Penguin Random House announces Dungeons & Dragons Encyclopedia for 2026

Penguin Random House has lined up Dungeons & Dragons Encyclopedia, a 320-page hardcover priced at $60 and scheduled for Oct. 20, 2026. The book is being framed as a single-volume tour through the D&D multiverse, with the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Spelljammer and Greyhawk all named in the listing.

The pitch is built for immediate recognition at the table. Penguin Random House says the encyclopedia will run A-to-Z through monsters, locations, heroes, villains and iconic items, which gives it the shape of a lore object rather than a narrow setting guide. For collectors, it reads like a premium shelf piece. For lapsed readers, it offers one place to catch up on the names that keep coming back in campaigns, sourcebooks and live-play chatter. For newcomers, it looks designed as a canon-friendly gateway into the core vocabulary of the game.

The author list gives the project real weight. Michael Witwer is the New York Times bestselling writer behind Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana, Empire of Imagination and Heroes’ Feast. Jon Peterson is one of the most respected names in game history and the author of Playing at the World, The Elusive Shift and Game Wizards. Matt Forbeck brings more than thirty novels and a long run of game credits, while Jessica Lee Patterson adds art-historical training, including a PhD from UC Berkeley and years of teaching and department-chair experience. Kalysta Harmon rounds out the lineup, giving the book a mix of design, history and visual perspective that suits a reference work meant to live on a gaming shelf.

The new title also fits neatly into Penguin Random House’s existing D&D line. Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana arrived on Oct. 23, 2018 at 448 pages for $50, and Dungeons & Dragons Lore & Legends followed on Oct. 3, 2023 at 416 pages for $50. In that company, the new encyclopedia looks less like a one-off tie-in and more like the next premium volume in a publishing run built for fans who want D&D history, art and lore in hardcover form.

D&D’s 50th anniversary campaign in 2024, with free play events and product tie-ins, showed how much the brand still gets from its own history. Hasbro says Wizards of the Coast publishes Dungeons & Dragons, and this encyclopedia lands in the same lane as the franchise’s other prestige books, where the draw is not just reading about Faerûn or Ravenloft, but having the whole shelf ready when the next session starts.