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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

With Dwarves, weapons, shields, armor, gauntlets, girdles, and class-suited items don't malfunction, so that's like 80% of the items you'd use as a Dwarf. Personally I never saw anyone apply it to potions, either. We certainly didn't. It was basically stuff like rings, boots, etc., and it's like, well, if it doesn't work for you, another PC will just use it, probably no great loss.

I've never met anyone who started with 2E who enforced the Raise Dead thing, because until well into the '90s, virtually I knew who played AD&D IRL, if they even noticed elves were missing from the list, thought it was a typo or oversight or elves were the "other creatures" listed, because in 2E it's completely unexplained. There's no text and no apparent lore-reason why it would be the case. It's not explained in the elf section in the PHB, it's not explained in the spell (indeed the relevant text is below), and it's not even explained in the Complete Book of Elves, it just has some waffle which only makes sense if you already know the restriction.

The exact text is: "When the priest casts a raise dead spell, he can restore life to a dwarf, gnome, half-elf, halfling, or human (other creatures may be allowed, at the DM's option)." Elves at worst thus presumably being "other creatures" because there's literally not a single word saying it doesn't work on them and they certainly are "creatures" lol.

I think the first time anyone even suggested it "definitely" wasn't a typo was in like 1993 or 1994, when we'd been running AD&D for years. And they had a cockamamie-seeming story about "elven souls", and how they couldn't be raised, which just didn't add up, but eventually we saw how the pieces fit together, but you kind of have to know a lot of random background stuff, because it was implicit, not explicit (literally). And by then we just didn't care, and I don't think many other people did either.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Besides as we all know the only valid species limitation is an all-elemental campaign.

My homebrew is close to that, 6 out of 8 player species are elementally aligned.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Sigil is practically Mos Easley cantina.

Antropomorphic animals or "furries" are relatively new as PCs but the new generation of players aren't like the previous ones because these have drunk from different sources, for example the videogames and the manga+anime.

I warn some pictures of furries are NSFW.

My opinion is ardlings have been created for non-Caucasian players who don't want to be clones of Tolkien's people.

 

[Faolyn]

Sigil is practically Mos Easley cantina.

Antropomorphic animals or "furries" are relatively new as PCs but the new generation of players aren't like the previous ones because these have drunk from different sources, for example the videogames and the manga+anime.

I warn some pictures of furries are NSFW.

My opinion is ardlings have been created for non-Caucasian players who don't want to be clones of Tolkien's people.

Even a lot of caucasian people don't want to be Tolkien clones.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

My opinion is ardlings have been created for non-Caucasian players who don't want to be clones of Tolkien's people.

I'm not sure why you would think the colour of someone's skin would influence their choice of species.

Anthropomorphic animals have a long history in fantasy. Aside from the obvious Chronicles of Narnia and Redwall, the myths and folktales of many countries feature anthropomorphic animals.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I'm not sure why you would think the colour of someone's skin would influence their choice of species.

Anthropomorphic animals have a long history in fantasy. Aside from the obvious Chronicles of Narnia and Redwall, the myths and folktales of many countries feature anthropomorphic animals.

plus liard and cat flow go back far in dnd and more than one video game fantasy setting derived from dnd tropes.

plus old sci fi where filled with them and the rift between the two was not as far as they are today.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Kemonomimi ("animal ears") is a fantasy race specie very popular in the isekai("another world") fiction.

Little Bit Beastly - TV Tropes

Known in Japan as "kemonomimi" (roughly translating as "animal ears", but not so easy to spell), these are the most dramatically anthropomorphized characters, who appear virtually human, but feature the added characteristics of an animal's ears …

tvtropes.org

How to explain it in a polite way? If I was a darkskin child from Africa or Iberoamerica I would be more interested, woulf feel more identified into a ninja turtle, barbarian duck or a samurai rabbit than a blonde or redheare+blueyed Caucasian pirate as main character.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Kemonomimi ("animal ears") is a fantasy race specie very popular in the isekai("another world") fiction.

But is far from the only source of anthomomorphic animals.

How to explain it in a polite way?

Not like that.

If I was a darkskin child from Africa or Iberoamerica

What if they where from America or Europe? You can't tell where people are from by the colour of their skin.

I would be more interested, woulf feel more identified into a ninja turtle, barbarian duck or a samurai rabbit than a blonde or redheare+blueyed Caucasian pirate as main character.

Why? All those sorts of thing can be found in the mythology of any country in the world. Including Spain BTW.

 

[Stormonu]

No one I know followed 1e nonhuman level limits. 2e weren't quite as restrictive, and with good ability scores, they weren't anywhere near as restrictive when it came to the levels of most campaigns...

I would be one of those people. Though, as we got close to the limits, the players were able to cajole me into using the slow advancement rules (triple XP).

If I were to go back to 1E/2E, I might very well consider enforcing those limits again, especially since I don't normally game much past 10th level anyways.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm guessing that even back then enough people said "but that's boring" and forced his hand.

Good thing they did.

If D&D launched humans-only and purely sword and sorcery, I guarantee you some D&D-inspired system which had non-humans and a heavy Tolkenian influence rather than just Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock (all of whom I prefer to Tolkein, to be clear but...) would have eaten D&D's lunch sometime before 1990.

But that is pretty much exactly what Gygax says happened, that like literally everyone except him wanted non-humans and Tolkenian influence.

If I were to go back to 1E/2E, I might very well consider enforcing those limits again, especially since I don't normally game much past 10th level anyways.

Not a dig at you personally but this always confuses me - "I'd enforce limits that are incredibly unlikely to apply to the actual game I run" - it's not the first or fiftieth time I've seen someone say that, but it's like, "Man what?". Like what does that even achieve?

As far as I can tell, getting a campaign much past 10th or so in any edition is an achievement, and like, why crash that campaign into a wall for the sake of an irrational and poorly-conceived rule made up by a dead guy, which by his own account, he also didn't enforce! It just doesn't add up.

All level limits achieve is to derail campaigns which get past 10th (given most limits are between 9 and 13). Suddenly somewhere between 20% and 80% of the PCs have to stop levelling up, because what, they gained a relatively small benefit from some racial abilities earlier on? Many of which benefited the group more than them (spot secret doors, infravision, etc.). It's like "Oh you picked a race mainly for RP reasons, and your abilities benefited the group, but you picked the wrong class, so screw you all of a sudden!".

What's their answer even supposed to be - "Guess I'll die"? The group isn't going to stick together much longer if only some of the PCs are levelling up, is it?

If there's some kind of awesome justification and solution to the "Group probably stops playing/re-rolls" situation, I'd love to hear it.