Hi Monte! I'm not familiar with your recent work, but I've been an avid PS fan since getting my grubby little hands on the boxed CS back in the 90s. So thank you for your contribution, and thanks for answering all these questions that I'm sure you've answered a million times already!
1. Which PS themes do you find the most compelling/fun/distinctive?
2. Being a conglomeration of scattered lore written by dozens of D&D authors over the course of twenty years, did you ever feel creatively constrained by that history?
3. Is there anything in particular about PS that you're proud of? That stand out in your mind as great things, even if created by someone else?
4. Is there anything in particular about PS that you'd do differently, if you had your druthers? (Or maybe you already have with Numenara, or some other game I haven't played!)
Thanks!
1. I liked the wild, almost limitless imagination involved, and the sense of wonder, which I think was needed for D&D at the time. I liked the sense of mystery, and that not all of them--in fact, many of them--were not solved for the DM, but left up to him or her and the game group.
2. Sure. But that's always going to be true of any shared-world environment, particularly for one with different sensibilities at play. For example, 1E operated on the paradigm that you didn't go to the planes until you were very high level. PS tried to make it a place where you could start your 1st level character. That changes a lot of things.
3. Tons and tons of things. I still like Dead Gods from start to finish. Sigil itself (created by Zeb) is a work of genius, from the torus shape to the factions to the Lady to the dabu and everything else. There are also little things that most people don't remember, like the Temple of the Captive God, or Xanxost, or a million other things. Good memories for sure.
4. Some of the complexities that came from the example in #2, like the changes to spell effects based on the plane you were on, or the loss of cleric spells and so on were neat in 1E, but in Planescape were kind of a pain. I wish we could have explored more of the demiplanes or alternate primes, too, where things could get really weird. Years later, under my Malhavoc Press label, I did a sort of Planescape reunion and brought together Colin McComb, Ray Vallese, Wolfgang Baur, Michele Carter, myself and even Zeb to create a book called Beyond Countless Doorways. It was a d20 book about other planes, but could easily be used in Planescape for demiplanes, alternate primes, Abyssal layers, and so on.