The new Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook is almost finished and will contain four psionic subclasses

Work continues on the 2024 edition of the Player’s Handbook, one of three volumes that will form the foundation for Dungeons & Dragons’ future, and the team behind it says they’re actively revising the print version. During a recent “fireside chat” with Todd Kenreck, the designers guiding the popular tabletop role-playing game revealed details that fans of psionics will be happy to hear.

Kenreck joined Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, two lead designers on the D&D 2024 project, and reviewed a Player's Handbook that he described as “pretty alarming” in size, compared to previous versions. The team is apparently “making final adjustments, looking under the hood.” [and] “Making sure everything is where it needs to be,” Crawford said.

The new Player’s Handbook, which will be released in hobby shops and digitally on September 17, will precede the accompanying Dungeon Master’s Guide by two months (the Monster Manual won’t be released until February 2025). Compared to previous processes, the text and art for this book were developed simultaneously—an intentional choice that allowed the illustrations and words to exist in conversation with each other rather than feeling like an add-on.

While the new PHB will feature many user-friendly improvements, information reorganization, and a revamped presentation that still feels like D&D, both Crawford and Perkins insisted that updating their 10-year-old tabletop tools will be worth the effort.

“While the core game is solid and compatible with the adventures people have already experienced over 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 revised core rulebooks. These are brand new books.”

Among all that new information will be two yet-to-be-revealed psionic subclasses: the fighter’s psionic warrior and the rogue’s soulknife, which will make the jump from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything to the core rulebook. The D&D creative team scrapped the fighter subclass in favor of a martial character whose brains and brawn are equally lethal. Both of these character options join the previously revealed psionic sorcerer and primal warlock to create a neat niche of brain-powered adventurers.

Kenreck ended the talk with a promise (or threat) that the next discussion on the Player’s Handbook would be an in-depth analysis that could go on “for hours and hours.”