New rules, setting guide, adventures, magic items and more!
Wizards of the Coast have just dropped a load of information on the upcoming Dungeon Master’s Guide for D&D 2024 and it sounds stuffed to the brim with all sorts of DM goodness!
Below I’ve gone over everything revealed about the new DM’s Guide along with core differences between this and the 2014 edition.
If you’d rather watch the reveal video, I’ve embedded it below:
When does the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide release?
The full release is on the 12th November, however, if you happen to be a hero or legend tier subscriber on D&D Beyond, then you’ll get access a little earlier. Hero tier subscribers will get digital access on the 5th November while legend tier subscribers will get access on the 30th October.
What’s included in the new DM’s Guide?
Quite a lot! As with the Player’s Handbook, this is 64 pages bigger than the previous DM’s Guide. It’s crammed full of the expected advice for DMs, but also comes packed with an entire campaign setting in the form of Greyhawk, tracking sheets, loads of magic items, 5 short adventures, 15 maps, a fold out map of Greyhawk including both the setting and city, rules for things like traps, curses and all new rules for bastions. And that’s not even everything:
| Feature | 2024 DM’s Guide | 2014 DM’s Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | 384 | 320 |
| Magic items | 400+ | 302 |
| Settings | 1 | 0 |
| Adventures | 5 | 0 |
| Maps | 15 | 8 |
Greyhawk setting guide
The 2024 DMG aims to give DMs the tools they need to create an adventure. To enable this, it gives an entire setting guide in the form of Greyhawk.
Greyhawk is the original setting first created for D&D and includes many famous and well-known characters from the multiverse. The likes of Iggwilv, Mordenkainen and Bigby all had their origins here.
As was true of the original Greyhawk, its lore, locations and characters were simply the backdrop to highly customisable adventures. DMs have always been free to fill in the gaps and make the world and lore their own. This makes it the ideal setting for the DMG where Wizards of the Coast want to grant the tools for DMs to build their own adventures.
5 example adventures
In keeping with the theme of aiding DMs to create their own adventures, the DMG will now include 5 short adventures for characters of various levels. These adventures are specifically designed to show DMs a format for how they might prepare their own adventures. This means that they won’t look like the campaign books we’re used to. Instead, they’ll be half a page long, including key plot points and NPCs. Just enough information for DMs that know their own world, to run their adventure. Just like you might prepare a homebrew adventure for your own games.
Maps
The DMG will come with 15 maps. Some of these will relate to the adventures featured in the DMG while others will be more generic maps. The idea behind these is to provide maps that can be used and re-used in many different situations for a consistently useful resource.
There will even be a double-sided pull out map of Greyhawk. One side will be a map of the world, and the other will be a map of the city of Greyhawk.
Tracking sheets
There’s a lot of stuff that DMs need to track, so now the DMG will include sheets that can be printed and used to track various things. This includes the likes of initiative order, session story beats, magic items given and more. Most importantly, they also include pictures of baby monsters on them!
Lore glossary
One of the challenges of being a DM is knowing all the vast lore associated with the D&D multiverse. The lore glossary is there to explain who and what all these bits of lore are, from better known things like the planes of existence, to more obscure individuals like the Raven Queen.
Chris Perkins confirmed that the default setting for D&D moving forward is simply the multiverse. This means a shift from the Forgotten Realms as a default, but also means players and DMs becoming familiar with the lore of all sorts of worlds and characters. And this is where the lore glossary will be extremely useful.
Magic items
The largest part of the 2024 DMG will be dedicated to magic items. There will be over 400 of these, more than in the previous DMG, and all magic items have been refreshed and improved.
For example, many magic items are more flexible now. They gave the example of the flame tongue sword, which has options for other weapons to have a flame tongue too. They’ve also worked to fill gaps in the magic item repertoire.
With the multiversal nature of D&D 2024 there’s also been an effort to ensure there are magic items suitable for all sorts of settings. Essentially, this means that it’s easier to fashion magic items after the needs of your party.
There are also more magic items dedicated to famous characters that wielded those items, like from the 1980s D&D cartoon. This includes things like the energy bow wielded by Ranger Hank.
Crafting magic items
While the Player’s Handbook contains rules for crafting more ordinary objects, the DMG contains rules for crafting magical items. So you have a framework for having a party wizard craft their own magical item.
Bastions
5e hasn’t really had any rules to help players create their own base of operations, but D&D 2024 attempts to rectify this. Based loosely on the stronghold rules of previous editions, bastions are an optional rule DMs can use with players that allows them to create a base of operations.
The rules allow for bastions to be created from level 5 onwards (a point when you might actually have enough gold and experience to buy/build and run your own bastion). Bastions are active even when players aren’t in them, and allow for you to have various activities run by hirelings while you’re away. They can be used to harvest resources or craft items, and when you’re there, you can use the things in your bastion for your own purposes too.
This makes bastions a great out of session activity for players. They might decide to design the layout of their bastion or determine what to provide their hirelings. This makes it a great way to engage players between sessions. Will they create a fortress, a dungeon maze, or something completely different? The choice is up to them.
Other rules
As you’d expect, there’s a whole toolkit of rules dedicated to helping DMs know how to handle various different situations. This might be common things like how to run traps or what to do if you cause a total party kill, to rarer things like how siege weapons work or what happens if a meteor lands on your players (well their characters anyway, it won’t help you with the emotional loss of meteors falling on your actual players).
How to be a DM
The new DMG is designed to help DMs of all levels. The previous DMG didn’t really do enough to guide new DMs into how to be a dungeon master.
The first sections are dedicated to these basics with crucial explanations like how to setup a table, what the dungeon master’s screen is for and how to gather players for a game.
But it goes beyond the basics too. The book is also a resource for how to be a great DM. There will be information about how to make games fun for all your players, how to get to a plot point without having players feel like they’re being railroaded and even things like how to introduce foreshadowing into your games. The hope here is that even experienced dungeon masters will recognise things that they can introduce into their games that they hadn’t considered before.
That’s everything we know that’s coming to the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide. How does it sound? Let me know in the comments below.
Spotlight on D&D 2024
All the latest updates on what’s changing with the 2024 rules revision.
