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.

 

[Micah Sweet]

why do you want them all gone? as it is a popular position but I have never really learned why?
is it just the animal people thing? as I consider that lazy you need to custom-make your races from lots of things to make something truly worthy.

Some folks just don't like animal people in their D&D. It doesn't fit their paradigm of what D&D fantasy is. Or fantasy as depicted in film and TV, in many cases. There's a reason nearly every fantasy film or series prominently features humans or at least very-near-humans (the Witcher is a good example of the latter).

 

[Incenjucar]

Some folks just don't like animal people in their D&D. It doesn't fit their paradigm of what D&D fantasy is. Or fantasy as depicted in film and TV, in many cases. There's a reason nearly every fantasy film or series prominently features humans or at least very-near-humans (the Witcher is a good example of the latter).

Eh. Special effects are expensive, actors want the audience to see their face, Hollywood is bizarrely puritanical about some things, there's a bit of paranoia about certain audiences, and the people who fund things tend to not respect an audience's ability to process multiple concepts at once. It's a self-reinforcing thing, like the idea that cartoons are for kids.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Eh. Special effects are expensive, actors want the audience to see their face, Hollywood is bizarrely puritanical about some things, there's a bit of paranoia about certain audiences, and the people who fund things tend to not respect an audience's ability to process multiple concepts at once. It's a self-reinforcing thing, like the idea that cartoons are for kids.

I disagree as a larger point, although I'm sure some of that is in there. Most folks IMO want a familiar point to ground themselves on, so they can launch into the fantasy from somewhere they already are invested in.

 

[Incenjucar]

I disagree as a larger point, although I'm sure some of that is in there. Most folks IMO want a familiar point to ground themselves on, so they can launch into the fantasy from somewhere they already are invested in.

I am familiar with this cliche but I've never seen it substantiated. Sci-fi and animation are chock full of sympathetic non-humans, sometimes in entirety human-free worlds. Using human behaviors certainly helps, but people love non-human humanoids of all kinds, and even some non-humanoids with expressive enough behaviors.

 

[see]

I've always been fascinated by groups like this. I'd say about about 15% of PCs were human in my experience running 2E for dozens of people over the years, maybe lower. Elves and Half-Elves were the commonest by far, followed by Dwarves, then humans,

Huh. I generally found that elves were quite effectively discouraged by the fact that raise dead didn't work on them, and dwarves by the magical item malfunction rules.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Some folks just don't like animal people in their D&D. It doesn't fit their paradigm of what D&D fantasy is. Or fantasy as depicted in film and TV, in many cases. There's a reason nearly every fantasy film or series prominently features humans or at least very-near-humans (the Witcher is a good example of the latter).

a wolfman is a near human, just beyond special effects till relatively recently, the common demi-humans has to do with people copying Tolkien and the fact that just slightly exotic-looking humans were somehow sufficiently different for most people, I am trying hard not to think about why as that will make me sad.

I do agree that just a humanoid dog or cat is lazy but something more could be nice we have had truly nuts mythological people before.

I disagree as a larger point, although I'm sure some of that is in there. Most folks IMO want a familiar point to ground themselves on, so they can launch into the fantasy from somewhere they already are invested in.

that is why we have the humans in the setting that is their job to be the familiar in a world so very not.

Huh. I generally found that elves were quite effectively discouraged by the fact that raise dead didn't work on them, and dwarves by the magical item malfunction rules.

wait do elves not have souls?
can dwarves not make cool stuff? that is like their thing denying dwarves the ability to craft the cool stuff would be like removing having a mind from a human.

 

[Incenjucar]

If you had a tabaxi in the D&D movie with high-end CGI and a good performance with appropriate feline behaviors without being pure cliche I'm fairly sure that audiences would fall in love with them. Shrek's Puss in Boots keeps getting shows and movies.

 

[Micah Sweet]

a wolfman is a near human, just beyond special effects till relatively recently, the common demi-humans has to do with people copying Tolkien and the fact that just slightly exotic-looking humans were somehow sufficiently different for most people, I am trying hard not to think about why as that will make me sad.

I do agree that just a humanoid dog or cat is lazy but something more could be nice we have had truly nuts mythological people before.

that is why we have the humans in the setting that is their job to be the familiar in a world so very not.

wait do elves not have souls?
can dwarves not make cool stuff? that is like their thing denying dwarves the ability to craft the cool stuff would be like removing having a mind from a human.

Humans in the setting and humans in the party are two very different things.

 

[see]

wait do elves not have souls?

In fact, the 1st edition explanation (in Deities & Demigods) literally was that elves, half-orcs, and intelligent monsters didn't have "souls", they had something similar-but-distinct called "spirits", and that's why raise dead and resurrection didn't work on them.

In 2nd, that explanation wasn't carried forward, and resurrection worked on elves, but raise dead still didn't.

can dwarves not make cool stuff? that is like their thing denying dwarves the ability to craft the cool stuff would be like removing having a mind from a human.

They could make cool stuff. But each time they they tried to use most magic items ("rods, staves, wands, rings, amulets, potions, horns, jewels, and all other magical items except weapons, shields, armor, gauntlets, and girdles"), there was a 20% chance the item wouldn't work.

 

[humble minion]

We did. But we're talking very early here, before really anything significant was known about 3E's mechanics except stuff like they were killing THAC0 and making to roll high was always good and so on. It was mostly just the designers saying it was going to be fairly compatible, and "easy to convert characters" and so on.

The edition wars did start before it was out, but they started once we'd seen the actual mechanics. Also any character that wasn't single-classed was completely impossible to meaningfully convert, and I dunno about you, but easily 80% of 2E characters I saw were multi-classed.

My recollection (through the mists of time) was that WotC was saying 3e was going to be 'fairly compatible' with 2e at a time when the rumour mill was going all a bit screw-loose with 'OMG the MtG company bought D&D and are going to make it into a CCG, you'll have to buy magic items in random boosters and playing a paladin will need a Rare card!'

In that context, a relatively conventional RPG, with D&Ds six ability scores, classes and levels, hit points, vancean magic, three core books etc etc kinda did count as 'fairly compatible,' considering the alternatives that were being rumoured. Yeah, there were certainly some areas that didn't convert well (multiclass PCs being top of the list), but it was still, y'know ... D&D.