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.

 

[Incenjucar]

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.

The Complete Book of Humanoids was released in 1993.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, by Palladium, came out in 1985.

Anthro in RPGs is very old.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

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.

It can work just fine if you're not so invested in a single PC that you can't move on to a new one. Not that anyone needs to do that if it doesn't work for you.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It can work just fine if you're not so invested in a single PC that you can't move on to a new one.

It still derails the campaign completely.

Because what are the actual options?

1) The level-limited PCs stay in the game, but they're now having hugely less fun, watching somewhere between 80 and 20% of the other players slowly get further and further ahead of them, where they have to stand still.

2) They drop that PC and start a new PC at what, depending on the DM and relevant house rules, probably somewhere between level 1 and some percentage of the level of the other PCs.

So they're both having less fun and less effective, and the campaign is probably over before they even catch up.

3) The player(s) impacted quit the campaign, or everyone does.

Great! Awesome! Really helped!

(All because Gary Gygax had a dumb idea that he didn't actually use in his own games. He didn't even run AD&D, for the most part, because he didn't like the rules lol).

If there are other options, I'd love to hear them! It's a bad rule, that the author didn't use, that wasn't well-considered or well-designed, and that has no discernible goal or goal-oriented thinking behind it, other than "derail campaigns that reach higher levels" (but I'm pretty sure that's unintended).

Moving on to a new PC is a red herring here, I'm afraid. This isn't the death of a low-level PC.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It still derails the campaign completely.

Because what are the actual options?

1) The level-limited PCs stay in the game, but they're now having hugely less fun, watching somewhere between 80 and 20% of the other players slowly get further and further ahead of them, where they have to stand still.

2) They drop that PC and start a new PC at what, depending on the DM and relevant house rules, probably somewhere between level 1 and some percentage of the level of the other PCs.

So they're both having less fun and less effective, and the campaign is probably over before they even catch up.

3) The player(s) impacted quit the campaign, or everyone does.

Great! Awesome! Really helped!

(All because Gary Gygax had a dumb idea that he didn't actually use in his own games. He didn't even run AD&D, for the most part, because he didn't like the rules lol).

If there are other options, I'd love to hear them! It's a bad rule, that the author didn't use, that wasn't well-considered or well-designed, and that has no discernible goal or goal-oriented thinking behind it, other than "derail campaigns that reach higher levels" (but I'm pretty sure that's unintended).

Moving on to a new PC is a red herring here, I'm afraid. This isn't the death of a low-level PC.

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.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I do suspect that some of Gary's stated stance on Tolkien's influence changed from before and after Tolkien Enterprises sued TSR. And while he said "I don't understand why anyone would play anything other than a human fighting man," his most famous character was a magic-user (Mordenkainen).

It's also hard to say how much D&D being first would've still counted against other competitors. Was being able to play non-humans an integral part of the special sauce? Quite likely, yes, but but would their absence have been enough to turn the tide against all the other ingredients? That I am not so sure on. Plenty of other early RPGs only provided options for playing humans. I suspect that D&D sans non-humans would've still be a success, and that momentum would've made for an insurmountable lead. It wasn't until the early 90s when another RPG dethroned D&D's #1 RPG slot, and it wasn't a fantasy RPG that did it (Vampire: The Masquerade).

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.

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!".

One thing that my group had going back then, that appears to be fairly common amongst other gaming groups of the time, is that players had multiple characters that they would cycle through for each adventure, depending on both mood and who was still recovering from the last adventure. In the one campaign I ran back then that actually got high enough to where people started encountering level limits, my recollection is that people just started playing those characters less and less.

I'm not defending level limits, however. The current solution of giving humans stuff rather than taking away from non-humans is certainly preferable to me.

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.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

Players get attached to their characters. They've invested time and thought into their background and mannerisms. Why should they give them up and make a new character?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If the goal is to have a human-centric game and you don't want to just ban the other choices entirely, there need to be better incentives to play humans than just "we broke everyone else to pressure you into making the choice we want you to make."

 

[glass]

The Complete Book of Humanoids was released in 1993.

The Complete Book of Humanoids was goblins and orcs and giants, not furries (I guess gnolls count, and one or two more if you include scalies, but it is very much not the focus of the book).

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.

I also never quite understood the point of level limits. Either you hit them and the character rapidly becomes unplayable, or you don't (either because the character never gets that far or because they are easily replaced) and they do absolutely nothing. Either way, they utterly fail as a balancing mechanism.

Back when I played 2e, we houseruled them out and gave humans a couple of bennies instead (+1 to any stat and the ability to multiclass, IIRC).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

The sort of DM who enforced hard level limits was not the sort of DM who was "cool with that", and I say that with the extreme confidence of a Veteran of the Psychic Wars, er... I mean the veteran of a million of discussions of exactly this from 1992-1995-ish.

Disregarding all that, in TSR's game, all else being equal, a nonhuman PC is more powerful than a human one.

Yeah and let me be clear: they thought like this because they were fundamentally bad at game design.

That's not entirely their fault - they were pioneers. We walk on the road of corpses their dumb decisions laid down. But let's not celebrate bad and fundamentally ill-conceived game design where the goals of that design are unclear and certainly unmet. If we're going to celebrate that, let's all cheer for Synnibarr or RIFTS: South America 2 or something!

This was a key problem in the early AD&D phase of game design, and in a lot of '80s game design generally, which often was not goal-oriented, but merely people stumbling around in the dark making rules for the sake of rules, and without no holistic conception of how those rules would impact the game.

Also, let's be real here, there was direct anti-correlation between the power of nonhuman PCs and their level limits.

That is to say, the more powerful, the more outrageous a nonhuman PC was, the HIGHER their level limits were. The weaker, the less impressive a nonhuman PC was, the LOWER their level limits were.

Again I would say this is fundamentally because they were not good at design. On top of that, some classes weren't limited much - so it was fine to be an Elf Ranger, but not an Elf Cleric - even though Elf racials synergised with Ranger far better.

So I think maybe we have to reject the "power" thesis to some extent, especially as we can see how much more focused on "theme" the limits seem to be. Especially with the optional rule where a high stat meant a higher level limit lol. An 18 will get you +3!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yeah and let me be clear: they thought like this because they were fundamentally bad at game design.

That's not entirely their fault - they were pioneers. We walk on the road of corpses their dumb decisions laid down. But let's not celebrate bad and fundamentally ill-conceived game design where the goals of that design are unclear and certainly unmet. If we're going to celebrate that, let's all cheer for Synnibarr or RIFTS: South America 2 or something!

Yeah, I love a lot of the OSR, but the fetishization of early designers is silly. They didn't know they were making bad decisions, so they made a lot of them. Every new field starts the same way.

I imagine there are car purists who would love to own a Model A, but YouTube is not full of videos insisting we should all go back to hand-cranking our car engines. (It would be pretty wild to see, though, considering how many motorists' arms got broken that way.)