Cleaving through kobolds with the improved Rage powers of the Barbarian felt excellent when I tried one of the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide’s new mini adventures, particularly when Dungeons & Dragons game director Jeremy Crawford is your Dungeon Master. While my party and I relished our overpowered characters as Crawford cheerfully described how we eviscerated these kobolds, he then told us about the horrific Arch Hag, who could give Baldur’s Gate 3’s Auntie Ethel a tough time, and the unstoppable Blob of Annihilation – both titanic creatures of ridiculous power arriving with the 2025 Monster Manual.
The updated bestiary, which packs over 500 monsters, is the last revamped core Dungeons & Dragons books and it’s releasing in February, 2025. While it’s crammed with expanded lore and rebalanced stats, I’m mostly interested in the handful of behemoths that will truly test a party’s might – and after playing an adventure with Crawford in the DM’s chair, I got to ask him and D&D principal designer James Wyatt about what facing the monstrosities of the Forgotten Realms will be like with this refreshed book.
What’s that coming over the hill
While these massive monsters may sound completely new, eagle-eyed readers of the 2014 Monster Manual will recognize that a few entries, such as the Tarrasque and Kraken, had a “(titan)” tag already. What did this mean exactly? Well, nothing, unless you read a particular sidebar on page 11 of the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide explaining that titans are divine creations. As Wyatt points out, that was the only place you could learn the meaning, and nobody could ever find it when playing one of the best tabletop RPGs.
This served as the perfect excuse for Crawford, Wyatt, and the D&D designers to give the titans a major upgrade for the 2025 Monster Manual.
“In the new Monster Manual we now have a whole family of [titans]”, Crawford says. “And part of our goal was making sure each creature type had some kind of apex monster that you could put in a fight with a Tarrasque, but more likely, put it in a fight against high-level characters.
“And so now the Tarrasque and Ancient Dragons are joined by a high-CR ooze, the Blob of Annihilation. We even have a high-CR construct, a Colossus, that is a skyscraper tall,” Crawford adds. There’s also the previously mentioned Arch Hag and several others joining the fray.
The meaning of the tag remains the same too, with these creatures being descended from or created by gods, but the Blob of Annihilation gets its titan status thanks to the skull of a god stuck inside it. With this narrative setup, there are sure to be plenty of creative ways you can use these titans – Crawford’s point about them being designed with the Tarrasque in mind makes me wonder how feasible a Pacific Rim-style adventure would be where players could pilot the titanic construct to beat up the rest.
Monster math
But, as well as adding a host of god-like creatures, Wyatt reckons that the 2025 Monster Manual also makes it easier for DMs to “provide appropriate challenges for [player] characters, especially around level 10.” Striking the balance of fun and challenging in D&D combat can be tricky as a DM, so I’ll gladly take the almighty titans. But with the class improvements and changes in the 2024 Player’s Handbook, they certainly aren’t the sole solution to this problem.
Crawford explains that the tweaks in the 2025 Monster Manual include changes to the underlying math of D&D too. “10 years ago, once you got to level 10, the monster math for high-CR monsters was progressing pretty linearly,” he says. “Whereas now there are some major jumps under the hood in the math that will, I think, be bracing for some people when they reach certain levels.”
While these difficulty spikes sound ideal for players climbing the upper echelons, I couldn’t help but think about potential adverse effects on the levels below. However, Crawford says that he isn’t concerned because of how these monster difficulty spikes interact with linear player character power. “The higher level you get, that’s when suddenly you will be like ‘oof! This high-CR dragon is hitting way harder than it was 10 years ago!’, but it will take a while before you get there. So, 1st to 5th level will feel pretty similar to how they felt before, although even around 3rd level, you’ll start noticing some creatures that are packing a bit more of a wallop than they did before.”
While I’m obviously not out to kill my players, I’m looking forward to figuring out which hardened monsters I can throw out with this updated Monster Manual. Hopefully the number changes and new tricks will make monsters as interesting for DMs to use as they are for players to fight. Then you can put them up against the biggest monster mashup the world has ever seen.
Want to work out which adventure to play next? Don’t miss our guide to the best D&D books. As for presents to give the pen-and-paper RPG fan in your life, check out these D&D gifts.