Planescape Essential Elements - Your Opinion Wanted
- Thread starter TarionzCousin
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I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
1) "Urban." Sigil is quintessential, but many other planar cities will work as an element, too. The idea is, however, that the city serves as a hub point for a scattering of many different types of people and (especially) ideas. You need a reason for fiercely opposite things to exist side by side and want to achieve harmony with each other. Cities force that. This leads into politics, personality, kriegstanz and many other elements. This means powerful rulers (again, the Lady of Pain being iconic of this), where strength is important but perception and control are perhaps even more important. It also means urban concerns like labor, organized crime, enterprise and economy, and class struggle come to the fore. Limited space makes you live next to things you otherwise wouldn't.
This first note gives PS the feel of Imperial London or Turn-Of-The-Century New York, or Imperial-age Shanghai or similar: there's a wide world out there, and a lot of it is represented in the neighborhood, forcing you to contact the ideas that are radically different from your own. This is the stage in which beliefs conflict, and from where they can launch themselves to change reality. It also makes PS vaguely industrial and scholarly.
2) "Exotic Mundane." The Planes are some of the most exotic and bizzarre places in existence, and they're quite up-front about it. The Forbidden Zone shouldn't be a year's journey to the West, it should be just down the alleyway, right in your face, spilling over into your world and risking it becoming part of the Forbidden Zone. Creatures you have heard about in legend may be available for sale in the marketplace. Peoples you know only through hearsay are becoming next door neighbors. Meanwhile, the world keeps getting more exotic. As Tanar'ri dive bars pop up, people realize it isn't the creatures themselves that are so evil -- it is their beliefs, their minds, their actions, and their *culture*. This is the Culture Clash on a massive scale, so many ways of thinking and doing that work perfectly by themselves suddenly facing off against each other for control of the cities. You might be able to visit a restaurant at the end of the multiverse, but what it *means* is more important than what it *is*.
This gives PS the whole "look deeper" method to its madness, and gives real meaning to "belief is power." The beliefs of those who control, rather than their particular species, is what gives them power. Nothing is ever just what it seems -- the Tanar'ri dive bar is not just a place for fiends to let off steam, it is actually a plot to unseat the powers of government driven by the Anarchists. The gym isn't just a place to get fit, it's a philosophical meeting hall, where the body is trained to be one with the mind. This is where the "Center of All," "Rule of Threes," and "Unity of Rings" theories come into practice.
3) "Clueless Know-It-Alls" This motif is most powerfully presented in the form of the Prime Mage, a spellcaster who thought he knew the dark of things, but turned out to be more green than a devil's copper, but it's born out by planewalking bloods every week: you don't know anything about this world. A portal that took you to a safe haven could shift to a deadly inferno overnight. A plane you understood so well could throw a surpise at you with infinite possibility. A contact you know may die, a coup may upset your puppet-king, and though true knowledge is power, it's also impossible to truly have. The world is an uncertain place -- you can't be sure if the Godsmen are right or if the Heartless are right or if they're both nuts, or if they've actually both got the truth. You can't depend on a leader you can't know. This is an important part of PS's "Big fish, MASSIVE OCEAN" feel: no matter what you can do, there's always more.
This motif emerges all the time in heroic adventure: you're the one-in-a-million, the exception to the rule, the girl who gets to see the balor's compassion, the lantern boy who gets a break by tripping the blooded planewalker (and walking away with his cursed mimir), the tiefling who can't stop his schoolboy crush, the modron gone rogue, the factolholic who OD's tripping on philosophy and reaches a higher state of awareness, the prophit for profit. The planes are filled with cutters with a story worth being told, but this is your game, and your story, and you get to see things no one ever has or ever will again, because no trip through the planes is ever the same twice.
This first note gives PS the feel of Imperial London or Turn-Of-The-Century New York, or Imperial-age Shanghai or similar: there's a wide world out there, and a lot of it is represented in the neighborhood, forcing you to contact the ideas that are radically different from your own. This is the stage in which beliefs conflict, and from where they can launch themselves to change reality. It also makes PS vaguely industrial and scholarly.
2) "Exotic Mundane." The Planes are some of the most exotic and bizzarre places in existence, and they're quite up-front about it. The Forbidden Zone shouldn't be a year's journey to the West, it should be just down the alleyway, right in your face, spilling over into your world and risking it becoming part of the Forbidden Zone. Creatures you have heard about in legend may be available for sale in the marketplace. Peoples you know only through hearsay are becoming next door neighbors. Meanwhile, the world keeps getting more exotic. As Tanar'ri dive bars pop up, people realize it isn't the creatures themselves that are so evil -- it is their beliefs, their minds, their actions, and their *culture*. This is the Culture Clash on a massive scale, so many ways of thinking and doing that work perfectly by themselves suddenly facing off against each other for control of the cities. You might be able to visit a restaurant at the end of the multiverse, but what it *means* is more important than what it *is*.
This gives PS the whole "look deeper" method to its madness, and gives real meaning to "belief is power." The beliefs of those who control, rather than their particular species, is what gives them power. Nothing is ever just what it seems -- the Tanar'ri dive bar is not just a place for fiends to let off steam, it is actually a plot to unseat the powers of government driven by the Anarchists. The gym isn't just a place to get fit, it's a philosophical meeting hall, where the body is trained to be one with the mind. This is where the "Center of All," "Rule of Threes," and "Unity of Rings" theories come into practice.
3) "Clueless Know-It-Alls" This motif is most powerfully presented in the form of the Prime Mage, a spellcaster who thought he knew the dark of things, but turned out to be more green than a devil's copper, but it's born out by planewalking bloods every week: you don't know anything about this world. A portal that took you to a safe haven could shift to a deadly inferno overnight. A plane you understood so well could throw a surpise at you with infinite possibility. A contact you know may die, a coup may upset your puppet-king, and though true knowledge is power, it's also impossible to truly have. The world is an uncertain place -- you can't be sure if the Godsmen are right or if the Heartless are right or if they're both nuts, or if they've actually both got the truth. You can't depend on a leader you can't know. This is an important part of PS's "Big fish, MASSIVE OCEAN" feel: no matter what you can do, there's always more.
This motif emerges all the time in heroic adventure: you're the one-in-a-million, the exception to the rule, the girl who gets to see the balor's compassion, the lantern boy who gets a break by tripping the blooded planewalker (and walking away with his cursed mimir), the tiefling who can't stop his schoolboy crush, the modron gone rogue, the factolholic who OD's tripping on philosophy and reaches a higher state of awareness, the prophit for profit. The planes are filled with cutters with a story worth being told, but this is your game, and your story, and you get to see things no one ever has or ever will again, because no trip through the planes is ever the same twice.
Graf said:
There are a few other places like that - it's physically impossible to raise a weapon in anger in both Valorhome (the realm of Kuan-ti in Elysium) and in Portent in Gehenna. But as they're located respectively on the lower and upper planes, they lack Sigil's status as a true neutral ground.
You can fight in Sigil, and its inhabitants do fight, constantly, mugging one another in alleyways, engaging in duels, arresting criminals, and ripping each other apart in arenas to the delight of spectators. There was even a war there recently. The Lady of Pain is there, somewhere in the background, and there's an understanding that she won't permit anything to truly threaten her city, at least not for long, assuming she isn't otherwise occupied or dead or imaginary (and she is all of those things). But really, Sigil is a neutral ground because the inhabitants of the planes need one, or want one, and Sigil is as good as any, and the Lady of Pain offers a decent justification for why this should be so. She's just proactive enough to rationalize the city's impossible existence, sort of, and just mysterious enough to never spoil any juicy plotlines or the players' fun.
There are no essential themes in a Planescape campaign. For some people, the core of Planescape is the philosophical war - the principles of Law and Chaos, of Good and Evil, of Balance and upheaval, of solipsism and nihilism, of substance and ephemera, of faith and doubt, of fatalism and transcendence - and the fact that the PCs engage these philosophies directly (also indirectly), swimming in them, embodying them, building houses atop them, destroying and rebuilding them. This is, I think, how David "Zeb" Cook thought of it. Armchair philosophizing as a PoMo RPG.
For others, the core of Planescape is the cool, exotic, sometimes surreal and magical places you can visit, the weird and wonderful races and spells and NPCs. The scifi and high fantasy elements, more extreme and over-the-top than in a typical fantasy RPG. The factions, the Outer and Inner Planes - none of those things are fundamental. This is, I think, how Monte Cook approached it.
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Kristivas
First Post
I really wanted to try a real planescape game. We always just used it to get from one game world to another, and on more than one occasion.. when a DM would throw in an NPC talking their "Sigil-jive", one of our group would usually just clock them and run toward whatever portal we were heading for. It was kinda funny, I suppose.
Underused, I'm sure. Where can you get current 3.5 PS material?
Underused, I'm sure. Where can you get current 3.5 PS material?
Shemeska
Adventurer
Belief = Power - The very landscape of the outer planes is a manifestation of the abstract alignments, and the fabric of those planes is warped and molded by belief. Gods are formed out of nothing by the combined worship and faith of their believers. The clashes of the Factions in Sigil is just a microcosm for the overall clash of ideologies out on the planes at large.
The Blood War - it's big enough to stand as a point of its own outside of the belief = power idea. The Blood War is the ugly side of the Law/Chaos conflict, the sinkhole of Evil's masochism unto itself, and something that draws in the attention of every one of the outer planes. Everyone has a stake in the outcome, and no one can ignore it. Even in Elysium the influence of the Blood War raises its ugly head, and nothing, absolutely nothing, is unsullied in its wake.
White and Black in an ocean of grays... - it's a complex world where absolutes of Good and Evil exist, but at the same time the world is awash in a morass of moral ambiguity. Good and Evil are not monolithic, Heaven and Hell are entirely relative terms, there is no objective punishment for wickedness or reward for goodness, but still the pure alignments exist in this same universe of moral relativism.
Things Don't Always Make Sense - logic oftentimes fails on the planes. Planes can be infinite or finite, direction isn't a solid thing, space is influenced by thought and intent as much as by a map, etc. Contradictions exist even if you can't fathom them, such as the Infinite Spire and Sigil place atop it, or the Nothingness that can be seen outside of the plane of Sigil's ring from the inside.
Belief versus Substance - while the Outer Planes are usually the centerpiece of Planescape, the inner planes are there as well, and they're their own unique environment. They tend to be concerned with the ideas of elements and opposition, and alignment and belief is at best a secondary concern.
The Blood War - it's big enough to stand as a point of its own outside of the belief = power idea. The Blood War is the ugly side of the Law/Chaos conflict, the sinkhole of Evil's masochism unto itself, and something that draws in the attention of every one of the outer planes. Everyone has a stake in the outcome, and no one can ignore it. Even in Elysium the influence of the Blood War raises its ugly head, and nothing, absolutely nothing, is unsullied in its wake.
White and Black in an ocean of grays... - it's a complex world where absolutes of Good and Evil exist, but at the same time the world is awash in a morass of moral ambiguity. Good and Evil are not monolithic, Heaven and Hell are entirely relative terms, there is no objective punishment for wickedness or reward for goodness, but still the pure alignments exist in this same universe of moral relativism.
Things Don't Always Make Sense - logic oftentimes fails on the planes. Planes can be infinite or finite, direction isn't a solid thing, space is influenced by thought and intent as much as by a map, etc. Contradictions exist even if you can't fathom them, such as the Infinite Spire and Sigil place atop it, or the Nothingness that can be seen outside of the plane of Sigil's ring from the inside.
Belief versus Substance - while the Outer Planes are usually the centerpiece of Planescape, the inner planes are there as well, and they're their own unique environment. They tend to be concerned with the ideas of elements and opposition, and alignment and belief is at best a secondary concern.
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