So, I'm cheap and try to avoid subscribing to too many things (I probably should subscribe to Dropout at this point, but oh well) so I don't have the text of the recent Game Informer article, which I believe is behind a paywall, but which gives a preview to the upcoming D&D core rulebooks.
Generally I've been referring to these as the 2024 Core Rulebooks, but as we learned a few months ago, the Monster Manual won't be coming out until next year. Still, between Flee, Mortals!, recent monster books like Bigby's, the quite expansive Monsters of the Multiverse, and other sources, I think I can manage to wait. The Player's Handbook is obviously the most exciting thing, and that one comes first.
But there's goodies in all of the books.
All three books will be massive tomes - each weighing in at 384 pages (I'm certain this was no coincidence - we saw that with the Spelljammer set all three books in that were 64 pages, even if at least one of them really deserved to be about four or five times as long. 384 I think is plenty even for such foundational books - I believe this is longer than any of the 2014 releases).
But now let's talk about the highlights from each book:
Player's Handbook:
A lot of the changes to classes and species (the new name for Race - a somewhat clinical but certainly precise term that I think wisely sheds the baggage of "race" as a term) I've already gone over here in this blog, but we do get some confirmations: the Goliath and Orc are both being added to the core list of choices, along with the Aasimar, which was not named in the playtest. Early on, they were experimenting with animal-headed humanoids called Ardlings to be the Upper Planar equivalents of the Lower-Planar Tieflings (riffing on established Celestials like Guardinals and Hound Archons) but the Aasimar were clearly just sitting there as the more obvious counterpart. I believe the plan is still to remove Half-Orcs and Half-Elves, instead allowing characters with mixed heritage to simply choose one species to represent them mechanically (and thus no longer privileging human/elf and human/orc hybrids). In other words, Half-Elves and Half-Orcs can still be part of your game worlds and options for your players, but you can also have, say, a half-dwarf/half-Halfling or a Tiefling/Goliath or an Orc/Gnome - you just pick which species' traits you closer embody (though I did create a character backstory for an Aasimar with a Tiefling wife whose children are just ordinary humans).
Each of the 12 core classes (sorry Artificers) will be present, each getting one big full-page piece of art to depict the class broadly, and then each class gets four subclasses (and upgrade for all but the Cleric and Wizard) that each have their own illustration, meaning 60 pieces of art for all the classes and subclasses. I don't know if we have the finalized list of subclasses, but there are some brand-new ones like the World Tree Barbarian, College of Dance Bard, and Circle of the Sea Druid.
Setting-wise, the PHB is going to be agnostic, intending not to favor one setting (such as the Forgotten Realms) over another, but will still have references to established settings like the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Planescape, and perhaps others.
The book no longer begins with character creation (though I think that will be toward the front) and instead has an extensive chapter of sample play and basic rules explanations. There will be a rules glossary that includes clear explanations of things like cover, jumping, and other things that one often finds hard to find in the 2014 PHB. One thing of note for those poor neglected artificers is that there will be a section here on crafting, with specific nods to making potions and spell scrolls, as well as specific uses for tools.
Evidently art is a big part of the book, as additionally every weapon type is going to get its own depiction (probably useful to show how a Halberd is different from a Glaive) and the Weapon Mastery will also be making it in there (which didn't seem to be at risk, but still good to confirm it - also, it finally makes a clear distinction between Glaives and Halberds mechanically!). There will also apparently be a lot of art depicting spells being cast, including a lot of the characters who created such spells, like Tasha casting her Hideous Laughter.
Dungeon Master's Guide
The DMG is always the core book that has to work to justify itself - frankly I think that it was useful when I first started running the game, but the new one is intended to have much clearer uses, including, shockingly, a chapter about literally what you need to do to run this game.
Here, while the book will give guidance on creating settings and does not push you to embrace a particular established setting, they provide Greyhawk as the template upon which to build a campaign setting (the argument being that it's a world that's a little less fleshed out than, say, Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, and thus easier for DMs to create their own stuff for it).
The DMG will also include a "Lore Glossary" like the PHB's Rules Glossary, giving you information about various notable proper nouns from D&D lore.
The Bastions system appears in the new DMG as an optional set of rules governing the player characters' home bases, which is intended to give players a bit of their own world-building opportunities and something to care about back home.
I haven't seen any mention of it, but personally I hope we get an updated and revised Dungeon Master's Workshop chapter, because I've had great success in implementing its monster-creation rules in building my own creatures that don't totally fit with published ones (for some reason my latest obsession has been with malevolent ambulatory vending machines as a low-level enemy in some surreal modern-set campaign).
I'm eager to see how it's written and set up, because it would be cool if it were the book a DM has behind their screen that serves as a useful reference for more than just magic items.
Monster Manual:
Well, the big thing is just more stat blocks. But what I find encouraging is their approach to monster families.
They mentioned that they're aware of how certain monsters that only have one or two associated stat blocks (Vampires, for example - which we'll get to in a moment) can sometimes feel hard to use because there's a good chance your players are too low-level to deal with them and could just get squashed, or they're high-enough level that they can't really pose a threat. So, they're taking some of these iconic monsters and expanding their families. Vampires were used as an example: for low-level players, they have some kind of nascent vampire, kind of a humanoid still in the process of becoming one, who could serve as an appropriate challenge for players who aren't ready to deal with the real thing. But then, for high-level players who could wipe the floor with the standard Vampire in the 2014 MM, there are things called I believe Nightbringers, who are like super-vampires and far scarier.
It does look like big, high-CR monsters are definitely something they're looking at here - among those mentioned are Archhags, elemental juggernauts, construct colossi, and something called the Blob of Annihilation, which is a Gelatinous Cube big enough to eat a whole town.
It also looks like various types of NPCs - pirates, wizards, bandits, etc., - are getting more fleshed-out families, which as I understand it means that you'll be able to use them in bigger level ranges. The game does start to run short of humanoid adversaries at high CRs, so this sounds very welcome.
General Thoughts:
I think WotC earned a lot of ill will at the start of last year with the whole OGL crisis, and paradoxically, the massive success of 5th Edition starting in 2014 has, I think, made a lot of people resistant to a revision of the game. But having gone through all the playtests and surveys, and seeing their approach to the game, I think most people who get their hands on the new books are going to probably be happier with the way the game plays and feels than they are now - which is saying something.
Now, what I'm curious to see is the degree to which the books support creativity. The core rulebooks of 5th Edition led me to the creation of what is probably the most extensively fleshed-out fantasy world I've ever conceived. It's perhaps not as original as my Otherworld setting, but knowing that I could have players delving into the deep history and strata of archaeology and magical agendas pushed me to come up with some ideas I think are really cool.
The great thing about D&D and tabletop RPGs in general, in my opinion, is the degree to which players can create and invent things. Indeed, I've been toying with this idea of creating a campaign on an "Endless Horizon" world, where players don't just come up with their own character's backstory, but an entire land and country that they've come from, all in a world that remains mysterious and unexplored from the players' characters' perspective. But even running in an established (albeit primarily established in a different game) setting like Ravnica, the degree to which I've created my own history and lore for that world has been an absolute joy (the players spent about five or six sessions in Agryem, Ravnica's land of the dead that was, for a time, just another neighborhood in the city-world, and I had a ton of fun turning it into a surreal shadow-realm utterly unsuited for living people to be there).
Something I worry about in terms of the direction that the game has gone has been a push toward doing things "their way," and stuff like the Planescape set feeling like it was mostly there to provide material for the packaged adventure (while it was far more substantial than the Spelljammer set, I really wish they would go back to the style of campaign setting book we got with Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which felt much more focused on inspiring DMs to come up with their own stories and ideas).
So again, I think it would be utterly tragic if there were not a revised version of the guidance on creating monsters and other such things. I'm happy to see Pistols and Muskets included in the PHB (for someone who abhors guns in real life, I really like having them in my fantasy games - blame Stephen King's Dark Tower series, I guess) but I hope we'll also see modern and futuristic weapons again in the new DMG, as we did in the 2014 one.
We are still a ways off from the releases here, but I am hyped to get my hands on them (and while I hope I can do this in a way that cuts in my local game store, these might be a physical/digital bundle because there's no way I don't want to have access to at least the PHB on D&D Beyond).
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