Wizards of the Coast’s latest preview for the upcoming DnD 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide introduces players to the ‘Dungeon Master’s Toolbox’ chapter, a grab bag of miscellaneous topics. While it has a broad range of contents, from rules for explosives to a spotlight on death, we’re particularly intrigued by the support it offers for DMs building dungeons and running dungeon crawls.
DnD 5e and DnD 2024 puts a lot of emphasis on empowering the players, giving all the DnD classes combat powers they can use every turn, and granting over half the DnD races dark vision. These make the old school dungeon crawl – a survival exploration puzzle where torches, rope, and rations were the most important resources – a thing of the past.
But there’s still plenty of fun to be had in adventures where the dungeon is a believable, threatening place, and the new DMG seems to be better placed to support that.
Creating a compelling old school dungeon has some really prosaic elements. According to the new preview – which you can watch in full above – the new DMG will have a whole section dedicated just to doors. It will list the hitpoints and armor classes for all different kinds of doors, from wood, to glass, to stone, to portcullises. There will be DC values for picking different qualities of lock, and for finding different kinds of secret door.
There will also be a section on mapping dungeons, plus random tables covering “dungeon decay” and “dungeon quirks” to act as DM inspiration. The discussion here is brief, so it remains to be seen how substantive these elements are: will there be anything to match the room-by-room random generation tables of yore?
The new hazards and traps section will enable the DM to up-level these classic pitfalls so that they’re more dangerous for higher-level parties: a bigger rolling boulder of doom, pointier spikes in the spike pit, and so on. The preview mentions ‘fireball fungus’, a luminous mushroom that can trigger an explosive chain reaction if it’s damaged.
A lot of the content in the Dungeon Master’s Toolbox chapter was present in the 2014 DMG or other supplements, but spread thinly throughout. The new format condenses the information down by topic, hopefully making it easier to reference when doing prep or on the fly.
With the DMG fast approaching on the DnD release schedule, expect Wargamer’s review soon. Follow Wargamer on Google News to make sure you don’t miss it!
Source: Wargamer
