Capturing Planescape

[Bodah]

For a number of years I've had a fascination with the Planescape setting (read the books, played Torment, etc) but for one reason or another I never got around to running it, that is until about a month ago I finally decided I would go for it and run my first Planescape campaign. I did my usual planning, read my favorite books of the line for inspiration, and even played through Torment again as well.

Sounds good, right? Well, here is my problem: I am not sure how to capture that atmosphere of Planescape that makes me love it so much, and then somehow channel it into my own campaign. I've ran games long enough that I am confident in my ability to run a fairly good game, but for Planescape I feel that it is essential to get the right feel for the setting into my campaign as well, and I'm not sure how to manage that. To me it just feels as though I am missing something. I want the players in the campaign to feel the same way that I do when I read about the material, which seems to be a more elusive goal in Planescape than it is in some of the more traditional fantasy settings.

So, if there are any people out there that have played in a great Planescape game, or ran one that captured the right feel and atmosphere, please give me any advice or tips you might have about how I can get mine feeling Planescape-ish.

Thanks.

p.s. I realize that I've left out details of my campaign ideas and the like. I really dont feel that I need help with those details, and I am infinitely more concerned with just getting that last little bit of atmosphere in line to make everything else fall into place.

 

[GreatLemur]

I've only played in one short-lived Planescape game (which actually used the Mutants & Masterminds system instead of D&D), but the first important atmosphere factor that comes to my mind is the whole cantina scene thing: Planar society is full of whole huge loads of weird and extremely varied beings, and that's something worth playing up a lot. And that's something that goes beyond species, too. Even if the guy selling the PCs weapons in Sigil is just an elf, he might be an elf from somewhere extremely strange, with a bizarre culture, religious beliefs, and mode of dress.

For that matter, this whole angle extends beyond the characters themselves, too. The architecture, food, art, currency, ideologies, equipment, and magic that the PCs encounter should also be extremely varied and unusual.

I think Planescape could actually be called kinda sci-fi. It's like a very, very "kitchen sink"-style fantasy game, but reordered in a way that's a little more like a space opera setting, and played with a kind of cynicism and world-weariness that's more typical of cyberpunk. (Although a certain degree of humor might not be inappropriate, too, given the obvious opportunities for sheer absurdity.)

 

[RichGreen]

Hi,

I ran two short Planescape campaigns, and the most successful was one in which the PCs were low-level Forgotten Realms characters who arrived in Sigil via a portal and just got caught up in the strangeness of the city, the factions and the portals. The Well of Worlds supplement is full of really good short scenarios that capture the Planescape feel. They are also very light on stats so you should be able to use them without too much trouble with 3.x.

The game where the PCs started as members of the factions etc didn't work as well. There was just too much background information etc for the players to absorb to really get into their characters.

In the last few years, I've used several planar locations in my regular (Greyhawk or FR) campaigns and always go back to my Planescape materials for inspiration and for cool locations to use.

Cheers


Richard

 

[megamania]

I more I hear from others the more I want to play. I know you wanted folks to reply that have played which I have not but I believe they hit it on the mark- variety.

Anything goes and it is up to you on what that means. Determine a limit to who could be there then cross the line by a step.

Go through ANY of your RPG books and look for ideas. When this fails then take knowns and change them.

DRow- dressed in large flowing satin brightly colored clothes where psionics is the thing. They hate violence.

Hill Giants- tinkers and masterminds. They follow Mechanus and believe in order and ruitine.

Darksun Ruitea (sp) halflings- Long introductions that are more of a ritual- Bow and say- "Good day and better days in the future. I am Simon Betroven Huim Beto the planar hopper magic retriever of the third rock from the sun whom is for hire to find and or replace lost goods here, now, the past and the future."

he says this to each player.

Play with it and be imaginative.

 

[shilsen]

Read Shemeska's story hour(s) on the Story Hour forum. Brilliant handling of the flavor of Planescape, IMNSHO.

 

[Danyael]

I've been running a campaign for about 10 years, which has practically all of Planescape's "feeling" around "plane journeys"... So heed my advise: You must be versed in all the factions of Sigil; their philosophies. I think that it's the single most important thing you should have in mind. Remember that the planes shift according to how strong a philosophy has become, so you should have a lot of people trying to "snuff it out". In a place where seeing demons having a drink at the local tavern a lot of killing is in order (so just make your PC's spectators for a while; a lot of people is crazy in the planes, having seen things they shouldn't have)... Oh, I recall a day that my players laughed about half an hour, when they were looking for a KEY (remember that in Sigil special keys open portals to specific planes in specific spots) so they entered a forge (where the blacksmith supposedly kept it; a bronze flower) and just before someone could talk, a lunatic screaming through the streets barged in, cryed "I'VE FOUND THE TRUTH!!", and just as fast made a world record breaking dash out of the place, screaming still. A PC got spooked and looked at the smith and asked: "What tha hell is his problem!?" The smithy replied: "Don't you see? He found the truth. Now, what do you want!?". Read the flavor text all around the books, and the glossary of Slang used in Sigil too. Read the descriptions of the "portal cities", and the domains. You'll need all that. (Again rememeber about the factions; and the "philosopher with clubs" stuff).

 

[ThirdWizard]

On Sigil:

Go for weird, exotic, and unexpected. Dress up the descriptions so that what might be normal is strange and foreign to the PCs. Think about how Planescape: Torment would have those odd magical items that worked like potions of healing or a magic lense and change the outward appearance so that they seemed new and interesting.

NPCs are more important. Politics should play a prominent role; everyone has an agenda or works for someone with an agenda. Sometimes these are out in the open and sometimes they're hidden, but they're rarely simple. The PCs are going to need some kind of political goals to fit in well, but that doesn't necessarily mean "politics." They might want to deal in magical weapons, which means they might form an alliance with the Doomguard, which means they might have to perform some services in exchange for access to the armory. And when the Doomguard's enemies come calling, the PCs might find they need to help to secure their supplies.

Places are strange. When the PCs visit a temple to Pelor, it might be a old, converted and concecrated, Set temple because they can't afford to build their own and land is scarce. Or it might be a shining example of Pelor, but the rest of the neighborhood burned down a week ago. Architecture varies, often from building to building depending on where you are in Sigil.

On the Planes:

I go for a Star Wars planet-like Planar feel. When the PC go somewhere on the Planes, then they'll probably see lots and lots of the same kind of terrain with lots of odd creatures making their way. So, go to the first layer of Ysgard during the winter, and they'll see lots and lots of snow, a frozen land with giant mountains as far as they eye can see. Go to Baator's first layer and they'll see broken wastes with exploding fireballs everywhere (I believe, been a while since I used Baator itself).

Inhabitants and places are strange. I've used a warlord on Ysgard who was trained in war on Mount Celestia, a pair of axiomatic mindflayers who ruled over a town of researchers, a group of raksasha on the plane of air who were collecting chunks of earth to mine rare minerals, etc. Think big. You aren't tied down to a material plane, which means that things can be used without having to fit into an established world, so you can go wild.

General:

At the same time it needs to be believable. That's mostly presentation and Player expectations. Don't be silly, even if you think an idea is somewhat silly, approached the right way it won't come off that way (unless its way over the top). Even that fire gnome Fated factor who smokes a giant cigar won't come off as silly if you play him right. I know.

And, let the players know that anything goes so they aren't caught offguard. Make sure they understand Planescape and what it entails. Give them lots of options in character creation, open up LA races and such so that they understand that these things will be normal. When they know they can play a fey'ri in "normal" society, then things start to come into focus, I think, even if they choose not to.

EDIT: You can check out my Story Hour, as well. I haven't updated in forever, though, thanks to being very very busy lately. Perhaps next month I'll have some time...

 

[Oryan77]

Everytime a planar thread pops up, I always hear someone say they think of the planes as being more mystical or dreamy (or whatever term to describe their version of the planes as being more "special") then written, but I can never get a real explanation on this. I'm curious to know how people make them more mystical than they are now in a way that actually makes their planar game different than normal. I ask this question every time, and I still have never gotten an answer from the people that tell me their planar campaign is more "mystical" than mine. So I assume they are just full of themselves & if you run a PS game using the material from published books, your game is going to be as "mystical" or "dreamy" as anyone else's planar game.

Like others said though, "think big".

Don't hold back on any ideas. The stranger your ideas, the more it will make the players say, "Huh?" And that's basically what you want to go for in PS. Get your players saying, "That's weird".

Other than the obvious tips of adventuring in weird locations & playing up on factions & upper/lower planar conflicts, it really helps if you are good at roleplaying NPC's. My strongest point is probably creating interesting and different NPC's and then roleplaying them well. Every NPC should have a lot of personality. Be flamboyant & loud a lot. Most NPC's on the planes will be full of themselves & self-centered. And being a place where your beliefs are an important thing....people aren't usually shy about telling you what they think. A lot of NPC's are so powerful that they won't care how they treat PC's either. Show the players early on that they are small fish in a very big pond. But, as they become more powerful, let them start pushing back at NPC's more so the PC's can show they are big shots too.

Even if an NPC is a weird creature that doesn't have much of a personality (like a Thri-Kreen), describe his actions well. Describe his constant attempt at communicating (by clattering his mandibles for example) or his "take charge" attitude in combat (pushing the PC's behind him so he can protect them). You can give the NPC an odd habit that might annoy or amuse the PC's.

Another thing that really helps is to have different NPC's taunt the PC's by name-calling depending on what the racial status is between the NPC's & PC's. For example, any fiend is going to remind the PC's they are pathetic mortals by constantly calling them Mortals. Sahguagin or Aquatic Elves in the Elemental Plane of Water will always call the PC's Landwalkers or Air Breathers. Any Planar humanoid NPC will call any PC from the Material Plane a "Prime". Petitioners might refer to the PC's as Planewalkers. Faction members will refer to a newely arrived Prime as a Clueless...or if the PC is in a faction, the NPC will refer to them by their factions nickname (for example, "the Taker" or "the Bleaker"). The Sigilian Chant from the Planewalkers Handbook can arm you with plenty of taunts also.

Then, every once in awhile, do the exact opposite of everything I just said That will give even more PS feel to the campaign. You basically want to keep the PC's imagination spinning.

 

[Ripzerai]

Everytime a planar thread pops up, I always hear someone say they think of the planes as being more mystical or dreamy (or whatever term to describe their version of the planes as being more "special") then written, but I can never get a real explanation on this.

Take Glorium, for example.

Glorium is the gate-town to Ysgard. It's a rural place with a few hundred people, no more. It's the primary gateway between two major planes of existence, but there's not a lot there.

What if Glorium saw thousands or millions of visitors a year, but those visitors never saw one another? What if some property of the town made it so that you never encounter anyone but the few hundred natives and your own party?

Embrace paradox and weirdness. Play up the mysterious nature of the planes - unthinkably vast and ancient intelligences just beneath the surface of everything. Everything is alive and sapient in some way. Everything is more meaning than substance. When you fight a slaad, you're fighting the idea of Chaos more than you're fighting a physical creature. There is at once one slaad and many; the creature can't be accurately counted or even clearly seen, although it can be banished from this world if you hit it enough with a sword. Chaos is apart from numbers. Everything's a spirit, a ghost, a minor god. Your sword is the idea of cutting made manifest, forged from the fevered thoughts of a githyanki imprisoned in Limbo. The buildings of your town are angry and jealous and desperately in love with you, when they're not pining for the moon. The stars have feuds and battles with one another. The sun falls from the sky, shot in the heart by the arrows of the primeval forest, and the PCs must find the sun's child to replace it.

The towns and people they visit are spirits, concepts. They are infinitely vast, even if they seem to be very small. You can explore them forever and never see the same building twice. And yet if the belief behind them changes, they can change as well - be shifted to another plane, or be destroyed entirely. They represent limitless power and are at the same time very fragile.

In the markets of the planes, one can buy cloth woven from bits of sky and frozen sorrow.

The Outer Planes are made of myths and stories. The PCs' clothing and equipment change to match the myths they're in, and they may have to wait until the myth ends before they can leave the realm. Only when they resurrect Osiris can they leave Heliopolis. Only when they kill the Hydra can they leave Olympus.

Time has no real meaning. The same stories repeat endlessly, each time slightly different depending on how mortals interact with them and remember them. Portals may lead to any time, so that the PCs may end up in some place decades before they were there last, or millennia after.

Planar beings have no fixed forms. A deva may resemble a winged human to one viewer, a winged dwarf to another, and a spinning tower of flaming two-dimensional geometric forms to a third. It has the same game statistics either way, conveniently enough.

A city may be rows of Cyclopean monoliths to one party member, but be a mess of well-kept cottages to another, and a primeval forest to yet another. It may be an inverted mountain made of water to a fourth viewer.

The gods have many faces. They are many and one. It's not clear where one god begins and the other ends. Different aspects of the powers may not know about one another. They may exist on many planes simultaneously.

The planes have no fixed boundaries. You can sometimes move from one to another by simply changing your perspective. They aren't fixed places. Planar relationships are a matter of opinion. Some say the outer planes are a wheel of 17 universes, but others say they are a tree, or a mountain, or a river, or a series of infinite bubbles, or a single undifferentiated mass, and they are right too.

The PCs have great power. Their thoughts can change, destroy, or recreate the multiverse, especially as they increase in power and influence. But so can everyone else's, and there are beings who are so ancient and fundamental that they might as well be immortal - reoccurring archetypes that may appear in different form each time they are encountered. They are the cards in an endlessly shuffling deck, but how they are configured, encountered, and dealt with is up to the PCs.

 

[Shemeska]

I've been running a Planescape campaign every weekend since about 2002, and I've noticed a couple things:

Planescape tends to have a really high learning curve if you're going to use the published material, especially given the history and political intrigue between the factions, sects, various religions on the planes, various races' interactions, etc. Your PCs can go anywhere in theory, so it's a very heavy burden on a DM to either know all that background or bluff their way around it and run it off the cuff without the players' being any the wiser.

Planescape can have a very different feel from DM to DM and group to group, depending on if you're running pre-Faction War or post-Faction War, and what planes you'll be having the PCs go to. It can range from a very dream-like, almost Dunsanian fantasy atmosphere, to a horror campaign; you can also risk being too whimsical, too over the top, too X, depending on what parts of the planes you're going to play up. You're in a landscape of extremes made manifest, so it's easy to oversaturate a game with some topics.

Subjective and objective truths exist side by side, and multiple versions of such truths might co-exist in blatant opposition to one another, and both or neither might be accurate. Things don't always make sense, some things flaunt obvious logic by their very existance and yet they exist regardless of mortal ability to rationalize them [the infinite spire is infinitely tall yet Sigil exists at its top, and you can see it on the Outlands, but you can never climb there or fly there because you'll never reach it].

Above all, belief is power. Toy with the idea, embrace it and run with it, and you'll have one of the key elements of Planescape.

Now my storyhour was mentioned as an example of the 'feel' of Planescape, and I'm flattered, but let me add a word of caution to using my work as an example:
1) My first campaign was brutally dark. In fact I made my players cry at one point.
2) It was set entirely post-Faction War so to some people it might completely miss the kreigstanz of the Factions that was one of the centerpieces of the setting's feel. Don't look to my stuff if you want good examples of the factions. Politics in Sigil I do a lot of, but not direct faction/faction clashes.
3) Back to that brutally dark bit...I featured the yugoloths as the primary antagonists, and for much of the plot they seem virtually omnipresent, with little opposition from anyone besides their own selfish selves, and at times some overwhelmed PCs (when the PCs aren't being played like chess pieces by the fiends). The upper planes feel neutered for a good while, and that seeming lack of opposition and justice versus evil might rub some people the wrong way before the tide begins to turn and I start to explore the celestials.