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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3971499" data-attributes="member: 2067">The heart of PS is really Sigil. That's where the factions sit, that's where the mortals live, that's PS's home. PS also needs the alignments pretty strongly, because playing with them is something the setting revels in. Philosophical gameplay is enhanced when your ideas change the world, and the cosmic forces of Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, and Neutrality all rubbing up against each other is good.PS doesn't need much of a specific arrangement of planes. Sigil can still serve as the gateway between the Shadowfell, the Feywild, the Elemental Chaos, and the hundreds of thousands of other planes that exist that mortals on the material plane aren't even aware of (Arborea, Pandemonium, Celstia, etc). PS does need a richness and variety of extraplanar creatures -- Planetouched creatures are the setting's elves and dwarves and halflings, and the more sources we give them to draw on the richer it is. There's a difference between a devil and a baatezu and a yugoloth, just as there's a difference between a demon and a tanar'ri and a gherelth, and an angel and a deva and an archon, and an eladrin and an animal lord and a slaadi, and an inevitable and a modron and a formian. So what does a 4e PS setting need?#1 - Sigil. This includes the portals, the factions, the Lady of Pain, the cant (though we probably don't need it in the rules themselves). This is the center of the game, the home base for the campaign, the place where the heroes and villains live and work. This is probably where a lot of low-level adventure goes on. The factions are especially key, here. Everyone's a preacher, everyone's a philosopher, from the richest Taker to the bartender who serves your drink as part of his Destiny.#2 - Alignments are strongly held by most creatures. Because a lot of 'em are MADE of alignments. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />#3 - A diversity of planar species that come from a variety of planes (not all of which are mentioned in the Core). I wouldn't mind freeing up a bit of this to include major players that don't really fit in the Great Wheel. Now the Feywilid and the Eladrin (4e eladrin) can have a major role, as can the Shadowfell and the various nasties from there, and maybe some critters from the Plane of Mirrors, or somesuch. Because the planes will be your playground, not all of them need to be hospitable (just like not all dungeons are easily survivable), and not all of them need to contain much diversity (it's okay if Bytopia is mostly uninteresting, so are the backwater podunks on a given material plane!). This should include gods, and it shouldn't be limited to just D&D gods. Without the Great Wheel being so strong an influence, you can actually adventure in Olympus and on Yggdrasil without the mental exercise of fitting it into the cosmology. It doesn't fit. It's just one plane amongst many. Asgard doesn't need to be part of Ysgard, it can be it's own place. The biggest project would be #3. I wouldn't mind advancing the timeline to include a few new factions, ditch a few that fell out during the Faction War (Change, like they say, is inevitable), keep them around as small sects or occasional threats without going into great detail on them, synthesize many of those that are really similar, focus on bigger themes, get a bit more MagiTech into the mix (maybe make it a bit more Victorian in flavor, embrace some of the Steampunk trappings). This is what I'm doing for my first 4e campaign, anyway. I'm not married to the history or the specific events or the specific NPC's about PS.</blockquote>

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