So, the attitude toward Wizards of the Coast online has been on the hostile side. The OGL debacle did little to endear the company to D&D's fans, and the AI art fiasco, while more a case of negligence than malice on the part of the company itself, and finally the disappointment of Spelljammer - a more expensive box set that seemed to give us far less than earlier campaign setting books had, and especially lacking in much of the "setting" part of the campaign setting, have led a lot of people to look at the upcoming Planescape box set with skepticism.
Honestly, I count myself among the skeptics, even though I've already pre-ordered the thing.
Luckily, some of the early previews from people who have gotten advanced copies suggest that, while yes, there are no new races or subclasses, there's still a hefty amount of world lore in the book. That lore, however, is confined to Sigil and the Outlands, missing out on the grand expanse of planes - Inner and Outer - that Planescape promises to take players through.
Here's the thing, though:
The original TSR Planescape box set from 2nd Edition was also confined to Sigil and the Outlands.
What we remember (or, as a latecomer to D&D, what I've read recently) is the large number of supplements that came after that initial box set. There were other sets that included Planes of Law, Planes of Chaos, Planes of Conflict, the Inner Planes, and more supplements that went into greater detail about the factions of Sigil and the city itself.
And here, I think, we run into a structural problem that no single Planescape release could solve: WotC's strategy in 5E has been to touch on many things lightly and reduce the number of products put out in the name of quality over quantity.
I think reasonable people could differ on how that's worked out - the risk you run with a quality-over-quantity approach is that if something isn't good, like the Spelljammer set, you have a lot of disappointed people. And if you make a ton of products, some of them will be fantastic, even if you can't control consistency as much.
I think, moving into the new core rulebooks and the quasi-new-edition that next year promises, WotC might consider expanding the team that makes D&D and putting out more products (isn't the goal of most companies to grow their brands?) Especially with D&D Beyond serving as a big digital platform, I'm shocked that we haven't been getting more digital-only releases like Domains of Delight to supplement and expand on things that the game has introduced.
Ravenloft, a fabled and beloved setting, has gotten two books - the Curse of Strahd adventure and later the full setting sourcebook Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. But I could imagine an alternate timeline in which every four months or so WotC publishes a new Domain of Dread with new magic items, spells, and player options as a digital-only release. Even if 5E has had a lot of content for the Forgotten Realms, the setting remains only partially explored in this edition, with barely anything leaving the Sword Coast.
Sigil is cool, and the Outlands is an interesting location (at least the Gate Towns are) but I think that for something to really be Planescape, you need to have inter-planar travel, and to do that, we need to know what those planes are like.
Now, the lore in the 2nd Edition books is amazing, and I highly recommend that anyone who's interested in the setting read through the Planes of Law, Planes of Chaos, and Planes of Conflict supplements, as I have. But getting an update to those locations that works both thematically and mechanically with what D&D is in the 2020s is precisely what we want out of a Planescape sourcebook.
To be sure, as a DM, I like to invent lore, important NPCs, and locations. My Ravnica campaign has featured a ton of utterly non-canonical additions to the lore of the world (like the fact that a player character's previous incarnation was seduced by an archdevil and was the original cause of the Orzhov Syndicate's corruption from spiritual caretakers to greedy crime organization) but even if I'm going to invent new characters and conflicts and locations in those various planes when I run a campaign, getting a sense of how they truly work is something that I'd like.
As an example: in all of 5E, we get only a tiny description of the Plane of Carceri in the Dungeon Master's Guide. It's described as the ultimate prison, with deadly, hostile, and treacherous environments stacked upon one another. That's about it.
You know what we don't learn? That the plane is a series of sphere floating in space, and endless string of pearls that get farther apart the deeper into its layers you go. We have a spell called Armor of Agathys, but nowhere in 5E does it name Agathys as the deepest layer of Carceri! (One could assume that Agathys was a person.)
Now, of course those older sourcebooks exist already, and they are available. But while I loved reading through them, time and time again I had to let my eyes wander over references to the 2nd Edition rules that mean next to nothing to me (like, what the hell does it even mean for someone to have an AC of -1? I know there's a real answer to that, but my point is that I'd much rather see a 5E stat block that is something I'm trained to actually make sense of).
I think there are passionate and well-meaning people who work on the game, and even when they make decisions I don't agree with, I have a lot of respect for what they do. But given the massive popularity of the game - a game that I'd guess accounts for more than half of all the actual TTRPGs being played in the world - I'm really surprised that they aren't trying to put out more products, which the player base is actively asking for.
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