Planescape 5 New D&D Books Coming in 2023 -- Including Planescape!

At today's Wizards Presents event, hosts Jimmy Wong, Ginny Di, and Sydnee Goodman announced the 2023 line-up of D&D books, which featured something old, something new, and an expansion of a fan favorite.

The first of the five books, Keys from the Golden Vault, will arrive in winter 2023. At Tuesday's press preview, Chris Perkins, Game Design Architect for D&D, described it as “Ocean’s Eleven meets D&D” and an anthology of short adventures revolving around heists, which can be dropped into existing campaigns.

In Spring 2023, giants get a sourcebook just like their traditional rivals, the dragons, did in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons. Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants will be a deep dive into hill, frost, fire, cloud, and storm giants, plus much more.

Summer 2023 will have two releases. The Book of Many Things is a collection of creatures, locations, and other player-facing goodies related to that most famous D&D magic item, the Deck of Many Things. Then “Phandelver Campaign” will expand the popular Lost Mine of Phandelver from the D&D Starter Set into a full campaign tinged with cosmic horror.

And then last, but certainly not least, in Fall 2023, WotC revives another classic D&D setting – Planescape. Just like Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, Planescape will be presented as a three-book set containing a setting guide, bestiary, and adventure campaign in a slipcase. Despite the Spelljammer comparison they did not confirm whether it would also contain a DM screen.

More information on these five titles will be released when we get closer to them in date.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I wouldn't say that 1e - 2e is exactly "compatible," but that's just my opinion. Of course you had different character options (Assassins, Half-Orcs, Monks, were gone), you had THAC0, but there were harder to spot things, such as increased HP among monsters. I have never tried it, but I'd expect a 1e party dropped into a 2e adventure wouldn't fare well. Just like a 3.5 party dropped into a PF1 game wouldn't succeed.

I did it. We just mixed 1st and second edition content freely, so if you wanted to play a half orc assassin you would just use 1st edition rules. There wasn't really any difference in adventures. Whilst 2nd edition characters tended to be a little stronger, it didn't make so much difference as player skill or high/low rolled stats.

 

[Demetrios1453]

So... Perhaps this thread should go back to discussing the upcoming products and what may or may not be in them, and the resulting excitement levels? Discussing the various degrees of the changes really should be its own thread...

 

[TwoSix]

1st impression is that if it’s only 192 pages like Spelljammer, I won’t get it. A Planescape book needs to be at least as lore heavy as the Eberron book.

 

[Mercurius]

So no mention of the "new settings?"

 

[timbannock]

Well, in 2023 I will be looking at Planescape before deciding whether to buy it or not. I don't feel I got my money's worth out of Spelljammer.

In a way, the announcement of the form-factor for Planescape coming this close to the release of Spelljammer means they likely don't have a lot of room to play around with formatting. I'm seeing a lot of complaints about SJ just being too short, and so at best we can hope they up the page count for all 3 books in Planescape, but...even then, that's a heck of a lot of ground to cover in very limited space! I'm very dubious that they'll do it any sort of justice.

 

[Michael Linke]

Well, in 2023 I will be looking at Planescape before deciding whether to buy it or not. I don't feel I got my money's worth out of Spelljammer.

Yeah, Planescape really needed the level of attention that Theros, Ravenloft, Strixhaven, Ravnica, etc got, and just... didn't. For no reason, they gave us this incredibly divergent setting that begs for unique systems and just didn't give us those systems. Ghosts of Saltmarsh is a more robust standalone campaign setting than the 5e Spelljammer product.

 

[Ath-kethin]

I'd be willing to bet Sigil has a shop that sells crystal balls, so...

Hey, I'll take what I can get at this point!

 

[Demetrios1453]

In a way, the announcement of the form-factor for Planescape coming this close to the release of Spelljammer means they likely don't have a lot of room to play around with formatting. I'm seeing a lot of complaints about SJ just being too short, and so at best we can hope they up the page count for all 3 books in Planescape, but...even then, that's a heck of a lot of ground to cover in very limited space! I'm very dubious that they'll do it any sort of justice.

They have over a year, which is time enough for feedback and adjustments. As you said, the main complaint is that Spelljammer didn't have the page count that the setting needed, and given that I've speculated elsewhere that a lot of the free SJ items on D&D beyond look like last minute cuts from the set, I assume that having enough material to fill a larger page count won't be an issue. I'm sure they're watching the feedback and will look into a larger set (or possibly just a single book again) for this release...

 

[Malmuria]

Planescape has (and always had) to do a lot of things

• Player options
• Sigil and the Outlands, including factions
• Manual of the Planes (each plane has a variable number of lairs, each of which is potentially infinite in scope)
• Bestiary
• general rules of navigating the planes and making adventures

The original PS box set had 224 pages of material, and was mostly just about the Sigil and the Outlands and the general vibe of planescape (each outer and inner plane got 1 page). The "Planes of..." box sets expanded on the outer planes, but to be honest rereading them now they take the infinity of the planes and turn them into a handful of locations that are either mundane ("here's what equipment you can buy in this town on hades") or incomprehensibly hostile to PCs with no good adventure hooks. The most successful PS material, IMO, was the sigil-oriented stuff (Uncaged, Guide to the Cage, Factol's Manifesto). And I think PS: Torment worked in part because it mostly stuck to Sigil and it's weirdness.

So, unless this slipcase is going to be monte cook-esque in length and density, the best thing they can do is focus on Sigil.

 

[timbannock]

So, unless this slipcase is going to be monte cook-esque in length and density, the best thing they can do is focus on Sigil.

I 100% agree. Since they are happy to kill some canon, it'd be great to roll back away from the Faction War and post-FW garbage and really lean into "here's how to do a citycrawl in a really bizarre city full of portals, and here's a bunch of really, really solid factions, locations, and political plot hooks."

I'd love that. That said, it's already been done extremely well by a few indie publishers for games like Troika! and the like, so even that may be a hard sell for someone like me, but would be awesome for newer players or D&D purists.