Within the first few pages of the new D&D Player's Handbook, you're greeted by pictures of dodgy deals with hags, a battle to the death with wyverns, and the fickle nature of a d20. (Roll a 1? Whoops, that's straight into the spike pit with you.) It's enough to make the previous version feel drab in comparison, and the book is so much livelier as a result. You can thank the game's recent success and (far) larger budget for that, but it's not the only reason. According to Dungeons & Dragons art director Josh Herman, it's also because this was an opportunity to start fresh.
"If you had one image to show somebody who had never played D&D before… what is that? That's what we tried to do in almost every instance," Herman explains when we catch up at Gen Con 2024. "What should a Player's Handbook show? What should a Dungeon Master's Guide show? What should a Monster Manual show? With the Player's Handbook [cover], we're looking at parties. We knew that we wanted to show a party, a composition of people. We wanted to show them with a dragon. That started [things]. What are they doing? What situation could they be in? And so we explored a lot of sketches on the player sample cover specifically to figure out what that moment was."
