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.

 

[Quickleaf]

So I was excited to hear Planescape makes a return, having never played the original, but totally loved the computer game form childhood.

Excitement turned to disappointment that the format will be be that three book set like 5th Spelljammer (mine arrived, and only the first two books are actual rules and lore, the third is just an adventure).

Is there a financial reason that Wizards do not do splat books for campaigns anymore? I saw someone selling of all his old Planescape and that has many books, but too out-of-date for my tastes, and expensive.

Have we actually received confirmation anywhere that Planescape is being released in a slipcase 3-book format like Spelljammer?

Possibly may be, but I'm not on top of the latest news.

 

[TwoSix]

Have we actually received confirmation anywhere that Planescape is being released in a slipcase 3-book format like Spelljammer?

Possibly may be, but I'm not on top of the latest news.

From the OP:
"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."

 

[Quickleaf]

EDIT: Ah, I see, it's from this Polygon article: D&D is reviving Planescape with a three-volume boxed set, coming in 2023

"Dungeons & Dragons used a Tuesday press conference to tease a packed release schedule, which includes the return of the Planescape campaign setting in fall 2023. The beloved setting, first published in 1994, will be getting the same treatment Wizards of the Coast provided with Spelljammer: Adventures in Space: a three-book slipcase including a setting guide, bestiary, and adventure campaign."

From the OP:
"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."

Right, I saw that in the OP too. Does anyone have a source on that statement?

Because just going by the blurb in the relevant time stamp for it just says:

"Finally, we end the year with a return to Planescape. This collection includes everything you need to explore Sigil and the multiverse beyond."

There's no mention of the specific format of the product.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The community seems to enjoy insulting people for houseruling. Otherwise, why is all the talk and angst focused on WotC's rule set?

What in the who new?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

this is a really good idea

I really dislike the Grewt Wheel, so hopefully they do this and find a way to finally make me at least Neutral on it.

 

[Malmuria]

So the "setting guide" will set out to cover Sigil including factions, the Outlands, and all of the planes of existence, and then I assume the adventure would be a sigil based portal hopping affair.

 

[Demetrios1453]

So the "setting guide" will set out to cover Sigil including factions, the Outlands, and all of the planes of existence, and then I assume the adventure would be a sigil based portal hopping affair.

If Polygon wasn't jumping the gun assuming the format.

 

[Parmandur]

The community seems to enjoy insulting people for houseruling. Otherwise, why is all the talk and angst focused on WotC's rule set?

....what?

 

[Orius]

Out of those books, Planescape is the only one I'm interested in. What they do with the factions will decide whether I'll bite or not, as I still have all my 2E stuff for it.

I'm pretty much done with new stuff myself, so if WotC wrecks Planescape or not it doesn't matter, I still have my old material to use.

Planescape has (and always had) to do a lot of things

• Player options
• Sigil and the Outlands, including factions
• Manual of the Planes (each plane has a variable number of lairs, each of which is potentially infinite in scope)
• Bestiary
• general rules of navigating the planes and making adventures

The original PS box set had 224 pages of material, and was mostly just about the Sigil and the Outlands and the general vibe of planescape (each outer and inner plane got 1 page). The "Planes of..." box sets expanded on the outer planes, but to be honest rereading them now they take the infinity of the planes and turn them into a handful of locations that are either mundane ("here's what equipment you can buy in this town on hades") or incomprehensibly hostile to PCs with no good adventure hooks. The most successful PS material, IMO, was the sigil-oriented stuff (Uncaged, Guide to the Cage, Factol's Manifesto). And I think PS: Torment worked in part because it mostly stuck to Sigil and it's weirdness.

So, unless this slipcase is going to be monte cook-esque in length and density, the best thing they can do is focus on Sigil.

Given that one of the reasons WotC canceeled the Planescape line in the first place was to bring planar material back into core, they've been using planar stuff since 3e, and 5e's core books already have a brief overview of the planes, focusing on Sigil is probably what they should do here. Covering the factions would be good, unfortunately WotC has typically taken a post-Faction War approach in the past. It's a shame because the factions were a central part of the setting. A DM who is just using general planar adventuring and isn't particularly focused on Sigil doesn't really need the factions or their politics, but they really should be there in a Sigil based campaign.

I 100% agree. Since they are happy to kill some canon, it'd be great to roll back away from the Faction War and post-FW garbage and really lean into "here's how to do a citycrawl in a really bizarre city full of portals, and here's a bunch of really, really solid factions, locations, and political plot hooks."

I'd love that. That said, it's already been done extremely well by a few indie publishers for games like Troika! and the like, so even that may be a hard sell for someone like me, but would be awesome for newer players or D&D purists.

I'm not a big fan of ignoring canon (though it doesn't help when canon gets all tangled up, but that's mostly just a problem for the Realms and arguably Dragonlance), but I didn't care at all for the events of FW. I don't like what it did to Duke Darkwood (even if he was a jerk), and I don't like the factions exiled from Sigil. FW supposedly wasn't supposed to be the endpoint of the setting and there were supposed to be follow ups to it. Quite frankly, FW shouldn't have ended with the factions booted out of Sigil. Even if the people working on the setting thought the factols should have all been eliminated (okay except for Rhys), it should have left things open where the players could have their PCs become the new leaders of their factions.

Bloody metaplots.

Hard disagree and I think this attitude was the result of narrow-mindedness (and yes I am specifically saying Jim Davis is that) and inability to conceptualize what a Planescape adventure looked like, even though there were pretty good examples. A subset of DMs definitely just want to have mindless planar jaunts, which didn't really require or involve Planescape at all, and were simply vexed/flummoxed by Planescape's material. Making Planescape more "normal" is just dreadful. Truly dreadful. And whenever I see this stuff described (and this was discussed a ton in the '90s), that's all it amounts to - less Factions, less politics, less NPCs, less Sigil, less talking, less roleplaying, more going to a dungeon (that just happens to be on another plane) and bonking monster heads and taking monster loot. It reminds me of the sort of people who played Dark Sun as a bog-standard dungeon crawl setting, and only used Dark Sun at all because it let them have particularly OP characters for their bog-standard dungeon crawls.

Planescape even had wonderfully game-able stuff that didn't even focus on being game-able, like Uncaged: Faces of Sigil, which just an incredibly useful book for actually running a campaign in Sigil. If you actually wanted to do that. But again, some people just wanted like "Dungeon Crawl: Planar Tourist edition". The same people tended to the ones who wrote rants about how the Factions sucked or were too "fancy" and had weird anger issues about the Lady of Pain (I mean that was a weirdly common thing "The Guy Who Is Totally Enraged By The Lady of Pain", back then).

Planescape was pretty high concept. I've had the material pretty since it was released, and it was only in recent years when I finally started getting a grasp on what to really do with it. It's not easy material for a new DM. Of course you're right that Planescape shouldn't be mindless plane crawls -- Zeb Cook himself said as much to DMs in the campaign setting box -- but it's a strongly role-playing setting and players who aren't into that are either going to struggle with it or take a dislike to it.

Lady of Pain hate is mind-boggling to me. Yeah, some people see her as an engine of "blue bolts from the heavens" or some such nonsense. That's using her wrong and again Cook pretty much explicitly laid that out in the setting box too. She doesn't interact with the PCs, period. She doesn't care about mortals unless they start destructively futzing with the portals, worship her, or try to gain control over Sigil. Then she either flays them on the spot or mazes them. She's there to make logical sense of the setting. The thing is, players who go out of their way to piss of the Lady are probably the troublemaking types who like to crash things in the game anyway.

 

[Parmandur]

If Polygon wasn't jumping the gun assuming the format.

It seems that Chris Lindsey and Chris Perkins did a press conference with a bunch of venues to give some talking points on these products, whence the Phandelver Campaign being "tinged with cosmic horror" and confirming the three book format for Planescape.

Now, knowing that it is a 3 book slipcase like Spelljammer, first I hope that it has larger books. Second, I would love it if the main book was a Manual of the Planes diving a bit deeper than the DMG into the Planes, while the Advebture was a Great Modron March style story.