Wizards of the Coast releases a new D&D video as it approaches the new year to talk about its updates for Dungeons & Dragons. The RPG’s new ‘Heroes of Undarin’ adventure is still incoming, and we’re now starting to learn more about how the new Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks that’ll follow it in 2024 are shaping up.
As Dungeons & Dragons expends past the Year of the Dragon in its current ongoing campaign known as Undarin, the new Dungeons & Dragons content will take a look at the results of the actions your adventurers have taken during the Year of the Dragon campaign, offering a different perspective to what’s come before.
Dungeons & Dragons director of global business strategy Jeremy Crawford sits down with D&D content director Todd Kendrick to talk about the past year of playtests and what they’re hoping to bring us with the new Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks in 2024.
The real update, in my opinion, is that Wizards of the Coast is overhauling Dungeons & Dragons to bring it in line with what Crawford calls “the current state of the art” as the D&D team hopes to keep 5th Edition alive for another decade. The new rulebooks are about more than just new races and classes, but are instead rooted in a new way of presenting and understanding the game’s rules.
“What we’re hoping to accomplish with these new rulebooks is to update 5th Edition to what I’m calling the ‘current state of the art’ to make sure that D&D is as good as it can be for another decade,” says Crawford. This means the rulebooks are about more than just new rules, it’s about making the rules as clear as possible, removing ambiguity and ensuring that every rule is presented simply.
I’m sure some people will be curious whether they’ll need all new rules to keep on playing their 5th Edition games and the answer is no, and that the new Dungeons & Dragons books will “be playable 100% independent of all prior books.” The new books will be completely backwards compatible with Fifth Edition adventures that you already own, and will be loaded with annotations so you can understand how and where everything fits together.
There are lots of other little tidbits of information, including that the team is moving away from using the term “race” and will instead be using “species.” There will also be a brand new core rulebook that focuses on monsters that turns the previous Monster Manual into the Monster Codex, which is filled with all new builds.
Lastly, the video explains that “the new core rulebooks are not replacements, they are additions.” To help signify this, the core rulebooks will only include the year if they need to differentiate between the 2014 and 2o24 releases. This is because Wizards of the Coast sees the new core rulebooks as the default rather than a distinct release, the rules for which all begin in the Year of the Dragon.
The video ends with Kendrick reflecting on how Crawford talks about this all as “being real,” and expressing how big these changes are for Dungeons & Dragons. “This is not like an entirely new edition, this is about updating 5th Edition for the future,” says Kendrick. The video closes with Kendrick and Crawford both emphasizing that these changes are meant to be “beneficial,” as opposed to invalidating the 5th Edition libraries that people already have.
This video is just the beginning of what looks set to be a very big year for Dungeons & Dragons, with the new “Heroes of Undarin” adventure due to arrive later in the season, followed by a new core rulebook edition. Make sure you keep an eye on everything coming to Dungeons & Dragons by checking out our guide to the upcoming Undirin season.