A new year means a new release schedule for Dungeons & Dragons, and Wizards of the Coast’s latest sourcebook is a compilation that marks some subtle but interesting changes to how the D&D tabletop game will operate going forward.
Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse made an early debut on Jan. 25 as part of Wizards’ special Rules Expansion Gift Set three-pack, with a solo release planned for May 17. Monsters of the Multiverse (MotM) features a massive bestiary of new and updated creatures for D&D, which includes a total of 33 new races that players can use for characters.
Those new races are the part that jumps out at me while I’m reading the book. In previous editions of D&D, many of its campaign settings featured entire species of humanoids that were there to be used as plug-and-play villains.
If you saw an orc, goblin, bugbear, or dark elf, it would generally be safe to consider it as evil. You might see the occasional exception, typically a player character, but the game was designed around a very simple moral architecture.
In June 2020, Renton, Wash.-based Wizards made an announcement that it would revise its rules so that none of the various races in the game would be automatically treated as malevolent. To paraphrase Wizards designer Jeremy Crawford, D&D‘s creative team now treats the psychology and cultural flexibility of every race in D&D the same way they treat that of humans.
MotM rewrites a number of long-running D&D monsters to make them suitable as player races, in a series of universally-applicable (“world-agnostic”) versions that also discuss their origins within D&D‘s established multiverse. Several races have also been carefully disassociated with their previous “all evil, all the time” characterization.
The new roster includes the aforementioned go-to monsters, like goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, and kobolds; a couple of outright monsters, i.e. changelings, lizardfolk, and yuan-ti; and some old favorites, such as the githyanki and githzerai.
Mechanically, MotM also does away with built-in stat increases/decreases for each race. Now, players can simply pick what stats to assign a bonus to at character creation. According to Crawford, this was a deliberate move to cut down on “min-maxing,” where players would automatically associate certain races with specific classes.
MotM also features a large bestiary of monsters, which draws on material from several past sourcebooks. This includes the Eberron campaign setting, 2018’s Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, and 2016’s Volo’s Guide to Monsters, along with a few updates. According to Crawford, there are over 250 monsters in MotM, which is more than any book in D&D‘s 5th edition besides the actual Monster Manual.
For all that, MotM is hardly required reading for D&D players, especially if you already happen to own some or all of the books that it’s drawing on. It’s neat and well-made, but for my money, the interesting part is how it signifies the continuing evolution of D&D. The game is getting more flexible, both mechanically and ethically, with an increasing willingness to throw a lot of its hoariest old standards out the window.
In addition to Monsters of the Multiverse, the Rules Expansion Gift Set includes a Dungeon Master’s screen, a slipcase, and new printings of 2017’s Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and 2020’s Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.
In keeping with Wizards’ recent initiatives, the Gift Set ships in a standard version and a “core hobby” limited edition, the latter of which will only be available for sale via brick-and-mortar game stores.
