This year's Q4 release of Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse looks like it will be following a similar format to Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. Now, the latter is perhaps the biggest disappointment of any 5E releases - long-abandoned campaign setting that players in the current, less "fantasy-purist" era were very eager to see guide them through the potential of running spacefarng, science-fantasy adventures.
Instead, what we got was a pretty good monster book, a fairly decent adventure (at least I think it's decent - I haven't run it) and a primary sourcebook that gave very little actual content beyond six playable races (one of which needed errata to remove some unconsciously - if we give them the benefit of the doubt - racist imagery and backstory - though I'm not going to get into that discussion). A huge portion of the Astral Adventurer's Guide is given over to descriptions of ships and their layouts, but gives us very little guidance on running ship-to-ship combat (in fact, it recommends players focus on their own character abilities once the ships are in range of one another).
At 70 bucks in the U.S., the box set was twenty dollars more expensive than the standard 50 dollar books that are usually published, but gave us less bang or our buck, with a total page count (which, I believe, included the title pages, rights pages, and tables of contents in each) of 192 - making it, I believe, the second-shortest 5E book, even if it were one volume, after Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.
The box set format and the hype building up to this long-awaited setting implied that this would be a massive event, and could shepherd in a whole new trend in D&D campaigns, but ultimately it left a lot of people feeling like WotC had totally misunderstood what players wanted out of a Spelljammer book.
The format for this sourcebook was quite different from previous ones.
I've gone on record saying that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is my favorite book published for all of 5E (perhaps making an exception of the core rulebooks, which are so foundational that you sort of can't dismiss them).
Now, I know that there are some people who point to this book as another sign of the decline of D&D as a brand and yearn for the older version of the setting.
I have to divide these critiques, because while I disagree with both, I think some are founded on sympathetic principles and some are not.
So, let's dispense with the latter first: if you think D&D has "gone woke," and that means it's ruined, then I'm just going to stop listening to you. The broad culture war going on is boring and stupid. If you have a problem with the existence of brown or black people, or the existence of queer people, or attempts to address the heavy weight of historical bigotries, you need to fix your heart. Grow up and deal with it.
But, there are other people who felt that Ravenloft as a setting had changed too much. For example, the earlier version of the setting had all the domains of dread sitting on a continent called The Core, and the misty borders of their realms were truly physical borders, such that, if the mists disappeared, you could simply plot a course through Barovia, Darkon, and Falkovnia (I don't remember if they're arranged such that this would be a direct route, mind you). As someone who is not as keyed into the older version of the setting, I'll admit that I'm much more comfortable taking a wrecking ball to that notion - I think the nightmare logic of the domains being sort of free-floating in the Mists, with no "true" land beyond them fits the idea of Ravenloft as a setting much, much more effectively.
And, where some of the domains were rewritten, well, sure, I understand the desire not to retcon your campaigns from thirty years ago to fit the new lore. Victor Mordenheim and his creation Adam have been replaced as the key figures of Lamordia, and while I think the idea behind Viktra Mordenheim and Elise is very cool, I'll concede that you might feel attached to the earlier version.
That said, I got the pdf for the original 1990 Ravenloft: Realm of Terror sourcebook, and... It kind of sucks? Like, it's kind of really boring? And, like, setting aside some of the dated cultural references (folks, the term is Romani, and they're not an inherently mystical and sinister people, they're just a long-oppressed ethnic minority) there's just not a lot going on here. One of the domains, the description more or less just says "there are hostile drow in the hills here," which feels like... how the hell does this evoke any kind of horror genre?
Now, let's talk about Planescape.
While the Ravenloft sourcebook from 2nd Edition was kind of shockingly underwhelming, given how popular I know the setting to be, the Planescape books are anything but. Sure, there's a few outdated (though as far as I recall, not quite as offensive) references in it, but broadly speaking there's just an immense amount of imagination at work there.
Really, the only tragedy for me is that I'm already running a campaign primarily set in a giant city filled with warring factions built on rigidly incompatible philosophies (Ravnica,) which means that the core part of the Planescape setting, the city of Sigil (I know that it's probably pronounced with a hard g, but as someone raised in a family that demanded precision in language, it pains me not to pronounce it with a soft g like the actual goddamned word, and I think the only reason anyone ever pronounced it with a hard g was because they didn't know how to pronounce the word sigil) is the part that I'm least interested in actually using in my adventures.
The original box set for Planescape detailed Sigil along with the broader True Neutral outer plane known as The Outlands. But in those TSR days, the general idea with D&D products was to publish each campaign setting as a product line, rather than a single book.
So, if you liked Dragonlance as a setting, you could pick up a bunch of adventures and sourcebooks that would expand upon what you got in the original publication. For Planescape, this meant in-depth sourcebooks that gave DMs (and players, though these products were mainly DM-facing - something we might bear in mind) a fairly thorough run-down of all the planes. You want a few pages describing the third layer of Acheron, and perhaps some power's (read: god's) domain within it? You can find that on page 21 of The Planes of Law: Acheron booklet, and read up on the layer known as Thuldanin, and the realm of Hammergrim, home to the duergar god of greed, Laduguer.
Each of the outer planes in three different publications - Planes of Law, Planes of Chaos, and Planes of Conflict - gets its own 34-page booklet. If you were to try to stuff those into a single Planescape setting book, you'd need 544 pages for just the Outer Planes themselves (not counting The Outlands,) and you'd still need to cover the factions, the inner planes, Sigil, and any player options like races (or species/lineages,) subclasses, spells, magic items, or unique gameplay ideas like Dark Gifts.
The box sets for Spelljammer and, presumably, Planescape evoke this idea of getting a really fleshed out new setting, but Spelljammer showed that it actually did a poorer job of that than previous releases like Eberron: Rising from the Last War, Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, or Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (which, while it puts a lot of power into DMs' hands to create their own regions of the setting, also gives us a very solid rundown on many canonical domains of dread and even suggests unique structures for adventures in those given domains).
I did a breakdown of my ideal Planescape book, written as an attempt to cram as much into the book as possible. That's not what we're getting. Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse will have a higher page count than Spelljammer did - I believe the published adventure that comes with it and the primary sourcebook will both me 94, rather than 64 pages (with a 64-page monster supplement - which I'm honestly fine with because Boo's Astral Menagerie was the one part of Spelljammer that felt the most abundant.) Still, that gives us 252 pages - a definite improvement, but still a little behind the page count of other popular 5E sourcebooks, which tended to be around 300.
However, the whole point of this post is also to say: the single-publication model is limiting on these sorts of books.
WotC has had a policy in 5th Edition of never assuming you have anything other than the three core rulebooks when you read anything new. And I think that policy makes a ton of sense - it makes things more accessible and doesn't lock out people who aren't obsessive collectors like me.
But it also leaves a lot of ideas brought forth underdeveloped. In all of 5th Edition, we've had two Ravenloft books published - Curse of Strahd and Van Richten's Guide. We've had one Eberron book. Our only Dragonlance book is the adventure, Shadow of the Dragon Queen (which I really got to finish reading, because I was enjoying it - Lord Soth's first appearance is an absolute banger of an "oh shit" moment).
D&D has a small staff - it's probably bigger than when I first heard this statistic, but last I heard there were only 20 permanent staff members on the team. Honestly, I think Hasbro could afford to hire some more people (and maybe rather than having cultural consultants as contractors, maybe hire on more people so that the diverse perspectives can be present from the ground up rather than as an afterthought?) One potential upside of bulking up the staff would be that you could potentially get people who really know their Ravenloft or their Eberron to be able to focus on that and pump out a ton of stuff for the setting they care most about.
With D&D Beyond integration, I also think you could very easily lean into digital publication of smaller sourcebooks - something they've done a little of, such as with Domains of Delight, but if you provided a lot more content for digital prices, I think you could have a real winner.
As usual, if there is an enemy to be found in why a brand feels like it's not living up to its potential (and I'm not really a doomsayer on D&D, but I do think there are aspects of the game's direction, like this box set format, that I don't really agree with) it's capitalism.
One thing that WotC has also emphasized is trying to make products that would normally be DM-facing appeal to players as well. This has likely driven the inclusion of playable races and subclasses in adventure books, like the Lunar Sorcerer in Dragonlance. In particular, the further digitization of D&D has driven players to feel the need to buy sourcebooks that were only really there for DMs in the past - on pencil and paper, it's easy enough at character creation for you to copy down the lineage traits for your dhampir in my Ravenloft campaign, but if we're using D&D beyond, you've got to hope that I've got that on my account and am sharing the content with the premium subscription, and that I don't have too many active campaigns going, so you might feel safer slipping WotC the 30 bucks to just let you make your Dhampir College of Spirits Bard without relying on me.
By creating a single big product, rather than several smaller ones for a setting, I think WotC hopes (though I don't know how effective this technique is) that more people will pay for the total package. That's perhaps the cynical reading, but hey, capitalism, in its modern form, is basically economic cynicism.
Now, many have argued that we're free to simply read the old sourcebooks (well, not free - there's still a fee to download the pdfs) and it's certainly the case that I've done just that to illuminate myself on the Outer Planes. But while it's truly an absolute joy to scroll through the art of Tony DiTerlizzi while reading up on the Bladelings of Acheron, the thing I'd get excited about is a new and fresh take on the setting. I want to see what new ideas have emerged regarding Planescape, and how the setting could best be formed around 5th Edition's gameplay emphases. How does the Radiant Citadel interface with the planewalkers of Sigil? What do the Athar think of Exandria's Divine Gate?
The sort of open-source nature of D&D has allowed an expansion of some of these settings. Darrington Press released Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn, which complements Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, using a similar structure to detail the continent to the west, which served as the main setting for Critical Role's first campaign. I imagine it's likely that we'll get another book from them detailing the continent of Marquet (the third campaign's primary setting). Likewise, Keith Baker released Exploring Eberron, which added more content for the 5th Edition iteration of his setting following the release of Eberron: Rising from the Last War.
But this, then, creates some tension with the ongoing integration of D&D Beyond. As a tool that is not just popular but now owned by WotC (and with plans to include a built-in Virtual Tabletop tool for it,) the tool's lack of support for non-1st-party books pushes us players/customers into a tighter position - left to hope that WotC publishes the things that we want them to.
Given the whole OGL debacle, I think we players are best off with a kind of decentralized ownership of the game. But at the same time, there are aspects of the official releases that I find myself kind of emotionally attached to. I think Chris Perkins might sometimes err too much on the side of referring back to D&D lore of ages past, but it comes through that that's because he has such a deep love for the game and its history, and it's the Acquisitions Incorporated games he ran that first brought me to D&D.
Still, I guess what this all comes down to is that I want Planescape to be awesome, and I'm worried it won't be.
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