Sigil in DMG2 - Any thoughts?

[Pseudonym]

Planescape turned them into the D&D equivalent of Star Trek aliens, IMO. It made them far too human, made their cultures and their mindsets far too comprehensible. The notion of a demon or a devil sitting down for a drink in a tavern in Sigil (just for example) is absolutely anathema to what these creatures are.

I don't think I've encountered the Star Trek alien analogy before, but it perfectly summarises my main issue with Planescape as well. Demons and Devils tending bar and speaking Cockney slang really made it hard for me to appreciate the setting. For all its good parts, that just jumped out as viscerally wrong to me.

I'm willing to give the 4e treatment a go, however.

 

[Shemeska]

lots of stuff

Did you ever get the chance to read through both the Hellbound: The Blood War box set, and Faces of Evil? I think a lot of the conceptions you've got about the way Planescape handled the topic might be removed, since they address a lot of what you find problematic (I see the topic in 2e as virtually a mirror opposite of you in this case).

 

[Mouseferatu]

Did you ever get the chance to read through both the Hellbound: The Blood War box set, and Faces of Evil? I think a lot of the conceptions you've got about the way Planescape handled the topic might be removed, since they address a lot of what you find problematic (I see the topic in 2e as virtually a mirror opposite of you in this case).

Owned and read Hellbound, read parts of Faces of Evil. Didn't change my opinion at all.

(In fact, the comic about the love between two fiends that came with Hellbound is a perfect illustration of the humanization/wussification I'm talking about. "Love" is something of which the physical embodiments of evil shouldn't even be capable.)

 

[Shemeska]

Owned and read Hellbound, read parts of Faces of Evil. Didn't change my opinion at all.

(In fact, the comic about the love between two fiends that came with Hellbound is a perfect illustration of the humanization/wussification I'm talking about. "Love" is something of which the physical embodiments of evil shouldn't even be capable.)

(In fact, the comic about the love between two fiends that came with Hellbound is a perfect illustration of the humanization/wussification I'm talking about. "Love" is something of which the physical embodiments of evil shouldn't even be capable.)

She was a maralith, and her 'love' was pretty transparently false. She used him and abandoned him as she saw fit, and he as a partially mortal cambion was the only one with truly mortal (albeit flawed) notions of the emotion. That's what I carried away from it. It made the entire Blood War backdrop even more brutal and miserable and potentially pointless, yet it still went on and that made it even more bleak.

Clearly we came away from the material with massively different reactions. For me the material gave the fiends for the first time what you found it taking away from them, and with very slim exception they haven't been explored in the same depth since then. I found it made them truly alien creatures, not just monsters in extraplanar dungeons, and it emphasized just how strange and at times incomprehensible the planes were.

But that's for another thread.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Clearly we came away from the material with massively different reactions.

Heh. Clearly.

and with very slim exception they haven't been explored in the same depth since then.

Of course, that's arguably part of the problem. It's possible for some things to be examined in too much depth. It's one reason I don't ever want to see a Far Realm sourcebook; as soon as we learn too much about the Far Realm, it ceases to be creepy and alien. (It's a concept Lovecraft understood, even if he occasionally took it too far.)

The fiends don't require as much "unknowableness" as the Far Realm, but they require some. That's not the entirety of (what I see as) the Planescape problem--I feel, obviously, that PS took them in the wrong direction--but it's a part of it.