Wizards of the Coast is producing lots and lots of copies of the new Player’s Handbook (2024). How many is that, exactly? According to vice president of franchise and product Jess Lanzillo, it’s exactly enough to meet the current demand — which is fairly high.
“The English language version of the 2024 Player’s Handbook alone achieved in just one month what took nearly two years for the 2014 edition across all language versions available in that timeframe,” she said in a recent video interview. Suffice it to say, therefore, that the new rules are plenty popular, so much so that Wizards has already ordered a second printing.
“This is a huge, kind of unprecedented print run for us,” she added. “I felt that we had aggressively planned for player demand, and the player demand has exceeded it.”
Nevertheless, stock remains in good supply. Polygon called about a dozen retailers in Illinois, Wisconsin, Arizona, California, Georgia, and Washington. All reported having the new book in decent quantities for their customers on Tuesday. Only two stores in one state, hurricane-ravaged Florida, said they were currently out of stock.
But while that initial print run has kept shelves full at local retailers — and on Amazon — big-box stores like Walmart and Target won’t see their copies until later this year or early 2025. Localizations of Player’s Handbook (2024) will also begin to reach those markets in the same time frame, with copies in French, Italian, German, and Spanish all currently in production.
Lanzillo said that based on demand for the Player’s Handbook (2024), her team at Wizards has already ordered a second batch of the Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024) as well. That book won’t hit shelves until Oct. 29, when a special collectible version becomes available at local retailers first.
“We know that there is a lag in between when we’d be able to restock, and print, and restock with all of our retailers,” Lanzillo said. “So we want to make sure that there isn’t a huge window where we’re not able to meet that demand. We’re working on it right now, so we feel like we’re going to time that perfectly and we’re really excited about it.”
Getting the right number of books into the distribution channel was a challenge, especially with the new “press checks” that Lanzillo said she implemented following quality issues with some products in 2023. But, she said, the production team — and its United States-based printing partners for this initial wave of product — rose to the occasion. Digital adoption of the new rules is also proceeding as expected, Lanzillo said.
“People are still creating characters using the 2014 rules [online],” Lanzillo said. “We want to make sure that anyone can play within whichever rules that they’d like, but we are seeing the 2024 [rules] outstrip 2014 [rules for] character creation — not quite two times as many, but around there. And it’s increasing kind of week over week as people get more used to it.”
Lanzillo said it’s a good sign that the sequence of the core rulebook rollouts — with the Monster Manual lagging behind in early 2025 — is going as expected.
”We’re seeing the pattern go exactly how we think it would,” Lanzillo said, “where you have kind of the solo-curious [at first], [and] now you’re getting Dungeon Masters going, ‘Hey, we’re going to do all [of] the new campaign within [the] 2024 [ruleset], let’s all start rolling up [characters with those] rules.’ So it’s a continuous spectrum of adoption, which is pretty great.”
The next hurdle for the brand will be crossing what appears to be a bit of a content gulf through the holiday and into the summer of 2025. The next big release after the Monster Manual (2025) will be an unnamed dragon anthology, which Lanzillo said will include encounters in the style of previous anthologies like Candlekeep Mysteries and Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel.
“They’re capsule dungeons with dragons in them for you to drop into your campaign,” Lanzillo said. “We really want to give players the option to not only experience the previous amazing campaign materials and adventure materials that we’ve already published with the new rules and go, Oh my gosh, this is amazing! But also to show them, Hey, here’s some ways that adventures and campaigns can blow out even further with these drop-in dungeons.”
Lanzillo said fans should be on the lookout for additional details on how older campaigns can be made backward-compatible with the new rules — especially as those rules apply to high-level monsters that have revised versions on the way. It’s hoped that third-party digital content, including fan-made content in the Greyhawk setting (which was recently unlocked by Wizards for monetization on the Dungeon Masters Guild), will also help fill that gap.
More than anything, Lanzillo said she was happy for the sense of continuity that this year’s rules revision has given to the global community.
“We want to reward rather than punish people for their knowledge and their investment that they’ve made,” Lanzillo said, which is why the original 5th edition rules from 2014 are still available and relevant. “We want to make sure that [fans] feel like the past decade they’ve invested wasn’t meaningless.
“We’re super, super grateful for how successful 5th edition has been,” Lanzillo added, “and that’s all because of the fans, and the last thing we would want to do is invalidate all of their love for the game that they’ve learned and that they’ve taught others.”
The Dungeons Master’s Guide (2024) will be available widely on Nov. 12.
