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“Mitzi,” the lobby dragon of Wizards of the Coast, has been given more space of her own in the company’s new Renton, Wash., headquarters. The bones scattered around her pedestal are, we were assured, just former interns. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde)
The future of Dungeons & Dragons was a secret inside a secret.
Wizards of the Coast hasn’t left Renton, Wash., but it did move out of its previous Landmark building space in July 2023. Its new location is close by, in an ordinary-looking office park with no branding at all. You have to take a secure elevator up to a particular floor, but then you’ll come face to face with “Mitzi,” Wizards’ famous lobby dragon, and her slightly more elaborate new digs.
During a recent tour of the new office, the Hasbro subsidiary unveiled its plans for the next year in the life of Dungeons & Dragons.
“We really see ourselves as stewards of this game,” said Jess Lanzillo, VP of franchise. “It’s a lifestyle and an institution … these are lifelong memories, milestones in people’s lives.”
Lanzillo was the first speaker in a presentation that took place in the “secret gaming lair” at Wizards’ headquarters. Next to one of the company’s kitchens, there’s a suspicious bookshelf that is in fact a door. Open it, and you walk into the one room at Wizards’ new office that actually looks like it belongs to a company that makes fantasy games.
A conspicuous display shelf in Wizards of the Coast’s offices holds a peculiar secret. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde)
The rest of the building is just an open-plan office. It’s got a great view of Lake Washington, but if you’ve seen one lakefront office in this region, you’ve seen them all.
The lair, on the other hand, features a full bar, a glass-fronted shelf of collectibles, dragon’s-head trophies on the walls, and a custom gaming table with a flatscreen monitor on its surface. A lot of work gets done here, as well as many of Wizards’ in-house games. Sometimes they’re the same thing.
We got to hang out in the lair for a couple of hours as several of D&D’s head writers walked us through the company’s plans for the rest of the year. This included head writer and systems architect Jeremy Crawford; principal game designer James Wyatt, who recently celebrated his 25th year at Wizards of the Coast; and principal D&D designer F. Wesley Schneider.
Wizards’ secret gaming room includes a fully-stocked bar, an oak gaming table, some very comfortable couches, and if you look closely, elaborate chandeliers made from leftover Magic cards. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde)
Bring on the bad guys
Dungeons & Dragons, the self-billed “World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game,” celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. The core of that celebration was the release of an updated and redesigned version of the game’s fifth edition rules.
According to Lanzillo, the response from fans has been incredible, with all of the 2024 books in reprints. The goal for 2025 is to keep that ball rolling, with a continued anniversary celebration that includes a return to the fan-favorite settings of Eberron and the Forgotten Realms.
However, as both Lanzillo and Crawford said, the plan for D&D isn’t to keep revisiting the past forever. Part of the point of 2025 is to, in Lanzillo’s words, “re-establish a world-building environment” — to rebuild D&D’s foundation in anticipation of doing new things with the game and its various settings.
The first step in that process is the release of 2024’s Monster Manual (Feb. 18), the final entry in D&D’s new core set of books. The Manual features over 500 monsters, which range from small fries like the traditional goblins and orcs to world-endangering threats like the classic tarrasque.
The tarrasque, at an official Challenge Rating of 30, is still the single most dangerous creature in Dungeons & Dragons. However, it has some competition as of 2025 from new monsters like the elemental cataclysm or the blob of annihilation. (Chris Rahn Image for Wizards of the Coast)
The big innovations for 2024’s Monster Manual largely have to do with ease of use. As Crawford has said in the past, the original 5th-edition books from 2014 were made on a relative shoestring, and as such, were more like warehouses full of ideas than any sort of actual guide.
2024’s Manual is better-organized, with multiple appendices, streamlined rules, and what Crawford referred to as “this amazing invention called ‘alphabetization.’” Every monster has been reshuffled so they’re easier to find in the book, there’s more useful information in each monster’s stat block to make it harder to miss, and there are new indexes in the back. Now you can search for enemies by their creature type or intended level of challenge.
If there’s a single marquee feature for the new Manual, it might be its art. Every monster has received its own unique full-color illustration. Past versions of the Manual have tended to depict the monsters standing at rest against plain white or transparent backgrounds, but the 2025 edition shows them all in their lairs or in action.
The goal is to make the Manual a “treasure trove of inspiration,” in Crawford’s words; each monster isn’t simply a static image and a bunch of math, but a living creature that could be the antagonist and/or focus of an entire adventure.
Going back to Faerun
Several wielders of spellfire are shown in the new Player’s Guide for the Forgotten Realms. (Taras Susak Image for Wizards of the Coast)
The Forgotten Realms might be D&D’s most famous original setting at the moment, due to the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the 2023 live-action film Honor Among Thieves. As such, it’s not surprising that Wizards plans to wrap up its two-year anniversary celebration with a return to the Realms.
Two separate books, the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide and Forgotten Realms Adventure Guide, are scheduled for a simultaneous release on Nov. 11. The former book is for players who want to create a new character who’s native to the Forgotten Realms, while the latter book is strictly for Dungeon Masters.
The Adventure Guide is intended as a deep dive into the length and breadth of the Forgotten Realms. According to Crawford, players’ reactions to Baldur’s Gate 3 were a big influence on the development of the Adventure Guide. That drove the decision to treat the Realms as what Crawford calls “micro-settings” — various disparate locations that are all still technically on the same world, but which are different enough to serve as the home for entirely different styles of D&D game.
For example, Icewind Dale is a solid background for a horror game; the Moonshaes would work for Celtic-inspired high fantasy; and the city of Baldur’s Gate is a natural place for any kind of heist, caper, or crime spree.
Meanwhile, the Player’s Guide provides eight new subclasses for player characters, such as a bard who uses the Moonshaes’ faerie-infused magic or a genie-themed paladin from Calimshan.
In addition, the Player’s Guide will feature a new mechanic called “circle casting,” where multiple characters can combine their magical abilities in a ritual to create a single powerful effect. This is meant to reflect several specific incidents that have taken place in the Realms’ backstory, but which have never been mechanically possible in-game until now.
Eberron introduced the artificer character class, which casts magic through the use of specialized machines. The new Forge of the Artificer book is intended to give the class the same “glow-up” that everyone else got from the 2024 Player’s Handbook, according to author James Wyatt. (John Grello Image for Wizards of the Coast)
Other upcoming projects for Dungeons & Dragons include:
Dragon Delves (July 8) is an anthology that features 10 ready-to-run adventures, each one of which is themed around one of the 10 classic dragons of D&D: red, black, blue, white, green, gold, bronze, copper, silver, and brass. Delves is intended as a deliberate follow-up to the new editions of both the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master’s Guide, as 10 examples of how to design and run a D&D adventure. It’s also planned to feature an art and history section that reviews 50 years of D&D’s dragons.
Eberron: Forge of the Artificer (Aug. 19) is intended as a companion piece to 2019’s Rising From the Last War. It returns to Eberron, a world of pulp adventure and magical technologies, with a broad-focused sourcebook that Wyatt said is closer in tone to 2020’s Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. In addition to chapters on new campaign ideas, revisiting playable species from Eberron like the warforged, and rules adjustments, Forge will contain a rules update for the artificer that’s intended to bring it up to rough parity with D&D’s other character classes. Wyatt made sure to note that he’d written Forge with consultation from Keith Baker, who created Eberron after winning Wizards of the Coast’s Fantasy Setting Search contest in 2002.
Heroes of the Borderlands (Sept. 16) is a new starter set that revisits the setting of the classic 1979 D&D adventure The Keep on the Borderlands. In addition to providing an entry-level experience so new D&D players can learn how to play the game, Heroes features several new mechanical options, such as a unique, newcomer-friendly “tile-based” method of character generation. “Pre-generated characters don’t let you make the character your own,” Crawford said. “This solves for that.”
A final unannounced project is scheduled for an indeterminate point in October, though no one at Wizards was willing to so much as hint what it might be.
The single common thread that joins all of these disparate projects, according to Crawford, is that each one deliberately tries to do something that’s never been done before in D&D’s 50-year history, such as brand-new mechanics or never-before-seen types of material.
“For every one of these products,” Crawford said, “we’re innovating in some way. That’s going to continue.”
Project Sigil
Wizards’ official not-necessarily-a-virtual-tabletop app, Project Sigil, allows you to customize every detail of a Dungeons & Dragons encounter, including custom spell effects. (Wizards of the Coast Image)
Virtual tabletops, or VTTs, are a big part of the modern boardgame scene. Apps like TaleSpire are used every day to play games online, which naturally includes D&D.
Wizards of the Coast announced 2 1/2 years ago, alongside the rules revamp that was then known as “One D&D,” that it had plans to get in on that action by building its own VTT in Unreal Engine.
I got a chance to check out a pre-alpha of Wizards’ then-unnamed VTT in May 2023, as part of a short adventure run by D&D designer Makenzie De Armas. (She proceeded to kill my character in one hit.) It was early days, but I thought there was potential in the system. Then I didn’t hear much of anything about it for 18 months, although that had as much to do with the rules update and the anniversary as anything else.
The VTT reappeared at this most recent media summit, now under the working title of Project Sigil. Now being built in version 5.4 of the Unreal Engine, Project Sigil is intended as many things — a world-building tool, a visual aid, a “hook for your imagination” — but not necessarily a VTT.
Wizards quietly tested Project Sigil out at a recent PAX Unplugged conference, at which it learned that the more it attempted to use Sigil to “automate” D&D, the less people seemed to like it. That influenced an evolution of the tool from a sort of virtual D&D companion into an easy-to-use 3D map builder.
Project Sigil lets users drag and drop a variety of included assets, such as barrels, cages, and candles, to create and populate a 3D dungeon map. (Wizards of the Coast Image)
We received a short demo of the current alpha version of Project Sigil from one of its lead programmers, who was able to create a fairly elaborate set for a graveyard in a couple of minutes. You can choose from a variety of pre-built options, such as trees, rocks, types of wall, and flooring, then drag and drop them into the scene. The focus of the app is creating “vignettes” — small rooms and short encounters, rather than something as complicated as a city block.
At time of writing, Sigil is intended to be connected directly to D&D Beyond for online play, which will allow you to import characters and monsters directly from Beyond to Sigil. This includes stats, hit points, and current spells. You’ll also be able to create and customize virtual miniatures for your player characters. You can also import your own 2D maps into Sigil, which can automatically convert them into a 3D model.
Notably, there are no plans at Wizards for Sigil to accept user-generated content, although many details about Sigil such as how and where players could share their maps are still in flux.
In response to questions about the potential for users’ content on Sigil being used to train an LLM, Wizards representatives were careful to say that “we have not changed stances or policy on AI.”
A short trailer is planned to debut from Wizards in the near future that will advertise the start of an open alpha for Project Sigil. Interested users should know that Sigil won’t necessarily be a low-demand program (“you’re gonna need a graphics card”), but the team is currently aiming for Sigil to have roughly the same PC specs as Fortnite.
Other interesting reveals from Wizards’ media summit included:
“We would be incredibly excited to have Baldur’s Gate 4,” Lanzillo said, “but it’s a scary assignment.” Larian Studios “reset the bar” for CRPGs with Baldur’s Gate 3, so Wizards feels fine taking their time with any potential follow-ups.
The 2024 rules refresh put several other projects at Wizards on the back burner. This included further potential crossovers with Magic: The Gathering. Once 2025 is over, D&D will have a “new road map” and more interplay between the two franchises, such as more D&D adaptations of famous Magic locations, may be possible.
Wizards subsidiary Archetype Entertainment revealed its science-fiction RPG Exodus at the 2023 Game Awards, but has gone dark since, except for Exodus‘ recent appearance on an episode of the Amazon Prime show Secret Level. However, that’s about it as far as news goes from Wizards’ internal video game developers, aside from the continued success of the mobile game Monopoly Go!
One of Lanzillo’s dream collaborations would be to get the Japanese artist Junji Ito (Uzumaki, Spiral) to contribute to a D&D project.
