Editor’s Note: For the complete Dungeons and Dragons 2024 experience, you can also check out our review of the new Player’s Handbook.
The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide is an excellent personal purchase, but it’s also a particularly perfect gift for a new Dungeon Master. This book goes deeper into creating and running an adventure than the 2014 edition. It is not an elite masterclass for those who are thinking of making an actual play broadcast or how to make a professional adventure fit for publishing. It is a practical primer that prepares people how to make an adventure for their friends. It provides wise advice, clear outlines and more importantly, good examples.
The first three chapters are excellent for new DMs. They are broken down as follows:
Chapter 1: The Basics The advice of this chapter is general in nature but gives specific examples. It outlines different play styles, atmosphere, house rules and terms like world-building.
“Respect for the Players” is a section covered in this chapter and is part of its advice, but the chapter also has another section including how “Respect for the DM” is also important. This is important since so many DMs feel overwhelmed trying to make a great adventure, and they can lose some of their joy in the game when the preparation and narration are ignored or discounted.
Chapter 2: Running the Game Knowing your players is the first section of this chapter. It states that “Knowing what your players enjoy most about the D and D game helps you create and run adventures that they will enjoy and remember.”
In addition to using great examples, this book has art that illustrates the advice. Page 22 has a portrait of four adventurers all doing something different on a journey, showcasing how different players enjoy different aspects of D and D. One character on the left of the illustration is examining a curious object, and two of the characters in the middle are having a conversation with one leaning in with interest and the other leaning back with perhaps bemusement. A fourth on the far right is pilfering some jewels from a sack.
Above this are sections in the text showing how socializing, storytelling, problem solving, exploring and acting are some common elements different players prefer as what they enjoy best about Dungeons and Dragons. They are looking for the Dungeon Master to craft an experience that delivers this, and the book gives great advice on how to do that.
It goes on to show how to run combat and tracking initiative, and it also gives alternate ways to do that like making an initiative score for each player so that no one has to roll all the time, making combat faster. It also gives advice on how to describe and make decisions that won’t slow down the gameplay.
Chapter 3: DM’s Toolbox This is a chapter very much like a toolbox. It has different tools, some you may use a lot like how a character is created to less used but much debated activities like how to craft a magic item or a new spell. How to deal with character death is given a whole page along with how the difficulty different doors and their locks can challenge an adventuring party.
It was the most idiosyncratic chapter but to me the most informative and inventive.
The book has Tracking Worksheets such as:
- Game Expectations that have theme, flavor, sensitive elements, limits for player safety and comfort and what they hope for
- Travel Planner that tracks whether a group is moving fast, normal or slow (exhaustion and stealth are impacted by this with the 2024 Rules)
- NPC Tracker with stat block, alignment and personality
- Campaign Journal with session number, session date and summaries
There are nine of these and again, they are useful tools. This whole book is a toolbox for a Dungeon Master, and it addresses many issues that come up in D and D and especially those that occur with 5th Edition.
This is a book designed by Christopher Perkins and James Wyatt. Much like the new Player’s Handbook, it takes the ten years since the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition and adds what they heard was needed. In an interview with the Dungeons and Dragons YouTube Channel, Perkins pointed out that no previous Dungeon Master’s guide gave working examples alongside the advice.
Personally, I am really happy they included an open ended Greyhawk as this example. In my previous review of Vecna: Eve of Ruin, I was hoping for such a work from Wizards of the Coast. Perkins gives good reasons for choosing this in his many interviews besides this being the 50th Anniversary. He mentions that it is the first official setting and gave rise to much Dungeons and Dragons lore. When he first discovered a bare bones folio of Greyhawk as a young player, Perkins was struck by its customizability, and this Greyhawk does just that. While there have been many elaborate additions to Greyhawk and even an eight yearlong campaign called “Living Greyhawk,” the Greyhawk presented in this book is pared down to essentials.
Players and new Dungeon Masters who use this skeleton setting have it backed by the very spells and magic items in the book. Many come from Greyhawk characters like Vecna, Tasha, Mordenkainen and Bigby. But the book goes beyond Greyhawk and gets into the whole multiverse of Dungeons and Dragons.
This multiverse is explored and defined in Chapter 6, called Cosmology, written primarily by James Wyatt. The opposite page that introduces this chapter has a dynamic illustration of the Sigil’s silent protector, the Lady of Pain, bringing destruction to those who would disrupt her realm. The metaphysical art and maps in this chapter inspired me to write some ideas down about multiplanar adventure. The 2014 Player’s Handbook also has a chapter on the multiverse hitting home what it has become to Dungeons and Dragons.
Chapter 7 has tons of Treasure Tables, most of it magical. It increases the number of items from the 2014 book and has many more common magic items. It also makes the supposition that players should have more than a few magic items, although not all of high power. An idea on the size of this trove of a chapter is that it starts on page 212 and ends on page 331!
Chapter 8, the final chapter, is called Bastions. It sets up the possibility for 5th level characters to have a home that they control and populate with followers and hirelings. It has lots of mechanics and possibilities that add the chance for a player to have their character put down roots and do their own miniature worldbuilding within the greater world of the campaign.
This final chapter doesn’t end the book. It finishes with two appendixes. The first is a Lore Glossary that is a welcome thing for those new to D and D. It gives the most famous heroes, villains, gods and magic materials from all the settings. The Raven Queen, a personage used by Critical Role in their campaigns and first conceived in D and D’s 4th Edition, is given a great description. The second appendix has lots of generic maps that can quickly be used by a DM for an adventure.
This guide does what it is supposed to do, guide someone to make adventures that both they and their players can enjoy. An experienced DM may know and practice much of the advice and mechanics in this book and will use the new crafting rules or rely on the tables for how to handle special doors. A new DM will be able to use all of this book and again it would be a great gift for them. I enjoyed it and really liked the double-sided poster sized Greyhawk map. It shows much but also inspires me to explore and create more both within and beyond it, like this book.