Dungeons & Dragons’ new Player’s Handbook is nearing completion, will contain four psionic subclasses
Mind bullets, that’s telekinesis!
Work continues on the 2024 edition of the Player’s Handbook, one of three tomes that will comprise the foundation of Dungeons & Dragons’ future, and the team behind it says they are actively reviewing the printed version. During a recent “fireside chat” with Todd Kenreck, the popular tabletop RPG’s guiding designers slipped details that psionics fans will be happy to hear.
Kenreck joined Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, two lead designers on the D&D 2024 project, and checked in on a Player’s Handbook that he described as “quite alarming” in size, when compared with past versions. The team is apparently “making final tweaks, looking under the hood [and] making sure everything is where it should be”, said Crawford.
Due to hit hobby store and digital shelves on September 17, the new Player’s Handbook will precede its accompanying Dungeon Master’s Guide by two months - the Monster Manual won’t release until February 2025. Compared with past processes, this book’s text and art were developed simultaneously, a purposeful choice that allowed the illustrations and words to exist in conversation with one another as opposed to feeling like a supplement.
While the new PHB will have plenty of user improvements, reorganisation of information and a revamped presentation that still feels like D&D, both Crawford and Perkins insisted that it will be more than worth updating your 10-year-old tabletop tools.
“Even though the core game is solid and compatible with the adventures people already have from the past ten years, every page is different from the equivalent page in the 2014 PHB,” Crawford said. “And that’s true for all three of the revised core rulebooks. These are new books.”
Amongst all that new information will be two psionic subclasses not yet revealed - the Fighter’s Psi Warrior and the Rogue’s Soulknife will make the jump from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything to the core rulebook. D&D’s creative team scrapped the Brawler subclass in favour of a martial character whose brains and brawn are just as deadly. Both character options join the already revealed Psionic Sorcerer and Great Old One Warlock to create a tidy niche of cerebral-powered adventurers.
Kenreck ended the chat with a promise (or threat) that the next discussion of the Player’s Handbook would be a deep dive that might stretch “for hours on end.”