190 free Dungeons & Dragons trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
68 free Dungeons & Dragons trivia questions with answers. Roll for initiative. This DnD trivia quiz spans fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons: the Chainmail rules and Blackmoor campaign that spawned it, the 1974 white box, the split into Basic and Advanced, TSR's rise and fall, and the editions that followed all the way to the 2024 revision. Expect monsters (beholders, mind flayers, the plastic-toy origins of the owlbear), settings from Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms to Ravenloft and Planescape, characters like Drizzt, Mordenkainen and Strahd, and the wider culture: the 1980s Satanic panic, the Saturday-morning cartoon, both films, Critical Role, Stranger Things and Baldur's Gate 3. Easy questions suit newer players; the expert tier is for people who remember THAC0. Every answer is checked against a reference page and the exact source sentence appears under each question, so table disputes can be settled without pausing the game.
30 of 190 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was the original Dungeons & Dragons box set first published?
1974
The three-booklet set had a production budget of only $2,000, with just $100 set aside for artwork.
Q 02Which two designers are credited with creating Dungeons & Dragons?
Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson
The pair later fell out; Arneson filed the first of five lawsuits against Gygax and TSR in 1979.
Q 03Which 1971 miniature wargame supplied the original combat rules for D&D?
Chainmail
Its 14-page fantasy supplement already included heroes, wizards, elves, orcs and dragons.
Q 04What is the referee who narrates a D&D game and plays all its non-player characters called?
Dungeon Master
Other systems use 'Game Master'; the 1983 cartoon even made the role a diminutive, mysterious character.
Q 05Which die decides whether an attack hits in D&D combat?
Twenty-sided
The other polyhedrals mostly roll damage; two ten-siders together make 'percentile dice'.
Q 06How many ability scores does a D&D character have?
Six
They are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma.
Q 07In which year did Wizards of the Coast buy the near-bankrupt TSR and take over D&D?
1997
The buyer had made its fortune with Magic: The Gathering and was itself bought by Hasbro two years later.
Q 08For roughly how much did Hasbro buy Wizards of the Coast in September 1999?
$325 million
The company had been founded by Peter Adkison in 1990 and named after a guild of wizards in his own D&D campaign.
Q 09Where is Wizards of the Coast headquartered?
Renton, Washington
Lake Geneva was TSR's home; at its 1983 peak the company employed more than 6% of the town's population.
Q 10The original 1974 game had only three character classes. Which of these was one of them?
Cleric
The others were fighting-man and magic-user; races were human, dwarf, elf and hobbit before Tolkien's lawyers objected.
Q 11In 1977 D&D split into two branches: a basic game and which more rules-heavy line?
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
The split lasted until 2000, when the 3rd edition dropped the 'Advanced' prefix.
Q 12Which was the first hardcover D&D book, published in 1977?
Monster Manual
The Player's Handbook followed in June 1978 and the Dungeon Masters Guide in August 1979.
Q 13What colour was the box of the 1983 Basic Set revised by Frank Mentzer, with Larry Elmore cover art?
Red
Elmore's cover shows a warrior facing a red dragon; the 1977 Holmes set had come in a blue box.
Q 21The vorpal sword, which lops off heads on a lucky roll, takes its name from which poem?
Jabberwocky
The 'Blade Barrier' spell, by contrast, was inspired by the flaming sword at the gates of Eden.
Q 22The owlbear and the rust monster were both inspired by what?
Cheap plastic toys from Hong Kong
The bag of figures was mislabelled 'prehistoric animals' and actually contained kaiju from Ultraman and Godzilla films.
Q 23What does a rust monster want from adventurers?
Their metal gear
Gygax liked the idea of a non-lethal creature that eats hard-won possessions rather than the characters.
Q 14Who led the small TSR team that designed AD&D 2nd Edition, released in 1989?
David 'Zeb' Cook
Cook later designed the Planescape setting in 1994.
Q 15In which year did the 3rd edition reunite the game's two branches and launch the d20 System?
2000
A revised 3.5 followed in July 2003, and the rules were released under the Open Game License.
Q 16What working name did Wizards of the Coast use for D&D 5th edition during its 2012 playtest?
D&D Next
More than 75,000 playtesters sent feedback before the 2014 release, timed to the game's 40th anniversary.
Q 17On what date was the 5th edition Player's Handbook released?
August 19, 2014
It topped Publishers Weekly's hardcover nonfiction list, selling 22,090 copies in one week.
Q 18The 4th edition (2008) cut the alignment grid down to how many alignments?
Five
They were lawful good, good, evil, chaotic evil and unaligned; 5th edition brought back the classic nine.
Q 19Gygax credited the law-versus-chaos alignment idea to which two fantasy authors?
Moorcock and Poul Anderson
Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions also gave the game its regenerating troll.
Q 20D&D's 'memorize a spell, cast it, forget it' magic came from which author's Dying Earth stories?
Jack Vance
The lich-god Vecna's name is an anagram of the author's surname.
Q 24Roughly how big is a gelatinous cube?
Ten feet
It has been in the game since the 1974 'white box', sliding down corridors digesting whatever it engulfs.
Q 25Which many-eyestalked floating monster does Wizards of the Coast keep as 'Product Identity'?
Beholder
The original Japanese Final Fantasy used one as a boss but renamed it 'Evil Eye' for North America to dodge TSR's lawyers.
Q 26Which tentacle-mouthed, psionic monster is also known as an illithid?
Mind flayer
They first appeared in TSR's newsletter The Strategic Review in spring 1975 and are the villains of Baldur's Gate 3.
Q 27The displacer beast was borrowed from a creature in whose 1939 story 'Black Destroyer'?
A. E. van Vogt
The coeurl later reappeared in his novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle.
Q 28D&D's near-unstoppable tarrasque is loosely based on a legend from which country?
France
The Provençal tarasque was a dragon-like beast said to have been tamed by Saint Martha.
Q 29Tiamat, queen of the evil chromatic dragons, is usually depicted with how many heads?
Five
One per chromatic colour: red, blue, green, black and white; her name comes from a Babylonian goddess.
Q 30Which lich-turned-god is missing his left hand and left eye, both now legendary artifacts?
Vecna
His holy symbol is an eye in the palm of a left hand; Stranger Things borrowed the name for its season-four villain.