Dungeons & Dragons' 2024 rules revision is finally drawing to a close in 2025 with the release of the Monster Manual, setting the stage for a year of products that both look back to D&D history and try out some new things that haven't been done before. Although the Monster Manual may not be as central as the Player's Handbook, it's the final piece of the puzzle in understanding the scope of what D&D will look like in the future.

The new book has two big goals on its plate: cleaning up the shortcomings of its predecessor and synchronizing with the tweaks made in the new Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. Those prerogatives necessitate a lot of changes, from buffing many high-level monsters to rethinking the information and options that stat blocks provide.

Screen Rant sat down with lead designer Jeremy Crawford at the Wizards of the Coast office to discuss navigating these changes, adding new monsters and art, and what the approach to the new Monster Manual says about the books that are coming later in 2025 and in years to come.

Art In D&D's 2025 Monster Manual & Beyond

Fantasy Of Every Flavor

Screen Rant: With the new Monster Manual, one thing that really stands out, obviously, is the art. And I think there's a big dichotomy here between what we've seen. We’ve seen different approaches to art in the new core rulebooks.

In the Player's Handbook, when dealing with classes and things like that, there's a lot of very bright, cheery, happy fantasy world art. Very colorful. Move a little away from that with spells. With the Dungeon Master's Guide, you're getting some of this more moody, atmospheric stuff. And then in the Monster Manual, there's a lot of art that's a little bit grisly. There's a lot of art that's very intense.

Is the plan with every book and with every subject, thinking, what is the mood we're going for here? Is there any kind of throughline, or is it just every project, this is the mood, this is the scene, this is what we're trying to set with this?

Jeremy Crawford: Starting with the new core books, we are experimenting more with art than we have tended to in fifth edition up until now. And so you're going to see that kind of variety more and more. I mean, we previewed today that in Dragon Delves, for instance, every adventure has a completely different art style.

There’s even, you know, an adventure where it's black and white, and we’re wanting to experiment more and more not just with the subjects depicted in the art, but the style of the art itself. And you're going to see us do some even bigger experiments in some of the setting products coming up in the next few years, where we're looking for not only, again, depicting the right subjects, but what's a style that really conveys the mood that we're going for?

And I love that you noticed that in the Monster Manual, there is some intentionally grisly stuff. There's also some cheery stuff, and all sorts of things in between. Because so many of the monsters aren't just, you know, a creature with this many limbs and this breath weapon, but the creatures are a mood. They set the mood for whole adventures and so we wanted that mood to come through in a number of the pieces.

And so, yeah, if you look at the undead pieces, most of them, they’re shadowy, spooky. Many of the fiend images are very sinister. Some of the monstrosity pieces are downright bloody. But then you look at some of the images of angels or of the fey — much more vibrant than we've ever done before — and everything in between.

Screen Rant: Is that something we can also expect with the Forgotten Realms book for Dungeon Masters? Will that be leaning into, with the Dalelands maybe going in one direction and Baldur's Gate going in another direction with the art?

Jeremy Crawford: Absolutely. We spent a whole lot of time in the early days while working on that book doing a whole lot of visual concepting with a group of concept artists to get the look of each of those mini settings just right. And that includes not just, you know, what do the major locations and creatures look like, but even down to what does clothing look like in the Moonshaes as opposed to, say, Calimshan or Baldur's Gate? What is the color palette of each of these zones? Because those decisions then help us convey the mood of those places.

Finding The Balance In The 2025 Monster Manual

Big Changes & Tiny Tweaks

Screen Rant: In the Monster Manual, we've got a lot of tweaks throughout to balance all these things. How do you decide when some of them are very minor? Like a high-level monster, it might have some other changes, but it might go from 400 HP to 408 HP. What motivates those really tiny tweaks, and is there a way that you find the balance of that?

Jeremy Crawford: So sometimes those little micro-tweaks are really just a result of us using our spreadsheets and other tools that we use to balance the monsters with even greater precision. And sometimes, like we found going back that in this monster's math budget it could actually have a few more hit points. And the way we often think of monsters is they all have sort of a budget of numbers, and that budget gets spent on the monster's armor class, gets spent on its hit points, the damage it deals if it heals, how much it heals, the conditions that it's able to apply.

And as we revisited each monster, we discovered, oh, it's almost like discovering this monster had some spare change. We’ll spend it now. Now sometimes a monster had way more than spare change. So there are a few monsters in there where like, their hit points went up by a hundred. And so there are some big swings in the adjustments, but then there are also micro adjustments as well.

Screen Rant: Something that felt like some of the streamlining, maybe, is one classic element of the 2014 Monster Manual is what I would call Bite and Claw. There's a lot of monsters where they bite, they have a bite attack, and they have a claw attack, or an equation very like that.

And looking through this one, it feels like some of those either A: one of those would be reflavored a little bit or given something, or B: in some cases, it seems like that's streamlined. They have maybe one thing they do, and so they're not doing a D10 and a D6 or whatever. Was that something that was really a guideline of, let's not waste people's time with attacks that aren't providing very much variance in some cases?

Jeremy Crawford: Yes. One of the guidelines I gave to the team is, it's actually long been a pet peeve of mine, when we put in like, here are three attacks that all effectively do the same thing, other than maybe the damage type changing. And I wanted to basically, if we're going to have the DM read each of these, they should actually do something different.

And now that difference can be as simple as one's a melee attack and one's a ranged attack. But that is a meaningful tactical difference. But three melee attacks, all with the same range, that do nothing but damage, and one's bludgeoning and one's slashing and one's piercing, is not particularly interesting.

So that's why you'll see many of those actions have been replaced sometimes by actions that now might apply a condition or do something else entirely, or they have just been combined into a Rend attack. And then we just say, DM, use the Rend attack X number of times in the Multiattack, and that’s a kindness to our DM. And again, because we DM the game so much ourselves, it's also a kindness to us, because eventually we get bored of, you know, Bite, Bite, Claw, or Claw, Claw, Bite, or whatever the sequence is. It's like, okay, a monster can be more interesting than that.

Screen Rant: And some of those changes very much feel like, to me, the kind of DM homebrew of — the Hook Horror is one that I noticed where it's still doing essentially the same attack, but it can it can pull someone or push someone a little with the hook.

That's the kind of thing where I think when you're roleplaying in the game and you're doing this monster, you're like, how can I make this a little more interesting? That's the kind of thing that you would come up with. Are there a lot of those in the book?

Jeremy Crawford: Yes. Often we adjusted what a monster could do based on studying the art. Because the art in the Monster Manual we developed very closely with our art team. And we would sometimes, in our art meetings, decide we were going to change what the monster did as a result of our conversation about how the monster looked.

And the Hook Horror is a great example of this. When analyzing the Hook Horror, we thought, it is very odd that this monster has hooks, but doesn't actually hook anything. So how about we actually make it move people around? And so yeah, there are little fun new details like that everywhere in the book.

Screen Rant: With the new Monster Manual and now the complete suite of the new books, is this something where you've gone back internally — because of course, they're backwards-compatible with everything — have of the team played, say, Curse of Strahd through, or something like that with the new suite of books? Has that happened on any of the older 5e campaigns?

Jeremy Crawford: So, we have not, not entire, like, massive adventures, but pieces of adventures, taken encounters and just swapped in the new stat blocks. I've done that a number of times just to personally test things. To preserve the ability to do that is why we did not change the challenge ratings of any of the monsters in the monster manual.

We've been asked before, you know, if you found a monster where it wasn't actually living up to its CR, why not just change the CR? Well, one of the reasons we changed no CRs is all of our old adventures that we want you to still be able to use and assume the monsters in them are a particular CR.

And so that is a big part of our backwards compatibility push is to keep the CRs the same but just make it so the monsters are actually the CR that's printed in their stat blocks.

New Monsters & Old Monsters Made New

Pirates & Blobs & Hags, Oh My

Screen Rant: Another little compatibility feature is the table that has new names next to old names for some monsters, and there are also a lot of attacks that have been renamed. What was the process of deciding on certain ones? We really want to give this a new name, or we really want to give a new flavor to what this attack is called, or something like that?

Jeremy Crawford: With monsters, usually when we renamed something, it was because the monster was going from being on its own in the page to having companions, and so we needed a way to differentiate them.

With attacks we would sometimes rename them so that the name did a better job of conveying what the action did. Because we found sometimes, like three monsters might all have an action with the same name, but they all do very different things. And we thought, how about we give them different names so it's more obvious to the DM, who's DM'd a lot, each of these actions are in fact different from each other.

Screen Rant: I have to bring up the pirates because that's maybe my favorite thing here. And one of the things we see here is a Pirate iral who, I think, is CR 12. Which is something that I've run into before in my campaign, with pirates specifically, but with other NPCs where you want to have a genuine threat to a party that's not just starting out that isn't maybe a necromancer reflavored as a pirate, but a pirate.

Is that something that in the future we'll be seeing more NPCs, and in this book, that present significant threats without necessarily being super powerful spellcasters or whatever, but are just formidable foes?

Jeremy Crawford: Absolutely. One of our goals was to make those NPC subgroups have big bads in them, or potentially big allies, because we know many DMs often prefer, like, urban campaigns. Or like in the case of a pirate campaign, it's mostly involving you know, threats on board the pirate ships. Maybe occasionally you'll fight an aquatic beast. And we wanted to make it easy for DMs who like that kind of story to have the big bad be something other than a dragon or some other classic monster, but instead one of these NPCs you meet.

And that's why in many of the NPC groups, not just the new ones, you'll see now that there's kind of, there's a big bad one that we've put in. So that if you want to have, like, the ultimate representative of this particular group, it's already made for you.

Screen Rant: A number of new additions to the book have already been talked about. Some haven’t. Do you have any particular new monster that is the most exciting to you here? Besides the Blob of Annihilation, because it's too easy.

Jeremy Crawford: That blob is my baby, because I was the one who came up with this originally and the one who came up with the joke name that somehow stuck. I think one of my other favorite creatures is the Arch-Hag, and that's because I love hags. I love that hags so often can, sure, be a foe that you fight, but sometimes it's a foe that you end up allying with, or instead of having combat with them, you just, you know —

Screen Rant: Strike a deal.

Jeremy Crawford: You strike a deal with them. And so I love that the Arch-Hag gets at that dual nature of the creature, while also really showing that if you do decide to fight them, it's going to be rough. And they're going to . Because you almost assuredly will not be able to kill them. And they will that you attacked them, and they will come for you, wherever you are in the multiverse.