Well, the part of my campaign that came before the visit to sigil finished up with enough time to spare that I decided to move forward and give them a taste of what I had set up so far. I'd love some critiques by planescape veterans on if i managed to use the slang correctly.
Previously they had been trapped in a pocket dimension. I didn't tell them as much but it's quite easy to imagine it was a maze. For whatever reason (maybe that I loved chrono trigger growing up) this particular maze was a tiny plaza with a single light and an old man that sent them on vision quests to signify hitting their paragon paths. When they finished he lamented that he couldn't send them directly home, but he could send them somewhere that could.
Stumbling through a portal, they ended up rolling out of a fireplace, covered in soot, alarming even an otherwise seasoned old Sigilite woman. "Adelaide! Adelaide come quick, these berks must be barmy as a spire god if they think coming in through the fireplace is gonna let ya peel one on us!"
The PCs make a somewhat middling diplomacy check to calm her down, while making no attempt to understand the lingo. Her tirade continues "What, are you addle-coved? We haven't even got jink worth lifting" and she squeezes in a few more swings of her broom. Her husband finally interrupts, assessing the situation more reasonably. "Calm down, Doris, look at the clothes on em... a band of primes if I ever saw any. Lady's word, folks, the name's Adelaide."
Predictably, the PCs are confused and ask where they are, and how to get back to the prime material plane. The man explains "You're in Sigil, though I wouldn't go around talking to any old body on the street that will listen like that. Every basher in a 2 block radius will see you as a cony and try to bob ya." The artificer, and the player playing him, are unamused by the lingo and contemplate killing the couple, but the old man continues. "Listen, if a prime's going to get anywhere you need a tout, but you gotta have the jink to hire em"
The PCs extract a armoire they shoved into a bag of holding after taking it from an eccentric dragon, hand-crafted by its eladrin slaves. "Hold on, this best not be cross-trade goods is it? There's plenty of berks who will pay the jink for slippery stuff but I'm just a simple cooper"
The swordmage quips "what exactly does cooper mean in this crazy city?"
The rest of the party: "uhhh, that's a barrel maker"
Swordmage: "oh... that's not some crazy made up word?"
They assure him the goods were not stolen (depending on your point of view) and pull out some coinage instead. Impressed, Adelaide tries not to be too surprised by their massive wealth and simply says "Aye, that's a gad of jink alright, you could buy a good tout with that".
Eager to get this band of adventurer's out of his house, Adelaide escorts them to the market ward. Having not been to a place where they can sell things for quite some time, the party begins counting over their rather large collection of wealth. They dally about for a while, so I image a few quick minor events and roll for one, from a dark alleyway a halfling jinkskirt offers to make their dreams come true for just 3 stingers. Not understanding what a stinger is a good 15 minutes are lost to laughing.
The artificer is still uncomfortable and is mostly out of character, imagining running at all the people in the city with his sword. I realize at this point that the party may have spent too long in the dungeons to ever truly come out. The swordmage found a cursed sword in the last dungeon they were in. It causes his mark to occasionally mark every single creature in the encounter and grant combat advantage to those he was originally intending to mark. In non-4e terms it essentially makes him very good at drawing the attention of monsters. He makes a fairly decent streetwise check to see if somebody in sigil would know how to remove such a curse, and a daytime merchant offers to tell him the name of someone in the night bazaar for 2 mert. Not knowing what a mert is, the swordmage has no idea if this is a fair price and shrinks away slowly.
At this point the session is winding to a close (the sigil part representing just the final 1/3rd of the day) so they ask their impromptu guide about inns. My unpreparedness comes to bite me as I'm unable to find appropriate GP rates in the sigil section. I do find info about Inns and read off the descriptions and insist that the price will vary by the Inn and the type of service requested. The artificer is displeased with that answer and threatens adelaide at swordpoint... but the wizard decides that the amount of money they have and the possibility of being hoodwinked justify them going to The Battlement (as described in the DMG2).
They arrive in the battlement, which is billed as an impenetrable fortress of an inn. I reckon this kind of protection is roughly equivalent to hiring a henchman of the party's level (which was so conveniently spelled out in a recent dragon article). The party balks at the price, even after I describe that the 5-person room has no windows, a steel reinforced door with one key, and a personal team of guards regularly patroling the Inn at off hours, with the whole building being made predominantly of worked stone. They barter with the owner, a half-orc who is uninterested in the antics of primes but a shrewd enough business-man to take any jink worth the effort. They talk down the price to 200g per night for the entire party, and express their confidence that they could also serve part-time as guards, even threating that they could take any group of the owner's toughest guards. They also think outlout about weather or not they could clean out the inn and take it over as their base of operations. I assure them that the 16 guards within earshot are all of their level or higher, and the owner is well into the epic tier.
Just the same, the owner is eager to close the deal and agrees to humor the party with some bloodsport later on, figuring if nothing else it would be a worthy diversion to keep the guards on their toes. The deal is sealed, but all their talk of wanton violence has attracted the attention of people the party did not realize was listening. As a final closing to the week's session, a shadowy figure walks up to them and offers his card, saying "You all seem like a fine bunch, and I'd love to talk if you find me again. All the same, consider this the Lady's whisper". The party is still confused about this "Lady" that people keep mentioning (several folk have greeted them with "Lady's word!"), and the business card only says "Dustmen".
So that was my first stab at doing Sigil! My players seemed largely incredulous about the fact that all of the lingo I spurted out was legitimate, and I fear at least a few players are not especially ready/interested in an adventure of urban intrigue. Just the same, my goal is to sort of let things flow and with a little more prep steer things closer to my original story, but I'd like to let them explore more if they discover the urge to do so. As I mentioned up near the beginning, I'd love some finer detail advice from folks who have run planescape/sigil more than me.
