Wizards of the Coast announces a light schedule of D&D books for 2025, plus a beta for its VTT — and my opinions about both

Though we’re still waiting for the updated 2024 D&D Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual (actually coming out in 2025), Wizards of the Coast just announced a new slate of products for next year. It’s a fairly light schedule, as the company clearly continues to focus on building the 2024 rules, with an updated starter set and two new Forgotten Realms sourcebooks (one for players and one for DMs). The Forgotten Realms books sound great, with new character options and subclasses for players, as well as new setting details for DMs, which offer different parts of the Forgotten Realms to set different types of campaigns in (without going through 50 years of Forgotten Realms content looking for what you want). There’s just a single adventure planned for next year: an anthology of dragon-themed one-shots. (Because for a game called Dungeons & Dragons, we fight surprisingly few dragons.)

The books seem interesting, but don’t offer a ton of content for D&D fans to get excited about. Of course, the 2024 books are wholly compatible with existing D&D books so you can enjoy any other recently released adventures, like Vecna: Eye of Ruin, which really does go through a sort of D&D’s greatest hits for the game’s anniversary. And the company is also continuing to bring independent creators’ content into the official D&D Beyond Marketplace, with books from The Griffon’s Saddlebag, MCDM, Loot Tavern, Hitpoint Press, Ghostfire Gaming, Dungeon Dudes, Kobold Press, and Free League. No new books were announced (and you can already find some books from many of these creators on D&D Beyond), but it’s good to see Wizards continuing the relationship and letting us easily integrate third party content into character sheets and campaigns.

Here are the D&D books coming up, this year and next:

• 2024 Player’s Handbook: September 17, 2024
• 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide: November 12, 2024
• 2024 Monster Manual: February 18, 2025 (yes, this 2024 book is coming out in 2025)
• Dragon anthology: summer 2025
• Starter Set, fall 2025
• The Forgotten Realms Player Guide, late 2025
• The Forgotten Realms Adventure Guide, late 2025

One particularly nice set of news is that the newly announced 2025 books will be available for sale two weeks early at your friendly local game store — a nod to the stores that keep the tabletop gaming community going, which has been cut out of sales with Wizards of the Coast’s early access options, which require ordering books directly from Wizards. Though the company didn’t say anything about getting digital/physical bundles — which, again, can only be bought directly from Wizards of the Coast — from local stores, it will still be nice to get these physical books early. Your local game store will sell books with alternate covers, and they’re always gorgeous. If you’re buying any of these books, I highly recommend supporting your local game store.

Project Sigil VTT is going into closed beta

Wizards of the Coast is also continuing to hype its upcoming virtual tabletop, Project Sigil. And even though I’m dubious of the company’s entry into the VTT space, I have to admit Project Sigil looks stunning. Wizards calls it an “immersive 3d sandbox” for players (and DMs) to build their own stories in.

It sticks to a tabletop style aesthetic with minis players can move around and dice that roll across the screen, but the graphics — powered by Unreal Engine 5 — go beyond what what you’ll find in other VTTs. Minis appear to be customizable, just like you might customize a video game character, with a selection of familiar friends available like D&D classic Drizzt and Balder’s Gate 3 favorites Astarion and Karlach. DMs can use pre-made environments, or create their own with a level building tool that seems to be the equivalent of having a Matt Mercer-sized collection of models, maps, and minis. The game looks very full-featured, but we’ll have to see how easy it is to use — and whether it can recreate the fun of playing D&D around a table.

But we’ll be able to check it out soon: Project Sigil will have a closed beta in fall 2024. Anyone with a D&D Beyond account — free or paid — can sign up, and participants will get five extra beta codes to hand out so they have a full party to play with. The VTT is currently PC only, but the devs talked about future availability on consoles or even mobile.

There’s no word yet on pricing or availability (or even a final name) for Project Sigil, but it will be interesting to see how it plays this fall. But I’m concerned about pricing more than anything — will we be paying individual microtransactions for every mini and map element? — which we likely won’t know any time soon.

Since I do my gaming on Mac and console, I’ll have to live vicariously through others. Please check out the beta on my behalf and tell me what you think.

So what’s the verdict on D&D in 2025?

I wouldn’t say I’m bowled over by what’s coming to D&D over the next year, but none of these books sound bad, and Wizards continues to make good moves to integrate community content with D&D Beyond. The 2024 rules will also be available for everyone, completely free to use, via a Creative Commons license next year, which will make the new edition highly accessible to all players. And I’m frankly thrilled that local game stores are getting books early, which is at least an olive branch to retailers who have been left out of the latest hype… but it’s possible that the upcoming VTT will continue to cut out retailers and third parties.

Even while the company seems to make smart choices, it also continues to make terrible missteps with the community. Just in the last few weeks the company has been issuing copyright complaints on YouTube for creators talking about their games who showed too many pages of their books. This type of copyright strike can do serious harm to a creators’ channel, and it can’t have made the company any friends amongst the people who could be its biggest cheerleaders.

D&D Beyond has also already started adding 2024 content to its digital toolkit, replacing older content. While it’s great that the new content is coming to the platform, it was a problem for people who wanted to use the old rules. The company’s answer was for DMs and players to use its clunky homebrew system to recreate the original items… a cumbersome task just to use a product you’ve already bought. D&D Beyond has walked this change back, allowing players to choose whether to use 2014 or 2024 character sheets and options, but it required a fair bit of player outcry first. It’s good to see the company responding quickly to player feedback, but it’s also a little frustrating that it was needed in the first place.

It’s hard to be excited for anything the company is releasing due to this erratic behavior, because you simply can’t be sure whether Wizards plans to support the community or push the community out. It depends on the day.

So I think the 2025 books sound interesting, and I already plan on buying the updated rulebooks coming out this year. But I am, at best, cautiously optimistic about the future of the game, which depends on whether Wizards of the Coast can keep players enthusiastic when the company itself doesn’t always support them. Without a group of engaged players and creators… well, there’s not much of a game to play. There are a whole lot of great new TTRPGs out there (particularly being produced by crowdfunding), and Wizards of the Coast can no longer simply expect everyone to play D&D because it’s the biggest game on the block. Beyond a the revised edition coming out this year, the game just isn’t offering a whole lot in this future release slate.

I want to believe. But in the meanwhile, I’m waiting to see what kind of attitude Wizards of the Coast has through the next year. I hope D&D will continue to be a fun, easy to play game that I can always get a group together for, but there are a lot of other games vying for my attention, and Wizards of the Coast is going to need to put some real work in to keep it.

After all, I just got my copy of Sentai & Sensibility, and who can say no to a premise like that?