Review Category: Books

When Dungeons & Dragons decides to go for a new edition, we get fresh versions of the three core books. The Player’s Handbook is always first, as it details the core rules for the game. The next book is the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which tells the Dungeon Master how to actually run the game. It’s also the book with all the magic items in it. (The third book is the Monster Manual, which is really just more resources for DM. We’ll review that when it comes out in 2025.)

The Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 is a 380+ page hard-backed book (available digitally) rammed with illustrations and guidance for novice and experienced Dungeon Masters, which is the fancy title we give to the person who actually runs the game. Players get to be one character, but the Dungeon Master (aka DM, Games Master, or Referee) gets to be everyone else and the world.

Previous iterations of D&D have taken different approaches to how to best guide a Dungeon Master. 2014’s Dungeon Master’s Guide had a much more rules-based approach, being more of a referee’s manual and technical guide on how to tinker with the rules than a tool for good storytelling. 2008’s Dungeon Master’s Guide had great guidance on improvisation, the use of props, and so on, but it sat on such a fundamentally flawed rules set that all the charisma in the world wouldn’t save you.

Luckily, the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 sits on solid rules set, namely its companion book, The Player’s Handbook, and it has about a decade’s worth of development. But it has a new challenge to deal with. During the last ten years, expectations of what it is to be a DM have changed. We’ve seen D&D become something that people pay money to see played in front of an audience, and the Dungeon Masters such as Brennan Lee Mulligan and Matt Mercer have become celebrities.  So, no pressure then.

This new book finds the fine balance between referee and storyteller. It’s a solid manual on how to build worlds and how to work with players, and it also provides rules and guidance on how to make things fair. We get solid advice on different play styles and different sorts of groups.  D&D is played by all sorts of people, and something that might seem obvious to you needs to be said to others.

The DM’s Toolbox chapter, for example, provides solid advice on not only how to invent a monster for the players to fight but also what to do when it all goes wrong and the entire party gets wiped out. (We’ve all been there.) The fact that it says “Death Must Be Fair” and then explains the steps to take when, say, your party decides to storm the gates of hell armed only with a wooden spoon and a grin pretty much sums up the gaming experience for Dungeon Masters.

The chapters on creating adventures and campaigns are also solid and break it down so you don’t miss anything for any of the players. Solid examples of how to plot and pace an adventure are provided, laid out in a clear and easy-to-replicate way.  

The new Dungeon Master’s Guide also provides a basic setting, Greyhawk, which is a very ‘knights and wizards’ style fantasy setting. This was the very first world ever created for D&D, so it’s appropriate that it’s the example world. The book gives the basics and explores some of the more fun elements of creating your own setting. The physical book also has a map, we are led to believe.

We only had access to the digital copy of this book for review, so we can’t confirm the physical quality of the book or check out the map at the back. Wizards of the Coast does have an excellent track record in this regard, however. The version we saw appeared heavily illustrated, but we can’t confirm if those pictures help or hinder the print edition. Certainly, they look nice on the screen of a laptop.

Still, it’s nice to see Greyhawk become such an essential part of the game, especially as the Forgotten Realms are broadly seen as D&D’s default.

The final chapter of the book (before we get to the useful and expansive glossary) is about Bastions. This is a hold-over from D&D’s origins as both a table-top wargame and as a game folk would play via the postal service. The idea is that as your character progresses in the campaign, they build their own ‘home base’, which can be used as a starting point for adventures and the like.

Imagine if Bilbo Baggins, when coming back to Bag End, had decided to hire some stuff and add a trebuchet to his garden, that sort of thing. The rules presented are a perfectly cromulent example of a cooperative world-building exercise. Alas, we can’t see them used very often. Many DM’s prefer to handwave these sorts of resources instead, and if you wanted to do this properly, it’s the sort of thing you should devote an entire campaign to and build a spreadsheet for, and it really deserves its own book.

Overall, it was the best Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide we’ve ever seen.

One entirely useless definition of art is anything produced with artistic intent that is heavy enough to break your foot should you drop it.  On that logic, The Making of the Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970 – 1977 is art. That said, a book that lovingly reproduces the first ever tabletop roleplaying game ever published should be regarded as art anyway.

At 570+ pages, with four separated colour-coded ribbon bookmarks, this book is certainly a beast that fits awkwardly on the shelf. This is primarily a reproduction of treasures from the Dungeons & Dragons archives; books and documents from the start of D&D that would be impossible for most folk to obtain by normal means. It includes things such as the first draft of the game, photographs of the various handwritten notes between Arneson and Gygax (the game’s creators) and so on.

It starts at the very beginning, with an excerpt from a gaming fanzine, and explores Chainmail, the early wargame that would be adapted into the game we know today. Elements such as Peter Gaylord’s character sheet for a single wizard character are included; these provide context for how a humble strategy game would morph into the worldwide phenomenon it is today.

The next chapter reproduces early drafts of D&D, letters between creators, pencil-drawn maps, and so on. We even see idle doodles of monsters and the like. After that, we get a full reproduction of the original D&D boxed set, and the final chapter is further ephemera, including articles from the time and supplements, including Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry. A yes, that means the first appearance of Vecna is reproduced here.

Commentary is also provided, and it’s mostly neutral in tone with some context added. If you’re researching the history of D&D, this book should not be your only source, but it is a jolly useful one, as it reproduces a lot of hard to find archive material and puts it all in one place.

Some of the language is of its time, a reflection of the standards back then and of course, there is a note informing the reader the content is presented as originally created “because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed”. This has been the policy on this sort of thing for years. It’s entirely sensible and modern and should come as no surprise to any serious person.

The book is useful for many reasons. It tells you where D&D came from, providing perspective as to what the future may have in store. It also refutes the claim that the older editions were somehow better; they clearly weren’t. As wonderful as these old pages are, the modern game has much improved.  So it’s a good defence against nostalgia-fueled foolishness, as well as being heavy enough to serve as an offensive weapon if required. (We are joking; do not use heavy books as weapons. Even if they do have illustrations of different types of polearms on page 420.)

Essential for some and a fun curio for others, The Making of the Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970 – 1977 is the ultimate book for the D&D fanatic.

We’ve seen the world of Dungeons & Dragons become its own whole and complete thing in recent years; not just a way for folk to express themselves, but the decades of lore and storytelling have become more and more codified in a way that is accessible and navigable. Yet still flexible enough to work as a tool for storytelling rather than a barrier.

The Practically Complete Guide To Dragons is not a traditional roleplaying supplement; it contains no new rules or ideas. Instead, it’s a storytelling book for younger readers, filled with many illustrations and large fonts. (If you want a book on dragons with stats, check out the excellent Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons.)

The Practically Complete Guide To Dragons is a stocking filler book designed to fit nicely on the shelf next to your D&D Player’s Handbook. It’s a lot larger than the Young Adventurer’s Guides, even though this is essentially one of those: a lore-heavy, fun-focused book aimed at new gamers that contains no actual game content. The guide will tell you how to identify a dragon (the shinier and nicer they may be) and how to fight a dragon (don’t). It also tells you what to do if you meet a dragon with many heads. (Run Away.)

The illustrations in this book are lovely, and this is an excellent treat for your fantasy-loving younger family member who might not have the concentration to sit down and play a TTRPG. This feels more like the sort of book an illustrator or animator would use as a reference for getting the dragons from Dungeons & Dragons correct rather than a book that will help you play a game.

Fun, but not for everyone.

With 50 years of games, stories and ideas to explore, it should come as no surprise that the Wizards of the Coast, the people behind Dungeons & Dragons, occasionally have a rummage through their back catalogue. Quests from the Infinite Staircase takes six classic adventures from D&D’s history, giving them a fresh coat of paint and clearer direction.

The book is very much a nostalgia fest; even the name is a shout-out to the old Planescape anthology Tales From The Infinite Staircase, though none of the adventures in that book appear here.  Our framing device for these adventures is the titular Infinite Staircase, an Escher-esque trans-dimensional space full of stairs that hang impossibly in space and lead to various places and moments in time.  The powerful djinni Nafas, a noble being who is also a genius storyteller, lives in this place. In terms of the game, this character exists to help move characters to the various adventures in the book, but it’s helpful to think of him as something akin to The Watcher from What If or the Crypt Keeper. He’s a djinn in charge of his own fate, and he’s only going to grant you wishes if you have a good story to tell.

The book re-imagines six adventures, first published in the 1970s or 1980s. The first adventure, The Lost City, is a pure call to nostalgia as it originally appeared in a 1982 D&D Basic Set, the first adventure many gamers played. As such, this new take on an old story still works; the core ‘my first adventure’ moments are kept, so players learn about dungeon crawling, traps,  talking rather than fighting through encounters, and so on.  It’s a ziggurat quest and a fun one at that.

Next up is When a Star Falls, a creepy low-level adventure filled with memory-eating monsters and dodgy prophecy. It’s one of the adventures written by the UK-based team,  which had a reputation for being slightly odd. It’s also one of those adventures many young Dungeon Masters took apart for all its ideas, and as such, tends to get mistaken for other stories, so it’s nice to see the original presented here.  The third adventure is Beyond The Crystal, another UK-made scenario that remixes Romeo and Juliet.  This has been remixed as a feywild, focusing more on interaction and problem-solving. Beyond The Crystal was very much before its time 40-odd years ago, but it’s perfect for modern D&D now.

Pharaoh is a comprehensive update of the original 1982 Tracy & Laura Hickman classic adventure module. This ghost story and pyramid exploration adventure was regarded as top-tier at the time, but gamers have moved on since then. This is a welcome and timely update.

The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth is an early example of a mega-dungeon crawl, written by Gary Gygax himself. It’s big, it’s fun, and it’s almost pure spooky horror silliness in places. It’s nice to have it updated so a new generation of players can survive a wall made out of corpses only to get eaten by something far worse. Will your players succeed and gain the Witch Queen’s greatest prize? Probably not, but it’s fun to try.

Finally, we get the historic Expedition to Barrier Peaks. This is where fantasy heroes explore a weird dungeon that turns out to be a crashed starship and almost suffocate putting on the ‘fancy armour’ (a space suit) or get eaten by bunny-themed monsters. It’s a classic for a reason, and it still holds up with this more intelligently thought-out version of the adventure.

Overall, this is a lovely blast from the past. Worth it for the bestiary of monsters alone, Quests from the Infinite Staircase takes classic stories into the modern day in the best possible way.