TheDungeons & Dragons2025Monster Manualis adding a lot, but one feature that won’t be getting attention is monster creation. Following on the heels of the 2024Player’s HandbookandDungeon Master’s Guide, the 2025Monster Manualpromises a selection of 500 monsters,over 85 of which will be new. Returning creatures and foes feature plenty of adjustments, although the book maintains backward compatibility with 2014 material.
AD&Dpress briefing for the 2025Monster Manualconfirmed thatmonster creation and customization don’t appear in the 2025Monster Manual. In response to a question about the contents of the “How to Use a Monster” chapter, principal game designer andMonster Manualco-lead Wesley Schneider explained that the chapter sticks to the basics of general use.
Wesley Schneider: If you want to get more into developing things, into tweaking things, so on and so forth, that’s really where the [Dungeon Master’s Guide] is going to serve you well.
The 2024Dungeon Master’s Guidedoes include a brief section on creature creation, but it focuses on mixing and matching pre-existing creatures. The 2014 book featured more extensive guidance about how to build monsters from the ground-up, so there was some hope for more complex rules to be deployed inThe Monster Manual.
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Keeping Dungeon Masters On Track
In a 2024interview withScreen Rant, creative director Chris Perkins explained the absence of complex monster creation in theDungeon Master’s Guideas a prerogative of making an easy-to-use starting toolkit for DMs.The focus on reskinning rather than ground-up creation makes the process “quick"and avoids the possibility that DMs could “create a monster that was off-CR and potentially wreck their encounter.” Senior game designer James Wyatt posited that"the best way to create a monster is by reskinning an old one.”
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Perkins didn’t rule out the idea of revisiting the concept in future books, calling it “absolutely within the realm of possibility” that more could come on that front. Clearly, the 2025Monster Manualisn’t the place where that’s going to happen, but rules expansion books in the vein ofXanathar’s Guide to EverythingandTasha’s Cauldron of Everythingcould always cover the subject.
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Streamlining the options for custom monsters definitely helps to keep less experienced DMs from veering off course, butit would still be nice to see a robust system return in the future. I mostly stick to tweaking monsters when I find their basic abilities underwhelming, something that the2025Monster Manualmay help with, or when I need to adjust them to fit my party’s level. While I don’t often build ground-up monsters like the 2014 guidance supported, I’d still like to see an updated take, and I’d definitely use it on occasion.
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There are always options outside the new core rulebooks, whether that’s returning to the guidance in the 2014Dungeon Master’s Guide, taking advice from third-party supplements, or browsing suggestions online. Given the surplus of alternatives, I can understand the decision to keep theDungeons & Dragons2025MonsterManualaway from complicated territory, but I hope future books do pick up the slack.
