Tony DiTerlizzi Describes Return to Dungeons & Dragons' Planescape

Tony DiTerlizzi has returned to Planescape, bringing his iconic art style to the popular Dungeons & Dragons setting as it returns to tabletops once again. This week, Wizards of the Coast released the Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse boxed set, which contains three books revitalizing the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. To help bridge the original iteration with Planescape with the present day, Wizards of the Coast tapped Tony DiTerlizzi, the artist who helped define Planescape's original aesthetic and style, to draw a new piece of art that was used as both the artwork for the DM Screen and the cover for all three books in the hobby store exclusive variant of the product. 

ComicBook.com sat down with DiTerlizzi via video to discuss his return to Planescape and what it was like to return to the beloved setting that he's associated with. "Overall exciting," DiTerlizzi said. "If I have hesitation, it's only because I really didn't want to let the fans down, I wanted to really create something special."

DiTerlizzi said that he and Wizards had talked about a Planescape revival several times over the years, with the artist even signed up to give a seminar on the philosophy of Planescape art and how he approached the art in order to "really pass the torch" onto a new generation and potentially help guide the look of it. However, it wasn't until early 2022 that Wizards formally told DiTerlizzi that they were moving forward with the Planescape book, which coincidentally was when the Spiderwick Chronicles and WondLa television shows were in production. 

"So, we talked about all these different ways that we could do it and they really wanted me as involved as I wanted to be," DiTerlizzi said. "It became clear that I wasn't going to be able to do interiors and stuff for the book, I just didn't have the time. So, what I had talked about was a Dungeon Master Screen that was like a Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band of Planescape. There's characters that you might recognize if you were a fan of the books from the '90s and then they've all been freshened up to reflect the new aesthetic of Fifth Edition. And then maybe we could take those characters and then use them on the individual covers which I'm not sure they've done something like that before."

"Obviously, the modrons were a no-brainer because I had been responsible for the redesign in the '90s that is still being basically used today," DTerlizzi said when talking about choosing what characters to include in the book. "The Lady of Pain was a no-brainer and then there's the githyanki and the githzerai, I know they were a big part of Planescape. I think they're a little more integrated into Fifth Edition now more than they were back in the day but I really wanted to draw a githyanki and we went from there." 

As for the overall aesthetic, DiTerlizzi noted that he wanted it to feel a little bit like a '90s revival. "I had a certain aesthetic that I couldn't seem to convey to them over Zoom so I just said that I really wanted to design the whole package," DiTerlizzi said "I want to design the fonts and it needs to be a little edgy, it needs to feel a little metal. It needs to feel a little grungy, it needs to feel like this was Pearl Jam then, this is Pearl Jam now, the band, this was Nirvana then, this is the Foo Fighters ... It needed to feel like a little bit of that '90s that was baked into that old Planescape needed to come forward in time but I felt like it still needed to hearken to that, the original, but feel refreshed." 

When asked if he's surprised that he's still so closely associated with Planescape and Dungeons & Dragons more generally, DiTerlizzi admitted that he was. "When we were making Planescape, Brom was working at TSR. Fred Fields, Tony Sudlow, Alan Pollack, Jeff Easley, Clyde Caldwell and Larry Elmore and Keith Parkinson – they were not on staff anymore but they were all around. You'd see them at conventions and at the offices so I did not feel like I was anything special. I just felt like I was a freelancer who got lucky and got to work on this really cool world and do his thing. And so, when I think back on it now, I'm touched. I'm always blown away when I'm at a book signing for a kid's book and someone comes up and they put down their Monster Manual or their Planescape stuff for me to sign, I am always touched by that. It means so much to me that they have been a fan of my work for 30 years."

Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse is available now at game stores and online. Tony DiTerlizzi's cover art is exclusive to the game store boxed set.