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.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I'm sure the cant will be downplayed or not even used in this upcoming version of Planescape.

If they still use the cant there's an issue like how the word "Nick" in Planescape means: to cut or attack, while the word "Nick" in modern day England means: to take/steal/swindle. I think in that case the modern day slang from England should be used instead.
If they still use a bit of the cant, they'll probably still use the word "Berk" but just like 2e they'll never explain that it comes from the Cockney Rhyme Slang "Berkeley Hunt" which rhymes with a word describing part of the female anatomy.

 

[Retreater]

We didn't get Dark Sun....

 

[mamba]

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

It’s the one I am most interested in, probably followed by the Giants.

I hope cosmic horror is more Lovecraft than code for ‘the BBEG is an Aboleth’

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

That was my experience. I used to wear silver nail polish sometimes, but that was like because I was "club kid"-adjacent and it went with my silver puffer jacket (it was the '90s, stop giggling people!). When I went to the Manchester University RPG society in late 1997, the number of people in eyeliner was zero, but the number of people playing WoD games was about 25. Two Vampire tables, at least one Werewolf, one Changeling, one Mage. Of course I really wanted to be on the Ars Magica table but they had a waiting list. There were two AD&D tables, for comparison.

 

[Parmandur]

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

The Heist book is coming out around the same time as the Heist movie, and the Phandelver campaign in the Neverwinter region is coming out shortly after the movie set in Neverwinter.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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).

I don't hard disagree with any of this, I just didn't find most of it to be a problem, and the Outer Planes boxes not being gameable is kind of not a Planescape problem, imho, because whilst they were marketed under the PS brand, they weren't really very, well, Planescape. They hewed way too close to previous Planar material and didn't seem to "get" Planescape.

And you can see why when you look at the authors.

Planescape and the whole philosophers with clubs thing is pure Zeb Cook. It's straight out of his mind. But that's the only one he did. All the rest is by others, particularly Monte Cook, and a lot of it seems to be uncomfortable with the level of sheer cool of Planescape, and wants to drag things back down and become just an aggrandized Manual of the Planes with a vague Planescape theme.

Re: Belief is reality, I don't think any mechanics were needed. Just the DM could determine it. But nowadays you would use mechanics, or rather, you'd probably have a framework for how to set up adventures about stuff changing planes.

Re: "What if they're not from Sigil/The Planes", well, quite, but that was part of the problem - Planescape wanted you to not be a tourist. But I feel like some of the authors were only interested in tourists. Every PS game I ran, I made sure to encourage people not to be bloody tourists, like even if they're from elsewhere, they should be integrated to Sigil or the planes, not just a rando. And the players loved this. One of the PCs in my 4E campaign was a Sigil native, for example, even though it was set in the FR (kinda).

I think Planescape was a visionary product which lost the visionary and then got increasingly compromised, mostly staying together because of incredible visual design and art (and zeitgeist!) and because the original conceit was so strong.

What I really hope they don't do is give us what amounts to "Monte Cook's Planescape" or some equally tepid or middling personage (sorry Monte, but you did your "Planescape" with Ptolus). I hope they can find someone up to the task. The logo and fact it's three-books bollocks like SJ do not fill me with hope, but you never know.

 

[agrayday]

maybe its my western world OCD, but is there a reason why Winter 2023 is to the left of Spring and summer 2023 with fall releases at the bottom? My brain wants to rearrange them in chronological order (left to right)....I first thought maybe it was a mistake and should have been Winter 2022.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

maybe its my OCD, but is there a reason why Winter 2023 is to the left of Spring and summer 2023 with fall releases at the bottom? My brain wants to rearrange them in chronological order....I first thought maybe it was a mistake and should have been Winter 2022.

Q1 = Winter, it's just a weird way of putting it. Put it another way, Winter here means Jan thru March.

 

[Demetrios1453]

maybe its my OCD, but is there a reason why Winter 2023 is to the left of Spring and summer 2023 with fall releases at the bottom? My brain wants to rearrange them in chronological order....I first thought maybe it was a mistake and should have been Winter 2022.

I mean, there's only 10 days or so of actual winter to come in 2022, and nearly 3 months at the start of 2023. So "Winter 2023" is in the right place.

 

[Parmandur]

maybe its my western world OCD, but is there a reason why Winter 2023 is to the left of Spring and summer 2023 with fall releases at the bottom? My brain wants to rearrange them in chronological order (left to right)....I first thought maybe it was a mistake and should have been Winter 2022.

Winter 2023 is January to March, it is in chronological order.