Planescape (+) What would you want for 5e Planescape?

[Faolyn]

Like I said before, Theros doesn't need to cover nearly as much ground as Planescape does. If anything, the writers of Theros were struggling how to fill more pages with material. Planescape will have the opposite problem; what material can they put in the book, and what needs to be cut.

The PS books were filled with interesting details that, honestly, could be cut out without much of a problem. If we were to assume a single book that covered the planes, Sigil, and the factions (and using the layout of VGR as a guide):

Each plane gets 3-5 pages. Planes like the Abyss would get more, although I personally would want a "random Abyssal plane generator" rather than list of named planes, since there are multiple lists of Abyssal planes available online. Each plane would include a couple of paragraphs on each layer, a "What People Know" section which includes examples of creatures and gods live there, as well as what factions, if any, have a headquarters there, and an expansion on the planar effects from the DMG--assuming that it doesn't just say "see the DMG for the planar effects. And then a sidebar for plot hooks. They seem to have removed the para- and quasi-elemental planes and shuffled them into the regular elemental planes. The positive and negative planes also seem to have disappeared. So, seventeen Outer Planes, four elemental planes, and maybe the Feywild and Shadowfell, so this section would be somewhere between 70-120 pages long.

A section on demiplanes, including examples and a guide for making your own. Probably another 3-5. pages.

A section on making your own cosmology, expanding what's already in the DMG. Probably another 2-5 pages.

A chapter on Sigil, with an overview and probably 1-2 pages for each of the six wards. Say, 15 pages total.

The factions, which would be a big thing. Probably 2-3 pages per faction, including advancement via renown, a la Ravnica.

Then races/heritages, archetypes, and monsters. Plus art.

As I said way earlier, I would much prefer if this were two books, one for the planes and one for Sigil, the factions, and the Gate Towns. But I think it's possible for them to squeeze everything in one book.

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

Sigil (and Sharn and cities in general) are great and classic places to have adventures.

Yes
But you can do an urban adventure anywhere
You can only have an adventure on the body of a dead god floating in the Astral Sea in Planescape

That's not Planescape, beings in afterlives such as petitioners are completely an afterthought in Planescape. The factions and Sigil are an essential element about Planescape and it's identity.

Were an afterthought and were an essential element
No reason they need to stick to the old focuses

Playing dead characters that's Ghostwalk's thing.

Combine them then

Add Spelljammer to the Astral Sea and Ghostwalk to the whole setting
Playing a favorite character that died prematurely sounds awesome

 

[Malmuria]

Yes
But you can do an urban adventure anywhere
You can only have an adventure on the body of a dead god floating in the Astral Sea in Planescape

Why not both? What Sigil gives you is that planar cosmopolitan weirdness, epitomized for me by that tavern in torment where the guy is on fire (in fact, most of Torment took place in Sigil).

Anyway as I mentioned earlier, I think the planes become unwieldy to describe in total because they are infinite but also weirdly subdivided into layers. One thing I noticed re-reading the boxed sets last year when I ran a PS campaign is that some planes get fewer details simply because the books feel they need to describe every layer. Among other dissatisfactions with the boxed sets. If I ran PS again I would probably come up with a new, looser cosmology.

 

[Demetrios1453]

They seem to have removed the para- and quasi-elemental planes and shuffled them into the regular elemental planes. The positive and negative planes also seem to have disappeared.

The paraelemental planes are basically there, as the border regions of the inner planes as described in the DMG. They have slightly different names, but are still basically recognizable as the paraelemental planes of old. The poor quasielemental planes seem to have long ago bit the dust however, unless a 5e Planescape would want to resurrect them.

The Positive and Negative Planes are mentioned in the PHB Appendix C, both in a sidebar and on the maps of the planes. Granted, even in prime Planescape days, they received little coverage and they were basically death traps to any who visited there (and would presumably remain so to this day).

As for how a potential 5e Planescape book would look, we really don't need to look much beyond the Eberrron campaign book.

Eberron Chapter 1: Character Creation.
Races - substitute Eberron races with missing Planescape races (bariaur, rogue modron, etc)
Dragonmarks and Group Patrons - substitute the Factions (and any other significant patrons wanted, if any). With 63 pages, this would give us 3 - 4 pages for each faction, with pages to spare. Given that Eberron did a fine job for the Dragonmarked Houses with 1 or 2 pages per House, we could probably get away with averaging 3 pages for each of the 15 factions for 45 pages, freeing up ~20 pages for the descriptions of the planes.
Artificer Class - hey, 10 pages of freed up page space for something else! We'll move those to the description of the planes as well!

Eberron Chapter 2: Khorvaire Gazetteer.
Nations of Khorvaire - Hey, 17 nations, 17 Outer Planes! Only about 2 pages per nation though, so we'll grab those pages saved from the previous chapter to give us about 4 pages for each of the Outer Planes, maybe more if we can grab some from other chapters. For comparison, the most in-depth coverage in the DMG is the Nine Hells with just over 2 pages, with most planes getting a paragraph or two, so no matter what, we're definitely building significantly there.
Distant Lands - The other planes. Most of these planes are fairly well described in the DMG, and aren't the main attractions for Planescape, so we may not need too much additional here.
Faiths of Khorvaire - another 10 pages we can donate to the planar description area.

Eberron Chapter 3: Sharn. 30 pages, which seems about right for Sigil, although we might be able to squeeze a few pages for the planar chapter. Easy 1 to 1 here.

Eberron Chatpers 4, 5, and 6 (Building Eberron Adventures (with mini-adventure), Treasures, and Friends and Foes) should also translate pretty well 1 to 1 to Building Planescape Adventures, Treasures, and Bestiary. We might be able to squeeze some pages out to feed back to the planar description section, although all of these would likely merit their Eberron page count ("Treasures" might even merit more); the Bestiary especially as we still don't have 5e updates for many Planescape creatures, celestials especially...

(The big thing is how many pages we can get to describe the planes. The 3e Manual of the Planes had 107 pages for the Inner, Outer, and Transitive Planes, and its coverage was reasonably thorough (it did have a much larger typeface than Eberron, so we would gain there!). If we do a straight transfer of Eberron, we've got 46 pages from Chapter 2, plus whatever can be spared from other chapters - I was able to pull 30 with little issue from Chapter 1, so if we get some small contributions from other chapters we can get close to that goal. Of course, again, we may not need to worry about the Inner Planes as much as they are fairly well covered in the DMG. Maybe go light on the descriptions and just have some new adventure hooks/sites for them?)

 

[Parmandur]

The paraelemental planes are basically there, as the border regions of the inner planes as described in the DMG. They have slightly different names, but are still basically recognizable as the paraelemental planes of old. The poor quasielemental planes seem to have long ago bit the dust however, unless a 5e Planescape would want to resurrect them.

The Positive and Negative Planes are mentioned in the PHB Appendix C, both in a sidebar and on the maps of the planes. Granted, even in prime Planescape days, they received little coverage and they were basically death traps to any who visited there (and would presumably remain so to this day).

As for how a potential 5e Planescape book would look, we really don't need to look much beyond the Eberrron campaign book.

Eberron Chapter 1: Character Creation.
Races - substitute Eberron races with missing Planescape races (bariaur, rogue modron, etc)
Dragonmarks and Group Patrons - substitute the Factions (and any other significant patrons wanted, if any). With 63 pages, this would give us 3 - 4 pages for each faction, with pages to spare. Given that Eberron did a fine job for the Dragonmarked Houses with 1 or 2 pages per House, we could probably get away with averaging 3 pages for each of the 15 factions for 45 pages, freeing up ~20 pages for the descriptions of the planes.
Artificer Class - hey, 10 pages of freed up page space for something else! We'll move those to the description of the planes as well!

Eberron Chapter 2: Khorvaire Gazetteer.
Nations of Khorvaire - Hey, 17 nations, 17 Outer Planes! Only about 2 pages per nation though, so we'll grab those pages saved from the previous chapter to give us about 4 pages for each of the Outer Planes, maybe more if we can grab some from other chapters. For comparison, the most in-depth coverage in the DMG is the Nine Hells with just over 2 pages, with most planes getting a paragraph or two, so no matter what, we're definitely building significantly there.
Distant Lands - The other planes. Most of these planes are fairly well described in the DMG, and aren't the main attractions for Planescape, so we may not need too much additional here.
Faiths of Khorvaire - another 10 pages we can donate to the planar description area.

Eberron Chapter 3: Sharn. 30 pages, which seems about right for Sigil, although we might be able to squeeze a few pages for the planar chapter. Easy 1 to 1 here.

Eberron Chatpers 4, 5, and 6 (Building Eberron Adventures (with mini-adventure), Treasures, and Friends and Foes) should also translate pretty well 1 to 1 to Building Planescape Adventures, Treasures, and Bestiary. We might be able to squeeze some pages out to feed back to the planar description section, although all of these would likely merit their Eberron page count ("Treasures" might even merit more); the Bestiary especially as we still don't have 5e updates for many Planescape creatures, celestials especially...

(The big thing is how many pages we can get to describe the planes. The 3e Manual of the Planes had 107 pages for the Inner, Outer, and Transitive Planes, and its coverage was reasonably thorough (it did have a much larger typeface than Eberron, so we would gain there!). If we do a straight transfer of Eberron, we've got 46 pages from Chapter 2, plus whatever can be spared from other chapters - I was able to pull 30 with little issue from Chapter 1, so if we get some small contributions from other chapters we can get close to that goal. Of course, again, we may not need to worry about the Inner Planes as much as they are fairly well covered in the DMG. Maybe go light on the descriptions and just have some new adventure hooks/sites for them?)

Excellent analysis here. The Adventure generation chapter can pull double duty for Planar description, as well, since "what do I even do in this Outer Plane?" is legitimate space to fill with the sorts of charts and tables in the equivalent chapter. Honestly, it seems quite doable.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Excellent analysis here. The Adventure generation chapter can pull double duty for Planar description, as well, since "what do I even do in this Outer Plane?" is legitimate space to fill with the sorts of charts and tables in the equivalent chapter. Honestly, it seems quite doable.

Honestly, it's the same format as Ravnica and Ravenloft, with a few minor variations. I was checking out Ravenloft after creating the previous post, and, coincidentally, there are, again, 17 main featured Domains. It's weird how 17 keeps popping up! This time they take up 108 pages, although there only 7 pages dedicated to the remaining Domains. There are, again, chapters for character creation, "how to run adventures in this setting" (really, in this case, 2 chapters), and a bestiary. The big differences are that NPC patrons/groups are much fewer than in Ravnica and Eberron (and Planescape), and there's no central adventure hub as in the other settings. But still, it's not terribly different from the general pattern. Honestly, to bring in a discussion from another thread, if we see a 5e FR campaign guide, I imagine we'd see, yet again, an almost exact same format...

 

[Demetrios1453]

Also, the Sigil chapter could easily include the Outlands, which would help with the lessening the page count burden a bit for the Planes chapter...

 

[Yora]

Sigil really isn't part of the Outlands, though. Even if the spire is. I see little usefulness in mixing information about two very different places together.

 

[Parmandur]

Honestly, it's the same format as Ravnica and Ravenloft, with a few minor variations. I was checking out Ravenloft after creating the previous post, and, coincidentally, there are, again, 17 main featured Domains. It's weird how 17 keeps popping up! This time they take up 108 pages, although there only 7 pages dedicated to the remaining Domains. There are, again, chapters for character creation, "how to run adventures in this setting" (really, in this case, 2 chapters), and a bestiary. The big differences are that NPC patrons/groups are much fewer than in Ravnica and Eberron (and Planescape), and there's no central adventure hub as in the other settings. But still, it's not terribly different from the general pattern. Honestly, to bring in a discussion from another thread, if we see a 5e FR campaign guide, I imagine we'd see, yet again, an almost exact same format...

Yeah, for Chapter 2 of Ravenloft, creation of new Domains took the place of the Guilds in Ravnica, or the gods in Theros. This shows that they are willing to mix it up, even if the overall template is strong.

Good point about there being 17 Domains rnnumer in Ravenloft. The Plsnes, if given comparable space, would be vastly guessed out compared to the DMG offering.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Sigil really isn't part of the Outlands, though. Even if the spire is. I see little usefulness in mixing information about two very different places together.

Well, the original Planescape boxed set did it, in that Sigil and the Outlands were detailed while the remaining Outer Planes had to wait until later boxed sets to get fully covered.