Newbie to Sigil seeks DMing advice

[Badwe]

Greetings,

first, let me apologize if I failed to find any threads that alread answer the questions I'm about to ask. I googled enworld with as many relevant combinations of words I could think of and didn't find anything perfect. If all you do is provide me a link to a thread that answered my questions, I would be infinitely greatful.


Ok, to the matter at hand. My players have been crawling through dungeons for 6 levels now (H2 and H3 from 4th edition) and I want to give them a brief break as I segue into a mod that starts at 12. To that end, based on what I read from the 4th ed DMG2 I felt like sigil would be a great place to have the players spend a quick jaunt in so they could embark on a very intrigue and mystery oriented adventure. I'm posting in the general forums because I know sigil transcends editions in a big way.

I'm looking for a couple things to help supplement the small amount of text I have concerning sigil. Any adventures from any edition that I could plunder for ideas, or websites with info about sigil would be great. I'm also looking to really push the style and mood of sigil, so I'd like some advice on how to really make the city come alive and feel like a distinct place. Part of what I'll be doing is playing some music, but most of the music suggestions I've found are either dark sun or general fantasy. It seems to me like I need music that conveys a bustling city trapped roughly between medieval and colonial in terms of technology and attitude.

 

[Oryan77]

What you want is to invest in the 2e Planescape Setting campaign books (expensive) or pdfs (much cheaper).

First, visit the site Welcome to Planewalker | Planewalker and see what you can find there.

If you can get a copy, the old Planescape RPG video game called Planescape: Torment is a very good game. It has a lot of Sigil adventuring in it. You can also get the soundtrack for the game to play music. I love the music for it. I use it all the time for my game.

Here are some books that focus on Sigil:

In the Cage, A Guide to Sigil (probably the best book for you to get)

Planescape Campaign Setting box set (contains the book Sigil & Beyond but also includes a few other planar books, including a map of Sigil).

Uncaged, Faces of Sigil (a book about popular NPCs that live in Sigil).

Planewalker's Handbook (not a whole lot on Sigil, but it could help spice up your planar roleplaying. It does include the planar chant dictionary. I use that to help me roleplay NPCs in Sigil so my players feel more like they are in a completely different city.

If you want to use the Sigil Factions, then the Factol's Manifesto is a very good book.

I highly recommend the 2e adventure Eternal Boundary. It's 2e and a low level adventure, so it would need converting. But it's very good and it really does a good job introducing PCs to a few parts of Sigil. A higher level adventure that is pretty good is Harbinger House, it takes place in Sigil.

There's also the adventure Faction War, but it is best to run that with a group that is already familiar with the factions. It's also a big adventure and the end of it changes Sigil dramatically. But if you guys ended up liking the Sigil stuff and adventured there for a while, this adventure is definitely a good way to spice things up.

Other than this, I don't think there is any other sources that will give you much more Sigil fluff. 3e and 4e don't really provide all that much info on Sigil. These Planescape books will give you more than you need.

 

[Ryltar]

Also, I cannot recommend highly enough that you visit The Mimir. It is old, but still functional for the most part, and has some pretty nifty adventure hooks. Also, the 'Scholar' section has a nice overview of Sigil's factions. The page isn't as organized as Planewalker is, however.

 

[Badwe]

holy cow, that's a lot of material! I'll have to be careful or I'll be tempted to keep them in sigil for longer.

 

[TarionzCousin]

A good overview of Sigil and the Outer Planes can be found at wikipedia. It's a nice, not-too-long, introduction to the setting.

 

[pemerton]

I've never GMed Sigil, and I while I find the idea interesting in some ways, I'm not the biggest fan of the tone and approach of Planescape.

Given this, one idea I've had for using Sigil would be to play up the sense of sordidness and oppression, in order to give rise to reinforce the players' attachments to the mortal world that their PCs came from and have (hopefully) become invested in. Sigil would then be one technique for bringing the planes into the game, while keeping the emotional focus on the mortal world rather than the planes.

 

[Banshee16]

Sigil is a pretty good place to break expectations. Playing some NPCs counter to type will really convey the impression that they're not in kansas anymore.

Possibly they run afoul of a Celestial....one serving a Power other than their own..maybe one from an opposed sphere.....

Maybe they can be presented with a situation where they might be tempted to kill a fiend, who's seemingly going to capture an innocent. Of course, if they interfere, a Celestial backs the fiend up...turns out they're both Mercykillers, and the "innocent" is a convicted murderer or something.

That type of thing.

The city itself is on the inside of a gigantic torus....so when they look up, they see the roofs of other buildings hanging above them, and streets mapped out across the sky....almost like in the movie Inception from last summer.

The sources described by others here are good ones. Your easiest source of info would be at Planewalker.....download the 3E conversion of the setting. I'm pretty sure it's got into about Sigil in there.

Banshee

 

[Badwe]

I definitely want to use Sigil as a palette cleanser. They've been cavorting around dungeons for several levels and killing with impugnity. After reading about the 4e version of sigil (which seems to be post faction wars) it strikes me as a place rife with intrigue but still capable of a few street brawls for when my powergamers get bored with talking.

I did get a chance to check out mimir and planewalker. I was immediately struck by the jargon dictionary and I'm hoping my tiny brain will be able to remember enough sigil-isms to make the place believable... albeit if a bunch of thugs yell "the tickler's gonna shout, liable to put us all in the dead box", the wizard is probably going to die of laughter. We'll see how much effort I put into integrating the dialect. Maybe I'll put common terms on notecards and give one to the party after each interaction, allowing them to slowly construct their own sentences in order to blend in.

One thing I didn't take into account was ensuring the party will want to return to the material plane. I will likely have to make allusions to their hometown, and the fact that there were rewards waiting for them after H3 that they never collected.

I still need some suggestions for music. Right now all I really have is the sherlock holmes soundtrack (from the newest movie) and possibly the termina theme from chrono cross. Any music that implies a bustling medieval city would be good.

I have a rough outline for the story I want to try and unfold in sigil, with apologies to you hardcore planescapers if it sounds completely off. The PCs discover that the key to a major gate back to the material world has been stolen, and in asking around they get hired by the merchant guild that owned the key to find it. They have to act quick because the merchant hired several groups, assuming a band of primes would fail miserably, so if they're not the first to find the info they don't get paid. They're on the trail for a top tier courier, one who uses rituals to bind their own life to the object they're transporting. This particular courier turns up dead, with no signs of wounding, meaning he died from losing the object. Further investigation will ultimately uncover that he sold the key to a rival group for big bucks to give to his secret mistress and lovechild. If the PCs are sharp, they may find out that the original plan was to use a portion of the profits to resurrect the courier, but his mistress isn't telling that to anyone that finds her.

I also need some red herrings. Most of the factions are assumed to be gone in the 4e version, but based on what i'm reading it seems like the dustmen or the xaositechts would be good candidates for bait when the PCs initially assume the key was taken by force. I also need a group that would be likely to pay big money for a key to the material plane and what their motivation for getting it would be. I'll work out the details as I go but mostly I really want to create some atmosphere. Thanks again for all the responses!

 

[ThirdWizard]

I would say run original Sigil, none of that post Faction War stuff. You should then tie everybody to a Planescape specific group, or at least as much as you think your players (and you!) can keep up with. Making the courier a member of the Bleak Cabal, for example, could mean a trip to the Asylum, gives him a more grim outlook on his job, and makes his commitment to a mistress and bastard son more of a plot twist.

If you make the ones who hired them a Faction, then you can have all kinds of reasons why they might want it back. Maybe the key belongs to the Society of Sensation and the location is a beautiful landscape with magic regenerative properties. It could have belonged to the Fraternity of Order, who are collecting keys to various places in an effort to unravel the mysteries about creating their own portals. If it belonged to the Fated, they might just want it back because it was theirs!

Plus, working with a Faction will push the PCs into more intrigue. If they're working for the Harmonium, the Free League won't be too happy to talk to them. If the courier was a Free Leaguer, then they're going to have to navigate some serious intrigue. If the PCs were hired by the Free League, maybe a hard-nosed portion of the Harmonium "confiscated" it for the city's own "protection." And so on and so forth. Now the PCs have to deal with that.

As for how to get them out of Sigil once they're there, I have that problem too. Once you glimpse the greater world around you, how do you go back? Your best bet is to make it dangerous, unpredictable (to a degree), and generally unaccommodating. Yeah, they can get what they need there, and maybe they'll go back in the future, but living there? Those people are crazy!

 

[invokethehojo]

My suggestions for music

try some apocolyptica (the older stuff, when it was just chellos)

also, and this might seem weird, but download some cirque de soliel music. It doesn't all work, but you can get a good mix of vibrant songs that really have an exotic and jumbled feel to them, which should evoke the melting pot fell of sigil pretty well.

and you can never go wrong with throwing in the Ravenous soundtrack, great background music.