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Wizards of the Coast aims to codify the advice DMs and Players have been giving each other for decades in a perennial book

D&D players are never shy about offering advice, so Wizards of the Coast are bringing a lot of that advice into a pair of workbooks.

Dungeons And Dragons Workbook DM Cover Image — Image credit: Penguin Random House

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Tue Mar 24 2026

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Getting started with Dungeons & Dragons is intimidating. The books are massive. The lore is dense. The community has been going for decades now, and it can be difficult to crack into if you’re on your own. So, Wizards of the Coast set out to give new players a pair of books to help get them up to speed on how to both play in and run a D&D campaign. In doing so, they gathered advice that has been given freely across online forums and posts in one place.

This May, two new officially-licenced workbooks are coming out to help both players and Dungeon Masters get to grips with D&D. The Dungeon Master’s Workbook of Worldbuilding: An Official Companion to the Dungeon Master’s Handbook and the Player’s Workbook of Epic Adventures: An Official Companion to the Player’s Handbook are both designed to complement the information in the core rulebooks. In doing so, author Andrew Wheeler seems to have delved deep into the advice experienced players have been dishing out for years.

That is the big takeaway from both these books; there isn’t anything in here that D&D players haven’t been telling each other for decades. The Player’s Workbook focuses heavily on building a backstory, with the intent to get the player to think about how their powers work and, importantly, how their character interacts with the party and the world. Likewise, the Dungeon Master’s Workbook answers questions like who to get players and characters invested in your campaign and how to build a setting that feels real. Pages and pages are spent on story hooks and how to flesh out a town.

The interesting thing about these books isn’t the information within them. Everything here has been talked about in other places by other players. A Google search will bring up hundreds of posts on Reddit or scattered across blogs and forums offering most of the answers presented here. The ambition and the usefulness of these workbooks come not from their content but from bringing that content together in one place. They won’t change the way experienced players and DMs play D&D, but they are a useful resource to hand someone starting out, which is exactly their purpose.

The Player’s Workbook of Epic Adventures and the Dungeon Master’s Workbook of Worldbuilding both go on sale on May 5, 2026.

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