With the final third of the new core rulebooks for D&D "5.5E" or "5E'24" or "6ishE" or whatever you want to call it now only a month away, the marketing blitz has begun, with an hour-long Todd Kenreck video on D&D's official YouTube page as well as a few D&D YouTubers getting a chance to preview some of the new and revised monsters.
If I were to sum up the developments as I see them, it's that monsters are looking to become scarier. Low-level monsters, like the humble Skeleton, are only getting a few little tweaks here and there. However, it looks like a lot of monster categories are getting gap-filling stat blocks. A Death Knight, for example, is meant to command a whole host of undead. But your big boss Death Knight for your tier 3 party could be surrounded by forty skeletal minions, and they'd still pretty much all get wiped out by a single Fireball.
I've found that the Skeletal Knight from the Dragonlance adventure is a pretty solid one to use as a high-level minion, but it'll be nice to get some more in-between options for iconic monsters (for whatever reason, I really like using Skeletons - I think it's the basic undead creature that skews more toward "armies of a dark lord" more than "mindless horde.")
The video is nearly an hour, so there's a lot to cover. One thing is that a lot of gender-specific monsters are being shown as no longer so exclusive - male Medusas, Hags, and Dryads were all showcased. As we saw in Scions of Elemental Evil, we also now have a very interesting change to the Succubus and Incubus. As imagined, these are no longer simply the female and male equivalents of one another, but are both available in both (or all, rather) genders, but here the Succubus is more of the threat on the physical plane while the Incubus is more of a haunter of dreams - and in fact, they're really the same fiend, able to swap which kind they are on a long rest. (Hey, is Pyramid Head from Silent Hill essentially an Incubus in this case? I don't know because I never played that game, but I was aware that it was the only masculine monster.)
There are also some changes to creature types. Gnolls, for example, are now fully just Fiends (actually much like those in Flee, Mortals!), which really hammers home that Gnolls are not just "hyena people" the way that Aarakocra are bird people or Tortles are turtle people. I'd be tempted to have a genuine hyena people who have to deal with the fact that people think they're Gnolls as a plot.
More transformative, the humble Goblin, perhaps the most iconic and classic "starter monster" in D&D, will now be considered Fey. This is actually pretty interesting - it makes it a little easier to justify Goblins as a kind of dangerous pest, perhaps side-stepping some moral questions of whether they're actually a marginalized people (though... that's a whole can of worms) but I also think really gives us a perfect "rank-and-file" fey creature we can use in just about any Feywild or fairy-centric story. As a kid, I always thought the aesthetic of Maleficent's castle from the Disney Sleeping Beauty was super cool, and her weird little minions would certainly fit as goblins. I'm curious to see if they'll do another reprint of playable Goblins as a species with the updated creature type (yes, the most recent reprint was in Monsters of the Multiverse, but we got new Aasimar, Goliaths, and Orcs in the PHB, so it's certainly possible - a part of me wishes they were bolder with creature types, such as making Goliaths giants, Dragonborn dragons, Aasimar into Celestials, and Tieflings into Fiends - though these latter two might be a little harder given things like Divine Sense and other spells and abilities that affect these creature types).
One preview we got was for Cyclopes (the plural of Cyclops, pronounced, I believe, as "sy-clo-peez,") who are given a little more of an identity as kind of mystic seers. The classic Cyclops is given a slightly different name (no longer just "Cyclops") and is still largely a melee brute, but they can knock you prone if they hit you (no save) and they also have a recharged reaction that imposes disadvantage on an attack against them while granting them advantage against the target. Still fairly simple, but it at least gives the Cyclops a bit of a more specific identity than that of any other huge brawler. There's also a new Cyclops Seer (or Diviner?) that is a CR 10 magic-using Cyclops that leans further into their divinatory powers. In my larger Spelljammer setting (that includes my primary homebrew world) there's an interstellar empire of giants, and I think Cyclopes will probably play a fascinating role in their society as kind of respected but also kind of feared mystics (especially since the Storm Giants at the top of that society are already considered mystical seers - so perhaps the Cyclopes are like speakers of contradictory truths to the prophecies of the Storm Giant sages).
The art for the monsters is also quite interesting - evidently they decided to be less dedicated to a singular art style and are embracing whatever is right for the right monster - some of the fiend illustrations are really cool and frightening. I honestly haven't used a ton of fiends in my campaigns, but I feel like it's pretty important to ensure that they're a stakes-raising presence - as embodiments of pure evil, they need to feel like they're going to be especially nasty, especially shocking in their cruelty, and probably tough to fight.
As suggested in the DMG, there are many new "titan" stat blocks that are meant to be potential final bosses for campaigns. Also, to my great joy, the Kraken actually looks like a giant cephalopod, rather than some kind of reptile-fish thing (personally, I've always liked the idea that you never actually see the central body of a kraken - just an enormous tangle of tentacles). We got some illustrations of the Colossus (the Construct titan).
I think the really important thing about the 2025 Monster Manual is that this is the final piece of the 2024 5E puzzle. Generally speaking, in most cases I think classes have gotten more powerful than they were in their 2014 iterations. In many cases, this is simply because some quality-of-life issues were fixed - like how a Devotion Paladin's Sacred Weapon was always frustrating because it more or less forced a Paladin to waste their first turn in combat to activate it, which would mean it was probably not worth it in the long run.
However, despite the broad buffs (the Paladin, I admit, might actually be slightly less powerful thanks to the Divine Smite changes) I don't think the power level for player characters was raised all that much (the Monk got an enormous buff, but they also had a long way to catch up). However, the monsters in the Monster Manual are looking a lot tougher. And between that and the DMG's encounter-building guidance, which skews for much tougher fights, I actually think we might be looking at a harder overall game.
And I'm curious to see how that works out. Feats, for example, are no longer an optional feature - but does this mean that if you aren't taking some big damage-boosting feat like Great Weapon Master or Dual Wielder that you'll not be putting out enough damage to keep up?
As always, it will be up to DMs to moderate the difficulty. The adventure I'm running in my high-level campaign is built such that the party can, in theory, get through the dungeon they're about to enter (they're in the building, but the dungeon is specifically one department of said guild headquarters) in one day... though it's a bit skewed. I'm using Flee, Mortals! for its "encounters per day" guidance, but the new DMG's encounter-building guidance - meaning that the, like, 5 "low" difficulty encounters are probably way more than the Flee, Mortals system is built for. That's fine, though, as I want to make it very clear to the party that they can retreat and regroup, like a classic dungeon delve (there are a few random encounters that will pop up if they do rest, but these will be trivial difficulty - just enough to put a little pressure on them). Still, I'm going to see how they do, and how many of these encounters they can get through without taking a long rest. They're also level 17, so I feel like I'm allowed and even obligated to put some really tough challenges to them.
But I'll have to see how these tougher monsters feel, and might need to readjust some of my assumptions. For ten years, 5E has generally been considered too easy at high levels, and even medium levels. We'll have to see if that's still the case.
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