Here's the Product Description
Here's the February & Beyond preview article with... the box art? Not much of a preview, but it's still pretty far out.
Here's a blog entry from the Dread Gazebo with more details on how the despair deck will work.
The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought & Beyond is a box set for DMs who want to take their PCs to the Shadowfell, or who are looking for a dark, urban setting for adventures. It includes:
* A 128 page DM book on the city of Gloomwrought, with some information on other Shadowfell locales.
* A 32 page book of Shadowfell encounters, primarily set in Gloomwrought
* Two sheets of Monster and Villain tokens
* A foldout battle map
* A 30 card 'Despair Deck' that DMs can use to "add suspense to any Shadowfell-based adventure"
Expected price point is $39.99(us).
Kinda wondering about something though... in the DDXP news threads people were talking about this product also coming with a Player's book (which would include a new Shadar-kai race,) but this isn't mentioned in the product description.
Bad: I would have wanted a complete treatise on the plane of Shadowfell (á la Plane Above and Plane Below; couldn't this have been Plane to the Right?) instead of focusing on one city. Now it seems more like some kind of adventure location than plane book.
I had also heard mention of a players book, and would certainly like to see an updated entry for the Shadar-Kai, but from the preview and product description, this seems to be strictly a DM purchase, which frankly I prefer as a release. I don't want players to have to buy DM resources to get the rules for their characters (a big part of why I don't like the shift of items from Players books back to DM books).
So at the moment it looks like the player's book is just a rumor. Since I feel ambivalent about it, I won't be upset either way.
That said, if there isn't a players book in Gloomwrought, then I go back to being confused and annoyed at the lack of a Shadar-Kai entry in Heroes of Shadow, and I really hope they get some more juicy Dragon coverage to coincide with these shadow-oriented releases.
As for the Despair Deck - I won't know for sure how I feel until we see more of how it works and what the cards look like, but at first glance this sounds like exactly the kind of card-based product I'd actually like to use in a D&D session - rendom, thematic, environment-based effects to give encounters a unique feel. Something that adds an extra touch of immersive flavor to combat, rather then further reducing immersion, slowing combat, and disturbing game balance by forcing an intrusive new minigame into each combat round.
The other thing I love about Gloomwrought is that, as a extraplanar setting, it will likely support gameplay in the paragon tier. After a couple years of 4e, I'm sick of heroic tier, and don't intend to play a 4e game or session below 11th level again. Watching encounters climb to 3rd level only to reset at first, seeing the new Monster Box (which for the most part I love) have progressively fewer monsters to choose from as levels increase, hearing that 2011's "campaign setting" will be a heroic tier only expansion to forgotten realms - It's just annoying. Why have three tiers if they're only going to support one of them?
Anyway, I'll be picking up Gloomwrought. Hopefully it sells well and we see more books of this type in the future. Maybe 4e versions of Frostfell, Stormwrack, & Sandstorm, with on-theme monsters, tokens, and decks of random environmental effects to add thematic flavor to encounters?
I'm less thrilled by the monster tokens. Whee, more pogs I'll never use.