The new official Dungeons & Dragons ruleset can be used to create your own material for free

It seems that the rise of tabletop role-playing games is not a passing thing. An entertainment from the last century that has gained notoriety in recent years with many gamers have joined in. The launch and success of Baldur's Gate 3 surely had something to do with these new players, who found themselves with a masterpiece and a desire for more. For all those groups of friends who want to play Dungeons and Dragons, the new books that made up the new set of rules for the game released their third and final volume this past February. Since last year, Wizards of the Coast made it known that, with the release of their latest book, the core of the rules, the System Reference Document, or SRD, would be licensed under a Creative Commons licence.

As posted by Jody Macgregor on PC Gamer, the 5th edition D&D licence was available under the terms of the Open Gaming License (OGL), but open to modification. With that permission to use the game's base gameplay by third-party developers, many niche releases appeared for hardcore fans of the popular title. The release of SRD version 5.2 under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0) licence means that it cannot be revoked, as well as the ease of including a single sentence in the citation.

This 5.2 version expands on the content of its predecessor, with multiple new skills, the 2024 weapon masteries, 20 more spells, 15 more magic items, new rules for playing as a goliath or orc, and many additional monsters. Some of the absences in the new SRD include rules for trademarked monsters such as the Illycids and Beholders, the Artificer class, rules for bastions and for playing as aasimar (celestial inheritance), among others that you can check out in the Wizards of the Coast FAQ.

The full document consists of a 361-page PDF, so there is a lot to cut through if you are interested in creating your own adventures.

Are you excited to be able to create your own story with the latest D&D rules after hearing this news?