I got my copy of the Planescape box set.
When it was announced that Planescape would be released as a box set rather than a single volume, a lot of people reacted with dismay. The reason for this was that its antecedent, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, was maybe the most disappointing release in all of 5E - not the worst, mind you, but most disappointing because of the incredible hype and then the let-down.
The problem with Spelljammer was primarily that there was very little "setting" in its setting. There was a Gazetteer for the Rock of Bral, but a huge portion of the Astral Adventurer's Guide was taken up by the deck plans of various ships.
To be sure, one expected that adventures aboard Spelljamming vessels would be a big part of a Spelljammer campaign, but we didn't get any mechanical ideas of how to, for example, run ship-to-ship combat, and we didn't get details on what the systems around existing settings were like. The emphasis of the book felt totally off. And on top of that, despite being broken up into three books, the total page count was significantly less than what we had gotten in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, the previous big return to a classic setting.
So, how does Planescape compare?
Well, I think we're definitely looking at a more useful product than the Spelljammer set. That's a low bar, though, so let's go through what the set actually gives you:
Sigil and the Outlands has a couple of feats and backgrounds as character options, but dedicates most of its page count to introducing the Factions, Sigil as a city, and the various Gate Towns. While the Gate Towns only get a two-page spread each, we do actually get a rundown of all sixteen of them, which is more than can be said for the old 2nd Edition set. Other realms in the Outlands do get touched on here, in a similar manner to the "other domains of dread" section in Van Richten's - a couple pages of single- or double-paragraph descriptions of various regions in the Outlands. There are a couple of spells that allow you to sense or close off portals, but that's it for those.
The Sigil Gazetteer is fairly thorough, going through each of the city's wards and introducing interesting NPCs and groups one could encounter there.
So, this book is not a great fit if you're just trying to mine it for character options - the feats could be good, but this is more lore-focused.
Morte's Planar Parade is the set's monster book, and has a whole bunch of outer-planar entities. What I appreciate is that it seems to focus a bit on B-side fiends - we get three varieties of Demodand (the jail-warden fiends from Carceri) and Baernaloths - a special type of yugoloth from Hades that might actually pre-date the yugoloths of Gehenna. We also get some expansion on Celestials (fitting as antagonistic celestials feel far more likely in a Planescape campaign) including three kinds of Archons (the celestials specific to Mount Celestia) and a few types of Guardinals (native to Elysium). Indeed, I can now really see why the Ardling from early One D&D playtesting was animal-themed. It does seem like there are a lot of animal-themed celestials. The monsters here run the gamut of CR, though I didn't see any super-high CR monsters that could be tier 4 campaign bosses. Still, if you want some beefy Modrons for a mid-to-high level party to face, this has you covered.
Turn of Fortune's Wheel is the included adventure, and while I haven't read the whole thing (that's true for all three books) it does seem to really go for a high-concept premise, which bears a resemblance to, but is not the same as, the beloved late-90s CRPG Planescape Torment. This is truly unlike any other adventure I've read for 5E.
So, overall, my general feeling is one of mostly relief. There's meat on these bones in a way that Spelljammer lacked, and I think this does actually give you the proper material to run a pretty dense and lore-heavy Planescape campaign.
That said, I hope that in the future, WotC will move back toward the "big thick tome" style of campaign setting book that we got with Van Richten's and Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica.
This set gives you a lot of equivalent content compared to 2nd Editions initial Planescape set - and if we're just comparing one with the other, I think there's no reason to be disappointed (at least in terms of bang for your buck).
But again, I think WotC's reluctance to expand upon these settings with supplementary products could be a big problem for Planescape in particular. From this product alone, you might think that "Planescape" as a setting is really just the Outlands and the city of Sigil. Now, the book explicitly tells you otherwise - that the setting is the entire D&D multiverse. But without getting old books (or pdfs) from the 1990s with a lot of rules text that is meaningless to a 5E player, there's nothing in the current edition that tells you what the various layers of Acheron or The Beastlands are. (Hell, I don't think that anything in 5E tells you that Acheron is a bunch of floating iron cubes or that Pandemonium is just a bunch of endless tunnels filled with howling wind where gravity just orients you to the nearest wall).
This is cool, cool stuff, and really important information for DMs who want to have a planes-hopping adventure or campaign.
I don't know if you would have been able to fit all of that in a book even if it had a page count comparable to Eberron or Van Richten's, but the choice to cram this setting into a box set that actually has fewer pages than earlier 5E setting books is... well, it's not the direction that I want the game to go in.
Still, if I don't let my pessimism get the better of me, and take this set on its own merits, I think you get a really great primer for the setting, with useful 5E-compatible elements (even if most of them are just monster stats).
I'll be honest: I wish that we got some of the Sigil Cant (the bizarre set of slang that the whole of 2nd Edition Planescape was written in - even the "just for the DM" rules and lore bits,) which is even seemingly absent in Morte's color commentary in the monster book.
Still, the set presents Planescape as the bizarre, weird, and deeply philosophical setting it's meant to be: there are no stats for the Lady of Pain and the book reminds DMs not to every try to give her them, and we've got the Unity of the Rings, the Center of the Multiverse, and the Rule of Threes, orienting us in the patterns and perspectives of planar folk.
But those of us who have read (or played back in the day) the 2E version will have to import knowledge about some other things, such as the planes themselves and ideas like Planars versus Primes versus Petitioners.
With the natural point of comparison being Spelljammer, I will say this, which I mean as an endorsement: the content of these books (or at least Sigil and the Outlands) prioritizes the right kind of content. I'd have happily had maybe like one or possibly two deck plans for ships in Spelljammer if we got those pages dedicated instead to the Wildspace systems around canon D&D worlds. Here, though, if the page count does limit how much of the setting they can actually fit in there, the choices as to what they include feels like it's much better this time around.
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