Dungeons & Dragons Announces Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse

Dungeons & Dragons has announced a new rulebook called Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. This new rulebook was announced at the "Future of D&D" panel today at D&D Celebration, a streaming event held to celebrate the release of the new adventure book The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. The new book is a collection of content from previously released D&D rulebooks, including 30 playable races found outside of the Player's Handbook. Also included in the book are 250 monster statblocks, many of which were revised and streamlined in response to player feedback. The book will be released as part of an upcoming Rules Expansion Gift Set released in January 2022 and then as a separate book later in the year. The gift set is available to pre-order on Amazon now. 

The book will contain several revisions made in response to player feedback. One of the biggest changes is how spellcasting NPCs and monsters are presented. Instead of having traditional spell slots and access to spells that can only be found in another book, spellcasters will have Spellcasting actions and actions that mimic spellcasting. One example given was a "Holy Fire" action that would deal damage instead of a DM needing to prep to cast one of several potential damage-dealing spells. This change was made to better reflect a creature's CR instead of limiting their use due to prep constraints. 

The book will also notably have its monsters alphabetized instead of divided by subsets. 

The new book announcement was one of two major announcements in the panel. Wizards of the Coast also announced that they were working on a new "evolution" of Dungeons & Dragons for its 50th anniversary in 2024. This evolution will feature new core rulebooks but will be backwards compatible with existing 5th Edition content, drawing comparisons to the release of the revised 3.5 rules back in 2003 that tweaked D&D's Third Edition ruleset.

Other major announcements included confirmation that more adventure anthologies were in the work, and that the design team was working on three "classic" campaign settings. Two of these "classic" campaign settings will be released in 2022 and a third will be released in 2023.

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