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.

 

[Parmandur]

I might grab the Phandelver campaign for completeness with the 5e starters.

Not gonna lie, I'm weirdly excited by this. This could be a great book.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

Yeah. I loved WoD and played in a group that LARPed Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling, Mage, etc. I am not and never have been an eyeliner wearing goth. We had about 40 regulars in the regular game, and when we ran Convention games had upwards of 100 people playing. Maaaaybe, 5% were eyeliner wearing goths. The rest were just people who liked vampires and werewolves.

 

[Parmandur]

I'm not sure how long it will all take, but I do know that a sizable chunk of the two years will be spent finalizing the changes, sending the work to the printers to print a ton of books and then shipping in time for release. The playtesting isn't going to be two years long.

Crawford provided a timeline. From this August with this first test, they are looking to test for 1 year, with flex time of up to 18 months. We know from the past thst finalizing and sending to the printer from the final playtest of material fir WotC is about two months. So, if things go pear shaped forml them and they need tonwalk stuff back and do revised tests, they have a lot of time to publish by Christmas 2024.

 

[mamba]

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?

If you do not know in advance whether all chars are 2014 or 2024, bring both - or trust the players that the chars are ‘legit’ instead of trying to confirm that in some form.

Make no changes to any of them. End of story.
If some player feels the 2024 chars are stronger (no idea if they will be, too early to tell imo), then maybe they should not have shown up with a 2014 one

 

[Parmandur]

That's the key. They now clarified very well what they meant with compatibility i.e. they believe the 2024 core rules should work with all previous adventures and supplements, but obviously not with 2014 core.

They stated thst they expect people to actively mix and match during this playtest. And we already have been moving and matching the options secretly for 2 years, they just came clean.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

SHOCKED that there's no tie in book to the movie. You know, like a Neverwinter adventure. An obvious miss.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it's rather unfair to call anyone who wanted something called Planescape to be about plane hopping adventure "narrow minded" and "mindless".

Whilst you certainly can make adventures for the setting, not everyone is into intellectual, philosophical and political adventures. Some people play D&D for mindless escapism. And the product was not advertised as "does not support mindless escapism". So people where justifiably disappointed. And I have little doubt that the new Planescape will support mindless escapism, and so people who want it to be ever so intellectual will be angry.

But Planescape is a setting about intellectual, philosophical, and political adventures! There is plenty mindless escapism elsewhere in D&D. If every setting supports the same kind of adventures, why bother?

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

I want to be able to ask questions in Planescape like they did in "The Good Place". Old PS seemed to have that vibe. Dungeon crawling (but in Pandemomium) is less interesting to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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).

This all sounds very much like someone's personal opinion. Fancy that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

They stated thst they expect people to actively mix and match during this playtest. And we already have been moving and matching the options secretly for 2 years, they just came clean.

I could have sworn i said a while back that WotC expected the Tasha's stuff to be the standard moving forward, no matter what they officially stated. And here we are.