Dungeons & Dragons – Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes Released

The newest Dungeons & Dragons supplement book, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, is now officially released and available from a variety of retailers and online stores. The retail price is set at $49.95, and if convenience is your thing, you can pick up a copy on Amazon, the D&D Beyond website, and even Steam of all places. Here’s the official description:

Discover the truth about the great conflicts of the D&D multiverse in this supplement for the world’s greatest roleplaying game.

This tome is built on the writings of the renowned wizard from the world of Greyhawk, gathered over a lifetime of research and scholarship. In his travels to other realms and other planes of existence, he has made many friends, and has risked his life an equal number of times, to amass the knowledge contained herein. In addition to Mordenkainen’s musings on the endless wars of the multiverse, the book contains game statistics for dozens of monsters: new demons and devils, several varieties of elves and duergar, and a vast array of other creatures from throughout the planes of existence.

And if you’re interested in some examples of what to expect from the Tome, you can check out these recent D&D Beyond articles with Mordenkainen’s take on the Giff, Trolls, Allips, Oblex, and Star Spawn. Here’s a bit about the Giff:

Jeremy Crawford: In Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, we include a group of people who are very dear to some of us, who were fans of Spelljammer back in the day, and they are the Giff. Not to be confused with the Gith, who also appear in this book, the Giff are essentially hippopotamus people. They are a group of people who have a very strict military culture. Everyone in their culture has a military rank, and they hire themselves out in groups as mercenaries, to different folk throughout the D&D multiverse.

Now we say, just in passing in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, that they are a spacefaring species, but we don’t really delve any further into that. We have been, as fans of Spelljammer, sprinkling in Spelljammer bits in a number of our 5th Edition books for a while. People will remember, for instance, that in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, we included the Neogi, who are villains in Spelljammer.

And so now, we have the Giff, who not only often wear monocles, and have fancy military uniforms, they also walk around wielding various firearms that they have developed, and which are iconic for them when they’re involved in battle. One thing we don’t also delve into in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, but which I enjoy about the old story about Giff, is they have a mysterious home world which supposedly they have even lost track of. It’s almost sort of like Battlestar Galactica’s story of their home was lost and they’re not even sure how to get back. And so now they are basically warriors for hire through the multiverse, and almost always as a group.

One of the things we point out is that Giff like to be together, and so you are almost never able to hire just one. It’s like they come in a party pack. Like, if you’re going to hire Giff, you’re going to get a group of Giff, and they can be extremely effective, but watch out for their gunpowder. We even talk a little bit about, in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, their explosive barrels and whatnot, so they can be dangerous as well.