Last year Dungeons & Dragons celebrated the 50th anniversary with the latest overhaul set of rules—not an entirely new edition, as has been the tradition in the past, but a rework and refresh of his fifth, a testament to how much reach and popularity the TTRPG has grown and taken root in since 5E’s inception ten years ago . Both updated Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide they acted by example: offering more ideas and scenarios to explain the rules to experienced and new players and DMs. The Monster Manual by its very nature it must have a different tact to fit this philosophy: after all, it is a very large list of creatures big and smallwithout threatening the end of the world. So to do that, you throw down the proverbial gauntlet and it shows you more and more ways to throw enemies at your party.
And when it is Monster Manual say more, that means more. “We took a look at 2014 Monster Manual and they were like ‘people have been asking for so much, we have so many more ideas,’” Wes Schneider, lead game designer at D&D and co-lead on the new one Monster Manualhe told reporters at a recent conference discussing the new book. “We know a lot more about this game and how we want to develop it—how can we improve the gameplay experience?”
Schneider and his colleagues lead on Manual, D&DJeremy Crawford, the designer of the principle rules, had one simple idea: larger. “One of the biggest goals for this new one Monster Manual is just more: more than what everyone wants from their monsters and their threats to their own D&D games,” continued Schneider. “To that end, you’ll see 85 new monsters throughout this book—these will be new creatures, these will be things you’ve never seen before, but these will also be amazing sightings of some of your favorite monsters, giving you more versatility, more gameplay , more opportunities to use them.”
This means, for example, that Owlbear is no longer simple only bear owl. Among the 300 pages worth of creatures inside, Monster Manual will feature variants such as Owlbears of the Feywild, Primordial Owlbears, or Owlbears imbued with eldritch magic. And some of those Owlbears are much, much nastier than others. “Something that in 2014 Monster Manual there is somewhat of a lack of big threats to play at a high level,” Schneider continued. “That won’t be a problem with 2025 Monster Manual. You’ll see more high-level threats, big monsters, creatures to finish campaigns, for epic gameplay.”
Like reboot Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide before that, Monster ManualThe refresh brought with it the opportunity to reorganize and restructure the way the bestiary unloads information about any given player. The new book will be divided into four different categories: an introductory section that offers advice on how to include any monster in your campaign; the aforementioned 300-page glossary of creatures and stat blocks to use with them (using the new format from Player’s Handbook); and two additions, one of the general animals you might expect to exist around the world D&D‘s multiverse, and the other groups monsters into instance groups to encourage DMs to connect different monsters in the game through logical connections via type or elemental affinity. And just like in the past books, this information has been restructured compared to the 2014 edition to present the information to players more clearly and logically (no more finding the Gelatinous Cube, the creature whose name famously begins with the letter “G” below the “O” for “Ooze” ).
Not only will the new Monster Manual offer more variations on classic adversary archetypes for more demanding combat applications, it will also offer tips and ideas on how to adapt them to create storytelling opportunities within your campaign. “These monsters aren’t about ‘here’s the knowledge, this is the only way to play a gargoyle, that’s what have to have anything to do with this creature,’ Schneider said. “Each monster is a whole series of adventures – we want to really make these stepping stones for your adventures, for telling your stories, for different things. There are little idea generator tables throughout the book…each one an adventure idea that DMs can take and incorporate into whatever they want or are inspired by.”
But for all the flavor and variety on display, sometimes you just need a group of increasingly powerful heroes to have increasingly powerful creatures to beat up and take stuff from. New Monster Manual not only will it feature more varieties of challenging opponents to include in campaigns—either through more challenge-rated stat blocks or simply having more varieties of generic creature archetypes, from skeletons to cultists, that push players out of their comfort zone into new approach tactics—it will also feature new a series of high-level threats representing the deadliest patterns of all time D&D monster line. They will form the main part Monster Manuala desire to expand the capacity and variety of what it can offer DMs to cast on stronger groups, from revenants that can haunt an entire building, not just a corpse, to oozing blobs that stir up the magical energies of the skull god floating around their lovely mass.
“In 2014 Monster Manualwe had ancient dragons [to represent all dragons]we had Tarrasque for monsters—we had a few other epic monsters for some other creature types. But as we built this new bestiary, we looked at some of the creature types that lack the ultimate threat—basically, friends and enemies of the Tarrasque,” Crawford explained. All of these new “ultimate threats,” as Crawford calls them, will come with a number of special mechanics that highlight them as dangerous threats (one example was the elemental cataclysm, a giant creature that can cause random environmental disasters during combat), as well as rallies legendary actions that they can use to push their threat even further But in line with the new Monster ManualDue to the more-is-more approach and updates to the broader core rulebook to simplify information, their terrifying stat block won’t be as scary to DMs as the creatures themselves are to the poor party they’re being cast on.
“In the past, DMs had to look up the cost of each legendary action to use every round of the game – they no longer have to,” explained Crawford. “The DM simply knows that this monster has a certain number of legendary actions to use each round, and then can choose from a list…the selection process will be easier, and we’ve also ensured that no matter what combination of actions you want to choose, this creature will stay on its challenge rating and it will be terrifying for your player characters.”
The more things change, the more some still remain the same. For all the new creatures, big and small, the previously teased Tarrasque will remain the biggest D&D bad in the new one Monster Manualwith the highest challenge rating… but to do that, he had to rise to the occasion. “We wanted to preserve the Tarrasque’s place as the top threat of the entire book, but to make it a reality and not just something communicated by a CR number, the new Tarrasque is scarier than any version of the Tarrasque in the history of the game,” Crawford teased.
“If anyone has ever experienced a group of player characters that tried to just attack one from a long distance and thought ‘oh, this thing can’t do anything to us’, just meet the new Tarrasque. Blows up buildings over long distances, shuts down teleportation around him, and more. Battle against Taraska [will be] where it’s not just the player characters that are in danger, but the entire environment around this titanic creature.”
At least you have some time to prepare. Updated Monster Manual will receive a tiered release during February 2025—with early access for D&D on subscribers of the main level and selected brick-and-mortar stores starting February 4th, Beyond hero tier subscribers on February 11th, and beyond from February 18th.
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