In Dungeons & Dragons‘ New Monster Manual, Bigger Means Better

Last year Dungeons & Dragons celebrated its 50th anniversary with the latest overhaul of its ruleset—not a brand new edition, as had been tradition in the past, but a reworking and refreshment of its fifth, a testament to just how far in reach and popularity the TTRPG had grown and entrenched itself since 5E began ten years prior. Both the updated Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide have operated on example: offering more ideas and scenarios to explain rules to experienced and new players and DMs alike. The Monster Manual by its nature has to have a different tact to fit into this philosophy: after all, it is a very large list of creatures big and small, non-threatening and world-ending. So to do so, it’s throwing down a proverbial gauntlet and showing you more and more ways to fling foes at your party.

And when the Monster Manual says more, it means more. “We took a look at the 2014 Monster Manual and were like ‘folks have been clamoring for for so much, we’ve got so many more ideas,'” Wes Schneider, principle game designer on D&D and co-lead on the new Monster Manual, told press at a recent conference discussing the new book. “We know so much more about this game and how we want to develop it—how can we improve the gameplay experience?”

© Wizards of the Coast

Schneider and his fellow co-lead on the Manual, D&D‘s principle rules designer Jeremy Crawford, had one simple idea: bigger. “One of the biggest goals for this new Monster Manual is just more: more of what everybody wants out of their monsters and their threats for their D&D games,” Schneider continued. “To that end, you’re going to see 85 new monsters throughout this book—this is going to be new critters, this is going to be things you’ve never seen before, but then this is also going to be incredible takes on some of your favorite monsters, giving you more versatility, more gameplay, more opportunities to use them.”

That means, for example, an Owlbear is no longer simply just an Owlbear. Among the 300 pages’ worth of creatures within, the Monster Manual will feature variants like Owlbears from the Feywild, primeval Owlbears, or Owlbears infused with eldritch magics. And some of those Owlbears are much, much nastier than others. “Something that the 2014 Monster Manual has somewhat of a dearth of is just great threats for high level play,” Schneider continued. “That’s not going to be a problem with the 2025 Monster Manual. You’re going to see more high level threats, big monsters, creatures for ending campaigns, for epic tier play.”

© Andrey Kuzinskiy/Wizards of the Coast

Like the relaunched Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide before it, the Monster Manual‘s refresh brought with it a chance to reorganize and restructure how its bestiary unloads information on any given player. The new book will be split into four distinct categories: an introductory section offering tips on how to incorporate any given monster into your campaign; the aforementioned 300 page glossary of creatures and stat blocks to use with them (using the new format from the Player’s Handbook); and two appendices, one of general animals you can expect to exist broadly across D&D‘s multiverse, and another grouping monsters into example groups to encourage DMs to connect a variety of monsters into play through logical connections across type or elemental affinity. And just like in the past books, this information has been restructured compared to the 2014 edition to more cleanly and logically lay out information to players (no more finding the Gelatinous Cube, a creature whose name famously starts with the letter “G,” under “O” for “Ooze”).

Not only will the new Monster Manual offer more varieties of classic opponent archetypes for more challenging combat applications, it’ll also offer tips and ideas for how to tailor them to create storytelling opportunities within your campaign. “These monsters are not about ‘here’s the lore, here’s the only way to play a gargoyle, here’s what you have to do with this creature,'” Schneider said. “Every monster is a whole host of adventures—we want to really make these springboards for your adventures, for telling your stories, for doing different things. Throughout the book are little tables of idea generators… every one of those is an adventure idea that DMs can take and build into whatever they please, or inspire them.”

© Johan Grenier/Wizards of the Coast

But for all the flavor and variety on display, sometimes you just need a group of increasingly stronger heroes to have increasingly stronger creatures to beat up and take their stuff. The new Monster Manual will not only feature more varieties of challenging opponents to put into campaigns—either through more high challenge rating stat blocks or by simply having more varieties of generic creature archetypes, from skeletons to cultists, that push players out of their comfort zone and into new tactical approaches—it will also feature a new swath of high-tier threats that represent the deadliest samples of any given D&D monster line. These will form a major part of the Monster Manual‘s desire to expand the capacity and variety of what it can offer DMs to throw at stronger groups, from revenants capable of haunting an entire building rather than just a corpse, to oozing blobs roiling with the magical energies of a god’s skull floating around in their goopy mass.

“In the 2014 Monster Manual, we had ancient dragons [to represent all dragons], we had the Tarrasque for monstrosities—we had a few other epic monsters for some of the other creature types. But as we were building this new bestiary, we looked at some of the creature types that were lacking an apex threat—basically, friends and foes of the Tarrasque,” Crawford explained. These new “apex threats,” as Crawford calls them, will all come with a raft of special mechanics that make them stand out as dangerous threats (one example given was for the Elemental Cataclysm, a giant creature that can invoke random environmental disasters during combat), as well as sets of Legendary Actions that they can use to push their threat even further. But in-keeping with the new Monster Manual‘s approach to both more being more and the wider core rulebook’s updates to streamlining information, their fearsome stat blocks won’t be as intimidating to DMs as the creatures themselves are to the poor party they’re being thrown at.

“In the past, DMs had to look up the costs of how much each Legendary Action cost to use in each round of play—they no longer have to do that,” Crawford explained. “The DM simply knows this monsters has a certain number of Legendary Actions to use each round, and can then pick from the list…the selection process is going to be easier, and we’ve also ensured that no matter which combination of actions you select, this creature is going to stay on its challenge rating and be terrifying for your player characters.”

© Chris Rahn/Wizards of the Coast

The more things change, the more some stay the same, however. For all the new creatures big and small, the previously teased Tarrasque will remain the biggest D&D bad in the new Monster Manual, with the highest challenge rating… but to do so, it’s had to rise to the occasion. “We wanted to preserve the Tarrasque’s place as the apex threat of the entire book, but to make that a reality rather than simply something communicated by a CR number, the new Tarrasque is more terrifying than any version of the Tarrasque in the game’s history,” Crawford teased.

“If anyone has experienced a group of player characters who have attempted to just attack one at long range and think ‘oh this thing can’t do anything to us,’ just meet the new Tarrasque. It’s blowing up buildings at long range, shutting down teleportation around it, and a whole lot more. A battle against a Tarrasque [will be] where it isn’t just the player characters who are in danger, but the entire environment around this titanic creature.”

You’ve got some time to prepare, at least. The updated Monster Manual will receive a tiered release throughout February 2025—with early access for D&D Beyond master tier subscribers and select physical stores starting February 4, Beyond hero tier subscribers on February 11, and more widely from February 18.

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