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.

 

[Faolyn]

Huh. With all the yelling about "monetization," I missed that in the threads about the call.

Thanks.

I'm not a Spelljammer fan, and my DM dance card is pretty full, but I had been under the impression that it was a perfectly usable book. (I briefly fantasized about doing the Aliens franchise in Spelljammer with kruthiks or maybe Firefly with space clowns replacing Reavers.) I guess the flavor was just too out there for a lot of folks.

This would also argue for making Planescape into more of a Manual of the Planes 5E + Sigil content than a full-fledged revival, IMO, although that is likely at least my own personal biases at play there.

I think the problem is that all it is is usable. It has stats and that's it. They barely included any of the Spelljammer lore. The old 2e books included factions, religions, conflicts, places of interest, and ways to make individual solar systems interesting and fantastical, and 5e failed to include any of that. The monsters were also fairly dull. For instance, they took away all the nuance from the reigar, removed the humor from the dohwar and giant space hamsters, and their cosmic horrors feel like nothing more than a relatively weak bag of non-horrific hit points.

The space clowns were fun, I'll grant you. I'd combine them with the rakdos monsters from Ravnica to flesh them out a bit.

 

[Incenjucar]

Which of the existing 5E books is regarded the best example of a useful setting book thus far?

 

[Quickleaf]

This Deadline article:

Hasbro’s eOne U-Turn: Behind Toymaker’s Decision To Sell Indie Film & TV Studio And What’s Next For IP Slate

Hasbro's plan to sell eOne's film and TV businesses three years after buying them for $4 billion has raised questions internally and on Wall Street.

deadline.com

Summary:

Hasbro was late November's worst performer in that week's S&P 500. Most analysts are pinning the downturn on Hasbro flooding the market with way too many Magic: The Gathering set releases.

Spelljammer: Adventures in Space has also not met sales expectations, and distributors have been left with a lot of unsold inventory from the set. The poor sales of Spelljammer, exacerbated a bit by the Hadozee fiasco, contributed to Ray Winninger's ouster from WotC.

In addition to being a cost-saving move, the Deadline article attributes the move away from an in-house film & TV division with the 2021 death of Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner, who was the main driver of expanding the company beyond toys and games and turning it into a TV and film powerhouse.

Goldner was replaced by Christopher Cocks, who had previously been head of Wizards of the Coast. Cocks doesn’t like the volatile profit margins of film and TV production that are not set like putting a wholesale price on a toy, for example, and could fluctuate.

Weirdly, Cocks DOES want to do in-house video game content, which is actually just as volatile in terms of profit margins as TV and movies.

That Deadline article does not even mention Spelljammer. Where are you getting "poor sales of Spelljammer" from?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which of the existing 5E books is regarded the best example of a useful setting book thus far?

Eberron from 2019. Nothing they've done since is anywhere close. That's actually my point.

 

[Burnside]

Which of the existing 5E books is regarded the best example of a useful setting book thus far?

I'm not sure there is any consensus, but imo the better ones are:

Explorer's Guide to Wildemount - excellent
Mythic Odysseys of Theros - setting-unique mechnics that are novel & work well, good general sourcebook for campaign inspired by ancient Greek mythology
Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide - somewhat underrated & maligned, perfectly decent big-picture overview of Sword Coast. But see the Wildemount book for what this could have been.
Eberron: Rising from the Last War - very solid

Out of the Abyss - kind of a mess as an adventure, but solid backdoor sourcebook for the Underdark
Tomb of Annihilation - great adventure & also solid sourcebook for Chult

 

[Burnside]

That Deadline article does not even mention Spelljammer. Where are you getting "poor sales of Spelljammer" from?

Planescape - 5 New D&D Books Coming in 2023 -- Including Planescape!

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Sigil has to be in Planescape, but I would say that the planes also need to be in it. If it just focused on Sigil, you'd potentially run into a similar situation as Spelljammer did with mostly just giving people information on the Rock of Bral.

As for what needs to change, Planescape's charm was that it leaned into the attitude and the weirdness and it leaned hard. Default 5e D&D is a lot weirder than default 2e D&D, so it's going to need to up the ante. Stuff like Modron drycleaning businesses, magical bowler hats, being able to walk into a bar and see Orcus crying in his pints because Demogorgon is still the Prince of Demons.

OK, assuming that Sigil has to be in Planescape (otherwise, it's just a Manual of the Planes), and it's a given that there's going to be changes, maybe even really major changes (like what was done to Ravenloft), then... what sort of changes--minor or major--could or should be done to Sigil?

 

[Incenjucar]

I'm not sure there is any consensus, but imo the better ones are:

Explorer's Guide to Wildemount - excellent
Mythic Odysseys of Theros - setting-unique mechnics that are novel & work well, good general sourcebook for campaign inspired by ancient Greek mythology
Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide - somewhat underrated & maligned, perfectly decent big-picture overview of Sword Coast. But see the Wildemount book for what this could have been.
Eberron: Rising from the Last Wat - very solid

Out of the Abyss - kind of a mess as an adventure, but solid backdoor sourcebook for the Underdark
Tomb of Annihilation - great adventure & also solid sourcebook for Chult

Huh. I see that the Eberron book had fewer writers and of course included Keith. I wonder if there's a passion gap going on. Hard to write well for a product you aren't in love with. Do we know if any of the Spelljammer writers are actually Spelljammer fans instead of just positive acknowledgers?

 

[Demetrios1453]

It's very hard for me to take seriously the idea that Sigil, which has been almost completely untouched by any official WotC sources for more than 20 years, has been "done to death." There is an entire generation of players that has largely never heard of it.

For casual consumers, D&D itself - meat and potatoes, Lost Mine of Phandelver D&D - is still a weird novelty. You really must be peering out from inside of a Gen X veteran player bubble to believe that Sigil is "played out."

If this product contains a lot of lore about Sigil, some folks will be unhappy because WotC will have to override and retcon previous lore.

If this product contains an amount of Sigil lore analogous to what the Rock of Bral got in Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, some folks will be unhappy that the amount of lore provided will be called flimsy and skeletal.

My concern is that Spelljammer: Adventures in Space seems to have flopped financially in a way that is very unusual for a 5E product.

I don't see a strong reason to think this Planescape product will do much better, given that:

1. Like Spelljammer, Planescape was never financially successful in any edition or in any medium (no, not even Planescape: Torment)

2. It's getting the "three slim hardcovers in a box" treatment, which asks the customer to literally pay more for less content

3. Like it or not (and I don't, particularly) the majority of players and DMs still seem to want an essentially Tolkien-esque setting and experience in their D&D. Deviate from it at your own risk (Ravenloft does fine, though).

They may have intended it to be "three slim books in a box", but, given how one of the biggest complaints about SJ is that the page count was far too small and resulted in important information being left out, I would hope they've taken that feedback and the product will be more "three medium-sized books in a box". And for all we know, they might have been planning for more hefty books all along anyway...

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I wonder if WotC worries more about to reanimate the brand and unlock in DMGuild.

I see my 3.5 books and I feel I have got a jewel in my hands, but when I see my 5ed books, I feel they aren't so good, these haven't got the same spark.

* Only the glitchlings as new PC specie? and what about the bariaurs or other planetouched lineages? for example abyssal genasies.

* How much big is Sigil comparing with cities from sandbox videogames (GTA or Cyberpunk 2077)? I mean today Sigil could be created in a videogame with all its houses, facades and streets.