Dungeons & Dragons Marketplace Dungeon Masters Guild Launched

Wizards of the Coast launched the Dungeon Masters Guild today, a user-friendly marketplace that allows those of you with an extra pinch of creativity to self-publish Dungeons & Dragons materials that other people can then choose to purchase, which inevitably leads to you (and WotC/DriveThruRPG) profiting. If you’re interested in setting your materials within The Forgotten Realms and have no plans to print and sell the content on your own, then you’re already in good shape, but if you want to take advantage of even more freedoms and use your own campaign setting, then you’ll want to check out this newly released 398-page System Reference Document for use with the Open Gaming License (OGL). Overall, this is big news for tabletop RPG fans, and I look forward to what the future brings when I finally find time to round up a group of players for a 5E campaign of my own:

Dungeons & Dragons is all about creativity. For more than 40 years, the folks who spent the bulk of their time creating amazing adventures, those noble Dungeon Masters, did not have a convenient outlet to share them with the gamers who weren’t sitting at their table. You either had to raise money to publish a physical book or zine on your own, or convince a publisher you had the chops. Now, the Dungeon Masters Guild puts the power to share that creativity firmly in the hands of the DM.

The Dungeon Masters Guild is a collaboration between Dungeons & Dragons and our friends at DriveThruRPG, and it is designed to support and reward you – whether you’re an experienced DM or just starting out. Today, you can upload your creations to the DMs Guild website, as well as browse submissions from some of gaming’s most esteemed designers.

For the first time ever, you’ll be able to self-publish material set in the Forgotten Realms using monsters, spells, characters, and locations previously unavailable. Set your side trek in Neverwinter or Baldur’s Gate, have your characters go toe-to-toe with the Xanathar, the beholder crime lord of Waterdeep, or fall in with some traitorous drow in Menzoberranzan. With some exceptions noted on the DMs Guild website, the Forgotten Realms is at your fingertips.

You can set whatever price you like for your creation; you can give your new monster away for free or charge a few gold coins. If you do decide to ask for money, you’ll get half of the revenue while DriveThruRPG and Dungeons & Dragons will split the other. We care about our creators and that’s why they get the biggest cut!

Creators can upload whatever kind of Forgotten Realms material they’d like to the Dungeon Masters Guild, but we’ll be featuring side treks, monsters, and backgrounds on the site. For now, the Guild is only accepting Forgotten Realms material that uses the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons rules. For everything else, we’ve updated the Open Gaming License so that publishers can continue releasing their own material. Read more about the updated OGL here.

Head to dungeonmastersguild.com to see what’s available to download right now.

On Friday, January 15th starting at 10am PT, Mike Mearls and Chris Lindsay from the Dungeons & Dragons team will host an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on the D&D sub-Reddit page to speak directly with the public on how the Dungeon Masters Guild works.