D&D's revised Monster Manual is aiming to provide oodles of plot hooks along with its stat blocks, and I'm already quietly stealing some for my own encounters
Dungeons & Dragons will be completing its trio of 2024 rules revisions—a little confusingly—on Feburary 18, 2025. Its third source book, the Monster Manual, comes on the heels of both the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide. I recently got to sit down last week, with a bestiary of other outlets, for a preview of what would be inside—and, honestly? As far as a tome of stat blocks goes, it ain't half-bad.
Obviously, as revealed by game director Jeremy Crawford and principal game designer Wesley Schneider earlier this month, the Tarrasque is getting some «fighting buddies». The amount of high-CR BBEGs here is, in truth, honestly kind of impressive—with promises to add a bunch of «apex threats» like the Elemental Cataclysm, a multi-headed beast with varyingly-flavoured maws of doom doing their best Tiamat impression.
Other big bads included the Animal Lords, CR20 demigods with different abilities based on your flavour of furry, as well as a Haunted House Revenant. My favourite by far is the Blob of Annihilation, a cataclysmic ooze with the skull of a dead god inside it. One which hosts its own demiplane that can draw you and your compatriots inside, which presents a problem—since killing it would collapse the demiplane and eject its inhabitants into the Astral Sea (that's 'outer space' in nerdspeak).
My immediate thought upon regarding this thing wasn't to use it as a CR20 battle, but instead as a plot hook for a Spelljammer campaign—why start in a tavern when you can be a gaggle of unassuming nobodies sucked into a giant ooze and shot into space after a group of high-level murderhobos kill it without regard for your safety?
And that, really, seems to be the major draw of this book. More impressive than the 80+ new creatures and the Tarrasque being able to blow up buildings now is the renewed emphasis on providing stories for fledgling DMs. For instance, there's more NPC-style blocks, like an entire crew of pirates to throw into your campaign, as well as a
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