Your Planescape experience

[Ambrus]

I recently ended a four year campaign and am in the planning stages for my next campaign. I've been a big fan of the Planescape CS since it was first released by TSR back in the days of 2ed. I loved the factions, the cant, the flavour and the city of Sigil. I've proposed running a 3.5e Planescape campaign to my players, set almost entirely in the city of Sigil; an urban planar campaign so to speak.

I've been looking over my old 2ed books (which describes the city before the 'Faction War' adventure) and the official Planescape website (planewalker.com) which describes the setting in the aftermath of the Faction War. The new 'official' setting mixes up all the old factions, adds a few new ones and pretty much cuts them off from Sigil in any meaningful way. I'm not certain I care to play in a post Faction War campaign. Is it pretty much the same, better or worse than the original?

I'm curious to hear about your own Planescape experience (both 2e and 3e), what were the best parts of the campaign setting, what type of adventures did you play through and what, if anything, would you do differently if you were to play in a revamped 3.5e Planescape campaign nowadays? Which published Planescape adventures were the best in your opinion?

I'd also like to hear your suggestions for running a purely urban campaign. Which recently published adventures might lend themselves well to this type of gritty urban setting? Thanks!

 

[Henry]

We just started (as in, last night) a Planescape campaign. Check back with me in 3 months or so!

So far, I'm enjoying it - the juxtapositions of types of characters, the stereotypes we are breaking across the board, the feel of so many things bigger than us threatening to squash us, and the sheer running we did in the first session have been a breath of fresh air. I'm used to "fight it or die"... we woke up, nude, being examined by Mind Flayers who kidnapped us in the first session as stuck us in an underground city full of them, which caused some concern at first.

So far, we are well on our way to returning to square 1, which was welcomed by the group. I'll have to let you know.

 

[Ambrus]

Sounds like a great start! What are you yourself playing and is the campaign post Faction War? Are you using the planewalker.com campaign setting?

 

[Atavar]

I was the DM for a Planescape campaign for a number of years back in 2nd Ed. We all had a great time playing. I think the best part of the setting for us was the variety--exotic locales, memorable creatures--along with a built-in, "plausible" way to go to so many different places in so short a time (i.e. portals).

We played almost all of it pre-Faction War, so I don't have much to say on the post-Faction War aspects of a Planescape campaign. Also (with one exception) we played 2nd edition in Planescape. The one 3rd edition game we played was an adventure I wrote (see below) that, while plane-spanning, did not take place very much in Sigil.

What were the best Planescape adventures? The ones that come to mind for me are Dead Gods (long adventure by Monte Cook), Doors to the Unknown, the Eternal Boundary, and Squaring the Circle (from the Hellbound: The Blood War boxed set). Interestingly, though, some of the favorites for my players are more generic adventures I adapted to Planescape, including Return to the Tomb of Horrors and Rod of Seven Parts. Rod of Seven Parts was especially fun to adapt to the planes...instead of the pieces being scattered across a world, they were scattered across the planes. For example, one of the pieces ends up in the castle of a family of cloud giants; I placed that part of the adventure in Ysgard.

I have a modest D&D web site that includes a campaign journal that describes the adventures we played in Planescape. It also includes the 3rd edition adventure I wrote to wrap up our Planescape campaign. The adventure even lead to the creation of the campaign setting proposal I submitted to WotC during their Setting Search a few years back. Here is the address, if you are interested:

http://home.comcast.net/~cakerley129534MI/dnd/index.html

One last thing...waking up naked seems to be a common way to start a Planescape campaign. I wrote a short adventure that had the party wake up, naked, being examined by unknown creatures. After blacking out again, they woke up together in prison cells without bars. In order to make their escape they had to climb onto each other's shoulders to get to the trapdoor in the ceiling. Unfortunately, during their first try they put the tiefling with the cloven hoofed feet at the bottom...my description of what that poor soul saw after he slipped is the stuff of legends in my group....

Thanks,

Atavar

------

"I am a unique individual." - A Free Leaguer who gets it

"So am I!" - A Free Leaguer who doesn't

 

[Shemeska]

I've been looking over my old 2ed books (which describes the city before the 'Faction War' adventure) and the official Planescape website (planewalker.com) which describes the setting in the aftermath of the Faction War. The new 'official' setting mixes up all the old factions, adds a few new ones and pretty much cuts them off from Sigil in any meaningful way. I'm not certain I care to play in a post Faction War campaign. Is it pretty much the same, better or worse than the original?

Having written the Sigil chapter over on Planewalker, lemme add my thoughts on the matter. The fate of the factions as described in the planewalker material directly on the factions themselves, and within Sigil itself, are largely derived from the appendix in 'Faction War' which gives a rundown of the immediate fates of those groups. Some of them have collapsed and no longer exist, like the Sign of One and the Believers of the Source, and their remaining members formed the Minds Eye. Beyond that, the only large changes in the Planewalker material is the detail given on the intra-factional fighting between the various inner planar splinter factions that remain of the Doomguard.

The factions still exist, they just no longer have a direct and official political role in the running of Sigil. But you can't order belief to end (though wholesale mazing, flaying, or other such things do tend to stunt it...), and so all those faction members are still around, still sharing their beliefs, and still wanting to push those beliefs on others. The kreigstanz is still going strong, but it's more subtle, and frankly it's now pushing outwards into the planes at large rather than being somewhat restricted to Sigil. The potential now exists for dragging other groups and even major planar races into the conflict of belief between the old factions and newer, emerging ones (like the Ring Givers, etc).

Blame me if you don't like what I did with them in Sigil proper

I'm curious to hear about your own Planescape experience (both 2e and 3e), what were the best parts of the campaign setting, what type of adventures did you play through and what, if anything, would you do differently if you were to play in a revamped 3.5e Planescape campaign nowadays? Which published Planescape adventures were the best in your opinion?

Keep in mind that I never played D&D prior to 3rd edition, so all of my exposure to Planescape came after it was out of print, or the bits of it that filtered through in watered down form in the 3.x planar material.

So since I never played the setting before Faction War, I've never run a campaign prior to that event and the restructuring of Sigil's power structure that followed it. I've heavily used the factions still, more of a proxy war through the guilds as the factions seek to reach their way back into power, treading the line between being kosher and being flayed for breaking the stipulations set down by Her Serenity. But those stipulations were fuzzy, and you can interperet them in several ways... lots of intrigue.

However I've also played less on the factions' strife against each other than I have advanced the push for power by people in Sigil that jumped to fill the power vacuum the factions left in the city's political sphere. Beings such as the various golden lords, Estevan of the Planar Trade Consortium, Zadara the Titan, the Marauder, Jeremo the Natterer, Cirily, and others. And my current and previous campaign have both tended to focus on events outside of Sigil, largely in the lower planes (for the 1st campaign), and the non NE lower planes in my current campaign.

My favorite adventures from the 2e material are probably a tie between 'Dead Gods' and the adventures in 'Hellbound: The Blood War'.

And, for what it's worth, my previous and current campaigns are slowly being written up in storyhour format (see the links in my .sig).

 

[DragonLancer]

A ran a couple Planescape campaigns back in the 2nd ed days. Its suitably different but utimately it was too different from regular D&D for my tastes.

 

[Gold Roger]

I once tried my hands at running planescape. I've found the setting to be great, but hard to DM. It also can't really hold up a storyline the way I prefer. All in all, I prefer planescape as the setting of short planar detours from more vanilla campaigns.

 

[Ambrus]

Great post Atavar. I'll take a look at your adventure later.

Blame me if you don't like what I did with them in Sigil proper

I was hoping you'd chime in Shemeska; you're our resident Planescape guru.

I don't have a problem with how you described the post war Sigil; it would have been silly to ignore those pivotal events of the war in a 3e PSCS. Since my group has never played in Planescape before however I'm free to set my campaign in either the pre-war or post-war periods. I'm just curious to see how people think each version measures up to each other. I did begin to look over your story hour last night but at 30+ thread pages it's a bit daunting to dive into head first.

 

[TheGogmagog]

I played PlaneScape in 2e pre-faction wars. If I were to run again and concinve the group to play I would probably have the setting be pre-FW, mainly out of familiarity. Maybe I would even run Faction Wars to update myself.

I don't like some of the 3e adjustments like factions as PRC's. If anything, I would make them +1 templates.

 

[Torx]

I've run both pre- and post-Faction War campaigns in both 2nd & 3rd edition. For me, it comes down to how much your players want to use the factions. I've found that with players clueless about Planescape, it's best to run post-Faction War as there is a lot of new information for them to get accustomed to, and the various factions and their influence are some of the toughest for them to wrap their playing skills around. Granted, I'm referring to mostly average gamers that I've played with; if you have a strong role-playing group, I think the Factions before the war are invaluable.

It also comes down to how much you want to focus on Sigil. IMO if I'm using Sigil as a base of operations rather than a campaign city, I'd rather leave the factions out of it (play post-war). However, if significant chunks of the game are in Sigil, the factions are awesome for villains, friends, and just general political intrigue.

In short, it all comes down to the composition and experience of your playing group and how much you plan on running your game in Sigil itself.