The 10 Things You Need to Know About the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide

If you’re anything like me and you’ve been running your games using the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide but felt like things could be easier, more streamlined, or just better organized—good news! The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide is everything you loved before, only better.

I played for years using the original 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide, and despite it being very useful, I found it could be lacking in certain areas. After spending hours flipping through the pages and prepping a handful of adventures with the new rules, here’s what stands out the most about the updated DMG. More importantly, here is where it makes up for what it lacked previously:

#10: It’s Much Better Organized

The 2014 DMG could feel scattered when you needed specific tools or pieces of information. The new DM’s Toolkit chapter (chapter 3) is the ultimate one-stop shop. Need to know how poison works? Want to drop a nasty trap on your party? Or maybe an unexpected chase breaks out. All that (and more) is now in one easy-to-find section, so you’re not hunting through random chapters mid-game. It’s made DMing a lot smoother and lets you focus on the fun, not the paperwork.

Even better, this DMG provides straightforward guidelines for homebrewing creatures, spells, curses, and magic items. The amount of customization you can bring to your table is massive, and it’s never been easier to do it!

#9: Bastions Bring a Whole New Layer of Play

Bastions are a huge new addition to the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide, and they’re probably going to change the way your campaign feels. Each player gets to control their own Bastion—a home base that levels up with them as they progress. The Bastions can be customized and expanded, but they don’t require constant upkeep. While your players are off on wild adventures, their Bastion is passively ticking away, growing in resources, abilities, or even defenses.

This mechanic adds a sense of continuity to the world. Your players now have a permanent stake in the campaign setting, something that grows alongside their characters. Bastions become a core part of the campaign, and it’s exciting to see players investing in their strongholds as much as they do their character sheets.

It’s worth noting that Bastions require a specific type of campaign with a solid amount of downtime. If your campaign is non-stop action, you won’t really have time to take in all the fun aspects of having a home base.

#8: It Shows and Tells How to Create Adventures

The new DMG doesn’t just tell you how to run an adventure—it shows you, too. With dedicated chapters that break down adventures and campaigns into their base components, you’ll get clear examples that walk you through the process. Whether you’re crafting an episodic adventure or a multi-arc epic with a continuous narrative, the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide helps you map out plot points, tie together adventures, and keep the flow.

My personal favorite way the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide achieves this is by breaking adventures down into a string of encounters. They describe how to move from encounter to encounter and how many encounters an adventure should have.

Then, they show you how adventures can be strung together to create a campaign and how to move from adventure to adventure.

This makes a seemingly monumental task (planning a long-term campaign) seem approachable, something that the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide seems to have a specific focus on.

#7: There are Five Ready-To-Play Adventures

For those times you need something quick, the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide has you covered with five ready-to-play adventures. These are short, modular scenarios designed to slot into any campaign. They’re also fantastic examples of adventure design, showing you how to structure an adventure from start to finish.

With maps provided in the appendix, you’re free to use these adventures as templates to create your own encounters. Whether it’s a cursed tomb or a haunted village, these ready-made adventures are tools for sparking creativity and giving you ready-made scenarios when you need them most.

I’ve actually shown how these can come together into a spooky haunted house adventure on D&D Beyond, which you can access for free here.

#6: The Greyhawk Setting is Back in a Big Way

The City of Greyhawk and Eastern Oerik are given new life in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide. Not only is there a double-sided poster map, but this update also expands on the lore and makes the setting easy to bring into your own campaign. Greyhawk has a rich, classic D&D feel, and now, with its detailed setting, it’s easier than ever to immerse players in its intrigue, secrets, and historic locations.

Whether you’re a longtime fan of Greyhawk or discovering it for the first time, this addition breathes new life into an iconic setting, complete with factions, notable figures, and adventure seeds that practically beg to be explored.

I want to do a full breakdown of the Greyhawk Gazeteer in this chapter later, so that’s all I’ll say for now.

But, I do think that it holds true to this historic setting, and definitely does it justice.

#5: Magic Items Have Seen a Facelift

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide introduces 20 brand-new magic items, with old favorites given fresh descriptions and artwork. But that’s not all: crafting rules have been pulled from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, letting DMs and players work together to make new items unique to their campaign.

Magic item pricing is also included, but it’s a simple chart that suggests how much an item of a certain rarity should be, rather than being specific per item pricing.

#4: Customization Options for Everything

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide encourages you to make the game your own with rules for customizing just about everything. Monsters, magic items, backgrounds, curses, and even spells can be tweaked and transformed using the rules in chapter 3.

You’ll find easy-to-follow guidelines for adjusting monster features without altering their challenge rating and making magic items with unique properties or restrictions.

It’s worth noting that the monster creation guidelines are much less in-depth than the 2014 DMG, which dedicated over a dozen pages to creating monsters to match certain challenge ratings.

However, the new customization options are still incredibly helpful.

As a DM with a busy life outside of D&D, I usually adapt existing monsters to fit my campaigns, rather than creating them from scratch. That’s exactly what the rules in the new 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide excel at, which means they may be catching onto the fact that most DMs already have their plates full.

#3: It Includes Handouts to Help Track Your Game

The new DMG is packed with handouts that help you stay on top of your campaign, from session to session. These include tools like the Game Expectations handout (for discussing tone and style with your players), a Travel Planner, NPC and Settlement Trackers, a Campaign Journal, and more.

There’s even a Bastion Tracker, so you and your players can keep tabs on their strongholds as they evolve. These tools make it easy to keep things organized, and they’re incredibly useful for long-term campaigns.

You can view and download these sheets for free on the 2024 D&D Free Rules on D&D Beyond.

#2: It’s Got Lore Galore

D&D’s rich world-building is celebrated in the new 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide with a Lore Glossary that collects entries on many of D&D’s most famous creatures, locations, and items. From mind flayers to Sigil, the City of Doors, and artifacts like the Deck of Many Things, this glossary is packed with interesting lore that DMs can use to enrich their campaigns.

It’s a goldmine for DMs who want to bring the larger D&D world into their games, giving players a sense that their story is part of a much bigger adventure.

#1: It’s Way Easier to Learn How to DM

Learning how to DM used to feel like climbing a mountain, but the new 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide turns it into a more gradual incline. The first two chapters are a masterclass for new DMs, covering everything from setting up encounters to handling roleplay with clear examples that guide you step-by-step. There’s even an actual play example that shows how exploration flows into combat, so you can see each part of the game in action.

One of the biggest highlights is the One-Hour Prep Guideline, which, as an aforementioned busy DM, I cannot suggest enough. This outline shows you exactly how to prepare a session in just one hour, hitting the key points without needing a weekend of planning. If you’re juggling work, life, and game nights, this tip alone will keep you sane and ready for game day.