Jeremy Crawford Interview: The Monster Manual and More
EN World sat down with Jeremy Crawford to discuss some of the big changes in the Monster Manual, as well as preview the upcoming Eberron book coming out later this year. Last month, EN World had the opportunity to travel to Wizards of the Coast’s headquarters in Renton, WA for a D&D press event. During the event, EN World had the chance to briefly sit down with Jeremy Crawford, the co-lead designer of the Monster Manual and discuss some of our burning questions about the book.
Note: This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
EN World: So my first question is about the aboleth. [Wizards] changed it from a fish to this weird otherworldly thing. Now the mechanics obviously are still mostly the same, but it’s no longer a little fishy boy, it’s a monstrous Eldritch entity. Why?
Jeremy Crawford: So a number of the changes we’ve made in the book motivated by a desire to have the monster’s design reflect its story better. And so we’ve talked a lot about, “We tuned up the mechanics, we made it more fun, we added in new twists.” But another big part of what we were trying to do is as we went to each stat block, determine is this stat block and the art together, are they actually delivering the story we tell about this creature? And so with the aboleth in particular, their story for a long time has been they’re enemies of gods, they’ve had these ancient empires and then we would looked at how we depicted them in the past. We weren’t getting that from either the art or the stat block.
They always came off as delusional.
Crawford: We really wanted to make it clear they are terrifying. And we especially had fun in the image that’s in the book of not just showing this big Eldritch horror, but even having a cultist bowing down before it to show that, yes, these are creatures who view themselves as superior to the gods.
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One of the things that I’ve been asking over the course of these interviews with the Player’s Handbook, with the Dungeon Master’s Guide and now the Monster Manual is that it resets the table, so to speak, for Dungeons & Dragons. So what are things that people should look in the Monster Manual, not only with the mechanics and how that’s going to impact gameplay moving forward, but with what creatures are appearing? How those creatures look? The dragons all got big redesigns and, lo and behold, we’re getting a dragon anthology. What things can we look at in the Monster Manual and say, “Ah, this is going to be a big deal for later”?
Crawford: I think first off, the NPCs are going to get a ton of use. And so I just would say to everyone, get ready for a lot of pirates and performers,
Also, some classic monster groups have gotten some really important changes. So just one example, goblins. Goblins show up at some point in most campaigns. And the goblin family that’s in the book, not only are they now designated as fey. One, we did that for story reasons, but that’s also going to have some mechanical outcomes, which are purposeful. It is purposeful that spells like charm person isn’t going to work on them. Hold person is not going to work on them.
That is an intentional design choice because it was important for us to better differentiate some of what in the past have been referred to as monstrous humanoids. We wanted to better differentiate them from each other. We didn’t want to fall into the trap of basically, “They’re all humans, but with just different foreheads.” We really wanted to make sure they’re truly different types of creatures and goblins for centuries in the real world have been associated with fey folk. This is a shift we started in Monsters of the Multiverse.
But then we also have some new goblins. We have the goblin hexer, which is a callback to a goblin we actually had in fourth edition because we wanted to have a tricksy spell-casting goblin in the mix. But then we also have created a new goblin minion because we wanted essentially there to be a goblin that could appear in even larger numbers than the baseline goblin we had before, because we know DMs often like to have hordes of them. That combo means you’re going to start seeing more spell-casting goblins, you’re going to see larger hordes of them, and some of your spells are not going to work on them the way they did before.
Another thing that’s going to be a biggie is just how often people are going to be surprised by creatures they’ve fought many times before. Surprise will come up less often for those monsters that tend to be pretty rare, so there’ll be less surprise there because probably the player won’t even be able to remember the details from before or they’re facing it for the first time. But with goblins, many people have experienced them before and so they’re going to start feeling like, “Oh, they’ve evolved.”
Another place where you’re going to see that is in vampires. I bring up vampires not only because they’re popular, but they come up a lot. I loved when I was at Luca Comics and Games, at the D&D games I was running there for attendees, I was always using monsters from the new Monster Manual including new vampires. And I loved seeing the shock on people’s faces when the vampires started doing things that they don’t do in the 2014 Monster Manual. Simple things like vampires can now just disengage as a bonus action because we realized when analyzing vampires, it was too easy to lock some of them down and part of the vampire shtick and folklore is they’re extremely difficult to pin down.
In addition to being able to encounter brand new types of vampires, because we have a bigger CR spread of creatures, we’re also going to throw people because now when you face a vampire, you don’t know whether it’s a standard vampire. Is this an umbral lord who’s going to be flying around and destroying us with necrotic magic? Is this a nightbringer that is almost more like a shriveled up Nosferatu that has different abilities from the regular vampire? So there’s going to be opportunities for DMs to pleasantly shock even the most jaded players because of a lot of these new things.
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When I was reading through the Monster Manual, I noticed it seemed to draw some inspiration from Fourth Edition. We saw the jobs that goblins have now and bloodied obviously has come back. Fourth Edition was the redheaded stepchild of D&D, and in recent years it’s kind of started to get its flowers. And I was wondering if that was a deliberate choice. Especially because you removed the adventuring day from 5E. Fourth Edition combat was very much felt like a test in every single combat. And Fifth Edition was more about resource management over the course of a day. Those are two totally different styles of games, and it seems like we’re going back more towards the Fourth Edition style of these combats are going to hit you harder.
Crawford: So just as when we first created 5E, we looked at all previous editions for gems that we could bring forward, we did that again. And so we were looking at First, Second, Third, and indeed Fourth. There are gems from Fourth Edition that we have happily brought forward. And several of us on the team worked on Fourth Edition. I, particularly in the later years of fourth edition, did a lot of work on monsters. And absolutely there are things that I did in 4E Monsters and that other members of the team did that we happily brought forward if we knew it worked well and we took the time to make sure it integrated into a fifth edition environment in a natural way.
We are always looking for opportunities to take the best parts of previous editions and bring them forward when the time is right, when the community seems ready for it, and when it’s the right tool for the job. Because anytime we’re faced with a new design problem, we have the option of either doing something new or repurposing something that we’ve done in the past in D&D. You can see that actually all over the place in this book. It’s a mix of things you’ve never seen before that particular monsters are doing, but then in other cases places where we remembered some nugget we loved from a past monster book. I always had a special fondness for the Goblin Hexer in fourth edition, and that’s why I put the Goblin Hexer on the list of monsters that would go into this book.
Along those lines, there’s three different types of Githzerai, three different types of Githyanki, three or four types of goblins in there. Are we going to see more of that in future book? Is that going to be the norm? One of the things that got brought up with the NPC statblocks is that any humanoid can use them. So, people said, “Well, orc humanoids, if I have an orc brawler, that should probably be stronger than say a human brawler,” which doesn’t really fit within the 5E ethos, but it is what it is. Are we going to start seeing more specializations in creatures as in “Here’s the general creature stat block, but here’s a couple of extra things that this monster can do to make it hit harder or be tricksier,” or something along those lines?
Crawford: We are signaling throughout this book, and this is a direction that we were taking in Monsters of the Multiverse and in some of the other books, where we really drive home that each stat block is representing only a slice of a particular type of creature. When we provide a stat block, it’s like, “Well, this is one way this creature could work.” We always love it when we do variants to drive home just how much design space and storytelling space there is within each of these monsters’ broad concepts.
That’s why with Githyanki, we wanted to add the Githyanki Dracomancer, not only to have a higher CR Githyanki to face, but also we realized in none of our Githyanki variants did we have one that was really leaning into that important part of their story of their bond with red dragons. That’s another example of how story was often motivating what we were doing with some of these new monsters. You’ll definitely see more variants in future books because we think it’s an interesting design space. It means we can tailor make things for particular settings, particular adventures. And it’s a good way for us to model for DMs what they can do in their own campaigns of taking the baseline version of something and then add in a few interesting tweaks and suddenly you have a whole new monster.
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Changing topics the various fiends, the demons, the devils, and the yugoloths, they also got updated looks. They look a lot more like monstrous and something that has been pulled out of an infernal plane. I did note that, because Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes really expanded the demon lore, I noticed there’s only a handful of each of those different types of the devils, the fiends. I was curious about why you chose which ones appear in the book, because I don’t think there was that many yugoloths in the 2014 Monster Manual. So why they were included in the 2024 Monster Manual and why, again, was the decision made to make them look very different than what came before?
Crawford: The fiends mapped to what was in the 2014 Monster Manual. Even the yugoloths, and this is actually a funny result of us using alphabetization for everything, the yugoloths previously were all crammed together in the 2014 book. They didn’t each have their own key piece of art. I actually love that you got the impression there were more of them because that actually gets at why we changed the organization and gave everyone a key piece of art because we realized some of these monsters were hiding in plain sight in the 2014 Monster Manual. If you have a page with a bunch of stat blocks on it, and then especially if you have one or two stat blocks that doesn’t have a key piece of art, it’s really easy for that stat block to never see use.
So, if a monster is going to make it into the Monster Manual, it’s going to get a piece of art that’s there to inspire you, draw you in, make you ponder as a DM, “Maybe I want to include this.” We also really wanted to make sure each stat block sang. When came to revamping the look of the fiends, we really wanted to drive home that just looking at them, you would be able to tell there is something malevolent here. This isn’t just a creature that rose up out of a swamp, it rose out of a swamp of pure evil. Tthat’s a mindset of really having the art communicate the nature of some of these otherworldly creatures. That was behind some of the visual revamps that we did for many of the creatures in this book.
You’ll notice that also celestials look more otherworldly than they used to. When we were evaluating some of our visuals, we frankly felt some of our celestials look too much just like, “Well, that’s just a dude who put wings on.” And we wanted to make sure that if you saw an angel, you could tell immediately, “Whoa, that is not from here.” So throughout the book you’ll see that a lot of the creatures that a part of their visual enhancement was bringing their nature to the fore, making it so that you could tell there’s really something special or terrifying or wondrous here.
That means some of the creatures are way scarier than they used to be. Also, some creatures are more whimsical than they used to be. All of that is tailored to what’s appropriate for the creature’s story and for the mood that we want to put in front of the DM as an enticement for the DM to ponder whether they want to include that monster in their game.
A very random side question here, since you brought up celestials. As a good Catholic boy, will we ever get biblically accurate angels in D&D?
Crawford: So we talked about that. We ran out of room. We have the classics – the solar, the deva and the planetar. We considered making room for an even higher CR angel than the solar and making it the actual terrifying look that is described in the Bible because a lot of people don’t realize angels in the Bible, especially the ones in heaven, are described as these clusters of wings covered with eyeballs. This is not the pretty person showing up with dove wings.
If they look humanoid, they’re low level. The more eyes they have, the higher up they are.
Crawford: It is with that in mind that one of the reasons that our concept for the angels is very much that they appear way they do to avoid breaking the minds of mortals. So you can actually think of the images that are in the Monster Manual for the angels, those are not actually their true appearance. That’s sort of the form they put on because to whatever mortal they were appearing to at that moment, that is the form that would make it possible for the mortal to be able to handle even communicating with the angel.
My last question, I’m going to jump ahead to Eberron. Can you give me a tease about what Eberron airship mechanics look like?
Crawford: We did some vehicle work in Descent Into Avernus with the infernal war machines that we are bringing to Eberron to provide an easier way for DMs to get airships into the mix.That’s all I’ll say for now, but we are building on some of the work that we did with infernal war machines way back in Descent Into Avernus.
