D&D Direct: 5.5E Dungeon Master’s Guide Preview – ‘100 Pages of Magic Items’
WotC offered up a look ahead at the new 5.5E Dungeon Master’s Guide during the D&D Direct. Magic items, old and new await!
Wizards of the Coast’s D&D Direct was today. During the course of their presentation they not only revealed upcoming titles, like a Dragon focused adventure anthology or two campaign setting books for the Forgotten Realms, they also gave us a look at the upcoming new 5.5E Core Rulebooks.
Now we’ve seen a lot of the Player’s Handbook, which is due out in three weeks. But we haven’t seen inside the Dungeon Master’s Guide too terribly much. Until today, when we got a look at what to expect in the 5.5E Dungeon Master’s Guide. It seems inside the book are two wolves: advice for DMs and a whole lot of treasure.
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I’m personally excited to see the return of DM advice like “know your players.” As James Wyatt outlines in the D&D Direct video, the new book is a complete overhaul of the DMG as you might have once known it. It’s hard to really talk about things like “backwards compatibility” from outside of the Player’s Handbook perspective. But I don’t know how backwards compatible this book may well be—but I don’t know that it needs to be either.
“The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide is really a top to bottom rewrite of the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide. It is chock full of advice for Dungeon Masters old and new, for you to really take it and run with it.”
– D&D Direct
But it’s not just new rules for running the game. We know that the DMG will also feature Greyhawk as an example setting, along with guidance about how to build your own world, how to construct adventures and campaigns. The kind of stuff that you don’t really find a ton of in the old DMG, which had a set of extra rules that weren’t in the Player’s Handbook for some reason.
I’m curious to see what a “top to bottom rewrite” looks like. WotC relies most on the DM to give people the D&D experience. But whatever changes the DMG may have, one thing isn’t changing: the DMG as a magic item catalogue.
“There is a big fat honking treasures chapter in the DMG, which is not surprising to anybody who’s seen DMGs of old. We’ve got a hundred pages or so of magic items in the DMG, many of them are new, just so we have a very well rounded selection of magic items to choose from.”
– D&D Direct
Here we get a look at the treasure tables. We’ve seen a few of the magic items before:
This is a page showing off the Energy Bow from the D&D cartoon fame, as well as some of the other items you can expect to find. With 100 pages of magic items, there’s going to be a lot to choose from.
The new Dungeon Master’s Guide releases November 12th, 2024
