Over 150 monsters from the Monster Manual have been added to Dungeons & Dragons new Free Rules set. This week, Wizards of the Coast updated the "Free Rules" for Dungeons & Dragons with 157 monsters from the new 2025 Monster Manual. Most of the monsters are low-CR, generic monsters, although there are a few higher CR threats in the free rules set. The highest CR monster in the Free Rules is the Stone Golem, with a CR of 10.
D&D's Free Rules are meant to be a replacement for the Basic Rules, which are based on the 2014 version of Fifth Edition and were also made available for free. There are a few differences - the Basic Rules has higher level threats than the current set of Free Rules, including adult dragons and balors. It's possible that the Free Rules could eventually get this higher CR monster content, as Wizards has updated both the Basic Rules and the Free Rules several times.
We'll note that there is a distinct difference between the 2014 Basic Rules and the SRD, which strips out all of the underlying lore and is solely focuses on the mechanics of D&D. So, folks wondering what 2024 content will be added to the eventual SRD (which dictates what third-party publishers can use in their own 5E-related content) may not want to rely on the Free Rules as a reference. However (and somewhat confusingly I might add), the Basic Rules published on D&D Beyond also includes SRD content, meaning that it actually has more content (such as races) that were not published in the Basic Rules PDFs released by Wizards of the Coast but were still allowed to be used by third-party publishers.
