D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide: Forget looting magic items—go make them yourself

The Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is giving us the biggest crafting project possible with Bastions. We'll be building castles and towers from 5th through 20th level. That lends some perspective to new crafting rules, which have been too long and arduous to pull off during normal D&D 5e gameplay. Also, this latest video from Wizards of the Coast is talking about new magic items, and not just the potion and scroll crafting introduced in the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook.

The new DM's Guide expands upon that tiny taste of crafting and lets you craft...everything else.

Crafting every other magic item works the way those basic crafting items work. You have the Arcana skill to make magic items, you grab the relevant toolkit, and the relevant spell your imbuing the crafted item with.

The example they use is crafting a magic item infused with Magic Missile. You look at your Arcana skill, you acquire a Woodcarver's Kit, you cast the Magic Missile spell into the item. The only other thing it requires is time and money. But in the world of D&D—at least in the world of fast-paced published adventures—time is your most precious resource. It's a resource you always have less of than you think.

Kenreck gets around to asking: Why is crafting such an aspiration for some players? Does everyone want to be Sauron?

You see, that's funny because Sauron may not have handcrafted all the Rings of Power in The Lord of the Rings, but he was certainly the mastermind behind their crafting. And if you haven't sifted through the internet dreck telling you to not watch The Rings of Power on Amazon, then you're missing out on a Tolkien-length epic crafting job.

They take a few moments to encourage players—not just Dungeon Masters—to purchase a Dungeon Master's Guide. This is unexpected. But they want to encourage players to craft. Since all the high-level cool stuff to craft is in the DM's Guide, that's why they'd want players to buy the book and look through it and come to their DM with crafting requests.

One category of items you won't be able to craft are Artifacts. Those are S-tier magic items whose crafting recipes are lost in the ether of time and space. 

Artwork-wise, plenty of very good artwork is being pulled forward from the 2014 5e DM's Guide. Sure, across-the-board new artwork would be great. They did that in the new Player's Guide. But money is slipping and time is ticking for getting these new 2024 Core Rulebooks crafted. We already went over how time is your most precious commodity in D&D. There's still a lot of new art too, though.

They also give you a few words' worth of advice on naming magic items and perhaps giving them a little backstory of their own. That's not just a +1 sword. It's Bob the Elf's +1 sword passed down through the ages. Boom. Your +1 sword isn't so forgettable now, is it? Or perhaps it's a sinister whispering dagger that says, "[expletive] you," when you stab someone with it.

Hey, that was Chris Perkins's example, not mine.

Sentient magic items (ones that can speak) will have an Alignment, as well as Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma ability scores. That's cool. That may bring up roleplaying opportunities—and conflicts—between player characters and their magic items. I certainly had fun with that during our Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus campaign. The Shield of the Hidden Lord was sentient and such a drag on the whole party that they chucked it into the River Styx running through the Nine Hells where it would lay at the bottom of the bloody water for the next 99 years.

And the DM's Guide is finally going to give you cold, hard prices on a lot of these magic items. In the past, you had to divine them for yourself, with a huge range of prices to grab from. Now, thankfully, we can know the prices. And the DM can go up or down from there as they see fit. That's a million times easier than having to invent prices for everything all the time. 

Also, every single magic item has been revised in some way. Either making it easier to understand, more fun to use, or some combination of the two. The folks at D&D Beyond, which is Wizards of the Coast's online platform for Dungeons & Dragons, went through some growing pains when implementing multiple editions of the Player's Handbook recently. Hopefully the hundreds of tiny revisions make to the magic items will integrate smoothly into their operations. 

Also, any named magical item, e.g., an Arrow of Slaying, may now have the _____ of Slaying applied to any other magical weapon that is more pertinent to your players. Perhaps you'll have a Bullet of Slaying, or a Glaive of Slaying, so your players won't just ignore magic items because that player character isn't proficient in their use. 

I had already started doing this, simply because I'd grown tired of that exact scenario. "Check it out! It's the legendary Blood Spear!" "Meh, I use swords. Leave it."

Monsters' treasure will also be given different themes. The loot popping out of a creature marked "Arcana" will list different categories of items such as gems and magic items. Whereas something marked "Relics" will perhaps drop a different set of magic items and art objects for their monetary value. This sounds great to me as a DM always grasping at different themes. But my players rarely have the patience to record anything more than an object's gold value, so, your mileage may vary. 

The new D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is a month away, launching on November 12. I can't wait to get my filthy DM paws all over it.