Making Sigil really different

[Rafael Ceurdepyr]

I am including Sigil in my next campaign, but I want it to be really different for my players. In my head is the possibility it will be too much like Sharn, or some similar large cosmopolitan city. Help me with some ways I can emphasize that it is truly a planar city, unlike anything else they've ever experienced. The stranger the better!

 

[Stormborn]

I am one of the players in Raef's game, but she said it was OK for me to see this thread since it was kinda my idea after she mentioned that she was afraid she couldnt capture an alien feel for Sigil.

I suggested bringing in very nonstandard races and locations. Like having a large glasshouse a la the green house in Perdido Street Station for a race of plants or the kephri houses in the same book that are covered in the wax like excretions of the nonsentient males of the species.

Another idea would be just putting things that the PCs are familiar with in very unfamiliar contexts. For example: Burgstom's Books - the stall contains piles of books in varieties of languages. The proprietor, Burgstrom, is an intelligent and winsom blue skinned goblin who speaks most of the languages of Sigil. While his system looks chaotic he knows everybook's location and keeps a vast catalog in his head based on language, origin, subject, age, and price for everywork he owns or has ever seen. He pays handsomly for unusaly books and on rare occasions even commisions adventurers to find new ones for him.

 

[Clueless]

If you're already running with some of Mieville's works as an inspiration then honestly - you're well on your way to a quality Sigilian atmosphere already. If your DM hasn't already read Perdido Street Station herself, then it's worth putting some time aside for it.

It's not just the odd people or environments though that you can emphasize - don't forget that Sigil is a morphic place with in a way its own personality. Emphasize the tight quarters, the odd little corners , and the rundown parts as well as the estates of the Golden Lords, covered in razorvine. The place can and will change around you, the inn you were staying at may have moved over a block tomorrow, or there may be a new little hovel across the street. Imagine a city where, at DMs whim, the *street* may attempt to cheer you up.

Water and air and resources may be something else to bring a unique quality to the place. Your party may not understand at first what the innkeeper means when he greets them before they do their morning wash-up in the fountain in the courtyard... "Yes, the water today is particularly Stygian, please pay in advance, and have a nice day!" And watching the air portals flush out the Lower Wards air once a week can be a mighty impressive sight. The players should get the feeling that the city is much like a giant terrarium, requiring the upkeep of some unseen force to keep the water flowing and the air churning. They're essentially living in a giant ring shaped life support system. It's not managed by a god with emotions, whims and demands - but nevertheless there are no outside fields to go running to, no walls to climb to freedom, should the unseen power decide to shut down life support for a week or so. That's why so many people in Sigil were frightened during the Tempest of the Doors - imagine realizing that you *can't* get out... and there's only so much air left.

The familiar within the unfamiliar is a common Planescape theme as well. It may be worthwhile to focus on the micro instead of the macro for the city. Let the players get used to one or two minor NPC's - people whose oddities become a highlight of the oddities of the city. The donut vendor outside the inn who constantly changes hairstyles from green and spiked to bald to pink with floating purple polka dots and sometimes changes *while* you are buying breakfast...

Another way of really highlighting the unique qualities of a town (any town, not just Sigil) can be to allow the players to become *involved* in the place. Sigil does have a Council, and seats are elected. Let the players vote on who gets elected, let them become involved in the politics or even run for office! Don't treat the city as merely a 'safe place to hole up while you get ready for the next mission' - let them think of it as home, and let them try to change it as they like. You'll have *tons* of opportunity to highlight unque aspects that way.

Let's see, other ways to make the city come alive... *racks her brain* Hm. Emphasize how much Sigil is like the Seattle of Shadowrun. It's the central 'safe' point where deals and plots are hatched. Let the party find out about conspiracies that affect other planar events - Blood War connections are nice for this.

And lastly - add some mystery. Play up that there are vast sections of Sigil that are almost entirely unexplored, like UnderSigil. Look up some of the research on the underside of cities like Moscow. There's a lot you can work with in digging into the buried past of Sigil to truly creep out your players.

You may want to pick a tone for certain sections of the city and run with that tone (dreary Hive vs. violent Hive for example). That way you have a guiding 'goal' for what you want to provoke in your players. That makes the job a bit easier.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Make it apparent that parts of the city is sentient, like the streets, alleys and buildings. Yes, Torment had the Alley of Lingering Sighs. But basically the idea that some of these shift around, and may react in certain ways to what the players do.

 

[Arkhandus]

I am including Sigil in my next campaign, but I want it to be really different for my players. In my head is the possibility it will be too much like Sharn, or some similar large cosmopolitan city. Help me with some ways I can emphasize that it is truly a planar city, unlike anything else they've ever experienced. The stranger the better!

I'd rather say that other large cosmopolitan cities try too hard to be like Sigil.

Sigil's the Center of the Multiverse, yo! Treat it as such. Sigil is where you see devils making deals with aasimar, dragons going shopping, modrons proselytizing, demons hawking unspeakable wares in the marketplace, formians remodeling houses, guardinals throwing back tequila shots with duergar, beholders chatting with elves, random xeg-yis zipping about for no apparent reason, talking mantlepieces in the taverns, packs of cranium rats scurrying about the Hive, dabus floating around with carpentry supplies to go fix things, goblin merchants hammering out deals with dwarves, and unidentifiable floating monsters drifting from one portal to another on some unknowable errand.


Also: Read Shemeska's Planescape storyhour. You'll get all kinds of ideas from Shemmy's plots and descriptions of Sigil.

Or play Planescape: Torment. That works too.

 

[Felix]

Aye! Berks be tollerin fer merkins, what with vistrim an waislin bein tudder on the lobber-shank. If it be gummer yer on the eyes for, paste yer skull-sweat to this lamb-hide: the Lady be nosing for cudgel-cleaners to vex a poxy wrangler, an sissle is the mark of the hide what crab-clamps the silver pretties!​

Ah, Planescape! The Cant and its crivilin sound; how I do vibbin thy opper-hopper!

 

[Ripzerai]

"The city is a sigil, the sigil seals the door. The city is a sigil, the sigil seals the Door. The city is a Sigil, the Sigil seals the Door. The City is a Sigil, the Sigil seals the Door."
- a barmy on the streets of the Hive.

"The City is vast. Its alleyways, thoroughfares, tunnels, bridges, and canals are denser and more numerous than the pathways of a brain. No one can chart its reaches, nor reach its end. And yet it is insubstantial. It is defined by that which it reaches out to. Compared to the realms beyond its portals, it is merely a sketch in the air. It is nothing at all. "
- One of the Deconstructionists of Xaos, speaking of Sigil.

"The door is the flesh. The Door is the flesh. The Door is the Flesh. The Door is My Flesh..."
- A barmy on the streets of the Hive, shortly before disembowling himself with a goblin short sword.

"The city is a cancer on the multiverse. Each of its doors pierce and fragment reality. As each door opens, existence becomes thinner. Each door begets other doors, other portals on other worlds, other cities of portals. And so the plague spreads. As more doors open, the walls of the multiverse begin to disintegrate. When there are more doors than walls, the multiverse will collapse on itself. Sigil is devouring the planes, and it is so beautiful..."
- a Doomguard philosopher-aesthete, speaking of the city she was born in.

"She is one of the race known as Mercurials. They come from a higher reality than our own, one so vivid that to them we are but memories of fragments of dreams. They live on the pure energy of their god, who is to other gods as we are to the stories we tell. They are so potent they need only remove their skins once a century to let the divine light refresh them, and they take no other sustenance at any time. We, who strive to forge our own potentials, pattern ourselves off of her. We flay our own skins off in the hope that some of her light may shine in, nourishing our souls so they may bloom in new dimensions."
- A heretical Believer of the Source

"The sewer nymphs are a far cry from the nature spirits you know, yet they have much the same mindset. It is only that it is befouled and stagnant water in urban centers whose beauty they defend. You think their idea of beauty must be very different from yours, but you are wrong. Once you've seen one, you'll never look at a gutter the same way again. I saw a nymph rise from the Ditch, and I thought I should die. When you've seen perfection, why should you look at anything ever again?"
- A blind barmy in the Lower Ward

There's a flash as you step through the portal. You stumble as gravity reorients around you - looking behind you, you see that the once-vertical door has become a rough hole in a slanting tent made of uncured hide, covered with strange organic tattoos. All around you are tall, looming buildings, their high peaks and twisted domes pushing into a poisonous-looking sunless sky through which arches - by the gods, is that part of a city hanging there sideways in the midst of the foul, low-lying clouds? Further down the street are many more buildings in innumerable architectural styles and materials, their only unifying trait being the rows of large, upward-sweeping blades that thrust out of so many of the rooftops like raised tiger claws. Buildings of bone and silk leaning against buildings of earth and wood and ivory, connected by high arches to buildings of brick and clay and felt and bamboo and on and on, buildings of four stories or more next to buildings that seem as if they have less than one. The streets are made of a similar variety of substances, all crushed and potholed by the passage of thousands and thousands of feet and wheels. Only now do you begin to really look at the people around you - many seem normal enough, though they look like they've come from more nations than you've ever heard of. Others aren't like anything you've ever seen, things with eight or ten legs, things that glow, shadowy wraiths that drift along without touching the ground, metallic orbs, bipedal animals, things that ooze or hop or slither, and, most disturbing of all - things that look human, but not quite, with something subtly wrong or alien or even sinister about them, things that make you shiver inside, walking down the streets and narrow alleys and arching stairways and steaming sewer entrances and high paths, sometimes appearing and disappearing without warning as they pass through arches and doors, as if they have the ability to step in and out of reality - perhaps something like you did, in coming here.
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Some of my ideas are hosted on Planewalker; they include things like Shadowtown and Krijjt, the Facades, the Central Nest, the Amber District, the Liliput District, the half-mazes, the Cracks, and New Nimur. Some of those ideas are pretty weird. On my site I've got the Wererat Ward, the Mazeworks, and streets made of iron and salt.

Definitely check out Brix's Guide to Sigil.

 

[Ripzerai]

This story might be inspirationally weird. Here's some descriptive parts:

They got their supply of death from the Mortician’s Guild, a group of cowled and robed acolytes who taught their apprentices that all life was a cruel illusion. They captured the last entropic gasps from fresh corpses, boiled the stuff down into its basic essence, and sold it to those who had use for such things, as the Essence Furnaces surely did.

The Essence Furnaces burnt a wide variety of such abstract substances - life, death, joy, misery, mathematics - to create their peculiar wares. Those who had to breathe the smoke the furnaces gave off swore that even coal was preferable, though Management swore the strange, multi-colored vapors were harmless. “They have passed through Fire,” they piously informed their employees. “And are thus made pure.” Management seemed a group of earnest, gray-clad men and women to most eyes, always smelling vaguely of ash. Jan thought they looked like owl-people, while Mog preferred to think of them as briar-trolls. Everyone who had seen their true forms cleaned their heads out with Water of Lethe as soon as possible.

Overhead, a spurt of fire melted a cloud, sending a blast of warm rain over the cobblestones. The sky-gates, which appeared erratically in the clouds and smog, provided the city with most of its light, heat, and precipitation.

He landed awkwardly on a narrow spiderweb path several hundred feet above the ground. The path had been originally spun by bebeliths some time ago, but local Hivers had been patching it so long that its evil taint had been smothered beneath layers and layers of whatever it was the Xaositects were thinking at the time.

This part of the path was bright blue and embedded with polyhedric dice. Moggin got up and began to walk, trying to avoid the points of the four-sided ones.

There weren’t very many people on the spiderweb path at this time of day. Moggin saw a green-haired tiefling walking with an ogre; a humanoid made of shadow herded a group of chattering magmin; a gaggle of sneering crowboys jostled one another as they navigated the thinner webs in as unsafe a manner as possible; a group of reptilian creatures with gliding flaps of skin were launching themselves into the air. Some celestial rats skittered out of sight as he came near them, the afterimages from their halos still hovering in the air.

A gigantic eye peered through a gate in the clouds, followed by an equally gigantic pair of fingers. They went away.

When thinking about Sigil, think if the City of Dis, think of Graz'zt's cities in Azzagrat - chittering imps and gremlins crouching in the shadows, laughing hideously and warring with the mephits, gambling houses where you can sell your soul, decadent brothels that provide only pain, abattoirs that exist only to grind humanoids into meat.

Think, also, of Yetsirah and the other bright and shining cities of the heavens, soaring towers made of celestial silver, the air filled with angelic harmonies, palaces made of light joined by rainbow bridges. Now let the silver tarnish as the towers are placed right among the abattoirs, the imps and the filth.

Now add some mortal things: hivelike buildings of clay like something built 10,000 years ago in a neolithic desert; the ghettos and alchemists of Prague, the spires of Moscow, the sewers of Lankhmar, the dungeons of Undermountain and Skullport; Greyhawk and Sharn and Freeport and London, Constantinople and Carthage, Rome, Tenochtitlan, and Cathay.

Add some fantastic things: glamorous ambassadors from the Seelie Court, sentient bipedal, clock-carrying rabbits delivering messages from the Queen of Hearts on one world to the White Queen on another; janni and azer and psurlons, fire elemental artists and goblin wizards, disguised slaadi, well-behaved illithids, neogi thieves, ice paraelemental pirates, githzerai street gangs, stately and elegant minotaurs venturing into Sigil from their island maze-cities, Norse giants, bureaucratic oni from the Chinese pantheon, demonic scarecrows warring with kenku, a cowardly leoine shifter dancing with a warforged woodsman, a human girl, and her little dog, too. Lost petitioners, exiled valkyries, and spirits of the ancient dead.

Emphasize the specifically Sigilian things: the blades and spikes, the stinking Ditch, the light-boys, factotums, and touts; the razorvine and dabus; the executioner ravens and Aoskian hounds; the sedan chairs and tentacled Arcadian ponies; wild theories about the existence or nonexistence of the Lady of Pain; the Collectors scraping corpses out of gutters for a pittance; the signs offering bounties for cranium rats. Of course, the portals, and those selling keys to them and rumors of keys to them. Everywhere, philosophy, dirty metaphysics and improbable faiths; Sigil is a town where philosophy is treasured more than gold. Never forget that. The people eat and breathe belief, often literally; new ideas are things to be fought over with blood and steel, to be stolen and hoarded, to be passionately debated and used to bind the hearts and minds of thousands.

Sigil is a city of philosophers with clubs, both before and after the Faction War. Their philosophies are more than half-mad most of the time, but they know that all belief is power - that belief changes reality and determines the fate of gods and souls. This is more true in the Outer Planes than anywhere else, and Sigil is the gateway to it all.

 

[Rafael Ceurdepyr]

Wow, these are some really great ideas. Yes, I plan to use Perdido Street Station for inspiration as well as the wonderful resources at planewalker.com. Planescape: Torment is still one of my all time fave computer games, so that's always in the back of my mind.

Keep the ideas coming! Thanks!

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Another to thing try with Sigil is to make even the familiar Humans come from strange cultures such as a caste-based culture that centers on becoming elementals, or if you can't think of strange human cultures, try putting in a lot of non-Western European cultures (like Chinese, Indian, Arabic, African or even Slavic).

You can even take generic D&D monsters, and play around with the expectations of what they might be like. With working-class goblin chefs, friendly Yuan-ti cultists, and undead paragons of virtue.

Another to work into an idea of Sigil, is secret parts of the city, unknown to all but a few, things buried away over the centuries waiting to be discovered by those who know the right 'chant'.

Sigil as a whole, might be a very jaded city, since everybody sees their share of the otherworldly often. But that doesn't mean there won't be the fantastical around.