2025 Monster Manual to Introduce Male Versions of Hags, Medusas, and Dryads

The upcoming Monster Manual will feature artwork depicting some creatures like hags and medusas in both genders, a first for Dungeons & Dragons. In the "Everything You Need to Know" video for the upcoming Monster Manual, designers Jeremy Crawford and Wesley Schneider revealed that the new book would feature artwork portraying both male and female versions of creatures like hags, dryads, satyrs, and medusas. While there was a male medusa named Marlos Urnrayle in Princes of the Apocalypse (who had a portrait in the book) and players could make satyr PCs of either gender, this marks the first time that D&D has explicitly shown off several of these creatures as being of both male and female within a rulebook. There is no mechanical difference between male creatures and female creatures, so this is solely a change in how some monsters are presented.

In other news that actually does impact D&D mechanics, goblins are now classified as fey creatures (similar to how hobgoblins were portrayed as fey creatures in Monsters of the Multiverse) and gnolls are now classified as fiends.

Additionally, monster statblocks include potential treasure and gear options, so that DMs can reward loot when a player character inevitably searches the dead body of a creature.

The new Monster Manual will be released on February 18th, 2025.

 

[MGibster]

I always found it weird that D&D and fantasy rarely handles monsters and species with more that 2 genders or sexes.

Weird? What kind of D&D games are you playing where the players are getting into the nitty gritty of gender/sex with creatures?

 

[Remathilis]

I think you are both demonstrating significant selection bias here. If you take the time to compare lore for specific monsters across editions, 5e comes in about average compared to previous editions, at least in terms of quantity. Quality is, of course, entirely subjective.

3e and 4e both had some lore-heavy Monster Manuals, with the Monster Manual V and Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale immediately springing to mind. And while the 2e Monstrous Manual is a wonderful book, a fair number of the entries suffer from the requirement that they take up exactly a page. While this forced some writers to get creative in producing interesting lore, there are also plenty of creatures with several paragraphs spent on unnecessarily complicated subsystems for that monster's abilities and quite a few that badly need an editing pass to deal with internal inconsistencies or incoherent wording.

When it comes to monster lore, every edition has strengths and weaknesses. That often depends on exactly which creature you're looking at, and, frankly, personal taste. In my opinion, anyone trying to make a claim that a specific edition is unequivocally best for monster lore is likely to simply be displaying their own edition biases.​

Oh, monsters books got better within each edition, but comparing MM 1's? 2e had the superior lore. It seems like MM1 is always focused on quantity over quality.

 

[Echohawk]

Oh, monsters books got better within each edition, but comparing MM 1's? 2e had the superior lore. It seems like MM1 is always focused on quantity over quality.

Well, strictly speaking, if we're comparing the first Monster Manual for each edition, 2e fares quite poorly, because that would be the incomplete Monstrous Compendium: Volume One, which covered only 250 monsters, of which 36 were ordinary animals and 29 were Player's Handbook races (including a whopping 24 stat blocks for various "Men"!).

I'll grant you that it had a lot of lore for the monsters it did include, especially compared to 1e, but it wasn't a great first monster "book" overall.

 

[Mind of tempest]

This is really what the Eladrin should be. Send them lock, stock, and barrel to the Feywild. Replace them as CG exemplars with a group including Asuras and Lillends.

just move the animals ones over as they seem to be structured as adventuring parties the most cg idea of powerful exemplars and make something cool for the NG plane

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, strictly speaking, if we're comparing the first Monster Manual for each edition, 2e fares quite poorly, because that would be the incomplete Monstrous Compendium: Volume One, which covered only 250 monsters, of which 36 were ordinary animals and 29 were Player's Handbook races (including a whopping 24 stat blocks for various "Men"!).

I'll grant you that it had a lot of lore for the monsters it did include, especially compared to 1e, but it wasn't a great first monster "book" overall.

Even that was better for my purposes than the 1st MM for any other edition. And 2e's monster output collectively was miles better IMO than the similar body of monster work for any other official version of D&D.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Yet we apply human morals to fictional nonhuman sentient beings all the time. If animals are also sentient, shouldn't the same judgements apply to them?

sentiant means aware of sensation, sapient is what you mean

 

[Remathilis]

Well, strictly speaking, if we're comparing the first Monster Manual for each edition, 2e fares quite poorly, because that would be the incomplete Monstrous Compendium: Volume One, which covered only 250 monsters, of which 36 were ordinary animals and 29 were Player's Handbook races (including a whopping 24 stat blocks for various "Men"!).

I'll grant you that it had a lot of lore for the monsters it did include, especially compared to 1e, but it wasn't a great first monster "book" overall.

Ugh. I don't think I've ever seen the binder in person, so I often forget how bad that supposedly was.

 

[Echohawk]

Even that was better for my purposes than the 1st MM for any other edition. And 2e's monster output collectively was miles better IMO than the similar body of monster work for any other official version of D&D.

If you are only looking at the quantity of monster lore, there can be no doubt that 2e wins hands down over any other edition, simply based on the volume of products. I too tend to view 2e lore with rose-tinted hind-sight, probably because there was so much of it and it expanded the D&D monsterverse so significantly. That much content has got to include something that gets the creative juices flowing.

But I think the quality of 2e lore is a bit more debatable. There is plenty of inspiring lore, but also a lot that feels like word-count padding. When I take the time to study the lore for any particular monster in detail, I'm often frustrated by the lack of coherence and consistency of 2e. Strangely. the opposite is true for 4e. In my head, I tend to think of 4e as the edition that has the least interesting monster lore, but when I take the time to study a particular critter, 4e usually fares much better than I expect it to.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Ugh. I don't think I've ever seen the binder in person, so I often forget how bad that supposedly was.

I loved the binder. I just wish it was formatted with one monster per sheet.

 

[Remathilis]

I loved the binder. I just wish it was formatted with one monster per sheet.

I can't imagine any binder with would survive the torture I put my MC through when I was young. That would be a pile of ripped pages in months.