D&D's next book is about Planescape, and 'fans of the Planescape: Torment videogame will see all sorts of nods'

A burning corpse as an attraction in a bar — (Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

There's a long tradition of connections between Dungeons & Dragons and the videogames based on it. Pool of Radiance, the 1998 videogame that kicked off the Gold Box series, was also released as a pen-and-paper adventure called Ruins of Adventure in the same year. More recently, Baldur's Gate 3 incorporated parts of the adventure Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus—if you want to know more about why there are so many tiefling refugees fleeing Elturel, that book has your answer. (Wyll's dad shows up in it too.)

The next D&D supplement is Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse, and it includes at least a few things players of 1999's Planescape: Torment will recognize. For starters, one piece of official artwork shows the Smoldering Corpse Bar, which either still has Ignus the burning wizard on display or has found a replacement for him.

What's more, the supplement's adventure book, Turn of Fortune's Wheel, opens with a familiar scene. "You wake up in the mortuary," senior game designer F. Wesley Schneider said in a first look video. "I'm sorry to say that you've died. Morte, the snarky floating skull, greets you and you realize that there's a mystery. Your memories are fractured and every time that you come back from the dead, you come back a little different."

While it doesn't sound like Morte will remain your companion throughout the adventure like he did in Torment, the rest of the plot will explore similar themes. "Fans of the Planescape: Torment videogame will see all sorts of nods to that story in the circumstances of the way the adventure begins," senior game designer Justice Arman said in a deep dive, "but also through the core mechanic that is happening throughout."

Due to what they're calling a "multiversal glitch", your PCs find themselves able to return from the dead, like a certain amnesiac Nameless One. The next time a character dies in Turn of Fortune's Wheel, they have the opportunity to come back different, perhaps as another class. Death is essentially a respec, with each player having the opportunity to craft three incarnations of their character and switch between them.

A floating skull watches a figure on a slab stir — (Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

Morte also shows up as the host of the bestiary, which is called Morte's Planar Parade. If it's anything like the Spelljammer bestiary, Boo's Astral Menagerie, it'll be a minor cameo, but it's nice he gets to show his face (such as it is) in the actual adventure as well. The third book in the set, and the one I'm most excited for, is a background book called Sigil and the Outlands, focused on the city at the centre of the multiverse. Here's hoping it's more detailed than the background part of the Spelljammer set, which felt a bit bare.

Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse will be out on October 17. Planescape: Torment is available in its snazzy enhanced edition on Steam and GOG.

PRODUCTS

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.