Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6395946" data-attributes="member: 2067">I ain't here to defend it (lawd knows it's a fools errand to try and sell bacon to a room full of imams), but I would like to offer a bit of a counterpoint, in the hopes that it might be of some use to consider where other folks are coming from at least.[sblock]Yeah, it's ye olde style vernacular as filtered through an American sensibility for a fantasy world. Not surprising that it wouldn't exactly translate linguistically. I wonder what would though? Is there some sort of inventive slang one can use to convey the feel of a sarcastic, jaded, Dickensian sensibility to someone regardless of linguistic heritage? Probably not. It's not the kind of thing often written into a pattern of speech. I'd point out though that the intent of the cant isn't to evoke a planar otherworld, but precisely the opposite -- to make it jaded and casual. The language of PS is the language of vernacular, of the "common tongue," of slang and dirty jokes in the oily back-alley. It's part of the feel of PS because PS is, in part, about taking those grand ideas that are discussed in high arcane jargon by proper folk and skewering them. Aye, the whole "doctors don't find damage believable" issue, but with philosophy. They're certainly not meant to be very philosophically sophisticated, just basically internally consistent enough to be coherent "things that people believe" (and since people once believed in an old man sitting on a mountain hurling down lightning bolts, this is not a particularly high threshold to cross). They are, at best, an Intro to Philosophy, but they're not even that, given that they smash elements of religions and spiritualisms right up inside the things and take them in directions that wouldn't make sense in reality at all. IMXP, the experience of play in Planescape is one of re-shaping reality according to the ideals you hold. "Exploration" in terms of "go somewhere cool, do some goal there, come home" is best used in service of that ideal, meaning that the context for "lets go visit a dead god" should be, for instance, "to discover the source of its power and use this for our own purposes." Which might be, "Distribute it among the people so that they have no cause to worship false gods." Or might be, "Use it to make me more powerful so that I can lead my very own cult of loyal sychophants."Or might be, "Poke a hole in Limbo and see if it all drains out."Or other things. The idea is that these are player-defined purposes. Infinity is their plaything.I think the breakdown of <a href="http://daedaluswing.wikidot.com/running-a-planescape-campaign#toc8" target="_blank">tiers</a> gives some insight into what I think a "good Planescape campaign" has in it as far as meat on its bones. And it's all about what you accomplish as a character, not where you go. I don't know that this matches the modules much. To be honest, most 2e-era adventures are not great, and even the best suffer from deep flaws, regardless of the setting they were for. I never paid much attention to the adventures for PS. The planewalker's handbook is a pretty good primer to the setting, though as a "primer," it certainly focuses on the what and who more tightly than on the DM's side -- though the concept of Belief Points as a kind-of-proto-FATE-point is notable. [/sblock]</blockquote>

Verification