All right, if you were wondering when all of the new core rulebooks were going to come out, today on a post at D&D Beyond, we've now got official release dates. Additionally, the new high-level adventure book, Vecna: Eve of Ruin, the anthology Quests from the Infinite Staircase, and a historical retrospective, The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, 1970-1977, have all gotten release dates as well.
First out will be Vecna: Eve of Ruin, which comes out May 21st.
This will be a big adventure book (256 pages - comparable to Tomb of Annhilation and other adventure books we've gotten) and starts at level 10, taking players all the way to level 20. The adventure appears to be a big setting-hopping one, with parts that take place in the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberron, Dragonlance, Ravenloft, and between worlds in Spelljammer.
The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons will be out on June 18th, and is a history of the making of the game by Jon Peterson, and includes an early draft of the game rules by Gargy Gygax from 1973.
Quests from the Infinite Staircase comes out July 16th, and is an anthology in the tradition of Tales from the Yawning Portal, updating old adventures that go from level 1-13.
The 2024 Player's Handbook comes out on September 17th.
The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide comes out November 12th,
And finally, the "2024" Monster Manual actually comes out February 18th of 2025 - a year and two days from now.
So, a couple surprises: I think most of us had assumed that all three core rulebooks would be out this year to coincide with the anniversary, but it looks like the Monster Manual will take a bit more time. I'm also a little surprised given that I'd assumed that the Monster Manual would come out before the DMG.
Still, there had been some concern over the last year that the D&D team would be too rushed to get the new core rulebooks out in a good state of quality. However, with seven months left for them to get the PHB done, I think we're actually looking pretty good. The big public playtest is done, it seems, and now it's all in internal testing and polishing, and I think seven months is plenty to get the PHB in good working order.
Because this isn't a full edition reset, of course, the lack of a new monster manual from the get-go is less of a problem. Especially with Monsters of the Multiverse providing a lot of monsters that conform to the new design standards, it's not as if people trying to run things with the new PHB are going to be completely lacking stuff to run the game with.
Still, the new MM is going to miss the 2024 window, which, paradoxically, I think is a good sign - if it means that the team has decided to take the time they need to get it done rather than trying to fit it into this symbolic but ultimately somewhat arbitrary time frame.
It is a little sad that it'll be over a full year before we get our hands on the new Monster Manual.
I am excited for Eve of Ruin - while I don't run published adventures, I find them good sources of inspiration, and I'm particularly eager to see the kind of content they have for tier 4 parties (given that I'm running a campaign with tier 4 characters now!) I'll confess I'm less excited about the anthology. And the history book - it's not for me (for one thing, I feel like every time I learn something new about Gary Gygax I find myself less eager to honor him as the creator of the game... kind of seems like the sort of person you'd like to consign to history).
With the core rulebooks not being fully complete until 2025, this does actually cause the game to butt up against the other big RPG release I've been looking forward to, which is MCDM's as-yet-unnamed RPG. (Part of me really thinks at this point they should make it something with the same initials: "Masters of Combat, Domains of Magic," or something like that.
Still, let's be honest: the PHB is the most important of the three books, and that's the one that is coming first, which is a good thing. Usually the fall is when we get the year's big adventure book, but not so this year.
I'll be curious to see what the cadence of releases is going forward, but this is everything announced so far.
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