D&D (2024) More D&D 2024 Tidbits: Aasimar, Goliaths, Town-Eating Gelatinous Cubes

Here are a few more tidbits from Game Informer's magazine coverage of the new edition's rulebooks.

• Iconic characters like Bobby the Barbarian, or Raistlin and Caramon Majere feature in the art.
• Each class and each subclass has its own piece of art.
• Species now include Aasimar, Goliath, and Orc.
• Bastions are in--player built bases.
• Greyhawk is the sample setting in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• Each book is 384 pages.

Monster Manual

• 75 new monsters in the Monster Manual; over 500 in total.
• Challenge rating remains the same.
• There are some new lower challenge vampires, and a higher challenge one called the Nightbringer.
• Blob of Annihilation is a gelatinous cube that can eat towns.
• Elemental Juggernaut, Archhag.

 

[Micah Sweet]

that would work too, but keep it consistent. I prefer alphabetical however, that way I do not have to know whether something is an aberration or monstrosity (or maybe even demon?) when looking for it

Yet if you want to know what all the demons are, you have to go through the entire list and pick them out. Heck, "green dragon" is under "G"! I cannot get over that.

 

[mamba]

Because they had been grouped this way for over 45 years, for one.

that does not mean it is a good idea and cannot be improved

The system has never listed full stat blocks by creature type.

I do not want them by type, I want it alphabetically, easier to find things without having to think about whether because a Pit Fiend is a devil I should be looking under D instead

 

[mamba]

Yet if you want to know what all the demons are, you have to go through the entire list and pick them out. Heck, "green dragon" is under "G"! I cannot get over that.

have a table for that, just like you have it for terrain

 

[Micah Sweet]

that does not mean it is a good idea and cannot be improved


I do not want them by type, I want it alphabetically, easier to find things without having to think about whether because a Pit Fiend is a devil I should be looking under D instead

Why would you be looking up pit fiends while having nothing to do with devils? How would you even know anything about pit fiends without knowing anything about devils?

And the old system, IMO, was a good idea and is not improved by what they're doing now, so from my perspective your principle, however reasonable in general it may be, does not apply here. Just because a system is new doesn't mean it's an improvement on the old one.

 

[Micah Sweet]

have a table for that, just like you have it for terrain

Why? What's the benefit of changing the organization after all this time? Everyone prior to MMOTM, including what is likely the majority of 5e fans, knows the old way. What does anyone get from changing it?

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I was thinking about the ardlings, and now my opinion is they need a different background. WotC needs to sell a different PC specie, with its own style, they could be easily imitated by 3PPs.

Spirit World

The Spirit World was one of the planes of existence[1] in the World Tree cosmology. It was home to the Celestial Empire and its Bureaucracy, the overarching pantheon of Kara-Tur.[2] The Spirit World was apparently incompatible with the Great Wheel cosmology, coming as it did from a radically...

forgottenrealms.fandom.com

I imagine the ardlings like the planetouched from the spirit realm, Maybe it was a part within the Beastlands, or the Feywild, but a zone was invaded and tainted by infernal forces, or dark feys, and then the spirit world is like a "planar dump", creating an amalgam of previous splits. Some zones were astral domains of ancient deities who "died". Other regions are like "ruins" of previous demiplanes.

It may be a beatiful place, but if you are a "sentient prey", your life is a nightmare wheren predators want to hunt and eat you, for example gnoll raids.

 

[Stormonu]

I don't think they'd bring back the ardling as a "now you can play a guardinal-themed aasimar", but I could definitely see it popping back up for all the people who want "tabaxi, but dog/deer/[insert animal here]".

That's more or less what I mean by "animal person" instead of "celestial planetouched". Ardling as a unified framework for all/most anthropomorphic animal species going forward, with little to no celestial theming - maybe keep the connection to the Beastlands as a justification for them covering any animal, but not much beyond that.

That's what I've been doing for my homebrew since at least 2E - I had an Animalfolk race and from that you could make just about any sort of animal themed humanoid you wanted. They are a sort of fey, so you don't generally have villages of just turtlefolk or dovefolk or whatever, they would be all mixed together - giraffefolk, tigerfolk, ravenfolk, etc. all in one place and intermingling, though some subgroups might veer towards certain occupations, social groups or whatnot. For example, the giraffefolk might lean towards being city guards, the ravenfolk have noble families in the city, while the tigerfolk make up most of the local clergy and the boarfolk have formed a crime syndicate who bully protection money from the local mousefolk shopkeepers.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Why would you be looking up pit fiends while having nothing to do with devils? How would you even know anything about pit fiends without knowing anything about devils?

Because I'm brand new and this adventure I bought says to use a pit fiend, but I can't find them in the "P" section anywhere!

Some newbie could buy the new Vecna adventure, so this could definitely happen.

But in any case, it appears that the MM will have lists of monsters of the same type elsewhere in the book anyway. So you'll be able to have them sorted in the old way as well.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Why? What's the benefit of changing the organization after all this time? Everyone prior to MMOTM, including what is likely the majority of 5e fans, knows the old way. What does anyone get from changing it?

What does anyone lose by changing it?

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Rilmani are classified as Celestials in 5e, and they're very different from the "sort of like Klingons but metallic" designs they had in 2e in that they are now more like constructs made of living metal (possibly liquid) and energy, with some very geometric shapes in some cases. Rilmani have been considered as a possibility for Aasimar ancestors since at least the Skills & Powers Dragon Magazine article on Planescape races near the end of 2e.