At the end of last year our family gave several of the leading meal services a try. Things we loved included being introduced to new ingredients and dishes. Things we hated, other than how seemingly every dish required a handful of little sachets of sour cream for some reason, was the fact that when you’re cooking an entire meal on a single cookie sheet everything kind of tastes the same. The prep was faster, and the meals ultimately more interesting, but the flavors were just a little off.
That experiment was on my mind during a private press event hosted by Wizards of the Coast last week, where it discussed its new Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. This book of monsters is bigger than ever before, with lots of choice morsels to be discovered inside — including more and expanded “monster sets” that can be used to create encounters on the fly. But while it’s built for speed and convenience, unlike HelloFresh, what these critters ultimately taste like is largely up to the chef — er, Dungeon Master.
The new Monster Manual (2025) — which is part of the 2024 5th edition rules refresh — joins the Player’s Handbook (2024) and Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024) as the new third pillar of the D&D tabletop experience. But while the previous version, published in 2014, felt more like a reference book, this document offers far more inspiration for improvisation. It also opens the door to adjust, augment, and reinterpret monsters and non-player characters in new and interesting ways. It’s not a meal kit that tells you exactly what to cook and how to cook it. It’s a book of recipes that encourages you to make a meal for your players right there at the table using whatever flavors you like.
The biggest change is a welcome reorganization of the layout of the manuscript itself, which now lists monsters alphabetically rather than by creature type. That means the iconic gelatinous cube gets filed under G, and not the O section where it was previously, under “oozes.” There’s an appendix at the back if you desperately need them to be sorted by creature type, and another that sorts them by Challenge Rating — that is, their relative strength in relation to other monsters. But they’re also organized by habitat, so if you’re running an encounter in the forest, you’ll have a concise list of all the critters that you’re likely to find there.
Readers will also find that so-called monster sets have been greatly expanded. So, instead of just a few bog-standard cultists, you’ll instead find multiple variations of enemies all based around the cultist theme. That way you can easily source monsters for an entire encounter where the enemies share a set of complementary skills and abilities — just like the heroes on the other side of the table do. That sort of thematic organization can be expected all throughout the book.
When the DM does settle on a particular monster or set of monsters, they’ll have more flexibility to tinker with them than ever before. This time out, alignments are merely a suggestion, game director Jeremy Crawford said at the event, so if you’d like to make the red dragon in your campaign a bit more friend-shaped, have at it. The monsters themselves will each have a little inspirational flavor of their own.
The Monster Manual (2025) is available for pre-order now. It arrives first at local game stores with a special collectible cover on Feb. 4, and with a wider release on Feb. 18.
