Celebrim said:
Honestly, I think that they do and are concerned with things that mortal minds can't comprehend. If you show me some planar beings and I can understand thier motivation, then I feel that you've overly anthromorphized them.
I almost agree with you here. I would say, comprehend is a little to far for me, but non-understanding of motivations, I accept. My players have never seen a Fiend or Celestial sitting around drinking and cavorting. I definately downplay the Outsider interaction in Sigil. I think the most interaction someone has done was with a Yugoloth who was looking for someone. The Yugoloth made him find someone, then killed the guy and left. Why? Best not to ask questions.
At least that would be a mysterious motivation, but its nonetheless an activity that I can cognitively grasp, so no.
Honestly, IMC Celestials usually questing, Devils are corrupting, and Demons and Daemons are doing their own things, which vary. So, I agree. They arn't ever relaxing or recreating, or what have you. They are always working toward something, whatever that thing might be. No rest for them.
Maybe in your world, but in my world, no they most emphatically do not. And even when they have something that looks like a home, mostly its an object of little significance to them that they maintain in order to give the occassional prime visitor something he can relate to.
Agreed, assuming we're talking about Outsiders here. Half-Celestials/Fiends are a different story, as are Planetouched, Gith offshoots, etc. These are basically mortals who evolved from the planes themselves. I suppose whether you like them or not will depend on how survivable you think the planes actually should be. The Githyanki, for example, forging an empire in the Astral, I love.
No, they don't. They don't have cultures and beliefs, they ARE cultures and beliefs. They are incarnations of ideas. Frustration doesn't have a culture or belief. It's a walking emotion. Death doesn't have a culture or a belief. It's a walking manifestation. The 14th of June doesn't have a culture or a belief. It's a walking incarnation. And the main thing wrong with that description is that they probably aren't doing anything so understandable as walking except in order to be comprehensible to a mortal observer.
Also, love it with regard to Outsiders.
No, they are desires, and their 'families' don't necessarily have anything to do with mortal families and they sure don't relate to them in a paternal/fraternal/maternal way. In fact, many of them are probably asexual unless they are incarnations of something with sexual conentations. In some cases they can freely change sexes like changing clothes, and in other cases they can manifest 'offspring' without the need for sex or acquire relatives which they were previously not related to and so forth.
Outsiders having little outsiders sounds so... mortal. Fiends actually stem from the souls of the most wicked mortals, given shape and permeated with the evil of the plane. It never goes into Celestials, though. I would assume that they spring into being when "existance" or whatever finds that they are needed, each with their own particular fate in the grand scheme of things.
There are more things in heaven and hell than exist in your philosophies.
I'm not quite sure I understand this statement. Are you saying that there is more to the planes than a mortal has knowlege of, and even though we have no beliefs about it, it still exists? A tree falling in the woods, and noone hearing it still means a tree has fallen in the woods?
There is no bloody difference between the two examples.
Obviously one is more "bloody" than the other.
But, in any case, I don't utilize this imagery.
No they don't. They don't even have to experience time subjectively.
One of the few times I had a planar excursion, the players went to a courtroom in which they saw a series of trials take place in which, after the evidence was presented in the face of unspecified charges, the prosecutor was found guilty and beheaded. Then a new prosecutor was found in the audience and the sequence repeated itself. What does it mean? Who knows. It might not even be happening, It could be merely the only way the process of something necessary to keep balance in the universe is comprehended by thier mere mortal minds. It would be like if gravity was incarnated and you were forced to watch a process which represented the sum of all gravitations in the universe pulling at each other. What would that look like? Whatever it looked like, the interpretation that it was recreation or whatever would be _wrong_ (and dangerously wrong). Maybe that was what the landscape continually being buried under avalanches of falling trash represented (another planar setting). Or maybe not. Roll your Knowledge(Planes) to try to make sense of it all.
You know, I find this kind of ironic. Many people don't like Planescape because its too surrealistic at times, but you seem to want the surrealism. It just goes to show you that you litterally cannot please everyone, no matter what. I, myself try for not too much surrealism, because tends to it leaves players baffled and doesn't breed player involvement (which I'm big on), unless very well crafted, and even then...
Obviously, if you love the idea of the planes as surreal, you arn't going to get a good game out of them if you are constantly there. It would involve too much blundering, too little interaction, and too little plot to make use of it as an actual long term campaign, though maybe an intersting episodic game if someone was into (which I think neither of us are). Which is another reason I underplay the surrealism, or at least make it a backdrop for my games instead of any real focus, for example, the changing to an anthropomorph on the Beastlands.
This might be where the stylistic difference counts the most.
So you make use of them in other ways. Great. But in doing so you have by the general admission of everyone here started doing things in the planar session that are more or less nothing but things that could happen in the prime with different window dressings. If I were to do so in my campaign, I'd fear that I'd not only wreck the value of my setting, but I'd demystify the 'other world' that as Lovecraft put it, 'lies beyond the Gates of Sleep'.
Planescape is interesting in that it is a philosophical setting. The Factions, beliefs having real power, and the pushing onto DMs that many situations can be solved through roleplay were part of what really made the setting stand out. Ironically, it went against the very dungeons and dragons that gave the game its name, with adventures where travel and meeting interesting people who lived in these strange worlds with strange ideas were the main focus. You could litterally change the face of entire areas by changing the way in which people there
thought.
The sense of mystery might be lost for some who are bombarded with mystery constantly, but for me, it only awakens new wonder every time I play. Once the PCs in my game came upon a giant temple, with portals to a temple just like it on every plane of existance. Only, they found out, it was actually one temple. Their notions of space and "where" something is were readily dismissed by some who knew about it as foolish and "childlike." One time they had to try and stop a war so that a kingdom would not move to the Abyss, and then they failed but changed things enough that a good portion of it fell into Carceri. Yet another time they came upon a Celestial guarding something. They didn't chat with him because he had nowhere to go, he wasn't interseting in the outside world, and he didn't care to inform them of what he was doing even though they were good. He told them to leave, for their questions were of no use, and they could not understand the true nature of what he was doing. [They wanted something he was guarding, but luckily for them did not decide to try anything.]
You could run it as a prime with different window dressing, I know. The game I'm running right now is kind of like that because I have two new players and I don't want them to be lost, so I'm slowly introducing them to the more in depth planar philosophies, so not too much weirdness.
Planescape is interseting to me in that it is whatever I feel like at the time. I can run a viking campaign set on Ysgard or I could run a Limbo/Pandemonium campaign where the main theme revolves around the abstract idea of true madness, what reality is, and if there is a distinction between the two. It's whatever you want it to be.
