Over the years, Dungeons & Dragons has had dozens of playable races for your character to inhabit. Maybe they're a half-Orc bard trying to make some coin in a local tavern, or a Gnome artificer hoping to test their latest inventions. Seeing if there are any new races with each new book is one of the most interesting aspects of each release, and Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse will be the biggest influx of player races since the core Player's Handbook released back in 2014.

But this is more than just dumping 33 new or reworked races on our plate and then leaving us to it; Monsters of the Multiverse marks a key turning point for Dungeons & Dragons with some of the most radical shake ups to the character creation system in years.

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As the "Multiverse'' in the title might suggest, Monsters of the Multiverse brings together creatures from across D&D's many settings and puts them together in a new, setting-agnostic book. While we may closely associate the Minotaurs with Theros or the Centaurs with Ravnica, this book presents them in a location-agnostic way that allows them to fit neatly into virtually any campaign you can think of. There are even a few debuts, like the tortoise-like Tortles.

They've all been balanced against each other, and Wizards claims they're all likely at least a bit stronger than they were in previous printings to accommodate for it. As Dungeons & Dragons principal rules designer Jeremy Crawford put it, the aim is to make it so that every race can "bring something comparable" to the table.

Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse Key Art
Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse Key Art

You might think trying to distance some species from the lore of their homeworlds may put a dampener on your worldbuilding potential, but actually the opposite will be true as Wizards of the Coast is using it as an opportunity to go deeper into their histories. For instance, rather than have the goblins be defined by their fervent loyalty to the Forgotten Realms god Maglubiyet, Monsters of the Multiverse will look even further back and give us a time before then for us to base our own setting's goblins on. This kind of intrinsic, archetypal analysis of D&D's species and what they mean to the game itself over any individual setting is an elegant way of making them open for inclusion anywhere.

While there are a few debuting races, the majority of them are tweaked and remixed versions of things we've seen before. Each race has been balanced with the others in the book – and made more powerful than previous appearances – as part of D&D's a more extensive retooling of its difficulty. This comes with several other changes found in the NPC and monsters chapters that try to make the game more challenging.

But by far the biggest change in this new book is in how it represents non-human races and cultures.

Each race has been universal in its culture, psychology, and skills for a long time. All Half-orcs were strong, tanky beings with ability traits that raised Strength and Constitution, and were skewed towards the chaotic evil end of the alignment chart, while every Elf inherently had higher Dexterity and a tendency for chaotic good.

As was announced in 2020 and put into action at the end of last year in a series of errata to other books, all of this has been completely stripped out. Now, players and DMs can freely decide on characters' ability modifiers, alignment, and even class. As the game's principal rules designer Jeremy Crawford puts it, the book wants players to be able to make characters that "really sing to them".

While the design goal was to give every race the same flexibility as humanity, that doesn't mean they've all now become indistinguishable from it. While ability score increases are gone, racial traits can still be found as long as they're based on that race's physical or magical nature.

For example, Kobolds are still small, have Darkvision, and can use their Draconic Cry racial ability. But they're no longer inherently cowardly and subservient, nor do they always lean towards being Lawful Evil. If you play as a Kobold, you can decide exactly what their personality will be, and your DM can decide what, if any, ability bonuses you receive to fit that character.

Although ability score increases are being removed, DMs are still encouraged to make use of the new floating score system to help shape the different cultures of their worlds. Sometimes that might just be the way things were, but having the freedom to play around and challenge the ongoing assumptions about each race and what they represent will open up a lot of roleplaying possibilities for DMs.

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More than just an expansion, Monsters of the Multiverse feels like a clarification of where Wizards of the Coast wants Dungeons & Dragons to be right now. Reworking non-human races to be less homogenised is just one aspect of this, with the retoolings of how NPCs and monsters work for player and DM accessibility being the other side of it. And, while every fifth edition book is going to be compatible with the upcoming revised rules, Monsters of the Multiverse's adjustments make it more in line with their vision than many other books.

Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse is launching on January 25 as part of the Dungeons & Dragons Expanded Rules Set, which also includes the latest versions of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Standalone and digital copies of it will launch on May 17.

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