Dungeons & Dragons will probably be finishing its trio of 2024 guidelines revisions—a little bit confusingly—on Feburary 18, 2025. Its third supply ebook, the Monster Manual, comes on the heels of each the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide. I lately received to sit down down final week, with a bestiary of different shops, for a preview of what could be inside—and, truthfully? As far as a tome of stat blocks goes, it ain’t half-bad.
Obviously, as revealed by recreation director Jeremy Crawford and principal recreation designer Wesley Schneider earlier this month, the Tarrasque is getting some “preventing buddies”. The quantity of high-CR BBEGs right here is, in reality, truthfully form of spectacular—with guarantees so as to add a bunch of “apex threats” just like the Elemental Cataclysm, a multi-headed beast with varyingly-flavoured maws of doom doing their finest Tiamat impression.
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Other massive bads included the Animal Lords, CR20 demigods with totally different talents based mostly in your flavour of furry, in addition to a Haunted House Revenant. My favorite by far is the Blob of Annihilation, a cataclysmic ooze with the cranium of a lifeless god inside it. One which hosts its personal demiplane that may draw you and your compatriots inside, which presents an issue—since killing it could collapse the demiplane and eject its inhabitants into the Astral Sea (that is ‘outer area’ in nerdspeak).
My quick thought upon concerning this factor wasn’t to make use of it as a CR20 battle, however as an alternative as a plot hook for a Spelljammer marketing campaign—why begin in a tavern while you is usually a gaggle of unassuming nobodies sucked into a large ooze and shot into area after a gaggle of high-level murderhobos kill it with out regard on your security?
And that, actually, appears to be the main draw of this ebook. More spectacular than the 80+ new creatures and the Tarrasque with the ability to blow up buildings now’s the renewed emphasis on offering tales for fledgling DMs. For occasion, there’s extra NPC-style blocks, like a whole crew of pirates to throw into your marketing campaign, in addition to a set of cultists for several types of worship. Not all cults sacrifice with the identical brush, as they are saying.
But the actual draw is how virtually each kind of monster—not all of them, however rattling close to shut—comes with its personal set of random tables to assist gestate concepts inside your thoughts. As Schneider describes, there’s been a deliberate transfer away from didactic loredumps and into options: “For us, these monsters aren’t about ‘this is the lore, this is the one method to play a gargoyle’ … each monster is a complete host of adventures.”
Here’s a pair web page examples shared with me by Wizards of the Coast—the Gargoyle and the Gelatinous Cube:
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Gargoyles, an in any other case throwaway assemble, get two tables. One with options for what sort of sculptures they are often, and one other for the place they’re hiding. While a few of these are your bog-standard gargoyle actions, others—such because the suggestion to put them amongst a graveyard of Medusa victims—are tremendous good encounter concepts.
The Gelatinous Cube additionally has some winners, with its random desk being devoted to the particles you may discover inside—such because the sadistic option to put a mimic inside one like some form of monster turducken, or an indestructible pill in an historic language.
These little touches are small, but when the Monster Manual is stuffed with them, it implies that Wizard’s remodeled it into one thing greater than its predecessor—it is not only a ebook of numbers, it is a ebook of plot hooks. Coupled with a number of the stuff that the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide is doing, any new DM to those revised rulesets goes to have a bounty of concepts to assist them put collectively their first homebrew marketing campaign.
The artwork helps promote this visually, too. They actually kinda pulled out all of the stops right here—if the Monster Manual retains hucking high-quality scenes into its pages, this will probably be one of many prettier books that Wizards of the Coast has made.
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Mind, lofty guarantees are one factor, proof is one other. These excessive praises I’m singing will solely stick if these tables are consistently utilized all through the ebook with the identical generosity, and never as soon as each 5 pages. That’s to say nothing of the bigger mechanical implications of this ebook, like whether or not the CR system will really work now—and that’ll have to come back out within the wash after hours of precise play. What I can say is that this effort to douse each critter in flavour is an especially welcome one.
The revised Monster Manual will arrive February 18 for most individuals, although D&D Beyond’s performing some early entry on February 4 for “Master Tier” subscribers and February 11 for Hero Tier subscribers—which I’m solely sharing right here for informational functions, not as a result of I feel early entry durations for D&D is an effective factor.
