2024 marks a full 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons, and Wizards of the Coast plans to celebrate the anniversary with several new projects and publications that celebrate the game’s history.
While Wizards has teased the anniversary celebration for a while now, a Dec. 1 panel at PAX Unplugged 2023 provided one of the first explicit looks at what’s ahead for D&D in the coming year. The panel featured senior designers Amanda Hamon and James Wyatt, with “system architects” Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford.
Hamon began the panel with a discussion of the designers’ favorite pre-made adventures from the last 50 years of D&D. This included the original Tomb of Horrors; Keith Baker’s 2004 book Eberron: Shadows of the Last War; this year’s Lovecraftian-themed campaign The Shattered Obelisk; and Gary Gygax’s 1980 module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, a famous adventure for the original edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons that was set inside a crashed starship full of hostile robots. Crawford noted that Expedition in particular is proof that “D&D has always been fundamentally weird.”
That ended up being part of the panel’s overall theme, as Wizards’ plans for D&D’s 50th anniversary involve revisiting many of the classic settings and modules from the game’s publication history. This includes Descent Into the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (pronounced “soj-can”), which serves as a sequel to Gygax’s 1982 module The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.
The original Tsojcanth, which Gygax wrote as a tournament adventure in the mid-’70s, is set in the Greyhawk campaign setting. The players were sent into the mountains in search of a stash of treasure left behind by the late archmage Iggwilv, a.k.a. Tasha. Descent, like its predecessor, is meant to be a short, difficult adventure that can be completed in a single session.
Another classic D&D antagonist is planned to reappear in 2024 with Vecna: Eve of Ruin. Vecna was originally an evil wizard who became undead, and eventually became a lesser god of secrets in the Greyhawk setting; you may also know his name from Critical Role or “Stranger Things.”
Eve of Ruin is planned as a full campaign, which plays out over the course of five in-game years and can take characters all the way to level 20. The same campaign was teased to “go back to D&D’s earliest days,” with appearances by several more of the game’s oldest signature characters. This would presumably include some of the OG wizards of the setting, like Otiluke, Tenser, Melf, and/or Mordenkainen.
More classic adventures are said to be included in Quests from the Infinite Staircase, a new anthologythat follows up on Monte Cook’s 1998 Planescape book, Tales from the Infinite Staircase. Quests will feature several “updated classic adventures,” roughly joined together by a new cosmic force.
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Finally, Wizards plans to publish a new non-fiction book, The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, 1970-1976. Coming in at over 500 pages long, Making will feature design documents and reproduced correspondence from Gygax, his co-writer Dave Arneson, and the other artists and designers who contributed to the original 1974 edition of D&D.
The biggest news for D&D in 2024, however, is its big rules update. For the last couple of years, Wizards has worked on revising, updating, and reorganizing the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual, as part of an initiative that was originally announced in 2022 under the working title “One D&D.”
Both Perkins and Crawford have been careful to note that this isn’t a sixth edition of the game, or even a “5.5.” Instead, it’s meant to be fully compatible with the version of the game that people are playing right now, with multiple new rules, updates, and options.
This includes a new facet of character creation, Backgrounds, which gives a character stat bonuses and an exclusive feat depending on where and how they grew up. This largely replaces the old mechanic from earlier editions of D&D, where characters got stat bonuses/penalties based strictly upon their chosen race. In addition, the 2024 PHB features a full 48 subclasses.
The 2024 DMG is better organized, in order to make it easier for new and old DMs to use, and contains both a full campaign setting and several pre-written adventures. It also contains a number of new magic items, including official stats for the various magic items used by the characters in the old Saturday morning Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show. (For some reason, Wizards has gone all in on that show lately; the characters made a cameo in Honor Among Thieves, are all in Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms,and are featured on the cover of the 2022 starter set Dragons of Stormwreck Isle.)
Finally, the Monster Manual features over 500 creatures that you can slot into your game as antagonists, with brand-new art for each and a new set of generic stat blocks. This includes several new monsters that are meant to pose a threat to high-level parties, with Crawford mentioning names like “arch-hag” and “blob of annihilation.” Previously existing monsters have also received a balance pass, with many of them apparently getting a damage buff.
No release dates or other information was offered at PAX Unplugged. This was, in Wizards’ words, a “teaser” of what’s to come for Dungeons & Dragons, Year 50.
