NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ondath" data-source="post: 8859954" data-attributes="member: 7031770">A couple of ideas come to mind:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Retcon the Faction War. Splatbook-induced metaplot advancement has proven to be unpopular anywhere it was done in the 90s, and noone I know likes the way factions became after the war. Instead, keeping the setting in a perpetual starting point like Eberron might be a better idea.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Lean into the fact that Sigil is a cosmopolitan city in the afterlife/realms of spiritual thought. Since Ravnica also exists for 5e, the niche of "culturally diverse megacity with competing factions" is suprisingly contested. In order to show what makes Sigil unique, the game really needs to focus on the philosophical ideas underpinning each faction and use the whackiness that comes from the outer planes to make them interesting. The Fraternity of Order isn't just the Azorius Senate without the colour palette, they literally discover new laws about the multiverse — and their discoveries push the multiverse into order. The inhabitants of the city shouldn't be just exotic material plane races, but extraplanar outsiders of all types - and the setting should really lean into the weirdness that comes with it instead of reskinning the merchant as an air elemental.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">While the city dealing with the dark of a lot of things and dealing with bigger matters than usually "clueless" adventures is fun, I really think Planescape needs to drop the holier-than-thou cynical attitude. It shouldn't be that the inhabitants of the Cage are philosophers with clubs that are better than your material plane party because they know the real chant. It should be that they are philosophers with clubs that happen to be interested in the Chant that most people take for granted. In other words, the perspective of the setting shouldn't be your average philosophy undergraduate student, but a philosophy graduate student. Less attitude, more pondering interesting questions.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">They should take a page off of the Radiant Citadel and make the Cage much more culturally diverse. The 19th-century London aesthetic with razorvines can only go so far. Since this is a cosmopolitan city (not only that, but a cosmopolitan city in the Outer Planes!), I want to see diverse and supernatural architecture! A district for air genasi where Arabian-style buildings are made of clouds! A Japanese-style shrine that sits on an impossibly high hill (as in, the height of the hill literally defies physics and all visual sense) where kami come to hang out! You can still add Planescape's doom-and-gloom to it (especially for neighbourhoods in the Hive), but that doesn't mean it has to be stylistically boring.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Do not, under any circumstances, reveal the chant about the big secrets of the Multiverse. None of that business about the Lady's identity or the extent of her powers, who exactly was Aoskar or if belief literally shapes the multiverse. These should be presented as big mysteries for any Planescape game that the DM has to answer by themselves (kinda like how Eberron leaves open the questions about the reason for what happened in Cyre and what The Lord of the Blades is really planning).</li> </ul>Ideally, what I'd want is something like Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition. Brings out all the fan-favourite features from older renditions, fixes what went wrong and gives a DM a host of options about specific metaplot questions.The cynic in me says that we'll just get a glorified Ravnica knockoff that replicates the best-remembered parts of the 2E books without understanding what made them so great.</blockquote>

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