The Dungeons & Dragons (DnD) game has three books that are considered “core rulebooks.” These are Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual. Together, these books provide everything you need to play DnD.
While the core rulebooks provide a lot of information, there are also infinite ways they could be expanded upon. You can think of the core rulebooks as the roots and trunk of a tree. Each chapter is a branch that can branch out to smaller branches. For example, you can take pretty much any chapter out of any of the core rulebooks and expand it into an entire book. You can easily write an entire book about “equipment” from the Equipment chapter of Player’s Handbook, or “creating adventures” from the Creating Adventures chapter of Dungeon Master’s Guide. A book about equipment could easily branch to more niche books like “seafaring equipment” or “forged weapons,” which in turn could inspire even more books.
Even many of the subchapters of the core rulebooks show potential for expansion into new books. Take for instance the Warlock subchapter of Player’s Handbook or the Curses and Magical Contagions subchapter of Dungeon Master’s Guide.
One could even expand any monster entry in Monster Manual into a whole book detailing the monster, its ecology, its lairs, its tendencies, and all the variations of the monster the players might encounter.
In each of the core rulebooks, but especially in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, there are tables of suggestions. Many of these tables are small and seemingly incomplete. There is potential to expand each of these tables with more creative ideas.
It would be fun to choose a chapter or subchapter from one of the core rulebooks and really expand upon it. Dungeon Masters and players who enjoy the particular aspect of the rules would find such expansions very useful.
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