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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Ok. To put into perspective, I'm being asked to run a D&D event for teenagers tonight at a public library. I have the adventure and I know they're playing 5e. All is cool. I can basically run what's going on.
If this were an event in 2024, after the release of D&D Whatever Edition, what do I do? Bring 2014 and 2024 Player's Handbooks? Look at character sheets to determine if the characters made from the 2014 PHB get appropriately improved backgrounds and that the humans now gain Inspiration every day ( - or is that only for 2024 Humans?) Do I allow the monsters from pre-2024 sources to do critical hit damage since they don't get the new recharge mechanics?
What about warlocks from 2014? Do they get full access to the arcane spell list like their 2024 counterparts?
Look, I have said in the past that 5e was growing stale and needed a new edition. I am not being resistant to change. We need a new edition and be willing to make big changes to make the best version of D&D. Otherwise, we are limiting what the game can be for perhaps the next 8-10 years.
I wish they'd just call it 6E and let real change happen.

I believe this might fall into the category of "overthinking it".

Most of that is just waffle that doesn't, ultimately, matter. It's sweating the details for no reason.

I do agree that calling it 6E and letting real change happen would be a lot cleaner and make things more obvious, but the reality is, if you turned up to a group with 1E characters with a 2E PHB and a 2E adventure, you could run it just fine, and I know, because I did. And there's little reason to think it won't be the same here. Will some classes/races be more/less powerful? Sure. But they'll still be in the same ballpark as most current material. Same with monsters. It doesn't matter re: crit'ing or not - it's just not that big a deal.

 

[Retreater]

I believe this might fall into the category of "overthinking it".

Most of that is just waffle that doesn't, ultimately, matter. It's sweating the details for no reason.

Yeah, I do tend to overthink things.
I tend to run more games for strangers than a core home group - people at events, game stores, organized play, etc. Having a clear, consistent rules set is important to me.
Also, I write for publication. Having an "up in the air" quasi edition change isn't good for that. That burned me once before when 3.5 was cancelled for 4e and I lost a mega adventure that was nearly complete.
As it is now, I have a couple of projects sitting with editors that might get scrapped because of these "minor changes."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah, I do tend to overthink things.
I tend to run more games for strangers than a core home group - people at events, game stores, organized play, etc. Having a clear, consistent rules set is important to me.
Also, I write for publication. Having an "up in the air" quasi edition change isn't good for that. That burned me once before when 3.5 was cancelled for 4e and I lost a mega adventure that was nearly complete.
As it is now, I have a couple of projects sitting with editors that might get scrapped because of these "minor changes."

With trying to write RPG products for a living I can definitely understand hating uncertainty here, it's already a very fraught business. I was responding more to your specific example of being asked to run D&D. I think unless they really mess up the math somehow (no sign of that yet) this will be 1E/2E levels of compatibility which means casual running of stuff should be fine with mixed rules. But publishing it will require you to pick - I imagine picking 1D&D will be the right choice, but we don't even know what 1D&D will look like in a few months, let alone by 2024.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I didn't call people mindless, please don't add that in there. I called the adventures mindless.

And Planescape had an extremely strong identity that was designed to appeal to people who wanted something different from generic dungeon-bashing (which had countless settings supporting it already). It wasn't a mistake or an accident, either - the recent book on TSR makes it clear it was targeted.

In the days before the internet, it was pretty hard to know how something was targeted apart from what it said on the box.

Snarking about "ever so intellectual" is pretty funny. It was no more "intellectual" than WoD.

Pseudointellectual, pretentious, edgelord, whatever you prefer. Plenty of people didn't like WoD either, but at least the box indicated that if you didn't wear black eye liner the product probably wasn't for you.

It was just slightly elevated above the norm. It's not asking for a lot. And they weren't "justifiably disappointed" any more than I'm "justifiably disappointed" that, say, Spelljammer isn't more serious and high-minded (I'm not, actually, but back in the day there were plenty of people mad it was "too silly" or "too cartoonish").

As for "It'll support mindless escapism", well maybe, but then that's pure hypocrisy, isn't it? Spelljammer retained its identity, right down even emphasizing the silliest elements.

Spelljammer has had the zaniness increased, and the "what if 18th century ideas about the universe were true?" aspect cut. It's been adapted to suit the time.

Why should Planescape lose identity?

Because black eye liner isn't cool anymore. That stuff has gone out of fashion. But Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is in.

I'd suggest a better route would simply be to make it more obvious how to construct adventures for Planescape without turning them into dungeon crawls or the like.

Dungeon crawls are easy and fun.

That said, I feel like DMs today are vastly more used to making adventures which aren't just dungeon crawls than they were in 1994, so it'll be less of an issue anyway.

All the more reason for more dungeon crawls.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Pseudointellectual, pretentious, edgelord, whatever you prefer. Plenty of people didn't like WoD either, but at least the box indicated that if you didn't wear black eye liner the product probably wasn't for you.

Oh boy.

Wow.

Okay I think we can see where the problem lies and it is profoundly not with Planescape's design or approach. That's quite a pile of inaccurate, and frankly rather funny invective.

Because black eye liner isn't cool anymore. That stuff has gone out of fashion. But Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is in.

ROFL dude.

Sandman is a TV series and hugely popular and you're trying to tell me black eyeliner isn't cool. I'm afraid we're going to need to travel back in time to like 2015 or earlier to make that true.

If it's changed about as much as SJ was, that's fine. We can lose the rebus-speaking dudes and some of the Cant, for example, or some of the more pointless Factions.

All the more reason for more dungeon crawls.

That doesn't even make sense lol.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

frankly rather funny invective

I was aiming for funny, rather than accurate.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I was aiming for funny, rather than accurate.

You're still trying to tell me goth isn't cool as the internet fawns over Sandman lol. And stuff like "Nope" is very well-aligned with Planescape, in terms of how it asks questions and so on.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah. My only complaint about the official statements yesterday was that they repeated the same thing Paizo did when they did the PF2E playtest, pretending that the release date for the new books could change depending on how the playtest goes. (The PF2E playtest was rocky, and the release date for the new books didn't change.)

I mean, Wizards pretty much has to release the new books in 2024 for the 50th anniversary of D&D. There's no way playtest feedback is going to derail that. Or am I too cynical?

You aren't. They will release 5.5e in 2024 even if it's not what they first envisioned. They've made the 50th anniversary announcement and can't/won't go back on that.

 

[Malmuria]

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).

Sort of...

• the short adventures in the box sets are either a) fetch quests ("your factol sends you to this plane to do this specific thing for an unspecified reason") or b) glorified encounters ("while traveling through Arborea you meet...").
• the longer adventures are railroads. Some are very entertaining railroads (Dead Gods), but it was peak 2e adventure writing. It's really hard to do a sandbox when the amount of options are essentially infinity.
• the outer planes box sets were evocative but no, not immediately gameable ("here's an infinite space consisting of howling, madness inducing caves! No, there's no reason for the PCs to be here at all, why do you ask?"). Either they were too abstract, or, the material itself doubled down on dnd conventions ("while you are in one of the literal hells our setting has on offer, you can meet this dwarven blacksmith from Toril who got stuck here. He makes swords.")
• the focus on distributing RL pantheons among the planes was in practice very cringe, as the kids say
• The belief-is-reality, philosophers-with-clubs things sounds great until you notice that there aren't really any mechanics for determining how and whether, say, a town in the outlands slips into a particular plane of existence or not.
• Sigil was the most gameable part of PS (and I agree that Uncaged is a great book), because you can run a city campaign, which is well-established campaign structure for dnd. The idea of factions is great, but I think they need more practical goals and territory within the city. And if the PCs aren't from Sigil...why do they care about the factions.
• the videogame planescape torment ironically shows what a Sigil campaign can be at its best, which is a kind of weird fiction urban mystery scenario (in which a basic roleplaying/call of cthulhu type system or similar would be better).

 

[Parmandur]

I’m guessing that’s in whatever video I haven’t watched yet, but makes sense.

And confirms, counter to my initial freak out, that I’ve been right about the level of changes we can expect. 4e-essentials, at most.

Yeah, exactly. He also was at pains to point out yesterday they expect people to playtest these 21 pages of material by using the existing Monster Manual, DMG, and PHB for every other rule. These are modules, not a new system.