D&D General How Do You Feel About Sigil?

[Ancalagon]

I have to disagree with you here. If Sigil is to be a place where dramatic political conflict can occur there absolutely has to NOT be an omnipotent ruler. Powerful? Sure. But not the unbeatable thing that the Lady of Pain is described as. There has to be a real chance that Hell or Asgard can take over the place; otherwise no drama. (Yes, one can have other dramas within a large, inter-planar city. Ones with different or smaller stakes. But I'm talking about the big political picture that is the setting's backdrop and major framing device.)

Okay, yes, above it was pointed out to me that, canonically, Vecna was able to enter Sigil and shennaniganize. So I guess that, canonically, means the Lady of Pain is not omnipotent within Sigil. It goes against the setting's original framing device. I consider that a good thing.

I think Vaalingrade has described the Lady of Pain (above) just right - she's a metaplot stick to keep players in line.

That's only because you think that omnipotent means involved. 99.9% of politics in Sigil she doesn't really care.

 

[Malmuria]

Planescape is kind of like "a wizard made it: the setting." You can sort of justify any sort of magical happening within the logic of the setting. For example, the portals just allow the dm a way to give the players a shortcut to the adventure and back. Similarly, if I were (and inevitably I will) run another PS campaign, I would base it mostly in sigil and use the city as a loose megadungeon, along these lines:

Pointcrawling Sigil's Undercity

In yesterday's post about the megadungeon possibilities missed in Planescape's hub city, Sigil, Michael Moscrip asked very nice and polite ...

hillcantons.blogspot.com

 

[Older Beholder]

As much as I love Planescape/Sigil, I've since replaced the multiversal hub city in my campaign with Ravnica.
Portals have been opening to the endless city plane across my homebrew setting, with the guilds popping up and extending their influence.

I find the Ravnica guilds are a bit easier to 'drag and drop' compared to Sigil's factions. As cool as the philosophers with clubs idea is, I've found it's something players don't really end up exploring in any great depth in games I've played.

 

[Merifluous]

I've always loved sigil and just recently started running it for the first time, using it as a hub world once my PCs reached level 10. It is very complicated to run and remotely hit the flavor b/c there are so many factions, the cant, the different planes, etc etc. My group is mostly relatively new to dnd and they enjoy it but I think they are along for the ride in a lot of ways. The power score blog has helped me a lot. One of the other challenges is it takes more work than I expected to convert the 2e adventures - first to get the lore right in my head (at least enough so I dont confuse my players, I dont care about it being perfect, just consistent), and second to make sure I can actually run the adventure and understand how it works. Adventure writing has gotten better with time IMO. I've mostly been running parts of the Great Modron March and Tales from the Infinite Staircase, with everything based out of a house in Sigil they got as a reward for one of the adventures.

 

[Merifluous]

I've always loved sigil and just recently started running it for the first time, using it as a hub world once my PCs reached level 10. It is very complicated to run and remotely hit the flavor b/c there are so many factions, the cant, the different planes, etc etc. My group is mostly relatively new to dnd and they enjoy it but I think they are along for the ride in a lot of ways. The power score blog has helped me a lot. One of the other challenges is it takes more work than I expected to convert the 2e adventures - first to get the lore right in my head (at least enough so I dont confuse my players, I dont care about it being perfect, just consistent), and second to make sure I can actually run the adventure and understand how it works. Adventure writing has gotten better with time IMO. I've mostly been running parts of the Great Modron March and Tales from the Infinite Staircase, with everything based out of a house in Sigil they got as a reward for one of the adventures.

I meant to add that I also get most of the critiques of it that I see here too. I just love the planar setting enough that I can see past all those.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

How do you feel about Sigil? Have you DM'd a game that featured it, or been a player in a game where Sigil was featured?

Personally, I dislike the idea of Sigil. D&D lore has detailed a number of cities throughout the planes: the City of Brass, Tu'narath, Zelatar, Hestavar, Dis, etc. Though I haven't done much with it yet (though I plan to soon in my current campaign), the idea that these planar metropolises exist and could trade and have political arrangements or rivalries with one another fascinates me.

I understand the convenience that Sigil presents as a central hub for adventurers to travel to other planes, but I feel that having it as the interplanar metropolis cheapens and distracts from these other cities.

Boooo! Your ideas suck and should be thrown in the fires of Avernus, frankly!

That's how I feel about this!

Give me Sigil or give me death!

More seriously, I think Sigil that isn't central isn't Sigil, but I'd love to see more detail on other metropolises, especially if they are cosmopolitan.

 

[Staffan]

I find the Ravnica guilds are a bit easier to 'drag and drop' compared to Sigil's factions. As cool as the philosophers with clubs idea is, I've found it's something players don't really end up exploring in any great depth in games I've played.

You definitely have a point there. Ravnica's guilds each have a strong identity and a place in the city: the Law, the Spies, the Church/Maffia, the Brutes, the Nature Cult, the physical Mad Scientists, the biological Mad Scientists, the Recyclers, the Zealous Army, and the Entertainment. Many of Sigil's factions are highly esoteric, and there's a great deal of overlap. For example, Sigil has three factions that are The Law: the Fraternity of Order that form the lawmakers, lawyers, and courts; the Harmonium who are the cops; and the Mercykillers who are the wardens of those sentenced. On the esoteric side are the Doomguard, Believers of the Source, and Sensates – sure, you believe that entropy is unstoppable, that you are a potential god, or that the purpose of life is to experience as much as possible, but what does that mean? The Cult of Rakdos has a similar outlook on life to the Doomguard (the supremacy of entropy), but they make it actionable through nihilistic entertainment and hedonism instead of just moping around being gothy and stuff.

Part of that is probably that the guilds are based around Magic's five colors who, while continually somewhat in flux, have a far stronger identity than D&D's alignments (which form the basis for at least some of Sigil's factions). Even if Red and Blue are never mentioned in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, they form the underpinnings of the Izzet League and its search for knowledge (blue) through reckless experimentation (red).

 

[Northern Phoenix]

I like it as a pre-made/pre-detailed fantasy-urban hub for "exploring the planes" adventures, but I'm not super invested in the specific lore or plot of of the old 2e modules.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I have no strong feeling but I never had a planer game, it seems oddly victorian needs a more modern look.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I didn't really care for planescape, even though I like planar adventures. Some of it's assumptions were the exact opposite of how I set my world up with. I used it as "the great meeting place of the planes" where people would meet and had a free city feel to it (not unlike Casablanca or something)- but the Lady of Pain was dead, and the factions never existed.