, but this is the first time the magic behind it has carried that name.
You don’t rename something for no reason. That revision doesn’t make much sense unless the D&D team has something in the works for Deep Imaskar, and since the city sits in the lowest reaches of the Underdark, it’s an opening to explore a corner of the setting that’s still a blank.
Speculation, clearly labeled
Wizards of the Coast has made Gen Con its annual stage for Dungeons & Dragons announcements, which is why the keynote details matter.
If there’s a story-focused Underdark book coming, Salvatore is the obvious name to write it. To be clear, that’s speculation. It’s still unknown how the D&D Icons team will interact with established mainline projects.
But whoever ends up holding the pen, there are plenty of players ready to pack the spelunking gear and the anti-spider repellent and head back down into the dark.
