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

[Shardstone]

As someone from a different generation than most here who has tried to run Planescape, I can safely say that using the old books provided me almost nothing for my table.

It is very, very hard to run Planescape using old material. It says taverns in Sigil, for example, are filled with planar creatures, but how do I play that out? If I have devils in dive bars chilling with seedy angels, tame demons, and a random Gith, what does that mean is happening? How do I show those interactions? How do I make sense of that?

Then I look at the old art of Sigil and...its just a normal mid 19th-century looking city. You're telling me that the famous City of Doors, which is host to literally every planar creature, looks like London shortly after the industrial revolution but before electricity was a real common thing? I find it so weird, and not in the fun Alice in Wonderland way, but in the "This is literally unrunnable" way because I didn't know how to segway my players into it. There was no opening, no passage for them; even though I gave them a guide, I still didn't know how to show the city, because the city itself makes no sense to me. I can't fathom how it works other than making everyone they meet "human" which seems to fly in the face of what the center of the mutliverse should look like.

If Planescape is going to come back, Sigil needs another look. They need to focus more on how crazy it is, and the constant nonsense that players can get into. Keep all the cool terms like berk etc, but make them not so totally human. Devil bodyguards should not act like meatheads from Baldur's Gate, and if they do (which in core Planescape they are portrayed as, at least going off the old books and art), it takes away a lot of the magic for me. It feels like an Adult Swim cartoon through this lens, and not like a crazy, philosophical adventure through mulitple afterlives, Hells, and everything in between.

But now we run into the problem. Planescape is big enough to be its own game.

I can envision a faction-war adventure book that's like the Ravnica book just for sigil, complete with rules for manipulating the city with ideas and beliefs and joining factions. But then that takes up a lot of space, so where do I put the stuff for all the other planes? Or the enormous bestiary? I guess Mordekainen's has us a little bit on the bestiary aspect but...we need more.

Always more. Planescape is a gluttinous, greedy setting when it comes to needing DM materials. So many planes, each their own universe with their own problems and story and niches and lore and epics, each one deserving of its own adventure. I can imagine a gameline with a "Planescape PHB" and then just adventure after adventure after adventure in the model of Strahd where you go to planes or cities or whatever and get into stuff. That's a lot! And that's what I need to run Planescape.

But this isn't feasible. So what I'm left with is reading lore about things that lack story seeds. Yes, the Lady of Pain once had a talk with Vecna. Ooooh! So what? What can I do with that? If I really thought, I guess I could come up with something, but I need more actionable bits in order to compel me to put in the work to the setting.

As for the art, I find it more important for the NPCs than the city. Whenever I see art of Sigil from the books, its just bland. Its a spiky, dingy, trench-filled and ratchet London where everything is dirty and I don't know, Angels just sit on city steps drinking a fifth of hennesy or something. Hell, this idea alone is more evocative then anything I've actually read or seen in Sigil.

I understand a lot of people on this forum like the aesthetics and the ideas, but honestly, I just don't know how I could get into it without something new. Not a total reimagining, because the foundational ideas of Planescape are solid, but from my perspective, the old boxsets and stuff (all of which I've read) are entirely lore with nothing to do and it feels like they half-ass the imagery a lot of the time.

 

[Weird Dave]

As someone from a different generation than most here who has tried to run Planescape, I can safely say that using the old books provided me almost nothing for my table.

It is very, very hard to run Planescape using old material. It says taverns in Sigil, for example, are filled with planar creatures, but how do I play that out? If I have devils in dive bars chilling with seedy angels, tame demons, and a random Gith, what does that mean is happening? How do I show those interactions? How do I make sense of that?

I can't agree with this more! I started playing in 1995, in the heyday of the TSR setting glut, and I loved the idea of Planescape and the planes. But the sourcebooks all felt like they were fiction reading material, fascinating but not enough there to help me run the campaign as a DM. I get some of the appeal of the "unreliable narrator" they were going with throughout the books, but I quickly found it frustrating to pull out relevant game material to use at my table. Maybe this was an appeal for some people? It wasn't for me but I never lost the fascination with big planar adventures or a setting encompassing them all.

I've largely avoided posting in this thread, because for me what I want out of a Planescape book I already designed - Codex of the Infinite Planes, available on the DMsGuild. In the luxury of not having to adhere to a page count, I wrote 10K to 15K words on each plane (16 Outer Planes, 4 Inner Planes plus 1 for the Border Elemental Planes, and 2 Transitive Planes, and 3 Echo Planes). Power groups, adventure sites, guidelines for traveling around the plane and to the plane, and plenty of adventure hooks. When I compiled them all together I split them into three books - gazetteer, monsters, and player info. It was too big to have in one single book!

For Planescape, I think it would be best served to transform it into a city-based setting in Sigil. I'm worried about the prospects of this, however, considering how similar Ravnica and Sigil are in a lot of ways, but it could be done by leaning into the City of Doors as the gateway to everywhere. Belief is a powerful, tangible thing in Planescape, so figuring out how to represent that to the characters would be one of the key nuts to crack. The factions try to harness that belief for their own ends, but how do the characters figure into it? Are they always pawns in a larger game? That gets old. Do they develop their own beliefs and pursue those?

Planescape felt to me like an attempt to bring the wonders and strangeness of the planes to characters starting from 1st level. It may be worth looking at transforming it into a playground for high-level characters. I believe Sigil was presented in the 4E Dungeon Master's Guide 2 as a paragon tier setting. That could work in a 5E version of the setting as well, and giving high-level PCs a chance to become bigger than they could be on the Material Plane.

 

[Sithlord]

As someone from a different generation than most here who has tried to run Planescape, I can safely say that using the old books provided me almost nothing for my table.

It is very, very hard to run Planescape using old material. It says taverns in Sigil, for example, are filled with planar creatures, but how do I play that out? If I have devils in dive bars chilling with seedy angels, tame demons, and a random Gith, what does that mean is happening? How do I show those interactions? How do I make sense of that?

Then I look at the old art of Sigil and...its just a normal mid 19th-century looking city. You're telling me that the famous City of Doors, which is host to literally every planar creature, looks like London shortly after the industrial revolution but before electricity was a real common thing? I find it so weird, and not in the fun Alice in Wonderland way, but in the "This is literally unrunnable" way because I didn't know how to segway my players into it. There was no opening, no passage for them; even though I gave them a guide, I still didn't know how to show the city, because the city itself makes no sense to me. I can't fathom how it works other than making everyone they meet "human" which seems to fly in the face of what the center of the mutliverse should look like.

If Planescape is going to come back, Sigil needs another look. They need to focus more on how crazy it is, and the constant nonsense that players can get into. Keep all the cool terms like berk etc, but make them not so totally human. Devil bodyguards should not act like meatheads from Baldur's Gate, and if they do (which in core Planescape they are portrayed as, at least going off the old books and art), it takes away a lot of the magic for me. It feels like an Adult Swim cartoon through this lens, and not like a crazy, philosophical adventure through mulitple afterlives, Hells, and everything in between.

But now we run into the problem. Planescape is big enough to be its own game.

I can envision a faction-war adventure book that's like the Ravnica book just for sigil, complete with rules for manipulating the city with ideas and beliefs and joining factions. But then that takes up a lot of space, so where do I put the stuff for all the other planes? Or the enormous bestiary? I guess Mordekainen's has us a little bit on the bestiary aspect but...we need more.

Always more. Planescape is a gluttinous, greedy setting when it comes to needing DM materials. So many planes, each their own universe with their own problems and story and niches and lore and epics, each one deserving of its own adventure. I can imagine a gameline with a "Planescape PHB" and then just adventure after adventure after adventure in the model of Strahd where you go to planes or cities or whatever and get into stuff. That's a lot! And that's what I need to run Planescape.

But this isn't feasible. So what I'm left with is reading lore about things that lack story seeds. Yes, the Lady of Pain once had a talk with Vecna. Ooooh! So what? What can I do with that? If I really thought, I guess I could come up with something, but I need more actionable bits in order to compel me to put in the work to the setting.

As for the art, I find it more important for the NPCs than the city. Whenever I see art of Sigil from the books, its just bland. Its a spiky, dingy, trench-filled and ratchet London where everything is dirty and I don't know, Angels just sit on city steps drinking a fifth of hennesy or something. Hell, this idea alone is more evocative then anything I've actually read or seen in Sigil.

I understand a lot of people on this forum like the aesthetics and the ideas, but honestly, I just don't know how I could get into it without something new. Not a total reimagining, because the foundational ideas of Planescape are solid, but from my perspective, the old boxsets and stuff (all of which I've read) are entirely lore with nothing to do and it feels like they half-ass the imagery a lot of the time.

I am an old guy that adores sigil. I can play it right out of my 2E sourcebooks with updated mechanics. Seedy angels…never.
But I wouldn’t mind an update making it much more high tech. Heck, they have all the knowledge of an infinite amount of planets in the multiverse. They can do better than the 19th century. If they want to make a high tech setting, sigil, mechanus, and limbo are it.

 

[Faolyn]

I am an old guy that adores sigil. I can play it right out of my 2E sourcebooks with updated mechanics. Seedy angels…never.
But I wouldn’t mind an update making it much more high tech. Heck, they have all the knowledge of an infinite amount of planets in the multiverse. They can do better than the 19th century. If they want to make a high tech setting, sigil, mechanus, and limbo are it.

So we need one or more factions that embrace transhumanism. (I can't think of any other philosophies that revolve around technology, although I'm sure they exist.)

Edit: It would be a splinter faction of the Believers of the Source, naturally.

 

[Sithlord]

So we need one or more factions that embrace transhumanism. (I can't think of any other philosophies that revolve around technology, although I'm sure they exist.)

Edit: It would be a splinter faction of the Believers of the Source, naturally.

I like the way you think. I may steal that idea.

 

[Faolyn]

I like the way you think. I may steal that idea.

Take, enjoy!

Actually, now that I think about it: while the faction war may not have been a great idea, maybe the factions do need to be shaken up a bit--maybe new factions should be made. PS always had sects, but those were limited to a plane or even a layer. Maybe some of those sects should grow up a bit.

 

[Malmuria]

As someone from a different generation than most here who has tried to run Planescape, I can safely say that using the old books provided me almost nothing for my table.

It is very, very hard to run Planescape using old material. It says taverns in Sigil, for example, are filled with planar creatures, but how do I play that out? If I have devils in dive bars chilling with seedy angels, tame demons, and a random Gith, what does that mean is happening? How do I show those interactions? How do I make sense of that?

Then I look at the old art of Sigil and...its just a normal mid 19th-century looking city. You're telling me that the famous City of Doors, which is host to literally every planar creature, looks like London shortly after the industrial revolution but before electricity was a real common thing? I find it so weird, and not in the fun Alice in Wonderland way, but in the "This is literally unrunnable" way because I didn't know how to segway my players into it. There was no opening, no passage for them; even though I gave them a guide, I still didn't know how to show the city, because the city itself makes no sense to me. I can't fathom how it works other than making everyone they meet "human" which seems to fly in the face of what the center of the mutliverse should look like.

When I run planescape, there are absolutely demons and devils and angels right next to each other. When they first got to Sigil I had them first seen a demon walking up to them, then accidentally knocking into them and apologizing. I think you just have to play into the silliness of it all. I actually think the cosmopolitan nature of the city makes it perfect for 5e, since any race can be found here and it's normal for all races to be interacting with one another, with the Lady of Pain keeping a sort of peace.

But I think the vibe of magic 19th century London/Paris is perfect, and gives me a lot of touchstones in terms of weird victoriana.

But this isn't feasible. So what I'm left with is reading lore about things that lack story seeds. Yes, the Lady of Pain once had a talk with Vecna. Ooooh! So what? What can I do with that? If I really thought, I guess I could come up with something, but I need more actionable bits in order to compel me to put in the work to the setting.

agreed. As a setting it was more evocative than it was directly useful. I think it was a section of tsr where the designers could just do what they wanted and experiment. The budgets for those boxed sets must have been enormous by rpg standards.

As for the art, I find it more important for the NPCs than the city. Whenever I see art of Sigil from the books, its just bland. Its a spiky, dingy, trench-filled and ratchet London where everything is dirty and I don't know, Angels just sit on city steps drinking a fifth of hennesy or something. Hell, this idea alone is more evocative then anything I've actually read or seen in Sigil.

this hurts my soul

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I am an old guy that adores sigil. I can play it right out of my 2E sourcebooks with updated mechanics. Seedy angels…never.
But I wouldn’t mind an update making it much more high tech. Heck, they have all the knowledge of an infinite amount of planets in the multiverse. They can do better than the 19th century. If they want to make a high tech setting, sigil, mechanus, and limbo are it.

One of my problems is that it never went full 19th century despite actually using 19th century English slang. There was that one guy who had arquebuses but that's 15th century technology. Printing presses (9th century tech, but 15th century in Europe) and factories certainly exist in Sigil.

I think Sigil should get a rail system at least, since Eberron and Ravnica have trains. Probably could do with other technology from the 19th century like photography and gramophones and other things too.

 

[Malmuria]

I can't agree with this more! I started playing in 1995, in the heyday of the TSR setting glut, and I loved the idea of Planescape and the planes. But the sourcebooks all felt like they were fiction reading material, fascinating but not enough there to help me run the campaign as a DM. I get some of the appeal of the "unreliable narrator" they were going with throughout the books, but I quickly found it frustrating to pull out relevant game material to use at my table. Maybe this was an appeal for some people? It wasn't for me but I never lost the fascination with big planar adventures or a setting encompassing them all.

The books do work better as reading material. One of my favorite books is Uncaged, but it is bananas by modern day standards. The hooks into the setting were mostly either a) here's something for the PCs to do if they need something to do, b) a faction wants an item or information or a problem solved or c) plane hopping railroad (the modules). I think they were trying so hard with the belief-is-reality concept, and with competing with white wolf, they forgot the setting is actually perfect for a group of interplanar treasure hunters and the factions that hire them, i.e. classic dnd.

 

[Malmuria]

One of my problems is that it never went full 19th century despite actually using 19th century English slang. There was that one guy who had arquebuses but that's 15th century technology. Printing presses (9th century tech, but 14th century in Europe) and factories certainly exist in Sigil.

I think Sigil should get a rail system at least, since Eberron and Ravnica have trains. Probably could do with other technology from the 19th century like photography and gramophones and other things too.

Discworld might serve as good inspiration along those lines, as would something like Magical Industrial Revolution. For me it was lighting and transportation that didn't make sense. So I put pillars of continual light everywhere.