The best D&D gift ideas for fans, players, and Dungeon Masters, too

Perfect for someone looking to get a taste of the game without spending too much time or money. The box set comes with five ready-to-play characters, a condensed rulebook for playing from levels 1 through 3, a set of dice, and an adventure that will plunge the party into an ancient war between dragons. All you need is a group of players around the table.

According to Polygon’s Charlie Hall, the new PHB is “an exceptional document, fat and rich with precisely the kind of materials that the community has been clamoring for. The team at Wizards of the Coast should be commended for creating something so extraordinary while under such immense and absurd pressure.”

Taking notes during games is often useful, allowing players to keep track of all the friendly (and decidedly unfriendly) characters they meet, plus everything going on in their adventures, so they can refresh their memory if they have to wait weeks between sessions. The Book of Holding offers a gorgeous place to do that, filled with grid paper so you can easily track progress when exploring a dungeon.

For players in several campaigns, the Mimic Treasure Chest notebook set will help them stay organized. This menacing box was designed by Eric Belisle, the artist who illustrated the shape-shifting creature in the D&D Monster Manual, and it’s filled with five notebooks, each depicting a different iconic foe, like a beholder or owlbear. It has plenty of extra room for storing dice and other accessories.

D&D players love collecting dice, and Elderwood Academy offers a huge collection of gorgeous ones, including this alloy set. It also sells rolling trays and dice boxes to protect your favorite sets, plus dice towers to add a bit of extra drama to the experience.

Players can bring their character to life physically with a Hero Forge gift card, allowing them to create a custom miniature to use in battles. The tool has an immense array of options for poses, clothing, and gear, allowing players to craft almost any look they can imagine and customize things — right down to the color of their belt buckle. Gift cards range from $25 to $300.

Polygon’s Charlie Hall says this book “feels like exactly what the game and its fandom needs in this moment. It would have been easy for developers merely to chase the community, codifying the way that the modern game is played and the culture that surrounds it. And yes, they’ve done that to a very large extent. But the book also moves the game forward in important ways, adding new and exciting tweaks to an already winning formula.”

Another key resource is the Dungeon Master’s Screen (2024), which provides a quick rules reference and some beautiful art to hide your notes from the players. It was revised based on DM feedback, with the most-used information kept to the sides of the four-panel screen so they won’t be blocked if you’ve got a laptop in the center of your space.

If you’re looking to make your game a bit more immersive, the D&D Campaign Case: Terrain goes a long way to leveling up beyond the standard playmat. It features 30 interlocking tiles that can be used to build dungeons or wilderness encounters decorated with reusable clings representing treasure, traps, furniture, and foliage.

Equally useful is the D&D Campaign Case: Creatures, which makes it easy to populate encounters with kobolds, dragons, and skeletons, as well as providing tokens for player characters. Reusable clings can be applied to discs in three different sizes and then packed up neatly in a box that’s easy to carry to your next gaming session.

The 2024 PHB added some extra complexity to character classes, but if your group is particularly interested in new mechanics, you could gift your DM the advanced 5th edition Level Up: Adventurer’s Guide. The book redesigns every class to give them more to do both in and out of combat while remaining compatible with the rest of the game.

DMs are always looking for new ways to challenge their players, and Flee, Mortals! The MCDM Monster Book offers plenty of them. It builds on the selection of foes in the D&D Monster Manual to provide complex encounters populated by foes with plenty of abilities that work well together. Buy this for your DM at your own peril!

One of the best ways to get new players into Dungeons & Dragons is with a one-shot or short adventure. Quests from the Infinite Staircase makes that easy, offering six adventures from the game’s history revised for 5th edition rules. Options range from exploring a massive, buried colony ship to helping to put a pharaoh’s soul to rest.

Most D&D adventures focus on lower level play, but if your party is ready for something more threatening you could gift your DM with Vecna: Eve of Ruin. The campaign sends players across the multiverse to stop the machinations of the evil wizard who inspired the most recent season of Stranger Things, taking the group from level 10-20 for a final showdown to save all of existence.

Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse provides everything needed to explore one of D&D’s strangest settings, which served as the inspiration for the seminal Planescape: Torment video game. The box set includes an adventure, a bestiary of denizens of the outer planes, a DM screen, and a book packed with options for characters with their own philosophy for navigating the cosmos.

Visit a whimsical carnival and journey into the realm of the fey in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, an adventure for characters levels 1-8. It’s a great game for creative or pacifist players, as every encounter can be solved without resorting to combat. It also offers some cute new character options with playable fairies and rabbitfolk.

Loot Tavern’s Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting offers numerous new subclasses, a whole new class based on Pokémon, and novel species like oozekin and lumbering pangolin folk. On the DM side, it’s packed with rich adventures where players don’t just slay monsters, but also learn to harvest their parts to make powerful (and often deeply goofy) magic items and food.

The D&D spell Heroes’ Feast conjures a meal that boosts your allies before a big fight and Heroes’ Feast Flavors of the Multiverse lets you do the same thing in real life. Narrated by a party of world-hopping adventures and filled with a mix of fantasy art and luscious food photography, the cookbook offers recipes for everything from Cornish game hens perfectly sized for a halfling to vegetable-packed elven flatbread.

Many D&D adventures begin in a bar, and you can add some flavor to the setting with Puncheons & Flagons. The book contains 75 recipes for bar snacks, cocktails, punches you can make ahead of time to serve the whole party, and nonalcoholic drinks so everyone can get in on the fun.

Travel back in time with The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977, an enormous tome released to celebrate the game’s 50th anniversary. The book reprints Gary Gygax’s first draft of the game along with the material from its original box set and supplements, with extra context provided by historian Jon Peterson.

The legendary wizard Mordenkainen narrates Dungeons & Dragons Worlds & Realms, a journey through the game’s multiverse that’s packed with art from throughout the game’s history. Short stories provide a deeper dive into the setting and their key characters, offering plenty of inspiration for players and DMs planning for their next adventure.

Set sail for the pulpy science fantasy realm of Spelljammer with Memory’s Wake by Django Wexler. The novel is a swashbuckling adventure featuring a woman who must impersonate a missing pirate queen and travel the astral sea in search of a mysterious treasure.

Looking for some atmospheric music to set the tone for your next D&D session? Bardic Inspiration: A Musical Journey Through the Forgotten Realms provides a soundtrack available digitally or as a double vinyl, with tracks dedicated to the game’s signature villains like Lolth and Tiamat, and evoking iconic settings like Neverwinter and Skullport.

Baldur’s Gate 3 lets you plunge into the world of D&D’s Forgotten Realms on your own time, and it’s easy to spend more than 100 hours searching for treasure, pursuing romances, and coming up with creative (sometimes nonviolent) solutions to win fights. It’s a wildly ambitious video game that can also help familiarize new players with the rules of D&D and how different classes can play well together.

For a competitive spin on D&D, try Lords of Waterdeep, a classic board game where players hire adventurers to go on quests as they compete for control of the city. You’ll have to carefully plan where to deploy your agents, using intrigue to mess with your opponents and pursue your secret goals.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves beautifully captures the silliness of many D&D games, where unlikely heroes save the day despite making lots of mistakes along the way. The charming film, starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, and Hugh Grant, can also help you introduce someone who’s never played D&D to the game world and why it’s so much fun.

Assemble a crew of scoundrels, then go on heists and other shady jobs in the haunted city of Doskvol in Blades in the Dark. Your characters and gang will grow in power as they come into conflict with numerous other factions in a fast-paced game that encourages the game master to make things up on the fly.

Work as a group to design a setting based on your favorite JRPGs in Fabula Ultima, populating the world with dangerous monsters, helpful NPCs, and dastardly villains. This is a game best suited to a longer campaign that will allow you to play with the complex character system, where you’ll mix and match 15 classes.

Pathfinder began as an offshoot of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition but has since rolled out its own ruleset, purging all traces of D&D’s systems and setting. Pathfinder 2e is a deeply complex system for players who want a lot of choices in how to design and level up their characters, and what to do with each round of combat.

Vaesen offers a darker approach to fantasy role-playing, taking its inspiration from Nordic mythology. The artwork is phenomenal and there’s also an expansion that can take your investigators and monster hunters into the folklore of Britain and Ireland.

Journey into the far, far future in Numenera, a science fantasy game that established the highly flexible Cypher System. Build highly customizable characters by stringing together evocative descriptors, then explore a world of lost technology and bizarre creatures.

D&D is best suited for groups of four or five players, but Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game thrives with just two. The adaptation of the neon-noir films is focused on investigating mysteries in future Los Angeles, uncovering the misdeeds of corporations, and retiring rogue Replicants through a heavy emphasis on moral conflict and chase scenes.