If you were waiting for Black Friday to snatch some treasures from the vaults of D&D Beyond, you may end up more disappointed than a rogue with a poor Perception skill. This year’s deal package is rather underwhelming, but there are still two precious items you may want to steal from the pile. Just make sure to share them with the rest of the party.
The 2025 Black Friday offers from D&D Beyond include a total of seven items. The sale ends at midnight Pacific time. All prices are for physical+digital bundle, when available:
- Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, $69.95 (was $89.94)
- Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, $59.95 (was $79.94)
- Vecna: Eve of Ruin, $$69.95 (was $89.94)
- Adventure Anthology Bundle (includes Quests from the Infinite Staircase, Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, Keys from the Golden Vault, Candlekeep Mysteries), $159.85 (includes products valued at $210)
- The Deck of Many Things, $69.99 (was $99.99)
- Rules Expansion Gift Set (includes Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse), $129.95 (was $169.95)
- The Making of Original D&D: 1970–1977, $59.97 (was $99.95)
Unless you’ve somehow missed all the extra gaming content from the books included in what’s now known as the Rules Expansion Set, this is hardly an enticing list. There are no D&D 2024 products here, which is odd, considering you can find some of them for a discount on Amazon, including the Strangers Things tie-in Welcome to the Hellfire Club boxed set, the latest D&D starter set, Heroes of the Borderlands, and even a great Eberron bundle that includes Rising from the Last War and the recent Forge of the Artificer. This deal also includes the worst D&D 5e product, in my opinion: Vecna: Eve of Disappointment.
However, there are still two pretty sweet deals you can get from D&D Beyond this year. They are very different products, but both are worth a spot in any D&D fan’s collection.
The Making of Original D&D: 1970–1977 is not a gaming product. It’s D&D’s origin story, told from the records of the two men credited with its creation, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. If you are a history buff and an old-school fanatic like me, this is the book you’ll want to get for the holidays. What’s great about it is that it is not just a chronicle of the creation of the game (you can find plenty of those around) but it presents that story through rare documents, including the very first draft of Original D&D from 1974, never released to the public until now, written on Gygax’s typewriter, and with notes from himself and Arneson. On top of that, and of a collection of magazine and fan articles, the book includes a facsimile of the first printings of Original D&D. If you don’t want to spend a silly amount of money to get the actual thing, this is the best alternative.
Moving from reading about the game’s history to actually playing the game, the other product that I would buy from this Black Friday deal is Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. For the uninitiated, Undermountain is the most famous dungeon in the Forgotten Realms setting, located deep under the fabulous city of Waterdeep, created by the powerful and absolutely insane wizard Halaster Blackcloak. This is what is called a “mega-dungeon,” a sprawling, multi-level structure that is so deep and complex that you can easily set an entire campaign in there. Conveniently, the levels get harder the deeper you go, so even a low-level party can enter this relatively safely from its most famous access point, the well in the Yawning Portal inn.
This book is great because it takes one of the least appreciated aspects of modern D&D, dungeon crawling, and turns it into an entire campaign setting. Undermountain is far from a mere container for monsters and treasure; it’s a breathing world, daunting in its extension and complexity. Every level has its challenges that don’t come just in the form of traps and monsters (but there are also a lot of traps and monsters), but also the different plots unraveling in each of them, with conflicts among the denizens being a highlight. Some of these even span multiple levels, offering plenty of opportunities for role-playing and storytelling. If you’re a DM, the sheer amount of content in this book will keep your players entertained for many months. You can set your campaign in Undermountain, drop it in your homebrew world, or just use one or more of the levels for isolated dungeon crawls. If that weren’t enough, every level has the opportunity to be expanded by DMs with their own dungeon content.
If you are watching the final season of Stranger Things and are curious about what D&D really looked like in its early days, or if you want to embark on “dungeon crawls” as the protagonists of the show do at the beginning of the season, then you shouldn’t miss these two deals. Just don’t get tempted to buy Vecna: Eve of Ruin.
