DnD’s New Monster Manual Is Great For Players As Well As DMs

As someone who grew up loving Pokemon, Digimon, cryptids, and all things beastly, Dungeons & Dragons’ Monster Manual should be my favourite of the three core books. Full of creatures and nasties, it’s long been the book most bursting with inspiration for your stories… if you’re a DM. If you’re a player, the Monster Manuals of old were a bit boring. Stat blocks on stat blocks, minimal illustrations – not a whole lot to care about if you’re not running a campaign.

As the final part of the 2024 rules refresh (which, in 2025, feels poorly named, but go with it), the new Monster Manual might not have the big, sweeping changes of the Dungeon Master’s Guide or the Player’s Handbook, but it feels like a worthy update nonetheless. It’s got tweaks and improvements for DMs, of course, but it’s also finally making the Monster Manual the monster-loving book I’ve always wanted it to be.

For DMs, More Is More

Where the other two parts of the Core Rulebooks reworked and updated just about every aspect of Dungeons & Dragons, the new Monster Manual is focused on offering more. More monsters, more story prompts, and, through its ease-of-use adjustments, more time playing and less rummaging through pages for essential info.

The new edition includes 85 additional monsters, spread between wholly new entries – like a type of Revenant that relentlessly animates houses instead of corpses, and a whole chapter dedicated to pirates – and more variations of classic ones, such as multiple Owlbears. It also offers more for high-level parties, with high CR monsters like the Animal Lord and the Blob of Annihilation helping set up those big boss encounters.

Though you’ll find most of the story prompting in other books, these additions offer flexibility in how DMs can use the monsters. Take Cultists – instead of simply having a Cultist aligned to a god or a demon with a dagger and a creepy mask, we’ve now got variants that are sworn to different creatures, or even the elements themselves, with their stats changing to offer encounters that feel more flavourful.

The book also finally brings a change we first saw in Mordenkainen’s Monsters of the Multiverse to the Core books. Instead of a bizarre and unwieldy system of alphabetically organising by type (Beholders, Dinosaurs, Dragons etc.), it simply organises by name instead. That Blob of Annihilation is under B for ‘Blob of Annihilation’, not O for ‘Ooze’, making it much easier to find in a hurry.

Between that and lots of smaller tweaks, like putting lair actions right in the stat block instead of floating away in another book entirely, the goal is to streamline the Monster Manual experience. No more awkwardly having to hunt down stats or interactions your party has sprung on you – it should all be on the page, and that page should be easy enough to find.

More Interesting For Players, Too

Though the DM’s experience with the Monster Manual is ultimately the most important thing, I’m not often in that camp. I’m more a player than a DM, so the Monster Manual has long been a technical handbook I’d never need to refer to. The new edition seeks to change that, turning the book into something people like me are likely to open more than once.

For starters, the illustrations have been completely reworked. Instead of disembodied creatures floating in a void, each one now has a full illustration that not only looks stunning, but places them within context. Gargoyles leaping around Ravenloft, Gelatinous Cubes slorping through a Faerun dungeon – you get a sense of their size, their weight, how they behave, and how big of a problem they’d be to run into. They also tease where stories could go next. The art for the Mind Flayer isn’t just a mind flayer: it features an Elder Brain, a Nautiloid ship, and a peek at the Astral Sea to help flesh out what would otherwise be a strange tentacle guy. It paints D&D as the multiverse it is, rather than a rote list of stat blocks.

Spread throughout the stat blocks are hints of flavour and story that make it far more interesting for casual readers. The old manual had the odd quote here or there, but the new edition has larger sections dedicated to backstory, like having the DM roll a D6 to determine what is floating in the middle of a gelatinous cube, or a writeup on the Gargoyles by an Elemental Planes Scholar. It’s integrated into the entries themselves, rather than an afterthought whacked on to the illustration.

Of course, your DM might decide Mind Flayers don’t have Nautiloids or access to the Astral Sea in your campaign setting, but that’s not the point. Dungeons & Dragons isn’t about following the strict world Wizards has set out, it’s about seeing where the possibilities presented to you go, and this book conveys that excellently no matter on what side of the DM screen you’re sat. For players, this feels like the first book outside the Player’s Handbook actually worth owning.

I grew up on the Dragonology books you’d get from Scholastic book fairs, and this is giving me the same vibes; I don’t need to use these monsters, I just want to know everything about them. As sacrilegious as it may sound, the new Monster Manual may well be the ideal coffee table book for those not juggling a campaign. With its gripping illustrations and story prompts that invite further questions, it’s something I can see myself flicking through in a spare ten minutes, which is more than I can say for my very dusty 2014 edition.

The 2024 Monster Manual launches on February 18, 2025, with early access through D&D Beyond starting a week earlier, on February 11.

Your changes have been saved

Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game that first took the world by storm in the 1970s, and continues to enchant millions of players today. With a seemingly endless number of modules and campaigns for you to play, as well as the possibility to do your own thing, you’ll never get bored of playing D&D. 

Created by

E. Gary Gygax
, Dave Arneson

Latest Film

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

First TV Show

Dungeons and Dragons

First Episode Air Date

September 17, 1983