Writer’s Note: By the time this article will hit publication, the livestream of the event where this news broke will have been a week and a half old. That said, there are some very important announcements about the future of D&D and it bears repeating. A lot of sites and chatter are already talking about the “next edition” of the game, which seems to be coloring what they said in a light that wasn’t necessarily meant, so my aim here is to try and report the information from that stream as objectively as possible while still offering some thoughts on what that could mean for the game. The panel “The Future of D&D” is available to watch on YouTube and features Elle Osili-Wood moderating with Ray Winninger, Jeremy Crawford, Liz Schuh, and Chris Perkins to talk about this news.
Let’s get the big news out of the way first – there is a shakeup coming to 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons in the year 2024. Alongside the 50th anniversary of the game, 2024 will see “the next evolution” of the game with new Core Rulebooks being released. Work has already begun on these books to update the rules and bring them more in line with what the community wants to see. Winninger did stress that these new books would be fully compatible with all existing 5th Edition material already released as well as any release coming out in 2022-23.
This sounds less like a 3.0/3.5 update to me and more like them just attempting to rebalance existing material as the game has developed over the last 7 years, but time will tell. Expect to see some more surveys coming out through the end of the year and likely throughout next year as well as Wizards continues to get pulse checks on what the community wants to see.
Also announced was a “new” book coming out in January 2022. Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse will gather over 30 system agnostic PC races from existing Wizards publications as well as 250 updated monster and NPC statblocks from the Monster Manual, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes. Jeremy Crawford did tease several new stat blocks – the Bard from Monster Manual and the Warlock of the Great Old One and Warpriest from Volo’s Guide to Monsters. These updated stat blocks appear to be following the format that was explored in Candlekeep Mysteries especially with regards to spellcasting creatures with the stated effort to make them easier to prep and run. These updates as also cited as a way to bring these monsters and NPCs in line with their listed CR and allow them to be more effective at what they’re supposed to do. Furthermore, as a quality of life feature, each of the stat blocks will appear alphabetically by their name, for example a Glabrezu would be listed under “G” and a Red Dragon would be listed under “R” instead of in the “D” section as subsets of Demon and Dragon respectively. It’s a small thing, but it’s nice for general accessibility and usability.
Monsters of the Multiverse will first release as part of a gift set along with new printings of both Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and later will release as a standalone book. Furthermore, the gift set will be available in standard covers as well as brand new alternate covers as well as a new Dungeon Masters screen. Retail on this gift set will be $169.95 and is available for preorder now.
Also in the realm of 2022 releases, Winninger announced that following Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft two other major classic settings will be released next year along with “a cameo appearance” of another campaign setting. Finally in 2023, a fourth full classic campaign setting will be released. These 2022 campaign releases will be released in an entirely different format than what we’re used to. No concrete news yet on what these campaign settings coming next year will be, but Chris Perkins did share a very early sketch of a hydro74 cover that will be releasing in 2022 featuring everyone’s favorite miniature giant space hamster, Boo front and center. So… Spelljammer confirmed?
Furthermore, we can expect more adventure anthologies like Candlekeep Mysteries in the future as well as potential news about two brand new in-house campaign settings that Wizards is playing around with internally. As much as I enjoy seeing classic campaign settings brought back, this is honestly the most exciting news for me. New campaign settings means more to new players than reviving classic settings does, and I’m excited to see what they’ve got cooking in internal development.
Jeremy Crawford and Liz Schuh both emphasized listening to the community both in regards to longtime players as well as those who just started playing the game in how they develop the game, emphasizing Dungeons and Dragons as a “living game.” They further discussed how they’re continuing to explore options to make the play experience as exciting and as accessible as possible. Wild Beyond the Witchlight was cited as examples of things they’re exploring with regards to tools to make the game more accessible and more digestible for a DM to run as well as it being the first game where nearly every confrontation can be solved non-violently, hinting that we could see similar experiments in the future.
So what do you make of this news? What are you most excited about? Regardless, it feels like it’s going to be a good couple of years to be a D&D player.
Ben Erickson
