Planescape Planescape Artist Tony DiTerlizzi Shares Planescape Playlist

If you use Spotify, this playlist is the music Planescape artist Tony DiTerlizzi used back in 1994 to get into the right mood to draw for Planescape.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

2. Planescape dealt with at least some philosophical themes with the factions--the Harmonium (Hardheads) are 'law and order at all costs', whereas the Revolutionary League are rebels for the sake of rebellion, and countless others: the Dustmen try to be undead, the Athar are atheists, the Takers basically are Ayn Randites, etc. It's a little college-bull-session-y, but that's the age a lot of us were back then.

Even at this age, whilst it is definitely quite "college naughty word session", yes, that's kind of well-pitched for the level of philosophy that can work really well with D&D, not quite beer and pretzels (though not a million miles from it), but not po-faced and over-serious either. The Factions are pretty accessible, as written in 2E, conceptually, and everyone is going to find a number that either resonate with them or that they'd just enjoy roleplaying.

I'd add onto this that Planescape's birth coincided with the rise of "Alternative" music's mainstream popularity. MTV's Planescape came out just two years after Alternative Nation started airing. Looking at the art, you see people with goatees, piercings, long/spikey/gravity-defying hair, spiked jewelry/armor. All stuff you'd see if you went to a club or a concert back then (minus the horns, wings, hooves, and modrons). While D&D being cool was still decades off, Planescape looked more modern and "with it" than your average Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk product.

Yeah I think this is often overlooked. By 1994, a lot of AD&D 2E stuff felt like it was aimed at a sort of 30-something crowd who were not cool (I was 16 then, note), I mean, obviously fellow geeks/nerds, but they're this really different kind, different era. Not all the stuff, but a lot of it. It didn't really speak to me.

But Planescape jesus, it was like they'd drilled into my skull. Especially the art and the Factions and the cant. Often slightly older or a decade or so younger players sneer hardcore at some or all of that stuff, but for me, and I think a lot of Xennials and older Millennials, it was so horrifyingly spot-on. I was reading one of the books on a break at school, and I was at a weirdly cool-but-alternative-kids-only school (long story, and several people famous now were in my year or the one above, again long story), and people, like cool people who'd never played an RPG or even knew what they were wanted to see it, and loved the art and the vibe (including the cant). I never got any of them into D&D with it, but I bet today in the same scenario I would have, and it shows how absolutely on-point Planescape was.

By the end of the 1990s it was not quite as on-point anymore, but now, in the 2010s and 2020s, that whole vibe has become part of the culture (and kids dress more like we did back then than '80s kids or something, and have done since like 2014), so I think today it could potentially get both a very specific set of grogs and semi-grogs, and kids who have rarely seen that style "in full flight" before.

 

[Sithlord]

Would any kind soul be willing to explain to me why Planescape was so popular back in the day? I've looked through the books in recent years, but I wonder if because I came to the game long after it was released that I'm missing out on what seemed to make it so special and popular with people. The setting certainly seems to be very fondly remembered by those who were into the hobby when it was released.

You could travel anywhere in the multiverse to any setting. And all u needed was to discover the right portal and find the right key. And u could do it at first level. And this imho is where ad&d charisma was better because a first level person could be as good as a 20th level person at charisma reaction checks. U might fast talk a little fiend as easily as a 20th level character and negotiate with a arcanaloth for info. And it was discovering new things and explorations and learning little secrets to how the planes worked.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The way portals worked in Planescape was a stroke of genius, too, and again, very on-brand for the 1990s, and actually pre-figuring similar thinking in a lot of later fantasy including urban fantasy.

Specifically, prior to Planescape, the notion of fixed portals was present, albeit uncommon, but generally speaking, they were either always open, or closed and opened by a spell being cast or an elaborate ritual, or only opened when there was a specific cosmological alignment. They also tended to be very obvious things, like purpose-built gates in the middle of a room (or the middle of nowhere), giant symbols on the floor, and so on.

With Planescape, those are all still possibilities, but basically any doorway of any description MIGHT be a portal, and to use a portal, i.e. to travel through it to wherever it went to, the key could be anything - you might have to be carrying a specific object (like a certain sword), or a general object ("a red rose"), or being thinking a certain passphrase, or in a certain mood, or smelling a certain scent, or humming a specific or general tune, or really just anything. Suddenly, every doorway or similar in an entire campaign setting COULD be a portal. Familiar areas could easily have portals in them (because IIRC, they're not necessarily detected by Detect Magic, unless open, and they may only open as you step through them with the key), that have "always been there", but just have an obscure key. You could even have them be the subject of a mystery of the like - maybe people keep going missing when walking down a certain street with a few archways over it, and no-one can find that pattern, but eventually the PCs work out that there's a portal, that only activates between midnight and 3am, and only for people who carrying at a gold coin of a certain year or king. Then of course there's an adventure in rescuing them or whatever.

 

[Zaukrie]

The art. The planes could be ANYTHING. Monsters weren't just for fighting....you even cavorted with devils or demons sometimes...For me it was the art and the interwoven fiction. So much depth. You didn't use much of it in play....but still....

 

[Sithlord]

The art. The planes could be ANYTHING. Monsters weren't just for fighting....you even cavorted with devils or demons sometimes...For me it was the art and the interwoven fiction. So much depth. You didn't use much of it in play....but still....

Yes. I loved aligning with the devils to stop demons from winning the blood war.
In fact devils had this view of the rest the multiverse that they were ungrateful. Because it was the devils that kept the demons from destroying the planes.

 

[Nawara]

This all makes sense. Discovering Planescape in 2008 or so, I just had to put on my dad's Enigma CD while reading it. Everything about the setting was so... 1994 college French major... that anything else felt wrong.

It just makes you want to order a cappuccino in a for-here mug at the kind of coffee shop where there's a magazine rack full of old Wired issues and the baristas are still allowed to play their own music.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This all makes sense. Discovering Planescape in 2008 or so, I just had to put on my dad's Enigma CD while reading it. Everything about the setting was so... 1994 college French major... that anything else felt wrong.

It just makes you want to order a cappuccino in a for-here mug at the kind of coffee shop where there's a magazine rack full of old Wired issues and the baristas are still allowed to play their own music.

Love it!

And yeah, it's a setting that was incredibly of-its-time, but sufficiently stylish, consistent, weird and outright cool that it feels worth rediscovering in the way some 1970s clothing was, or some 1980s and 1990s music, or some 1990s and even 2000s video games, and so on. Very specifically time-bound, but also cool.

I hope if they do bring it back, they keep that vibe - it's sufficiently cool and weird that it won't hamper sales in the way something that felt purely dated would (so, unlike say, Dragonlance). And we see how even really young people have bizarrely awesome grasps of styles of previous eras.