How do you actually Planescape?

[Yora]

I always liked Planescape all the way since I first got in contact with D&D at the end of the 90s. So far, I have never run a Planescape campaign, or even played in one. But always wanted to.
Now I feel the time has come to actually do it.

But I feel the main reason I've never run it, or heard of anyone else running it, is that it doesn't really do much of a job of explaining what you're supposed to do with it. The first box set is so helpful to tell you that a Planescape campaign shouldn't be about killing monsters and looting dungeons, and of course most parties won't have any chance to fight an army of Baatezu or a demon lord and his horde of Tanar'ri. Instead should be about "themes". Then rambling on a bit about themes in lofty terms, without really saying anything about how you play with themes.
"You're on your own from here. You of course know what to do. Good luck. Bye."

Unlike the many times before that I toyed with the idea to run a Planescape campaign, this time I actually have a rough idea for a central thing a campaign could revolve around. That's a start, I guess. But Planescape promises to be much more than ordinary AD&D adventures, except set in the planes. How do you actually use Planescape material to have a campaign that is really Planescape? What specifically would PCs be dealing with and motivated to do? They won't be freeing the world from evil, they are not supposed to get rich. What then?

 

[DangerousPuhson]

In my admittedly short time with Planescape, things seemed to mostly run as a normal D&D campaign, except with the fantastical locations of planar settings. Rather than going from a little town into the mountains to find a dungeon, we were going from a big town (Sigil) into another plane to find a dungeon. Instead of boring ol' regular fantasy mountains, you get fantastical floating mountains of quartz with molten silver trickling down as waterfalls. And of course all your urban adventures take place in Sigil or the fantastical City of Brass or whatever. Other than that, most of the same play approaches apply.

 

[Malrex]

This whole idea has been poking the back of my mind. I know absolute zero about Planescape, Sigil and whatever else...I just recently bought the books, but haven't had time to read them yet. I never understood the planes or different dimensions. What do they do? What's the point? Is it just a location where certain beings hang out, and things may be weird? What is the point for a PC group to be there?

I find it heartening that others are wondering what would motivate the PC's...

I have a Part 2 to a published adventure that I want to write one day. Wisps of ideas abound, but what is the point of a different dimension? What's the fascination with it...what would be the PC's motivation? Sure...a PC that has built a castle and dominated the 'normal' plane of existence may want to explore out in the chaos realms or whatever...but why?

My theory is that the player is looking for new rules to overcome to find a challenge. They know all the rules already...they know when to run or fight...a different dimension/plane brings weirdness, something they haven't experienced before, so it makes it fun. I could totally be wrong with this theory...

Maybe magic doesn't work the same, maybe creatures aren't damaged the same....different rules = different challenges. You can still have the weird stuff like 'floating mountains of quartz with molten silver'--I think there is something there that players are looking for, but I also think different rules may attract players. Can everyone fly due to no gravity? People with black hair have powers over others? Do all spells do double damage or no damage or no effect?! How to overcome this new dilemma/challenge--thats where the fun is.

I've never had a planes/dimensions adventure. Probably because my DM and group of players enjoy the game up to about level 9 or so before starting over.

"What specifically would PCs be dealing with and motivated to do? They won't be freeing the world from evil, they are not supposed to get rich. What then?"

This is a great question and one I keep coming back too. This is not about characters.....I think this is more about your players. I envision characters trying to figure out a way 'home'---and the players are thrust into a weird situation where their mighty magic weapons or spells may not work as well and so it feels like a level '1-3' adventure again or something new. Where learning the new rules is a 'bonus'.
Maybe this is an old, tired hook....but that feeling of 'hey!! the rules have changed. Fireballs do double damage and have double the radius...you bit it hard the first time, is this such a good thing?Better re-think your tactics'---Rethinking tactics is what I think a new plane/dimension should do...but this is coming from a guy with zero experience, and who is adamant about writing an adventure about it...lol.

 

[Yora]

My perception is that these things are all about regular planar adventures in a regular material plane campaign. The kind of things you would do with the information from a dungeon master's guide or a manual of the planes.

The Planescape setting is different, though. It's not an expansion for other conventional fantasy world, but a setting in its own, where the worlds of the prime material plane fade into the background and are pretty much forgotten. You could use Planescape material in other campaigns, but the setting books themselves say that that's not really the point of making it a new campaign setting. The intention is to start in the planes at 1st level and stay there for the entire campaign.

I think there's three main elements that make Planescape different.

The first one are the Factions of the humans and demi-human races that are all centered around philosophies. I believe mostly real philosophies, but taken to a deliberately absurd extreme. The idea here is to create NPCs with colorful personalities that have quirky reasons to want the things they do. Weird villains and odd allies, who might be persuaded to change their current plans based on unusual reasons.

The second one is that players can walk up to and interact with powerful planar creatures outside the context of combat. In a more regular campaign, demons and the like always plan to cause massive destrction to everything around them, either by pulling the strings or going on an endless rampage themselves. If parties go to the Abyss, you expect everything they encounter to immediately fight them to the death.
While the planes are the same places, creatures in Planescape behave very differently. All demons and the like can be proper NPCs, and the more intelligent ones are meant to be that. You would not get into a room and see a nalfeshnee or cornugon standing there that immediately tries to eat you. These are powerful and high ranking officials and generals in the service of demon lords and archdevils. They talk with PCs like human generals or vizirs would in a conventional campaign. And then maybe try to eat you instead of calling the guards if you don't have a good explanation for your presence.
In the same way, even low level character might get an audience with a god or an archangel to petition them for assistance with issues that concern them. These are things that would seem inappropruate for regular low level adventurer in the early parts of the campaign, when they are supposed to fight rats and goblins. But the absurdity of such situations is very much at the heart of Planescape.

The third thing is that Planescape creates a context in which characters can visit extremely strange and unusual locations fairly early on without them having to be big megadugeons or otherwise great affairs. In a regular campaign, going into the dungeons below the giant palace of a ruler of Hell would seem appropriate for a huge high level adventurer. In a Planrscape campaign, the party could just be handed release papers for a prisoner with an offical seal and told to go to the palace, show the papers, and come back with the prisoner. Of course they would be surrounded by armies of devil that could wipe them all out in a single round, but since they are on official business, they won't be attacked unless they tey something funny. Even relatively low level parties can do that and it might only take a single session. They would not be fighting any hordes of devils, but instead navigating pitfalls to not accidentally get themselves pulled into any commitments to the devils they interact with on their visit.
Of course, just walking into a giant castle in hell and showing your papers to the gelugon's guarding the 50 meter tall adamantine gates would be a bit absurd. But as before, that's kind of the point. And you can have dozens such episodes over a single campaign, making it possible to see great numbers of spectacular and unique locations you don't normally see in regular fantasy campaigns that remain liited to one mortal kingdom.

But in the end, there still remains the question of why? Why would the players go to these places and do such things? Simply having a faction leader randomly ask the party to go to a fortress in hell to pick up a prisoner would feel forced and unbelievable. Within what greater context nakes it sense for the players to do these things and be invested in their outcome?

 

[Beoric]

The planes would have to be made relevant to each other in some way, so that the party's needs and desires on one plane can only be met by travelling to another plane, and then another and another. If each plane is self-contained then you need to go there first, without a reason, and find the adventure once you are already there. In other words, it needs to be a single cohesive setting, not a method of travelling between settings.

I haven't read it, so I don't know if this happens, but from the lack of direction you all seem to experience I suspect not. I mean, if you have detailed factions, but the factions themselves don't suggest a direction of play involving the planes, then they have done something wrong.

 

[Yora]

Now that you mention it, the factions don't really have any goals or motivations. They just have a philosophy, but there's no real goals associated with that.
The Signers belief that you can shape reality by imagining it. Great. What kind of reality do they want to imagine?
The Dustmen believe that Life in the material plane is alteady the first stage of the afterlife, that everyone has forgotten the True Life they originally had, and that they are stuck to be reborn in the Multiverse until they can reach True Death. Interesting. So what do they do to reach True Death?
The Sensates want to experience as many different things as possible to have enough information to figure out the meaning of reality. Could their goals and activities be narrowed down a bit from "anything"?

Same thing with the fiends and angels. What do they want? Fight the Blood War and corrupt mortals is an activity, not a goal. Fighting evil may be a goal, but an infinite and impossible one to ever reach in the planes.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I reckon the philosophies of the factions are meant to be broadly applied to many scenarios, and thus are kept purposefully vague.

For instance, if all we are told is that the Dustmen are trying to reach "True Death", then you can slot a Dustman plot for true death into many scenarios specifically because they didn't outline exactly how the Dustmen are meant to achieve it. If True Death were definitively achieved by, say, being slain by a worthy opponent (Klingon style), then all Dustmen-related adventures would be about seeking out a worthy opponent. But by keeping things vague, True Death Dustmen adventures could be about other ways of True Death, like by virtue of magical ascension, or by dying while saving a life, or by inscribing your mortal name into the Tome of Profanity, etc.

 

[Beoric]

Now that you mention it, the factions don't really have any goals or motivations. They just have a philosophy, but there's no real goals associated with that.
The Signers belief that you can shape reality by imagining it. Great. What kind of reality do they want to imagine?
The Dustmen believe that Life in the material plane is alteady the first stage of the afterlife, that everyone has forgotten the True Life they originally had, and that they are stuck to be reborn in the Multiverse until they can reach True Death. Interesting. So what do they do to reach True Death?
The Sensates want to experience as many different things as possible to have enough information to figure out the meaning of reality. Could their goals and activities be narrowed down a bit from "anything"?

Same thing with the fiends and angels. What do they want? Fight the Blood War and corrupt mortals is an activity, not a goal. Fighting evil may be a goal, but an infinite and impossible one to ever reach in the planes.

Yes, if content doesn't drive adventure then it is just background. Sometimes someone will develop it into something useful and share it (Keith Baker is famous for doing this with Eberron material), but until they do it is interesting but not useful.

 

[Yora]

I think that's an issue with a lot of material from that time. It's not quite as bad with Dark Sun, but it has the same problem.

It's the issue with material being written to be read, not to provide something that helps GMs running a game.

 

[Beoric]

It's the issue with material being written to be read, not to provide something that helps GMs running a game.

People keep saying this, but the writing is usually so bad I find it hard to read. I can't imaging reading it for fun. Whereas I find materials that have more utility are also more pleasurable to read.

 

[Yora]

I basically use only five of the resources, the Campaign Setting box, Planes of Chaos, Planes of Conflict, and Monstrous Compendium 1 and 2. I think those are pretty good in presenting a lot of content that makes me want to use it. The other stuff I find much less interesting or inspiring. I think it feels a bit like going through the motions, spilling a lot of ink while not actually saying much that seems either interesting or useful. Looking at Faces of Evil and Factol's Manifesto specifically because I always expect those to provide juicy material you can really work with, but after having read up on a group, I still feel like I don't really know anything I can work with.

Though I feel I have to ask: Are there any actual fans of Planescape in this thread? Replies are always welcome, but I feel nobody of use has any actual experience with it.

 

[TerribleSorcery]

I am a huge Planescape fan, and have been a player in the setting with two different groups over the years. One time I played a modron. I even called everybody "berk." So I think my credentials check out.

I had the same experiences that DP mentioned - things were more or less like the D&D we all know and love. Very city- and faction-oriented plus a lot of wild extraplanar scenery, but otherwise the same kinda thing.

This is actually kind of a long rant that requires some justification (and maybe I could turn into a 20-page blog post some day...), so I will offer only a short unsupported statement: Planescape suffers from the same failures that the '90s White Wolf games did - tons of background material that doesn't do anything to drive play (compare the faction descriptions with any of the 'clan/tradition/etc' sections in the nearest WW book - oooh kinda similar huh?). Sometimes this is what happens when folks bolt a bunch of brand-new shit onto a game they thought they understood. Are we supposed to be dungeon-crawling like usual? Are we having debates about the nature of the universe? How will the DM ever know? What the fuck do you prep??

We can all imagine a different way of describing Sigil that would include '100 people you can meet at a Sensate orgy' or 'magic weapons of the Godsmen' tables, etc. Unfortunately we didn't get that. You have to start from scratch, basically, trying to figure out what kind of adventures the PCs are going to go on. The mountain of words in the box set doesn't really get you started, because it offers very little about the ground-level action that PCs are concerned about when they start playing.

Despite this, I love Planescape (mostly from a safe distance, I suppose). It had some good ideas. It had lots of flavour. DiTerlizzi's artwork is great. And of course the setting is completely redeemed by the classic PC game Planescape: Torment. If you haven't tried it, go out and do so now. It's on GOG, there is no excuse: https://www.gog.com/game/planescape_torment_enhanced_edition

 

[TerribleSorcery]

A few more suggestions after I thought about this a bit:

I think with any setting involving HEAVY THEMES, you really need to secure player buy-in and constrain their choices a little bit. It would be better to have a party consisting of perhaps 2 or 3 factions at the most, so they have compatible motivations from the start. Instead of classic D&D adventures involving killin' mufuckas and gettin' money, they would have faction-oriented goals at the start. Go out and bring order to the universe in the name of the Godsmen! Go get laid in the name of the Sensates! Or whatever. This is also a problem with White Wolf, where the setting information is a fucking mile deep and almost no player I ever ran for gave a flying fuck about learning all that stuff. Who wants to read up on 10 factions just to create a character? Not me.

When I played in a Planescape campaign, having everyone free to create whatever character they wanted led to problems. Terrible, terrible problems like "I can't do this adventure because of my alignment." Normally this would be a slappable offense in my book, but in this case, we're playing Planescape right? So your character's beliefs are much more important than ever before, it's not mindless hack & slash (or so we're told)! The only other way to get around this is if the adventure involves some problem so pressing that a totally diverse group of PCs must band together despite their differences, and that road begins to strain credibility quickly. Especially since even an urgent fantasy-adventure crisis like "the impending destruction of the multiverse!!!" would be a GOOD thing according to some!

Telling your players "OK guys, we're playing [Bleakers/Harmonium/etc], they have this kind of world view..." isn't railroading or anything, because the faction goals are fairly general and leave plenty of room for players. It's not much more constraining than telling your players you're running a game with Good-aligned PCs only (a fairly commonplace thing).

The alternative to this would be starting everyone as Clueless Primes, so the characters know just as much as the players. This might be even more fun in its own way. In this case, maybe dealing with the Factions would be closer to standard "faction play" as its discussed in the OSR - alliances of expediency and mutual self-interest instead of full membership. Something to think about.

 

[Yora]

After completing my current N1/I1 campaign, I am planning to get a Planescape campaign going later in the year. The general idea I have is that the PCs start at first level as primes from a dying world with a dead sun, who followed a stream of other people fleeing through a gate leading into the Outlands. As they step out of the gate, they arrive at a newly founded town that is being build into some old ruins. (Players who are familiar with Planescape or want to do the homework can make bariaurs, githzerai, aasimars, or tieflings as well who ran into the town while wandering the Outlands.)
There's a Signer transmuter who was giving the first arrivals useful help in planning their new town and teaching them that it could be anything they could it imagine to be, but who has started getting on everyone's nerves because she comes up with new city concepts every week. A few Bleakers have started looking after unaccompanied children who have been picked up on the road leading to the gate by people who don't know what to do with them now, and they have gotten quite popular with locals who are wondering what the point was in saving their own lives when the whole world they knew has ended. Some Doomguards are on the lookout for new recruits as well, for the same reasons. And there's a group of Dustmen who have set up shop in some ruins near the gate because they are curious to study the death of a whole world, often creeping out the locals with very uncomfortable questions of what they experienced before they managed to escape.
Since a new town is being created from scratch by people completely new to the outer planes, it is not at all certain yet if the town will actually remain in the Outlands, or if it will take on a character that shifts it somewhere else like former gate towns. I think that's a pretty solid foundation to build a theme based campaign on. Players could attempt to influence the other people of the town to keep this from happening, or choose to help it along in a direction they approve of.

Another thing that I want to include (and which actually came before the town shifting to other planes) is that there's an arcanaloth who has discovered that the original massive 20-meter Sphere of Annihilation is sitting beneath the ice of the lowest layer of Carceri. The Anarchists in Carceri thinks that the power of such an artifact can only corrupt whoever possesses it and will inevitably be used for the oppression of the little people by some powerful elite. So they are absolutely on board with stopping anyone from finding its exact location and taking control of it, but also constantly suspecting each other of wanting to claim it themselves. There is also a rogue Asura of the Fated who thinks the sphere would be an incredibly powerful weapon to destroy evil and believes that it should be hers. So she's trying to gather an army of bariaurs in Ysgard for a crusade into Carceri.
A supermassive sphere of annihilation is of course also super attractive for the Doomguard, who believe they have the only legitimate claim to it. The Dustmen find the whole idea rather offensive, as annihilation seems like a cheat to reach True Death and make their whole philosophy superfluous, so it surely can't work that way and must instead doom a soul to a different perverse type of oblivion that makes obtaining True Death forever impossible.

I think all of these ideas could be bundled together under a theme of finding purpose when everything that used to matter is gone, and you have unlimited possibilities because all obligations and commitments ceased to have relevance. Doomguard and Dustmen all lean to somewhat fatalistic outlooks on such a situation, while Signers and Fated would see it more as an opportunity to realize ambitions, with the Bleakers hanging somewhere inbetween. (Anarchists don't really play into this, I just think they are fun and have a presence in that general corner of the Great Wheel.

What I am still clueless about is how to connect the sphere of annihilation to the new town in the Outlands. It should have some relevance to the future of the townspeople, but I don't see why an arcanaloth would care about them while searching for a sphere of annihilation.

 

[The1True]

I have run three or four Planescape campaigns over the years. I love this setting!
A couple of pieces of advice:

"Uncaged" and "In the Cage" as well as "The Planewalkers Handbook" really help fill in some of those blanks you're talking about.

It's dorky as hell, but as the DM you HAVE to use that stupid slang. Keep using it in all your dialog until the players give up and start doing it too. It forces you into that alien mindset and really encourages everybody to make ROLEplaying choices rather than rollplaying...

Make it clear that due to philosophical affinities good people often work side-by-side with evil in this environment. This is mind expanding.

I love that campaign concept you've come up with, but I would highly highly recommend running a couple of the published adventures the first time out so everyone can get the hang of things. I've run "The Final Boundary" at least three times (It's like B1 for Planescape) and "The Great Modron March" and "Dead Gods" really nail it. If you're not down with that, consider shuttling your PC's on to Sigil from their starting town early on. There's more material available on Sigil and more opportunity for interaction with all of the factions. Wait...are PC's even allowed to play petitioners? I feel like there's difficulties involved with doing that. Like they can't be raised or resurrected whasoever and they hate traveling beyond their home planes...

 

[Yora]

No, petitioners don't work as PCs, since they can't gain XP and won't leave their home planes unless on a specific mission send by their god.

I agree that the published material for Planescape mostly treats it as an urban setting that is all about Sigil. The outer planes sometimes feel a bit tagged on in any sources that are not specifically about them. I just really don't care about urban campaigns.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

Here's the major selling point of Planescape in a nutshell: the planes can technically be anything, in any wild configuration you want. DMs want their players to see wondrous things, go fantastical places, and meet powerful beings, and planar travel makes that easy. Normally, planar travel in a D&D game is a high-level affair and meant to be done with a deft hand; Planescape does away with that restriction, enabling players to travel through the planes early, and thus beginning their adventures by visiting exotic locales right from the get-go. A Planescape game is more about wowing with imaginative environments and painting fantastic word-pictures for the players rather than crafting a nuanced plotline or challenging dungeon (not to say the game doesn't have those too, but it's not the main selling point of the setting).

The factions/Sigil stuff is weird because it runs counter to the main selling point of Planescape; that is to say, it turns the fantastical endless possibilities of planar travel into mundane, prescriptive urban gameplay. I think that's what generates the most confusion around Planescape -everything is expected to be fantastical, and yet half the source material focuses on banal factions and the same big city.

 

[Evard's Small Tentacle]

Just the font alone makes my eyes bleed. There are some interesting concepts there like sigil always shifting and not having a set city layout, the dust men and other such factions. But the execution is in no way well done. I think Dead Gods has some good ideas that is stealable if memory serves.

it’s one of those settings where the weight of content needed collapses playability and makes a GM give up because it’s so dense and verbose.

Al Quadim has less of an issue with this that other of those ADD settings.

 

[Yora]

I discovered that if you don't go to burrow deeply into Sigil, and pick yourself half a dozen planes that your campaign will focus on, there's not actually that much content to work through. I'm working on an idea that includes Outlands, Ysgard, Pamdemonium, and Carceri, with side tours to the Beastlands and Gehenna. I read through the information available to these and picked out the places and people that I would like to use, and it really is not a terribly long list. I would even say that for this restricted area that I chose, it's actually a pretty lightweight setting.

The Planescape material is certainly big, but it really is not dense. It's written to be entertaining to read, and ao it's happily chattering on about not much of substance most of the time. The actual meat of the setting probably could fit into a single hardcover book.
That certainly is a massive fail as a game product. But I think that does not really damage the world that much. To run a Planescape game, you probably have to approach it with a perspective similar to trying to run a game in the world from a novel or a movie. You are given ideas and an overall style, but to play in it, you need to build your own "setting", with places, people, and stories.

That makes it a really shitty game product, but I still really see huge potential for a "homebrew planescape" campaign.

 

[The1True]

I think 'shitty' is a pretty strong word.
I agree that the Planescape material is 80% fluff, but unlike other rambling elfgame products, these stick diligently to a uniform 'voice' throughout. The effect of this is to essentially add acting notes along with their guidebook notes. Almost like a travel dictionary added to your travel guide.
Planescape has a distinct style. A style that is key to the setting. By constantly absorbing information in that style, your are immersing yourself further and further in the milieu, picking up its particular argot until you can't help but pass that along to the players. What results is a role-playing experience quite foreign and otherworldly.
I understand what DP is saying that it's prescriptive, which a DM used to producing their own material may find constricting and Players used to complete freedom may initially rail against being told how to act, but it's laying down the rules of a completely different universe to your usual fantasy setting. The products are teaching by example; follow their quaint railroads for an adventure or two til everybody gets the hang of it and then you're ready to go. Like the Lonely Planet guidebook; you ride the tour bus with the loud Americans and see all the marquee sites and get your feet underneath you before you wander off the beaten path into the insular lovely Brandenburg countryside. If you rip that stuff out and just publish the raw data of the various NPC's and settings, you're getting 1/10 the experience. You and your players are going to play it out the same as every other campaign, just with a few more weird faces down at the tavern.