D&D 5E Tasha's Cauldron of Everything Speculation: Xanathar's Guide to Every thing Contents Comparison

[Parmandur]

By way of comparison with Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, Xanathar's Guide to Everything wasthe same length at 192 pages, and had a similar level of Subclass options options (32 vs. 30 for the new book the most direct comparison between the 2 books):

- 6 pages on intro and basic rules questions

- 65 pages for Character stuff:

• 53 pages covering 32 Subclasses and a few other Class bits
• 11 pages for "This is Your Life" extended Background generation
• 1 page for Feats

- 69 pages for DM tools:

• 12 pages about rule adjudication (Tools, falling, sleeping)
• 24 pages about encounters &
• 11 on traps
• 13 downtime rules
• 9 magic items

- 24 pages for Spells

- 3 pages on how to run a shared campaign

- 15 pages of name tables

Based on the length of the Subclass UA's from this year (they are formatted the same as the final book, but without art pieces), the Class information section should be similar in size, roughly a quarter of the book.

I suspect the Lineage system will be hefty, so I'm guessing about the size of the This is Your Life section combined with the name tables.

 

[Rellott]

Don’t forget that Tasha’s will reprint the whole artificer class, probably with its 3 original archetypes and the new armored archetype, plus all the original artificer infusions and some new ones. A whole class plus 4 archetypes and customization options is gonna eat up several pages all on its own. It was 10 pages in Rising from the Last War, with the art used there, and we’ve been told there’s at least one more art piece being added, so I’m guessing that’s about 12 pages of total space in Tasha’s.

 

[Parmandur]

Don’t forget that Tasha’s will reprint the whole artificer class, probably with its 3 original archetypes and the new armored archetype, plus all the original artificer infusions and some new ones. A whole class plus 4 archetypes and customization options is gonna eat up several pages all on its own. It was 10 pages in Rising from the Last War, with the art used there, and we’ve been told there’s at least one more art piece being added, so I’m guessing that’s about 12 pages of total space in Tasha’s.

Yes, about 12 pages sounds about right: but other than the Artificer, that leaves only 26 Subclasses for the Core 12 as opposed to 32 from Xanathar's, so the page count should balance out. The variant Class UA is about 13 pages, so is more significant than the Artificer (though Xanathar's did have significant chunks of variant Class rules, too).

Also more significant is the Group Patrons chapter in this new book: they are not reprinting exactly what was in Eberron, but that was 38 pages in that book.

 

[Parmandur]

What we know about Tasha's Cauldron:

There will be 4 chapters totaling 192 pages:

• Character options
• Spells & Magic Items
• Group Patrons
• DM Tools

Xanathar's had ~33 pages for magic items & spells, and as notes above Eberron had about 38 pages of Group Patrons.

So if we go with approximately something like the following:

• Chapter 1: ~80 pages
• Chapter 2: ~30 pages
• Chapter 3: ~40 pages
• Chapter 4: ~40 pages

The final DM Tools chapter includes the following:

• Supernatural environments and natural hazards
• Parleying with monsters
• Session Zero
• New puzzles (designed by Elisa Teague) and traps to drop into your game
• Sidekicks

Those are pretty big question marks as far as length. The Sidekicks UA was 6 pages without art, but Crawford has said both that they have been simplified after testing, bit are also appropriate for use by players.