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.

 

[Remathilis]

This has some truth to it, but let's not overstate things. Players could and did keep characters for a long, long time and we became very attached to them. GG himself had a number of characters that he played for years - Mordenkainen, for example.

I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying that it was an accidental discovery rather than something planned for and addressed in the rules. Which is why the rules and the game itself have moved from grinding though dozens of magic-users until you get a Mordenkainen who survives, to a more Raistlin "playing a single PC from low to high level across a single campaign" style.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This is 1e ya'll are talking about. It's entirely possible they got TPK'd by some slime before they got to that level.

It's entirely possible they got TPKed by giant frogs lurking under a drawbridge.

(An extremely real source of 1E TPKs.)

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

It's entirely possible they got TPKed by giant frogs lurking under a drawbridge.

(An extremely real source of 1E TPKs.)

Frogs are pretty slimy, so I'm still right.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Been DMing 2E campaign again and after about 6 months of playing every weekend they have all reached level 4 give or take. Out of the 5 only 2 have lived through the whole campaign so far. A Wizard/Cleric and a Druid.

XP is given for monsters defeated (dead or snuck around or driven off etc etc), completing quests, and bonus XP as I see fit. Sometimes the game ends with 500 XP each, sometimes 2K each.

It's been very nice to go back to XP use. The players look forward levels more. Levels aren't just assumed to go up every other session or so. And they seem so much happier to gain a level then they did in 5E due to the increased lethality of AD&D.

Of course this doesn't really work with 5E since everyone has the same xp limits.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This was the fatal flaw in Gary's D&D; there was never an expectation of emotional attachment. You don't grow fond of the Monopoly top hat, or of Miss Scarlett, or of the 14th French Light Cavalry Unit. They are all pieces of a game. Which is why the Pre-Hickman style of D&D treats PCs as pieces in a game rather than characters in a story.

It was an aspect of Gary's D&D. Calling it a flaw is just personal opinion.

 

[Faolyn]

Been DMing 2E campaign again and after about 6 months of playing every weekend they have all reached level 4 give or take. Out of the 5 only 2 have lived through the whole campaign so far. A Wizard/Cleric and a Druid.

XP is given for monsters defeated (dead or snuck around or driven off etc etc), completing quests, and bonus XP as I see fit. Sometimes the game ends with 500 XP each, sometimes 2K each.

It's been very nice to go back to XP use. The players look forward levels more. Levels aren't just assumed to go up every other session or so. And they seem so much happier to gain a level then they did in 5E due to the increased lethality of AD&D.

Of course this doesn't really work with 5E since everyone has the same xp limits.

See, In all of my 5e games, I've never seen anyone expect to go up a level "every other session." We do milestone leveling and it's pretty obvious to us all that we go up in level only after achieving the milestone, not just at random times when we have defeated enough monsters--which is especially good for us because we're not a combat-heavy group. Mind, achieving the milestone does usually have a boss fight attached to it, but combat isn't the main point of the game as a whole.

...Actually, I think the only time we did go up rapidly was when we were using encounter XP, and that was when two of the players decided to convert the GDQ series to 5e. And we as a group decided we didn't really like that game because it was all combat with very little RP.

 

[Faolyn]

It was an aspect of Gary's D&D. Calling it a flaw is just personal opinion.

Considering this is a role-playing game, it's definitely a flaw to expect to treat the characters as nothing more than pawns.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Considering this is a role-playing game, it's definitely a flaw to expect to treat the characters as nothing more than pawns.

Again, a flaw from your perspective.

 

[Faolyn]

Again, a flaw from your perspective.

It's not a flaw to expect a role-playing game to include role-playing.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Again, a flaw from your perspective.

I don't think this really flies man, and I don't mean that meanly.

I don't think it flies because Gary himself repented of this view later in his career, so he clearly eventually came to see it as a flaw or at least not something desirable. Dangerous Journeys, for all we may (and should) criticise it, absolutely sees PCs as well-developed characters, not playing pieces, and isn't anywhere near as murderous as D&D could be early on. Also it has a hideously fiddly chargen system so you'd be righteously mad if you had to keep making new DJ characters lol (I'm still mad about "Metaphysical Speed" as a substat lol just screw you man!).

The character-as-playing-piece is interesting because you can see how it bridges the gap from military simulations where maybe the people involved were "playing" specific individuals, and training-exercise-type roleplay and more Dave Arneson-esque RP where you're playing a character you actually created and invested with life.

It also helps, in my opinion, explain why players are so much more okay (in my 30+ years of experience lol) with pre-gen PCs getting killed than PCs they created getting killed.

Unless they've played them a long time (i.e. say deep into a WEG Star Wars Darkstryder campaign), people tend to see pre-gens as just "playing pieces". Yeah they'll ham it up a bit, they'll RP them, sometimes they'll even go outside their comfort zone, but it's because they don't care, not because they do care.

I think it's fair to say roleplaying games wouldn't have ever become as big as they did if we'd stuck to the Gygaxian meatgrinder/playing piece approach. In fact, they'd probably have evolved into "dungeon combat" games rather than stays as RPGs (there are tons of examples of these, WotC produced a bunch even).