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]

where does the cosmic horror bit come from ? I saw nothing in the Wizards Presents stream

You saw it, but it was so horrific that you immediately buried it in your subconscious. So now you can't remember. Apart from the nightmares.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't understand WotC's announcing the 6E playtest and then promoting what amounts to "dead edition" books.

It’s simple, none of that is true.

They haven’t announced 6e, and these books will be fully compatible with both the 2014 and 2024 PHBs.

Not only have they explicitly said that the new updates will be compatible with all published adventures and supplements, along with other statements to the same effect, they also are putting their money where their mouth is with a full slate of D&D products leading all the way up to the anniversary releases.

 

[Dried]

I think Planescape will be focus on Sigil and the outer planes could be explored with other products compatible with other settings (I mean we already had Avernus, lore about the blood war, the plane presentation in the DMG, Astral in Spelljamer, etc).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Honestly it sounds like more of a change than I expected, but it is more like a 1e - 2e change versus the 2e-3e / 3e-4e / 4e-5e change. The big point (whatever you call the edition) is that they are saying you will be able to run any adventure from 2014 forward with the 2024 core books without making any changes. You can use the 2014 MM monsters with the 2024 PHB characters.

so far, you can use a new background with a 2014 race. You can allow PCs made with all published 5e books in the same group. They’re all 5e.

It's. Not. The. Same. Game.

It is tho

The official name isn't 5e

It literally is tho

Praise day at even, a wife when dead, a weapon when tried, a maid when married, ice when ’tis crossed, and ale when ’tis drunk.----Havamal​

The original made such a powerful impression that I think caution is due, lest we find the "updated and improved" version more honestly described as "vandalized and defiled".

I wanted to hit like for the Havamal quote, but couldn’t when I read the rest. “Vandalized and defiled”!? Really!?

As you say, 1e-2e was an edition change, and was also almost completely backwards compatible.

This is more like essentials. Which was literally just an expansion and update of 4e, not a new edition, just like this will be for 5e.

Another reason why I'm glad I'm not on it.

So that isn’t a thing, and I just wanna clarify that all they did with Volos and tome of foes was mark their content as “legacy” in the system, and provide an optional toggle to hide legacy content or not.

The 5e Spelljammer book isn't bad, it's just incomplete. We'll surely get many hours enjoyment from it as it is, but there's a lot of stuff that really needed to be included but just wasn't. I bought it because money is no object. But for someone less fortunate than me who has to consider purchases, I would advise they place 5e spelljammer VERY far down on the list of "must have" books. As I said elsewhere, if you're not a die hard spelljammer fan, but want to do some kind of ship based exploration campaign, Saltmarsh and/or Theros are a better value.

As someone who has spelljammer and has never given half a fig for the setting before this iteration, I strongly disagree.

It is excellent. If money were tight and I’d had to save to get it, I’d have considered it worth it.

 

[Maxperson]

How many hours of enjoyment do you expect per dollar in order to get your "money's worth"? I tend to value mine at about $5/hour -- the same I pay for a movie in the theater. So I would expect the $65 Spelljamemr set (which i didn't buy, to be clear) should provide at least 13 hours of entertainment for me (and, presumably, my book). In truth with D&D stuff it requires more than that because i usually have to buy whatever it is for Fantasy grounds as well.

I don't use series adventures designed to take PCs over a bunch of levels. And the actual rules are sparse. The combat rules aren't very detailed. The ship maps and sizes I have from 2e. The Rock of Bral is so few pages that it might as well not be in there. I'll have to use my 2e version to make it functional. About all I got were a few monsters, some races and a few backgrounds. That's not $65 dollars worth of material.

 

[mamba]

So no mention of the "new settings?"

Planescape ? or are you hung up on the plural ?

 

[delericho]

Of the new products, Phandelver is the only one I have any real interest in.

However...

Phandelver is such a good adventure, I can't imagine them not screwing it up trying to expand it to a typical 11 level campaign.

Sadly, this is my fear, too.

 

[Reynard]

I think Planescape will be focus on Sigil and the outer planes could be explored with other products compatible with other settings (I mean we already had Avernus, lore about the blood war, the plane presentation in the DMG, Astral in Spelljamer, etc).

With very little to go on, I bet the plan is to do it like Spelljammer-- with the option to shift gears if Spelljammer ends up a flop. They have lots of writing and design to do regardless of final form and they will know by Christmas if the Spelljammer format is a winner.

 

[Smackpixi]

I find the notion of a cosmic horror “tinged” expansion to LMoP intriguing…

I do as well. My sense is that’s just code for the baddies are going to be mindflayers though.

Edit: To clarify, I’m interested either way.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My experience of Planescape was that there were lots of high concepts & lots of words, but most of it wasn't very game-able and didn't translate readily to stuff a DM could implement at the table. I'm echoing Jim Davis of WebDM when I say that I'd like to see a more adventuresome Planescape.

Hard disagree and I think this attitude was the result of narrow-mindedness (and yes I am specifically saying Jim Davis is that) and inability to conceptualize what a Planescape adventure looked like, even though there were pretty good examples. A subset of DMs definitely just want to have mindless planar jaunts, which didn't really require or involve Planescape at all, and were simply vexed/flummoxed by Planescape's material. Making Planescape more "normal" is just dreadful. Truly dreadful. And whenever I see this stuff described (and this was discussed a ton in the '90s), that's all it amounts to - less Factions, less politics, less NPCs, less Sigil, less talking, less roleplaying, more going to a dungeon (that just happens to be on another plane) and bonking monster heads and taking monster loot. It reminds me of the sort of people who played Dark Sun as a bog-standard dungeon crawl setting, and only used Dark Sun at all because it let them have particularly OP characters for their bog-standard dungeon crawls.

Planescape even had wonderfully game-able stuff that didn't even focus on being game-able, like Uncaged: Faces of Sigil, which just an incredibly useful book for actually running a campaign in Sigil. If you actually wanted to do that. But again, some people just wanted like "Dungeon Crawl: Planar Tourist edition". The same people tended to the ones who wrote rants about how the Factions sucked or were too "fancy" and had weird anger issues about the Lady of Pain (I mean that was a weirdly common thing "The Guy Who Is Totally Enraged By The Lady of Pain", back then).