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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 6397737" data-attributes="member: 11697">That's not quite so much a Planescape thing universally as it is a yugoloth thing. While other planes and planar races have ancient primordial backstory, it's not secret so much as just poorly known (predating mortal life will tend to make your origins obscure). The 'loths on the other hand were secret-mongers, puppet masters, fastidious record-keeping truth-obsessed liars that presented themselves as planar mercenaries with no agenda other than greed and self-interest.That's also a me thing. I absolutely adore the kind of games that can develop from elements of secret history and the interwoven bits of myth, lies, belief, and unreliable narration that can grow up around such things. It's a thing that you find in fiction, be it Lovecraft or more modern authors like F. Paul Wilson using similar elements in their own work. I latched onto the 'loths in Planescape as a favorite element partially because of that aspect of them (McComb, Vallese, and others made the 'loths complex and wonderful creatures to use IMO, and I'm still inspired by how they went about describing them).My own work has picked up on 'loth style secret history if you look at Pathfinder's daemons for instance. While the Four Horsemen rule their race, they supposedly displaced a singular original leader who they then scrubbed from history as best they could, because while they siphoned its power for themselves, they couldn't actually kill it, and oh they tried. But the story got out, or at least some of the truth about the Oinodaemon aka The Bound Prince aka it might be dead/it might be imprisoned/it might be playing the archdaemons like puppets/it might all be a myth to be presented as a giant bugaboo to keep the rest of the multiverse from extinguishing the soul-eating daemons as an existential threat because removing their leaders might wake up something even worse. That's ultimately for DMs to decide for their own games, but I like to present a rich field of options rather than a singular history for such things.I pull this stuff in my own campaigns as a well. Currently I'm running a Planescape-inspired Pathfinder planar campaign set in Galisemni the City of the Celestial and the Damned, a planar city drifting within the chaos of the Maelstrom (Pathfinder's CN plane). Like Sigil, nobody knows where it came from, its history largely vanishes past a few tens of thousands of years before the present, and where history is vague, legend fills the gap. There's no Lady of Pain, but seven gigantic statues of keketar proteans referred to as The Watching 7. People don't get mazed or flayed, but if the city is threatened or someone gains too much power or the city becomes too stable and static... probability starts turning against you. You might slip and snap your neck, you might stutter and mispronounce a spell and somehow summon a balor rather than a dretch, etc. It happens and while nobody has any proof, it's presumed that the 7 are responsible, whatever they are, however they got there, etc. I presented the following as an intro bit of flavor text for the players' guide that I gave my players about the city:That said, I'm not sure that I've ever run a classical Planescape campaign with all of its original 2e tropes. I've always plucked out particular elements and run with them (the 'loths, secret history, the planes as places of wonder and paradox rather than high-level dungeons, belief shaping reality, etc), and being post-Faction War the factions never came into play and I made up for that I suppose with some absolutely byzantine fiendish politics (not just the 'loths, but diabolic and abyssal prehistory as well). Planescape just provided a spectacular base for the weird direction that I ran off with it in, and clearly it can support a wide array of games and play-styles once you realize that you can damn well change whatever you want in your own campaign (I certainly did).</blockquote>

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