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]

The bigger miss is no MtG card set tie in to the D&D movie, it's leaving $100 million dollars on the table.

Could be a Secret Lair.

 

[Reynard]

No, ROI is the return on the money spent on the project. Books are pretty much fixed cost. A 300 page book for a given quality, stable of creatives and so on cost the same. If the target market is me it is 0 because I cannot afford a $500k book and something greater than 0 if the market is the US population so all thing being equal they will target the largest market.
That is not to say they will never bring out something that targets DMs only as a goodwill project but probably not a book.

I think you missed my point: if the cost to produce the book is substantially the same as it was before, but now not only do you have more ready cash but also there are 4 times the potential buyers, the "it isn't profitable enough" excuse starts to look really thin.

 

[TrainedMunkee]

True, but there's no indication that Radiant Citadel was ever meant to be a reimagined Sigil. Doomspace, on the other hand, was almost certainly a reimagined Dark Sun at some point...

Here's what you do.

You bring a PHB, and you either bring pre-gen characters, or you ask them to make characters.

Currently there are only a few differences between 2024 characters and 2014 characters.

1) An extra language
2) An extra tool proficiency
3) An extra feat
4) Variant race abilities (like we already have)

So, if you have a bunch of 2024 people who bring their own characters, and you feel like the other PCs in a one-shot aren't as good... give them a level 1 feat from 2024 (someone has the book, since they built the characters) and... that's probably it. All of the other major changes are on the DM side, and just like "do you allow us to climb on monsters" or "do you use the Piety system" from other official books, you might need to field questions on what rules you are and aren't using.

Easy.

If you watch the video or read the FAQ, they never say that you will be able to use the 2014 books. You won’t be able to. This will be by design. They did say you will be able to use the adventures and expansions. They want you to buy the new big three. It is what it is, so if you walk into a public game post D&D One, you will be bringing your anniversary edition books.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I think you missed my point: if the cost to produce the book is substantially the same as it was before, but now not only do you have more ready cash but also there are 4 times the potential buyers, the "it isn't profitable enough" excuse starts to look really thin.

Just vote with your wallet.
If enough people do, maybe you get your wish.
Why should they change a running system?

 

[Reynard]

Just vote with your wallet.
If enough people do, maybe you get your wish.
Why should they change a running system?

How do you vote with your wallet for a book that doesn't exist?

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I think you missed my point: if the cost to produce the book is substantially the same as it was before, but now not only do you have more ready cash but also there are 4 times the potential buyers, the "it isn't profitable enough" excuse starts to look really thin.

A business executive is answerable to their owner/shareholders not to their customers. If an executive make the decision to produce a lower ROI product they are not going to have a job for long. Changing that is the subject for a discussion somewhere not on this site. Preferably somewhere with a nice bar.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

If you watch the video or read the FAQ, they never say that you will be able to use the 2014 books. You won’t be able to. This will be by design. They did say you will be able to use the adventures and expansions. They want you to buy the new big three. It is what it is, so if you walk into a public game post D&D One, you will be bringing your anniversary edition books.

They aren't going to risk a 4e scenerio where they fracture the Player base trying to force all players to buy the One D&D PHB. What will happen is they will errata the naughty word out of the 5e PHB, bringing all common elements between 5e PHB & One D&D PHB in line, but certain exclusive PHB 5e content will remain mostly the same, and still be legal, like the Half Elf and Half Orc, which the PHB 5e has, but One D&D doesn't.

If they ban the 5e PHB a huge chunk of the player base will be like screw you WotC drop D&D or ignore One D&D and only use 5e products, costing sales on supplemental materials.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

They aren't going to risk a 4e scenerio where they fracture the Player base trying to force all players to buy the One D&D PHB. What will happen is they will errata the naughty word out of the 5e PHB, bringing all common elements between 5e PHB & One D&D PHB in line, but certain exclusive PHB 5e content will remain mostly the same, and still be legal, like the Half Elf and Half Orc, which the PHB 5e has, but One D&D doesn't.

If they ban the 5e PHB a huge chunk of the player base will be like screw you WotC drop D&D or ignore One D&D and only use 5e products, costing sales on supplemental materials.

You could be right. Sort of how software companies no longer support old APIs but continue to maintain and support them in the background years after they are no longer official to avoid breaking existing applications built on them.

 

[DEFCON 1]

How do you vote with your wallet for a book that doesn't exist?

You buy products from the Third Parties that make stuff for DMs that WotC specifically decided not to do-- because they were more niche and that was the whole point of having 5E under the OGL, so WotC wouldn't have to produce a lot of low-selling niche product and could let smaller Third Party companies do it for them instead. And perhaps if certain product lines do well enough, then maybe WotC would come to the conclusion that what they thought was a niche product had a fanbase that was actually larger then they thought and thus decide to maybe make a version too.

The problem of course is too many players (at least here on EN World) have this hang up that they think anything done by 3P companies haven't been playtested enough and is going to suck. So they instead don't buy the products that might actually be useful to them and instead just wait and wait and wait for WotC to hopefully get around to doing it. But until it is proven to WotC that all these isolated DM-focused ideas actually have a substantial number of people wanting them... they have no reason to jump in to step on the work the 3PPs are doing.

 

[Reynard]

They aren't going to risk a 4e scenerio where they fracture the Player base trying to force all players to buy the One D&D PHB. What will happen is they will errata the naughty word out of the 5e PHB, bringing all common elements between 5e PHB & One D&D PHB in line, but certain exclusive PHB 5e content will remain mostly the same, and still be legal, like the Half Elf and Half Orc, which the PHB 5e has, but One D&D doesn't.

If they ban the 5e PHB a huge chunk of the player base will be like screw you WotC drop D&D or ignore One D&D and only use 5e products, costing sales on supplemental materials.

I expect a sidebar that says something like "characters created using the 2014 PHB get to choose from on of these 3 crappy feats!" and that's about it. The migration will happen naturally with a huge number of immediate adopters and new players buying the One books and eventually others dropping out or replacing their books. Or, more likely, people adopting DnDBeyond to get just the stuff relevant to the character they are or want to be playing (assuming a la cart is still a thing on DnDB).