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]

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.)

I love a lot of OSR stuff too, and the funniest thing with it is, it often ends up being ahead of 5E in some ways. Certainly I'd say that, all in all, Worlds Without Number is a slightly more modern and together RPG than 5E, despite being consciously OSR. It even solves some long-standing problems with D&D that 5E doesn't even attempt to address (most notably KO'ing/killing enemies from stealth without the system becoming cheesy). Hell I think a case could be made that RC D&D was "more advanced" than AD&D 2E when RC D&D arrived in 1991, and probably until quite late in the '90s (after Combat & Tactics and so on).

 

[Incenjucar]

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).


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).

Humanoids book contained:
: aarakocra, alaghi, beastman, bugbear, bullywug, centaur, fremlin, giant-kin (firbolg), giant-kin (voadkyn), gnoll, gnoll (flind), goblin, hobgoblin, kobold, lizard man, minotaur, mongrelman, ogre, half-ogre, orc, half-orc, pixie, satyr, saurial, swanmay, and wemic.

Wemics are cat-taurs, and reptile, bird, and amphibian folk do generally count. And yes gnolls are anthro hyenas.

 

[Reynard]

And yes gnolls are anthro hyenas.

DEMONIC anthro hyenas!

 

[Faolyn]

DEMONIC anthro hyenas!

Not back then they weren't. They were just another humanoid species.

 

[glass]

Humanoids book contained:
: aarakocra, alaghi, beastman, bugbear, bullywug, centaur, fremlin, giant-kin (firbolg), giant-kin (voadkyn), gnoll, gnoll (flind), goblin, hobgoblin, kobold, lizard man, minotaur, mongrelman, ogre, half-ogre, orc, half-orc, pixie, satyr, saurial, swanmay, and wemic.

Wemics are cat-taurs, and reptile, bird, and amphibian folk do generally count. And yes gnolls are anthro hyenas.

OK, to be fair I forgot about aarokokra and bullywugs. OTOH, I would not count wemic any more than I would count the actual centaurs, and minotaurs I suppose should technically count but they are not what people normally mean when they say "furries" either. But even if you count all three, that is still only nine out of twenty-six (if I have counted right).

I stand by my opinion that "furries" were very much not the focus of the book, even if there were a few species that meet the definition.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I love a lot of OSR stuff too, and the funniest thing with it is, it often ends up being ahead of 5E in some ways. Certainly I'd say that, all in all, Worlds Without Number is a slightly more modern and together RPG than 5E, despite being consciously OSR. It even solves some long-standing problems with D&D that 5E doesn't even attempt to address (most notably KO'ing/killing enemies from stealth without the system becoming cheesy). Hell I think a case could be made that RC D&D was "more advanced" than AD&D 2E when RC D&D arrived in 1991, and probably until quite late in the '90s (after Combat & Tactics and so on).

The DIY culture of OSR and the "nobody is really paying attention to us" of the BD&D team definitely meant more experimentation and creativity.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

minotaurs I suppose should technically count but they are not what people normally mean when they say "furries" either.

The weird dudes who post cartoon porn in response to every Twitter trending topic (the geekier version of the political types who do something similar) would disagree with you.

 

[Reynard]

Not back then they weren't. They were just another humanoid species.

You know what I miss? Thouls.

 

[Nikosandros]

You know what I miss? Thouls.

Thouls are in OSE. However I wonder how legal is that. Some monsters are listed as being OGL thanks to the Tome of Horrors, but thouls are not among them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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?

I heard that, but I have never been so attached to a PC that I had any real issue with then dying if circumstances demand. I have plenty of character ideas, so a dead PC is just an excuse to try out a new one.

I really don't understand that degree of player attachment. On either side of the screen.