The First Additions to Dungeons & Dragons’ New Edition Are More Dungeons, More Dragons

You would hope that, when launching a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons—during the year celebrating 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons, even—Wizards of the Coast would’ve felt comfortable with the number of dungeons and dragons it had available to players. And yet, here we are, with further dungeons and dragons to come.

Hot off of its latest backtrack, today Wizards of the Coast unveiled its plans for the next year of D&D supplements, after the last of the new core rulebooks, the Monster Manual, rolls out in early 2025. Next year will see four new major releases for Dungeons & Dragons, three sourcebooks and a brand new Starter Set to replace the current boxed release, which will come with a new adventure to onboard players and is due for release in fall 2025. Things kick off first in summer with a dragon-themed anthology, a collection of lore about the myriad types of dragons throughout the D&D multiverse, as well as 10 new adventures themed around encountering, well, dragons in dungeons. Where else could they possibly be?

Later in 2025, Wizards will follow up with a duology of books based around D&D‘s most popular campaign setting, the Forgotten Realms. The Player Guide will feature new subclasses, feats, backgrounds, factions, and spells for players to craft their characters with, while the Adventure Guide will act as a lore book for dungeon masters to plan and build campaigns around. Whether or not they add any dragons to dungeons will be entirely of their own volition. Presumably, as Wizards has previously stated, any updated subclasses included in the new material that previously had Fifth Edition versions will be overridden with the new edition version here. But given last week’s controversy about how D&D Beyond will handle players having access to both 2014 and 2024 rulesets, there’ll still be some way to access old versions of returning subclasses.

Also briefly teased for 2025 was “Project Sigil,” Wizards’ own in-house virtual tabletop system. Inspired by the success of Baldur’s Gate 3—to the point that game characters Karlach and Astarion feature heavily in Sigil’s gameplay demos as playable figures—the new 3D system will let players create customizable 3D miniatures for their characters, and DMs design maps and areas to set their campaigns in. Sigil will enter closed beta testing this fall, with any Beyond subscriber regardless of free or premium access able to sign up now.

But aside from that, it’s a pretty obvious place for Wizards to begin building back up its new edition. While much of the material from Fifth Edition can still be used with D&D‘s new rulesets and books, it makes sense that the first wave of material made expressly for the new rules is going to lean on familiar ideas and settings. The upcoming Dungeon Master’s Guide is already going back to Greyhawk, so for now, we’ll get dungeons, dragons, and Forgotten Realms for the foreseeable future before D&D‘s new era begins to get a little more exploratory again.

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