Dungeons & Dragons Releases Surprise Unearthed Arcana Focused on New Bastion System

Dungeons & Dragons is testing a new bastion system, which allows players to create and customize their own strongholds. Today, the D&D Design Team revealed a brand new Unearthed Arcana, which focuses primarily on a new bastion system that will appear in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. This new system allows players to create and customize a bastion, either jointly with other player characters as a party stronghold or individually as a player character's home. The bastion system is meant to be accessed starting at Level 5 and allows players to spend gold to add a combination of basic and special facilities that can be run passively by hirelings and followers. 

Each special facility has its own ability that is usually activated by giving the facility a specific command. Special facilities range from arcane studies to smithies to war rooms and provide a variety of perks ranging from the ability to create potions to harvesting fruits that bestow the benefits of a lesser restoration spell on the person who eats it to training and arming hirelings. Each special facility also generates Bastion Points, which can be spent on magic items (subject to the DM.) The system also comes with Bastion Events that can be used as adventure hooks or ways to engage the employees of the barracks in different ways. 

The UA also includes a number of revisions to several cantrips, with True Strike now utilizing a player's spellcasting ability instead of Strength or Dexterity and Shocking Grasp now preventing use of opportunity attacks instead of all reactions. These cantrips primarily focus less-used cantrips with the aim of better balancing them when the rules revision comes out next year.

You can check out the full rules revision here. 

Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Core Rulebook Changes Explained

Originally called One D&D, the 2024 Core Rulebooks are an upcoming set of revisions to the three main rulebooks used to play Dungeons & Dragons. To date, Wizards of the Coast has released seven playtests mostly focused on the Player's Handbook, with many of the changes focusing on better balancing certain classes and subclasses or tweaking spells. While at one point the playtests seemed to suggest bigger changes were in store for Dungeons & Dragons, the 2024 rulebooks are now being described as revisions rather than a more radical change. Most importantly, the 2024 rulebooks will still be for Fifth Edition, the popular version of Dungeons & Dragons that's been in use since 2014.