Dungeons & Dragons’ New Dungeon Master’s Guide Revealed

In honor of Dungeons & Dragons‘ 50th anniversary this year, Wizards of the Coast will release an updated Dungeon Master’s Guide—the first in a decade—reflecting on the game’s long history and promising to be the most definitive edition of the iconic reference book to date.

At a recent press presentation, D&D creative editor Chris Perkins revealed the 2024 guidebook will be the very first to sport Venger, the villain of the 1980s animated series, on its cover. “My guy’s never been on a cover of an official D&D product before,” he confirmed, “so that persuaded us to give it some thought and Tyler Jacobson rendered this beautiful illustration showing the iconic 1980s cartoon villain casting some wonderful spell in the company of some of his best and closest friends— including two other villains named Warduke and Skylla, who were iconized as action figures in the ’80s. This is one of the many ways that this book kind of nods and winks to the 50-year legacy of the Dungeons & Dragons game.”

Fans with an eye toward the series’ future, however, will have the option of an alternative cover bearing the demon queen, Lull. According to designer and co-lead James Wyatt, “Olenna Richards gave us this depiction of the demon queen, Lull, who is weaving a tangled web in snaring some hapless soul. This resonates with me because the Dungeon Master is the role where you’re weaving stories.”

Though the latest edition is said to be “a book by DMs for DMs,” Perkins insisted it additionally serves as the perfect introduction to the game for the burgeoning Dungeon Master. In his words, “Our goal [was] to make this Dungeon Master’s Guide the most useful, most friendly, most invaluable Dungeon Master’s Guide that there has ever been. And the way I look at it is the Dungeon Master’s Guide should be the DM’s best friend, your trusty companion that you have with you, not only when you’re running the game, but when you’re prepping for your game. And so our goal is to basically deliver or fulfill that promise.”

Wyatt echoed his statement and elaborated more. “One of the biggest shifts with this book from its 2014 counterpart is just how information is organized,” he said. “We have front-loaded all of the basic learning material, the stuff that DMs need to know to get their campaigns off the ground and to make experience at the table as fun for players as possible. And then we get into the nitty-gritty of some of the corner case rules, how you create your own adventures, how you create your own campaigns. And then a lot of the information about the setting, the multiverse, the cosmology about magic items, all of that is then toward the back of the book along with two brand new appendices.”

If you’re completely new to the game, Perkins promised the updated guide will explain its cerebral and sometimes confusing nature. “The start of the book jumps right into the very basics of what it means to be a Dungeon Master,” he explained. “In the 2024 Player’s Handbook, we gave some some examples of play presented as sort of scripts, because the game fundamentally is about the conversation that unfolds at a table, the dialogue between the Dungeon Master and the players.” Thankfully, readers can expect included sheets and graphs to help them better visualize the game, as well as an almanac of topics that are likely to present themselves when running the game with a group of friends.

As Perkins said, “Chapter three of the book is this encyclopedia of miscellaneous things that come up in play or while you’re prepping your game. And the way the chapter is structured is very much like the rules glossary in the Player’s Handbook. Each topic is sort of dealt with alphabetically, but here, rather than having like just a paragraph or a few paragraphs of description of each thing, each of these topics is big enough to warrant a page or more.”

“Some of these sections can be up to six pages long because there’s a lot of information to cover,” he continued. “And not all of these topics come up in every game, and that’s another sort of important thing. Like if you don’t have a lot of firearms and explosives in your game, you probably won’t have to reference the firearms and explosives section of this chapter very often. Similarly, the siege equipment section might not get used terribly often, depending on the style of campaign you’re running. But these are all individually very important topics.”

So too will the guide help players craft their own original adventures and campaigns tailored to personal interests. According to Wyatt, there’ll be an entire chapter focusing on “thinking about the adventure from a narrative perspective. What’s the premise? The situation that the characters have to deal with? How you’re gonna hook them in? What are the encounters they’re gonna have along the way? How are you building tension and then releasing it in a climactic encounter at the end and then what’s the close of the adventure?”

As everyone who’s ever played with a good DM knows, the game has a tendency to take on a life of its own, and its storyteller may feel like they’re writing multiple seasons of their own television series. As Wyatt noted, “It turns out that crafting a campaign is a lot like creating an adventure, just sort of at a larger scale, where an adventure is a couple of sessions that you’re stringing together. A campaign is a couple of adventures that you’re stringing together. We use metaphors talking about TV series or comic book story arcs to sort of help you wrap your brain around the different scales of adventures and campaigns. But fundamentally, what is the premise of the campaign? What are the conflicts that are going to drive the adventures in the campaign?”

If you’re a player who likes to pull from the series’ expansive history of original characters and locations instead of creating your own, the book reintroduces Dungeons & Dragons very first fictional setting, Greyhawk. Incredibly, as Perkins noted, this will be the first book to ever detail an entire campaign there.

“It’s the 50th anniversary, so maybe this is a good time to take a setting that has lied fallow for many years, but that embodies sort of the 50 years of D&D,” he explained. “For those who don’t know, Greyhawk was the first official published campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. I first discovered it in a product back in 1980 called the World of Greyhawk Fantasy World Setting. It was basically a very thin folder containing a short little booklet and a map of the world, two maps of the world actually, and that was my first contact with a campaign setting. And a very young me fell in love with it exactly because it was not at all intimidating.”

He continued. “It was short, it left plenty of space for me as a DM to fill in the details. It just gave us a map with some short little descriptions of the locations on that map, and then basically said, ‘Hey, DM, go off, be fruitful, create, fill this in at your leisure, bring the conflicts of this setting to life in your own way.’ That really resonated with me. So when we were talking about the setting that we should use and knowing the space that we had in the DMG to contain it, this felt like a really, really good fit. And one of the other cool things about Greyhawk is this is a setting which says everything that’s in D&D is here. Dragons are here, wizards are here, bards are here, everything in the Player’s Handbook and the Monster Manual has a home in Greyhawk.”

In keeping with the series’ anniversary, the latest edition of the guide takes an old, yet underutilized concept and brings it to the forefront: the creation of “bastions,” fully realized sets for your characters to interact within.

According to Wyatt, “long time D&D players will know that multiple editions of the game now have tinkered with the idea of Stronghold building. This is an old idea in D&D. And because we’re in the 50th anniversary year, it seemed like just a wonderful excuse to go back and revisit that concept. We also wanted to take what used to be downtime in 2014 and sort of rethink it to make it a more fun and useful activity. And so, when we were in the early conversations about Bastions, the sort of guiding principle was, the player can play an invaluable role in creating content for a campaign. That the DM doesn’t have to be the only person who’s inventing things in the world of D&D. [We could] come up with a system that says, ‘Hey player, you can take custody of this part of the world and make it your own. And be the guiding force, be sort of the DM for this little microcosm within the greater world.’”

Once you have your characters, locations, and setting, the guide then takes you into the most easily accessible detailing of what’s long been considered the game’s untouchable third rail: its die-rolling combat mechanics. To quote Perkins, “In short, we’ve made it simpler. So the 2014 DMGs and Counter Builder Advice was three pages long. Now it’s one page or close to one page. We’ve sort of tightened things up to make it much easier for DMs to construct encounters that are of the challenge level that they want. So if they want a balanced encounter that’s not likely to result in any PC player character deaths, we have a much simpler, straightforward, less mathematically complex system that works.”

The guidebook additionally includes—for the first time ever, somehow—a full glossary of the game’s expansive lore.

“There’s a lot of assumed knowledge about some of the most iconic characters and locations across the D&D multiverse,” Perkins noted, but “for the benefit of DMs everywhere, we thought it’d be super useful to, in this Dungeon Master’s Guide for the first time, include a glossary that just provides short little descriptions of some of these iconic D&D elements. And you will notice going through the glossary that maybe a character is not listed here, that’s because that individual is probably described somewhere else in the book. So we don’t have an entry for Asmodeus on this page, you’ll notice, but that’s okay, he’s covered in the cosmology chapter. So this is it, this lore glossary is sort of a catch-all of a bunch of famous people, places, and things in D&D that aren’t covered elsewhere in the book.”

As a seal of quality on the finished product, Perkins revealed Wizards worked alongside four celebrity consults—namely actors Deborah Ann Woll (Daredevil), Isla Fisher (Wolf Like Me), Matt Mercer (Critical Role), and Zac Clay (World of Warcraft: Legion)—to play-test the book itself.

“We also worked with four outside consultants, and one of their goals as they were reviewing material was to help ensure not only was the advice that we were giving to DMs sensical, but that we were delivering ways to make the DM’s job easier,” he said. “So Matt Mercer, Deborah Ann Wall, Isla Fisher, and Zac Clay, all of whom have been DMs for a long time but have their own styles and their own ways of doing things, all contributed to reviewing the DM advice chapters to make sure that the advice we were giving was actually making the DM’s job easier, not harder.”

Perkins also confirmed the book was accessible to younger generations, speaking from his own personal experience. “I’m very lucky to live with two Gen Z Dungeon Masters,” he said. “My daughter and her girlfriend are important consultants for me. So there are examples in those chapters that are drawn directly from their experience, the things that they struggle with and have a hard time wrapping their brains around—the parts of D&D‘s history that I take for granted that is mysterious and mystifying to them. They often joke about taking psychic damage if I read them passages from the first edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. There’s even sort of D&D slang that they use that is unfamiliar to me, but they introduced me to the concept of a DMPC [a Dungeon Master Playable Character, meaning a character performed by the Dungeon Master, themselves]. We’re working very closely with our partners at D&D Beyond as they develop their suite of DM-focused tools to make sure that they are as friendly and accessible to the Dungeon Masters of all ages as possible. We don’t make any assumptions about who will gravitate towards those tools versus sort of a more old school approach, but I think that these conversations will ensure that we’re delivering the promise that regardless of how you want to play or how you play, we give you the tools you need to play your way.”

Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 will be available wherever books are sold this November 12. Preorders are now available.

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