D&D 5E WotC: 5 D&D Settings In Development?

WotC's Ray Winninger spoke a little about some upcoming D&D settings -- two classic settings are coming in 2022 in formats we haven't seen before, and two brand new (not Magic: the Gathering) settings are also in development, as well as return to a setting they've already covered in 5E. He does note, however, that of the last three, there's a chance of one or more not making it to release, as they develop more than they use.

Two classic settings? What could they be?​

So that's:

• 2 classic settings in 2022 (in a brand new format)
• 2 brand new settings
• 1 returning setting

So the big questions -- what are the two classic settings, and what do they mean by a format we haven't seen before? Winninger has clarified on Twitter that "Each of these products is pursuing a different format you've never seen before. And neither is "digital only;" these are new print formats."

As I've mentioned on a couple of occasions, there are two more products that revive "classic" settings in production right now.

The manuscript for the first, overseen by [Chris Perkins], is nearly complete. Work on the second, led by [F. Wesley Schneider] with an assist from [Ari Levitch], is just ramping up in earnest. Both are targeting 2022 and formats you've never seen before.

In addition to these two titles, we have two brand new [D&D] settings in early development, as well as a return to a setting we've already covered. (No, these are not M:tG worlds.)

As I mentioned in the dev blog, we develop more material than we publish, so it's possible one or more of these last three won't reach production. But as of right now, they're all looking great.

Of course the phrase "two more products that revive 'classic' settings" could be interpreted in different ways. It might not be two individual setting books.

 

[Parmandur]

And a different experience with it.

When I played Planescape it wasn't "Urban Fantasy" it was just a different kind of Fantasy Town as the Adventure Hub for Planeshopping adventures. We didn't explore Sigil's various nooks and crannies. We came back to Sigil after our adventures in the City of Brass or trying to divert the Great Modron March or get people out of its way, at least....

It wasn't "Sigil, City of Doors" the setting. It was Planescape. Plane hopping from Sigil to go to wildly different adventure locales than were otherwise available.

Sigil was just the place we'd return to and get insulted by random passers by for being Berks or Prime Scum. We'd drop our missions off, get a new mission, and go to another plane of existence to have an adventure.

Meanwhile Spelljammer was practically the same. Yeah, we'd fight pirates as we traveled between stardocks and worlds. But for the most part we'd just fly in, land, do the thing we had to do, then leave. The Ship was just our Portal to the new worlds we were having our adventures in.

Only instead of nihilistic taunts about our smallness in the grand scheme of things, we had Orko and Cringer type characters playing up the humor.

I mean, sounds like your description of Planescape is already doable with the DMG material. But what priduct we will likely see is going to be "Sigil, City of Doors" the Setting, with the planar material from thenDMG expanded a bit to go alongside Sigil and planar portals.

 

[Shardstone]

Like I’ve posted before, they don’t. They care about the trademark and that will keep them separate as well as the indications from Perkins and Crawford. It’s bad business to merge them into on IP. They have two possibly lucrative IP and Hasbro will want them to be distinct and separate to be able to milk them.

Strongest argument so far!

 

[Fenris-77]

Sure, I get the IP argument, it's very possible. Are those two IPs strong enough to make the cut over new material? IDK, maybe, I guess. Maybe not. It would also make a lot of sense to have those two IPs be compatible.

 

[Steampunkette]

I mean, sounds like your description of Planescape is already doable with the DMG material. But what priduct we will likely see is going to be "Sigil, City of Doors" the Setting, with the planar material from thenDMG expanded a bit to go alongside Sigil and planar portals.

If -that- is the case, and they're not going to expand on planar locations and stuff (Since that material already exists across various items) how are they going to fill a book with just Sigil stuff? That would be like them putting as much focus on the singular, titular, city as they put into all of the domains of Ravenloft combined. There's just not enough Sigil for that, I don't think. At least not without deep diving through allllll the Planescape materials TSR put out.

There are 16 Planar Factions. Giving each one a two-page spread would still be only 32 pages. And it's not like Planescape had a massive quantity of unique class identities. There were definitely a few class kits as I recall... Could do a boatload of Races? But the majority of the boxed set is planar maps, a DM's guide to the Planes, the -Player's- guide to the Planes. And then the map of Sigil's Torus, of course. But sigil in the boxed set took up about 50 pages. So that'd be 82 between it and 2-page-spreads for all the planar factions

What do you do with the other half of the book?

I could see them doing it as an Adventure Path, perhaps. With all the setting-material tied to the adventure. But as a core sourcebook? No. I don't forsee an entire book devoted exclusively to Sigil.

 

[teitan]

Sure, I get the IP argument, it's very possible. Are those two IPs strong enough to make the cut over new material? IDK, maybe, I guess. Maybe not. It would also make a lot of sense to have those two IPs be compatible.

With Torment being a wel regarded game that has proven to have legs? Yeah for Planescape at least. It’s core has been preserved through the decades since the line ended during the 2e retraction. Spelljammer? Ehhhh it’s been preserved as Easter eggs to an extent but not a lot of references to its setting ideas until 5e. You’d get hints but the Spelljammer itself, Rock Bral? Those sorts of things, beyond core critters not so much and aside from a couple novels and a short lived comic book it’s not really been a thing in 25 years. Torment is so well regarded and influential that they repurposed the name for a Numenera video game. Thing is the Spelljammer IP could be very lucrative with the right person doing it. It’s a brilliant idea with some iffy implementations in the year or so it was actually coming out.

 

[teitan]

Planar factions open up huge mechanical opportunities and the bean counters love crunchy stuff because it sells. The original boxed set isn’t far off from the 320 page counts of today’s good setting books and they did a book on Sigil itself in 2e, a couple actually, that were not far off from the size of the SCAG soooo… yeah a book on Sigil and a section on the planes and planar travel, creating your own planes? Easy to pull off. It could be 200 pages of Sigil and 100 pages of Planar stuff and they’d still have a ton of stuff they wouldn’t cover. There were 3 books on Sigil alone.

 

[Parmandur]

If -that- is the case, and they're not going to expand on planar locations and stuff (Since that material already exists across various items) how are they going to fill a book with just Sigil stuff? That would be like them putting as much focus on the singular, titular, city as they put into all of the domains of Ravenloft combined. There's just not enough Sigil for that, I don't think. At least not without deep diving through allllll the Planescape materials TSR put out.

There are 16 Planar Factions. Giving each one a two-page spread would still be only 32 pages. And it's not like Planescape had a massive quantity of unique class identities. There were definitely a few class kits as I recall... Could do a boatload of Races? But the majority of the boxed set is planar maps, a DM's guide to the Planes, the -Player's- guide to the Planes. And then the map of Sigil's Torus, of course. But sigil in the boxed set took up about 50 pages. So that'd be 82 between it and 2-page-spreads for all the planar factions

What do you do with the other half of the book?

I could see them doing it as an Adventure Path, perhaps. With all the setting-material tied to the adventure. But as a core sourcebook? No. I don't forsee an entire book devoted exclusively to Sigil.

Not exclusively, but largely. I'd expect a beefy expansion of the Outer Planes, similar in size to the Khorvaire Hazeeter on Eberron, the a Sigil section similar to Sharn in the same book. I would expect much, much more than 2 pages per faction, and a huge amount of Adventure generation material. I do expect that an actual Planescape product would dive deep into the while 2E line, getting as much into one book as possible. A hefty bestiary seems likely. In the final analysis, there is nonroom to shoehorn an entirely different genre into the book.

 

[Fenris-77]

There's only no room if you're hell bent on beating the lore drum really loudly. Sigil is a city, no matter how cool (and it is really cool!) but I really don't think a setting book on Sigil alone is going to be a huge draw for new players. You add in the planes stuff and it gets better, but a lot of that content suffers from it being a far better platform for high tier gaming, which is the least played bit.

The fact of the matter is that the book could easily include rules for ships and navigation in there. That fact that some might prefer a Sigil deep dive instead isn't the same as it not being possible to include that content, which is obviously is. I also think it better indexes WotC's current focus on getting more gameable content into their books. Anyway, I've had just about as much as fun as I think I'm going to here. Opine away gents...

 

[Parmandur]

Planar factions open up huge mechanical opportunities and the bean counters love crunchy stuff because it sells. The original boxed set isn’t far off from the 320 page counts of today’s good setting books and they did a book on Sigil itself in 2e, a couple actually, that were not far off from the size of the SCAG soooo… yeah a book on Sigil and a section on the planes and planar travel, creating your own planes? Easy to pull off. It could be 200 pages of Sigil and 100 pages of Planar stuff and they’d still have a ton of stuff they wouldn’t cover. There were 3 books on Sigil alone.

Exactly, it's a matter of paring down and curating material to fit in 256-320 pages, not stretching it out.

 

[Quickleaf]

@Steampunkette There's a little known NPC from AD&D named Captain Soot with a magical ship called Ebony Queen who sails the Inner Planes. He's first mentioned in ALQ4 Secrets of the Lamp (Wolfgang Baur, 1993) - a quick quote from that book: He commands a ship made of ebony and set with an orrery of the inner planes that he uses to trade with the genie realms, the mamluks of Qudra, and the Pearl Cities. Later the same NPC appears in TSR2634 The Inner Planes (Monte Cook & William Connors, 1998) - a quick quote: An interesting example of potential assistance is a blood named Captain Soot (Pl/male human/F12/N), who pilots a magical ship, the Ebony Queen. Soot sails the Inner Planes like [sic] eighteen individual seas and knows each like a well-seasoned sailor on the Prime knows the waters of his world.

I'll add that the premise of the Astromundi Cluster (1993) was a crystal sphere composed of free-floating asteroids, where weak barriers allowed free passage between the Inner Planes and Material Plane. So in theory Captain Soot could pilot his ship from the Plane of Fire and into the Astromundi Cluster.

There's definitely ways to get your desired effect of "planar traveling ships", and there's at least one enshrined in AD&D across 2-3 campaign settings.

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Speaking personally – I've DMed a lot of Planescape (years and years) and played a little Spelljammer (a brief campaign) – my sense is both settings have plenty of material to stand on their own legs.

For instance, the treatment of Sigil didn't end in the ~45 pages on Sigil in the Planescape Campaign Setting boxed set, but continued in portions of Factol's Manifesto, the 130 page In the Cage: A Guide to Sigil, and in adventures like Harbinger House and even Faction War. New locations were introduced in 4th edition and even 5e's Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, under the "marut" entry mentions a new location in Sigil – The Hall of Concordance. And that's not even getting into the presentation of Sigil in the CRPG Planescape: Torment (which may be relevant to D&D as there was a 2017 Dragon+ article where they converted the PS:T monsters to 5e & Wizkids put out a miniature of the Nameless One). I know less about the Rock of Bral, but there's at least one eponymous book covering 96 pages on that space port. Basically, the lore (for both settings) cuts deep. It may not fit their current publication strategy and some of it may not be the greatest writing or need heavy revision, but to claim there's not enough material seems inaccurate.

From what I recall, the two settings occupied different different themes / motifs / feels.

At least for me, Spelljammer is Treasure Planet with more in common with pirate and maritime stories than anything else. The wacky/weird moments were offset by emotional moments of crew interaction, betrayal, heists, and diplomacy gone horribly wrong. The focus was on the heroic action and on the journey. That was my "player's eye view."

Whereas Planescape is a China Mieville novel (e.g. City and the City) mashed together with Casa Blanca, Babylon 5, and Dante's Inferno. The wacky/weird moments were offset by reflective moments & philosophical questions. The focus was on the "why" and what the answer said about character identity. At least that's where I took it as DM.

I could see selectively bridging these themes at the adventure scale – the example of Captain Soot suggests what one implementation of that could look like – but I wouldn't be in favor of merging these themes at the setting scale. For the same reason I wouldn't want to merge Ravenloft with Dragonlance. I'm buying in for a particular feel. Yeah, if we're playing Dragonlance, we can have the session where we get pulled into Lord Soth's domain and have to make him feel remorse to escape, but overall I want it to feel like Dragonlance, not Ravenloft. If I've bought into the Treasure Planet of Spelljammer, I don't really want to get lost in trying to redeem an erinyes – I want action in space. Conversely, if I've bought into the philosophical fantasy of Planescape, I'm less interested in the "getting loot, doing transport job" hook that might work for a Spelljammer crew, and more interested in how my faction figures in.