Dungeons & Dragons Trivia
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227 free Dungeons & Dragons trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 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 227 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
Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are the credited co-creators. The pair later fell out; Arneson sued TSR over royalties in 1979, settling in 1981.
Q 03Which 1971 miniature wargame supplied the original combat rules for D&D?
Chainmail
Chainmail, Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren's 1971 medieval miniatures rules, supplied D&D's first combat system; its fantasy supplement already covered 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
The Dungeon Master (DM) runs the game and voices every non-player character; other systems say 'Game Master', and the 1983 cartoon turned Dungeon Master into a small, mysterious guide.
Q 05Which die decides whether an attack hits in D&D combat?
Twenty-sided
Attack rolls use the twenty-sided die (d20); the other polyhedrals mostly roll damage, and two ten-siders together make percentile dice.
Q 06How many ability scores does a D&D character have?
Six
A character has six ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma, each usually rolled on 3d6 in early editions.
Q 07In which year did Wizards of the Coast buy the near-bankrupt TSR and take over D&D?
1997
Wizards of the Coast bought the debt-laden TSR in 1997, flush with card-game profits; Hasbro then bought Wizards itself in 1999.
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
Wizards of the Coast is based in Renton, Washington, a Seattle suburb; its parent since 1999, Hasbro, is headquartered in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Q 10Which of these was one of the three character classes in the original 1974 D&D?
Cleric
Cleric was one of the three original classes, alongside fighting-man and magic-user; clerics could not use edged weapons and got no spells until second level.
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
The 1983 Mentzer Basic Set came in a red box, its Larry Elmore cover showing a warrior facing a red dragon; the 1977 Basic Set had been the blue box.
Q 21The vorpal sword, which lops off heads on a lucky roll, takes its name from which poem?
Jabberwocky
The vorpal sword comes from Lewis Carroll's 1871 poem 'Jabberwocky', where the 'vorpal blade went snicker-snack'; in AD&D it beheads a foe on a high attack roll.
Q 22The owlbear and the rust monster were both inspired by what?
Cheap plastic toys from Hong Kong
Gygax modelled the owlbear and rust monster on figures from a bag of cheap plastic Hong Kong toys, reportedly labelled 'prehistoric animals'; the bulette came from the same bag.
Q 23What does a rust monster want from adventurers?
Their metal gear
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
D&D Next was the public playtest name used from 2012; the finished 5th edition shipped in 2014, timed to the game's 40th anniversary.
Q 17On what date was the 5th edition Player's Handbook released?
August 19, 2014
The 5th edition Player's Handbook arrived on August 19, 2014, followed by the Monster Manual that September and the Dungeon Master's Guide in December 2014.
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
Gygax credited law versus chaos to Michael Moorcock's Elric stories and Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, which also gave the game its regenerating troll and paladin.
Q 20D&D's 'memorize a spell, cast it, forget it' magic came from which author's Dying Earth stories?
Jack Vance
Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories gave D&D its 'Vancian' prepare-and-forget spellcasting; the name of the villain Vecna is an anagram of Vance.
Gygax liked the idea of a non-lethal creature that eats hard-won possessions rather than the characters.
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 beholder, a floating orb with a central eye and ten eyestalks, is Product Identity, excluded from the Open Game License along with the mind flayer, displacer beast and umber hulk.
Q 26Which tentacle-mouthed, psionic monster is also known as an illithid?
Mind flayer
Mind flayers, or illithids, debuted in a 1975 TSR newsletter; the tentacled brain-eaters are the central villains of Baldur's Gate 3 (2023).
Q 27The displacer beast was borrowed from a creature in whose 1939 story 'Black Destroyer'?
A. E. van Vogt
A. E. van Vogt's 1939 story 'Black Destroyer' introduced the coeurl, a tentacled black cat-beast that became the displacer beast; it reappeared in his 1950 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
Vecna's severed Hand and Eye are among the game's oldest artifacts, first described in 1976; his holy symbol is an eye in a left palm, and Stranger Things borrowed the name.