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.

 

[mamba]

It's just good business. There are a lot more players than there are DMs. Putting out a book for DMs only is rather like putting out a product only for people with green eyes.

Funny that most books are for the DM then - and it’s not like PHB, Xanathar and Tasha sell in much higher numbers

Turns out more than one person can use the same book, and those get bought by the DM as well who then shares them with the players, players themselves rarely buy any book (not never, but they sell maybe 1.5 times as much, not 3 or 4 times - or at least they used to in years we have data for)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

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

Some of the movie marketing tie-ins may still be under wraps, to avoid spoilers for one thing. I notice yesterday a Lego tie-in for Bad Batch session 2, which included minor spoilers.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Haven't read the whole thread, but I really hope they don't go with the three-thin-book model for Planescape. It didn't do Spelljammer justice imho.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Haven't read the whole thread, but I really hope they don't go with the three-thin-book model for Planescape. It didn't do Spelljammer justice imho.

I've heard that is exactly what they are doing.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.



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'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.



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.

Yeah LoP was basically an official emergency button/open threat for the DM if the players pull something outrageous with portals (because sooner or later they will given the near infinity of possibilities). But yeah some people seemed to take the LoP as a personal attack. I dunno re running it, it made huge sense to me at 16 and I found it easier to run than, for example, Birthright or actually at that age, Ravenloft. I didn't even really get to know Hammer horror until around that age and a bit later, or gothic stuff in general.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Ravenloft. I didn't even really get to know Hammer horror until around that age and a bit later, or gothic stuff in general.

Interesting. I was 15 when Ravenloft I6 first came out and was already very familiar with the movies being parodied. They used to have a late-night horror double bill on BBC2 in the early 1980s.

 

[Reynard]

It's just good business. There are a lot more players than there are DMs. Putting out a book for DMs only is rather like putting out a product only for people with green eyes.

Sure, but they are also claiming 10 million active gamers, which means 2 million active GMs. If the customer has increased so dramatically over the last few years, that old excuse looks less and less viable.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Sure, but they are also claiming 10 million active gamers, which means 2 million active GMs. If the customer has increased so dramatically over the last few years, that old excuse looks less and less viable.

It is still just as viable on an ROI basis. Do you to spend $500k on developing a product for 10 million customers or 2 million customers?

 

[Reynard]

It is still just as viable on an ROI basis. Do you to spend $500k on developing a product for 10 million customers or 2 million customers?

That only works if you do not have any more capital than you did when the customer base was a quarter the size. Which they obviously do -- which they are pumping into a product that is probably even more niche than a GM book (the 3D VTT).

 

[UngainlyTitan]

That only works if you do not have any more capital than you did when the customer base was a quarter the size. Which they obviously do -- which they are pumping into a product that is probably even more niche than a GM book (the 3D VTT).

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.