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]

Personally, I like running and playing both sort of games. Simplifying, in one you more or less tell a story and the main characters are very important, in the other type, you play a game. The story is emergent (i.e. what happened in the game). Characters may die randomly and they get substituted.

The second type is more appealing to me, and it would be nice if WotC supported it, at least in the DMG with optional rules. I'm well aware that the default has passed me by.

 

[Nikosandros]

I cannot imagine anyone going to court to claim the exclusive right over thouls, arguably the silliest of all D&D monsters. (Yes, even worse than the adherer.)

Ahem...

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The second type is more appealing to me, and it would be nice if WotC supported it, at least in the DMG with optional rules. I'm well aware that the default has passed me by.

Goodman Games is sliding into your DMs as we speak.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Ahem...

View attachment 270262

Woof. Good point. Thouls are top 10, then.

 

[Incenjucar]

Of course anthropomorphic animal people
aren't the focus of the Humanoids handbook, nor should they have been. Fantasy is as big as it gets when it comes to possibilities, so there's room for all kinds of non-human species, not to mention non-real humans. The point is that RPGs have almost always been broader than Tolkien. We can all have our preferences, but "furry" PCs are older than dirt.

 

[Velderan]

In TSR's game, different experience tables allowed lower level PCs to catch up. Even if they didn't, there's no reason you couldn't start a new PC at the old one's level, if the DM is cool with it.

Disregarding all that, in TSR's game, all else being equal, a nonhuman PC is more powerful than a human one. That's why the level limits existed in the first place. If that disparity goes away (as it pretty much has), so to does the need for those limits.

Back in the 2e days, we ignored the racial level limits and people still made humans often enough despite being mechanically inferior. It probably helped we mostly played Dragonlance and the lore helped support making a human if your character backstory concept better fit a location typically populated by humans (e.g. Solamnia). IME story drives race selection more than game mechanics.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Back in the 2e days, we ignored the racial level limits and people still made humans often enough despite being mechanically inferior. It probably helped we mostly played Dragonlance and the lore helped support making a human if your character backstory concept better fit a location typically populated by humans (e.g. Solamnia). IME story drives race selection more than game mechanics.

Maybe it used to, but in my experience modern players care far more about their bespoke "personality" than the world said PC actually adventures in.

 

[Scribe]

For real lol.

I mean, I will say there's clearly a crossover between "actual furries" and "anthro animals which people are keen on", but like, which of that line something falls on, and whether there's even really a line, I'm not so sure about.

Certainly I used to be rather hostile to furries as a youth, and as an adult I'm like, whatever floats your boat, man, just don't say "yiff" in my presence please. Also being real furry stuff seems to have gradually become less sexual and less mystical (there used to be a lot of wacky claims of mystical connections and otherkin-ness and so on) and more expression-of-personality-oriented.

Minotaurs are certainly uhhhhh appreciated by the furry community though.

lol and people ask why I have none of those species in my world...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

lol and people ask why I have none of those species in my world...

I dunno man, I refused to have anything to do with them when I was like 14, but now it just feels churlish, especially as I've always loved Lizardfolk, who are total scalies.

And it's not like people aren't total perverts about elves. I mean come on. Elves are probably even more adored by the perverts* of the world than furry races are. And halflings or goblins? Wellllll, you don't want to look into that. Or maybe you do? /eyebrow waggle

Really if you don't want any races that appeal to um... specific tastes... you're looking at humans and maybe dwarves? Everyone else someone is leering at that.

* = I use this term non-judgementally, if you've got a better one, hand it over lol

 

[Scribe]

Wellllll, you don't want to look into that.

lol no, I dont.

This line of discussion has reached an end I believe.