The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide out now!

A Dungeon Master is called upon to play many roles in a Dungeons & Dragons group: storyteller, referee, judge (jury, and executioner too, if I’m being honest), lead snack imbiber (’cause not bribing your DM before you play is a big mistake!), and chief cat herder (because everyone knows that scheduling is truly the big bad in a Dungeons & Dragons game).

Well, our beloved DMs got some support in their quest in the form of the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide! It is an essential guide for running a D&D game, providing rules, advice, and inspiration for creating their own thrilling and unique games.

This new and weighty tome (coming in at 381 pages, nearly 60 more than the 2014 version, though as I noted in my PHB review here the font seems bigger and easier to read in the 2024 books) includes more than 400 magic items, 15 new maps, and so much more. Importantly, for me, it also the Fifth Edition introduction of Greyhawk, the original D&D world, absent from the lore since the third edition of the game ended almost 20 years ago.

As someone who was half-raised in Greyhawk, I’m thrilled by its inclusion. I haven’t pulled the full-colour map out of the book yet (and I may not because it sounds terrifying), but if I do, I’m framing it and putting it up on my wall. I can’t tell you how many hundreds of hours I spent traversing this world during my formative years, and if you’ll forgive me, I’m a bit emotional seeing it in print again.

General impressions

Like the 2024 PHB, the layout is magnificent. It’s easy to follow, well laid out, and is attractive to the eye. It’s not that the previous book was poorly laid out. Not at all. But the new one is just so good, it’s hard not to make a comparison.

I won’t belabour the point about the font size being improved, and the art being cool, you read that in my PHB review. It remains true for the DMG.

Like the PHB, the 2024 DMG has been reorganized…and it’s better. In the 2014 book, the primer on DMing was only three pages long. Now, it’s 15, and includes sections on the “things you need”, “preparing a session”, “how to run a session”, and “ensuring fun for all.” These are simple but important things, especially the last one.

A DM, in addition to the jobs I mentioned above, is also the head facilitator of fun. They are also the arbiter of disputes. It provides a fairly coherent section on rules as written, versus intended, using a comical example of a bucket brigade and the ready action (it’s on page 19 if you want a chuckle). Ultimately, the game is about fun, and newer DMs may not have the experience to try and override the extremes that can ruin it. The DMG is, ultimately, a guide to Dungeon Mastering, and just in the first few pages is providing great advice.

They’ve revised the estimations for combat encounters in the new book, which I’m all for; it wasn’t a perfect system in 2014 and they’ve definitely upgraded it in this new release. They’ve also added some useful tracking sheets for supporting campaigns. The one that really caught my eye was the “DM’s character tracker.” Includes space for the type of game the character/player is looking for, notes on their goals and ambitions, and plenty of room for other stuff too. It’s nice to have a centralized place for this information. If you’re like me you have notebooks full of indecipherable scribbles (a quest in itself) so this tool to help me stay organized is appreciated! Using this will help me deepen my world by having handy access to this information all in one place. Yeah, maybe it’s a bit of extra paperwork, but I dig it – and it’s like most of what 5e is all about: use what you like, discard what you don’t.

Chapter 5 is where my heart begins to sing: Greyhawk. A deep, invested look into the Free City of Greyhawk, the greatest (sorry Baldur’s Gate, Waterdeep, and others) city in the multiverse. With adventure around every corner, and some of it included in this book, it’s everything you need to start a campaign in this exciting new (old) world.

The new magic item section is very cool (energy bow? HECK YES), with so many new and revised items to explore. They’ve reorganized this chapter a bit, with the item tables coming after the item descriptions. The tables are also slightly revised too, gone are the beloved tables A-I, replaced instead broken out by treasure theme (arcana, armaments, implements, and relics) and rarity. Treasure theme will be explored in the 2024 Monster Manual. Likely each monster will be associated with an appropriate treasure theme, and DMs can draw from those tables as needed. It’s a better way to organize it, really.

There are rules for creating bastions and fortresses, which, without question, are so engaging. Other supplements from other companies have included rules like this, and I’ve spent more time than I’m willing to think about building castles, forts, casinos, cottages…

Lastly, the building includes a detailed lore glossary that includes important names and words from the many worlds of D&D. It’s a one-stop-shop for lore dumping that you can expand to build your unique world.

Overall, I really, really like the 2024 DMG. It finds a nice medium between providing a lot of background information for newer DMs, and resources for experienced ones, which begs the question…

Should you buy it?

The answer is probably yes.

The rules changes aside, the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide is a thoughtful refinement of Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. It will benefit any game you’re a part of, even if you’re a player. After all, you’ll need the 2024 DMG to look through all the magic items you’re going to bug your DM to give you in the next campaign.

If you’re on a tight budget, and you can never see yourself DMing, you might be able to skip it. It’s not 100% necessary, but it’s a very good piece of work, and I found it an enjoyable read. I’m very much looking forward to diving deeper and see anything I might have overlooked in the first pass.

If the Player’s Handbook, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide are any indication, the 2024 Monster Manual is going to be…killer…!

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Images by Wizards of the Coast

An advanced copy of the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide was provided for this review