Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
It's an exciting time for fans who play Dungeons & Dragons, and the rest of you who will. A brand new Monster Manual is finally here. This rounds out a trio of new sourcebooks making this a great time for new fans looking to jump on board, existing players looking for something new, and for Dungeon masters looking for more organized reference materials.
We don't like to think about it, but it has been over ten years already since the last Monster Manual, and a lot has changed in this new edition. It's bigger, for one thing. This 2024 edition spans a whopping 384 pages covering over 500 monsters, with new art and updated stat blocks.
One considerable change is the reordering of contents with a tighter emphasis on alphabetical order by monster name. It sounds so obvious that a new player might wonder how this could even be a change and what the organization was like before. For example, a reader looking for Gelatinous Cube will now find it alphabetically among other G names. Previously, a reader would have found it in the Os, as it is a type of Ooze. A new reader who didn't happen to already know that might have been quite baffled. This new edition does not assume such prior knowledge.
One's on the bottom, strong is he...
That said, it's not 100% alphabetical. There are still some monsters organized by group rather than name, but this applies only to variations of the same monster, not wholly different monsters. For example, you'll find Kobold Warrior and Winged Kobold on the same page. There's no need to flip pages to compare both versions of essentially the same creature.
For existing players who preferred having monsters grouped by type, don't despair. This new edition separately includes a series of potentially useful lists. In all, this edition lists Monsters A to Z, Monsters by Habitat, Monsters by Creature Type, Monsters by Group, and Monsters by Challenge Rating. So the tools are there, however one prefers to use them. It's your adventure.
The 2024 Monster Manual is available right now at D&D Beyond, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at local game stores. At D&D Beyond it is available in digital, physical (for those of us who need to feel real pages), or both. Alternatively, you can purchase the entire 2024 rulebook trilogy in one bundle. This massive set includes the 2024 Player’s Handbook, 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide, the 2024 Monster Manual, all in physical and digital form, as well as some exclusive digital bonuses including a Dragons of D&D digital art book.
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