Planescape 5e Planescape- What would you like to see in the upcoming setting?

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

Plus, those 96 pages includes artwork, which will reduce the amount of space for text.

To expand on this, I revisited the 3e Manual of the Planes a while back and was frankly shocked at how little artwork was used in the chapters detailing the planes themselves - I certainly don't want a picture book, but an art budget comparable to a standard 5e release is inevitably going to eat into the 5e Planescape gazetteer's page count far more than the 3e MotP did.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Don't forget that there will be at least some species and archetypes, and possibly backgrounds and feats as well. And they'd want to talk at least a little about gods. Plus, those 96 pages includes artwork, which will reduce the amount of space for text.

That's why I said that for all we know the game rules parts might get moved to the adventure book, as the setting book is specifically a "gazetteer", which makes it sound like it's going to focus on describing places, not character options.

But, at this point, it's all speculation until they reveal more.

 

[James Gasik]

~10 pages, two of which are 3/4 page artwork, including discussion of spell keys, power keys and magic items. Primarily covered by a chart/table. I think 2E Ravenloft may have had a bigger section.

Ten pages is still a lot to devote to a subject, IMO. Ravenloft had 8, technically, but I also count the section on how class abilities are warped; how dare your Ranger have an animal companion! There has to be a chance it turns on you!

Now Spelljammer, on the other hand had ten, but it was mostly how "fire is bad in the Phlogiston".

 

[Malmuria]

Honestly, I think trying to make a gazetteer of the outer planes is a fools erand. Even the "Planes of" boxed sets, while evocative in places, don't succeed on this account. The planes are infinite, and each contains several infinite (or at least gigantically large) layers. And yet, those layers are often very one note: here's an infinite swamp, here's an infinite cave, here's an infinite forest, here's...several more infinite forests! Moreover, the alignment system also makes them somewhat homogenous from a gameplay perspective. How does one create conflict and tension on a lawful good plane? How does one make a chaotic evil plane anything other than unremittingly hostile? Why are our low level PCs the one to deal with any heroic-scale problem.

I'm not saying there aren't good answers to the above questions, and the boxed sets and adventures here and there provided interactive environments with actionable hooks. Personally, I think the most effective adventures are ones where the stakes were all sigil based but might have involved some plane hopping. That way what the characters care about is fairly local, when you introduce a plane, you aren't trying to map out the entire plane, but rather one specific environment. It's far easier, imo, to take the theme of environmental Air and create a Djinn's lair than try to write a gazetteer-style guide to...Air...

my 2

ps. demi-plane's are also really useful for quick plane hopping

 

[Incenjucar]

Not sure how many of those questions are rhetorical. Planescape did a lot to humanize various monster types to show how things can be more complicated than alignment, like the tragic romance blood war story, or the weirdness with the Friendly Fiend.

 

[James Gasik]

Instead of focusing on Planes that exist, and that you can look up info about on the internet in like five seconds, a DM toolkit of planar traits and ideas for creating new Planes to explore would be better. Make the game like Frederik Pohl's Gateway, where players are constantly rolling the dice to find something new and exciting.

Examples:

"A wasteland of red sands under a magenta sky, with cyclopean ruins of a long-dead civilization."

"A world of endless stairwells and landings, like an M.C. Escher drawing."

"A plane where time runs backwards, and the characters must escape quickly or be transformed into helpless children, or even be erased from existence, with no one remembering they lived at all."

"A world of immense giants, where the characters are the size of toys."

"A realm of colorless fire, lit by a sun that radiates cold not heat, and the strange inhabitants that live there."

"A two dimensional world inhabited by two dimensional beings."

 

[Faolyn]

That's why I said that for all we know the game rules parts might get moved to the adventure book, as the setting book is specifically a "gazetteer", which makes it sound like it's going to focus on describing places, not character options.

It'd be pretty dumb to put character options in the adventure book; it guarantees that players would poke their nose in. I can see putting rules on portals or how spells are changed in there. OTOH, Ravenloft also had fairly extensive changes to how spells worked, and in CoS, those changes were reduced to "you can't leave the setting with magic, each domain acts as a plane, and other spells should be reskinned to be horrific-seeming."

While Planescape could have rules saying that, on such-and-such a plane, spells that do X act as if they're upcast by one level, or targets make their saves with advantage or disadvantage, I'm not sure that the writer's will do that. But, as you say, it's speculation for now.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

96-page adventure?

Glances at Lights of Xaryxis. Nope, no thanks, I'm out.

By the way, just for comparison, the original boxed set was ~228 pages, with NO adventure.

Light was 64 pages.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

I am guessing a lot of planer detail will come with the Adventure as it will no doubt involve plane hopping. The Gazetter will focus on Sigil, the Outlands and the Gatetowns.

 

[Stormonu]

Light was 64 pages.

Exactly. Longer than lights? Not interested.