D&D’s 2025 calendar hints at new books and new experiments

Published:2025-01-28T12:18 / Source:https://www.polygon.com/gaming/514939/dragon-delves-eberron-borderlands-forgotten-realms-announcement-release-date-price

On a cold, sunny January day, the creative team behind Dungeons & Dragons passed out early copies of the updated Monster Manual (2025) to gathered members of the press. But the attending crowd didn’t fly to the Seattle area for just one book. Over the next few hours, representatives from Wizards of the Coast unveiled a partial roadmap for the rest of 2025. 

“We’re still playing a little bit of catch-up after putting all of our resources into the core rulebooks update,” franchise and product vice president Jess Lanzillo said.

The overall message Polygon left with is that Wizards is beginning the year on the back foot. The Hasbro-owned company is still in the process of ramping up a steady cadence of new releases. Plans as described call out multiple new products being released over the next five months, but some are clearly still on the drawing board.

The presentation on this year’s catch-up period revolved around one adjective more than any other: Developers want to make D&D “easier” for both Dungeon Masters and players alike. But for now, we’re only getting hints as to what shape that design initiative will take, along with pledges that fans of all skill levels will appreciate them. 

Here’s what to expect.

Dragon Delves

A green and a Blue dragon, early renders of art to be included in Dragon Delves, coming in 2025.

After the Monster Manual goes on sale widely beginning Feb. 18, the second new book of 2025 is an anthology titled Dragon Delves, and it arrives on July 8. D&D’s 5th edition anthologies, which include titles such as Candlekeep Mysteries and the Nebula-nominated Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, are among the franchise’s strongest offerings, and we expect this to be no different. Lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford confirmed that it will include adventures focused on all five chromatics and all five metallic dragons, something that has never been attempted in an official D&D book before.

Crawford suggested that each adventure errs on the side of catering to novice DMs. “They’re pre-built, with new, easy-prep information at the beginning of each adventure, where it tells you, Here’s exactly what you need to run this adventure,” he said. Veteran and novice DMs alike can either plug these meaty adventures, good for two to four sessions each, into their existing campaigns. Alternatively, the book formally chains them together in the form of three full campaigns.

Each adventure, Crawford said, emphasizes the specifics of each particular dragon, zooming in on details such as their environments, temperaments, and motivations. As senior game designer James Wyatt pointed out, your party may choose to directly battle one dragon, then become the “frenemy” of another. To flesh out those decisions, the book makes a nod to some 50 years of historical context for each, including high-res art pulled from 1980s-era sourcebooks, old Dragonlance-themed Dragon magazine covers, and more. 

Eberron: Forge of the Artificer

Five characters, including a stout man in an overcoat, a woman holding a green flask and carrying a technical bag of some kind, a robot man, a man in a beige overcoat with a large pocket watch, and a fit woman holding a large plasma gun.

Next, on Aug. 19, comes Eberron: Forge of the Artificer, a book for players and DMs alike that returns to the series’ beloved, magic-filled Eberron environs for the first time since 2019’s Eberron: Rising from the Last War. While it will include what Crawford calls “glow-ups” of already published 5th edition content, it will also reintroduce the Artificer class to the updated D&D ruleset. 

That decision likely won’t surprise anyone who saw the Artificer return in December as the first Unearthed Arcana playtest of 2024. Crawford said that the resulting fan survey period following its release concluded with largely positive feedback from the community, which he suggested means the current preview edition will see some changes but not full rewrites. 

The Artificer class will be joined by four species from Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and includes new versions of the changeling, kalashtar, warforged, and shifter. A fifth species, called the khoravar, will also be added. Classically known as half-elves, they are being rebranded now that the series has formally moved on from the concept of fantasy “races.”

“We are actually embracing Eberron’s own lore by getting at the fact that the khoravar […] have always objected to being called half-elves,” Crawford said. “They’re not half anything. They are a whole people.”

Forge of the Artificer will also formally change dragonmarks from a species to a feat. That decision is intended to reverse a design decision that Crawford admitted “made it impossible to tell a story about someone who joins a dragonmarked house later in their life.” And in addition to Eberron-specific options for Bastion development, the book will include formal guidance on airships in campaigns — including deck plans.

Cover art for Eberron: Rising from the Last War shows a crowching character in sandles holding a boomerang. He’s standing next to a robot.

Dungeon Masters, meanwhile, will have access to three campaigns’ worth of higher-level, sketched-out content, as described by principal designer Wes Schneider. A section titled “Morgrave Expeditions” will be a pulp-inspired, Indiana Jones-style campaign outline. Meanwhile, “Dragonmarked Intrigue” is a campaign outline that draws much of its inspiration from the machiavellian nature of Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica, which set multiple factions from the world of Magic: The Gathering against one another. The final campaign outline, titled “Sharn Inquisitives,” maintains a gritty noir theme, with players taking on the role of magical gumshoes. Schneider said that these intentionally resemble the guideline-style blocks of lore, characters, and adventure suggestions found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024), released in December, as opposed to older 5e books’ campaigns that hold DMs’ hands.

Wizards staffers were blunt in describing this book as “an experiment with size and price,” without clarifying what precisely they’re experimenting with, but it sounds like Forge of the Artificer may have a lower page count than past 5th edition hardcover products. 

“We really view this as a toy box the way the [Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and all the other Everything] books are, where you can reach in and sort of grab a little bit of this, grab a little bit of that, and go,” Crawford said. 

Crawford and Schneider suggested that the new book will include “everything a DM needs” to run Eberron adventures, but DMs are strongly encouraged to refer to Eberron: Rising from the Last War — a full-fledged setting book — for more fulsome Eberron content and related lore.

Starter Set: Heroes of the Borderlands

A party of heroes fights against long-earned bad guys with hooked swords in a forest setting.

Continuing the event’s callback to 50 years of D&D history, the series’ next 2025 launch will revolve around one of Gary Gygax’s own signature modules, titled The Keep on the Borderlands, which was originally bundled in the 1979 version of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set before being published separately.

Details are otherwise scant around this upcoming Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, which launches on Sept. 16, but Crawford was ready to shout out its design priorities. First, character creation will now work somewhere between pre-made characters and rolling from zero by way of a “tiles” system. New players will choose from premade tiles based on aspects like class and species, combine them, and then, as Crawford put it, “bam, you have a character.” No pictures or further details about these tiles were made available.

This ties into Crawford’s promise of “way more components than [the] typical starter sets have had,” and these will also include cards (for spells and armor), tokens (for hit points and money), full-color maps, and more to be announced later.

We weren’t told what players will find at the updated Keep on the Borderlands setting, beyond the suggestion that “time has passed” since Gygax’s version — and that its contents blend neatly with the Greyhawk chapter in the Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024). But we do know that cooperative DMing is already one of the set’s inherent selling points.

Crawford said the “chunks look after themselves” — meaning, one DM can run a self-contained adventure, then the next can draw from overlapping NPCs and lore while still starting and finishing their own session. 

“We’re returning to a more old-school approach to adventure design,” Crawford said, “where the story emerges through play rather than being something front-loaded that the DM has to manage.”

Return to the Forgotten Realms

A two-masted ship with white sails scuds away from an erupting volcano while tailed-creatures with four legs fly around it.

Wizards wants fans to know that something is coming in October. A branding crossover? A book that ties into an unannounced video or board game? Your guess is as good as ours.

Roughly one month later, on Nov. 11, D&D will return to the Dalelands, the Moonshae Isles, Icewind Dale, Calimshan, and Baldur’s Gate in a two-book set, now officially titled Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide and the Forgotten Realms Adventure Guide. Crawford said that these books too were being built for speed and ease of use.

“In the [updated] Dungeon Master’s Guide, we showed that an adventure that you prepare for yourself can be as short as one page,” Crawford said. “And we, throughout this [Forgotten Realms] Adventure Guide, have very short adventures in each of these settings so that a DM can grab them and get DMing as quickly as possible. Or the DM can dig deep and create an elaborate campaign that perhaps delves into one of these micro-settings or spans across all of them.”

The Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide, meanwhile, is positioned to be a full guide to all of the Realms, reaching far beyond the scope of the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. It will be headlined by eight subclasses, including a Calimshan-derived, genie-flavored take on Paladins and a Moonshae-connected Bard — both available in an Unearthed Arcana playtest beginning Jan. 28. Meanwhile, spellcasters and feat users can expect a massive boost to their options. Crawford described the book as “a chance for [the team], via in-game mechanics, to create some of the epic elements that have often been in Forgotten Realms lore — with all the proper safeguards and ways for people to counteract these really intensely powerful forms of magic.”

The exact shape of each upcoming book remains unclear, a fact that Crawford was blunt about. 

“We never share the table of contents for a book until the book is actually being printed,” Crawford added. 

Wizards representatives suggested that “activations” through the year will include trickles of each upcoming book’s contents. Even so, the event’s overarching theme was one of continuity between existing 5th edition books and upcoming refreshes. Multiple times, Crawford and co. suggested keeping old 5e on hand to flesh out the contents of 2025’s books, but on a larger scale, Crawford celebrated the ground being laid by the refreshed core books for years to come — in the form of a bold yet vague pledge.

“One of the opportunities that we have by revising the game, as opposed to, again, blowing it up and starting over, is we can actually move forward,” Crawford said. “I can’t wait until we can tell you about 2026 and 2027.”

Source:https://www.polygon.com/gaming/514939/dragon-delves-eberron-borderlands-forgotten-realms-announcement-release-date-price

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