Your Planescape experience

[Psion]

Love planescape.

Not a fan of faction war or its results. Tend to ignore that or move things forward.

Not a fan of the faction PrCs either, and some of them don't match what the 2e faction is really about (Athar, I am looking at you.)

 

[Ambrus]

(Athar, I am looking at you.)

I always thought the Ur-priest from the Book of Vile Darkness would make an interesting athar-style prestige class.

 

[Oryan77]

My first time DM'ing was a 2e Planescape campaign back in 1997. I had only been playing D&D for 2 years before that and it was only in a Dark Sun campaign. I didn't know a thing about vanilla D&D or the planes. But Planescape was still calling me and I tried to make sense out of the planes. I studied the books until I had a mediocre amount of knowledge on what "the planes" were. The factions sounded cool, the new races sounded crazy, & the thought of being able to travel to such different environments really had my imagination pumping. Everyone kept pushing me to hurry & DM it so I tried before I was really ready. It was a train wreck; a couple players even decided not to play under me anymore because I was so inexperienced But when 3.5 came out, I started DM'ing again and have gone through a few new groups of players in the same campaign. I finally have a good set of players and we're going strong.

So my 2e PS experience isn't that helpful for ya, but I'm not having much trouble running a 3.5 version of PS. There's plenty of material to find for conversions. I just recently revamped the way I use faction benefits and I'm now using affiliations to represent PS Factions. I found some great custom faction affiliations someone on Enworld created. I'm reworking some of them to fit in my campaign better, but the guy did a nice job and affiliations work great for factions.

I'm still running things pre-Faction Wars. I love the factions and I won't run Faction Wars until I've ran everything I wanted to and when I feel the campaign needs a huge change like that.

The parts I like the most about PS is all the exotic NPC's I get to run & the exotic places the players get to visit. I admit that a planar campaign isn't much different than a normal campaign as far as adventuring goes, but the fact that there are no limitations makes it different. I can work anything into the setting with ease and it'll completely make sense. The setting also provides much more opportunities for roleplaying.

Running the Eternal Boundary adventure is a must. I highly suggest that, especially since you're doing a purely Sigilian campaign. It's low level and really good. It still takes players from Sigil to another plane towards the end but it's nothing major...it'll still be purely urban. The players will get to interact with the Dustmen, Bleak Cabal, Xoasitects, & then whatever other factions you throw in yourself.

You could probably run Harbinger House next. I haven't played it but I've skimmed through it. It's supposed to be good and it sounds fun. It's set in Sigil but it involves a bit of time in 2 gatetown which would still make this a totally urban adventure.

Here's a lit of the adventures that takes place totally in Sigil:

Eternal Boundary
Harbinger House
Doors to the Unknown (At the Shattered Temple)
Well of Worlds (The Mazes)
Dead Gods (Into the Light) - it's a shorter adventure at the end of the book. It can be run on it's own without running the main Dead Gods plot.

I ran Fires of Dis which I think is a really good PS adventure that just doesn't get much attention from PSers. You go from Sigil to a gatetown, then a lower plane to another gatetown. I thought it was very well written and fun to DM. It really teaches players a lot about different fiends and what it's like interacting with them.

I almost ran Deva Spark but it just didn't seem solid. It had some fun scenarios but it was very campy and the adventure seemed empty.

Other PS adventures that I haven't ran but I hear are good are Great Modron March, Tales from the Infinite Staircase, & Faction Wars. Most of the other adventures I've run weren't PS adventures.

 

[Henry]

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?

Our DM is a first-time DM, who is a big Planescape enthusiast. I believe he's using some material from the Planewalker site (he was very familiar with it already when I mentioned it to him) and he already runs a Planescape NWN mod, I believe. I'm not certain yet, since we actually haven't gamed in Sigil proper yet, but I believe it's pre-faction war, since he did ask us to think about factions we'd be sympathetic to, and my original character concept was a Mercykiller Cleric Bugbear, which he enjoyed.

I'm currently playing a Binder (from Tome of Magic) -- somehow, that class seemed to fit into Planescape like a glove. As an Aasimar with neutral to evil tendencies, I seem to be a great counterpart to the good tiefling in the party. There's a half-celestial paladin in the group, and the player's looks when I started tracing binding circles on the ground in my own blood and summoning an Otherworldly beingwas priceless. Even moreso when my feet turned to hooves and I started talking about "saving your limited godling's might" for healing because I had it covered.

So far, I anticipate much fleeing, many other stereotype-busting moments, and possibly having the paladin lynch me...

 

[Ambrus]

Nice responses guys. Good summary Oryan77. Could you elaborate on the Afiliations system you use for faction membership? Is that a newly published game mechanic? I'm not familiar with it.

 

[Psion]

Nice responses guys. Good summary Oryan77. Could you elaborate on the Afiliations system you use for faction membership? Is that a newly published game mechanic? I'm not familiar with it.

It's in the DMG II, though it has appeared in subsequent books defining organizations.

 

[JustKim]

I played Planescape during 2E and had a blast. Earlier in the year I kicked off a 3E Planescape game, pre-Faction War, but had to drop it about a month ago due to personal problems.

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?

It depends. Do you care about Sigil? Do you want to preserve the philosophical tones of the factions? If so, pre-Faction War is the better Planescape. I say this having looked at what planewalker.com has done with the setting and not liked it at all. It has always seemed to me that planewalker.com is more about playing house with fan favorite characters and tooling with mechanics than converting Planescape to 3E. When I started my conversion, I really looked through the site (and its horrendous layout) for something to snag if only out of tribute for all the work they've done. I found nothing.

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?

My experience in 2E was good. My 3E group had a harder time of things because we meet infrequently and play for short periods. The problem with Planescape adventures is that they almost all begin with an investigation to find either an NPC or a murderer, and this does not work well at all broken up across 6 weeks of time. My advice in this situation would be to get through the investigation quickly before the players get frustrated.

My favorite adventure was Harbinger House. I still see copies from time to time so it shouldn't be difficult to find. Among my least favorites is Tales from the Infinite Staircase. It's a long adventure split into modular mini-adventures, connected to a planar device which removes the need for Sigil. I didn't like the device, because I was basing adventures out of Sigil, so I tried to insert some of the mini-adventures without the overarching plot. A problem arose when I realized that some of the adventures don't even have their own goals, let alone conclusions, when used alone. I dropped that one quickly.

 

[Ambrus]

My favorite adventure was Harbinger House.

I have a copy of Harbinger House. It always seemed kind of interesting though I've long had some doubts about how it would play out at the table.

[Spoiler Alert!]Is watching some NPC the PCs have little connection to ascend to godhood with few significant campaign repurcusions afterwards fun? It seemed to me to be a rather weak ending.[End Spoiler]

What about it did you like so much?

 

[Psion]

Among my least favorites is Tales from the Infinite Staircase. It's a long adventure split into modular mini-adventures, connected to a planar device which removes the need for Sigil. I didn't like the device, because I was basing adventures out of Sigil, so I tried to insert some of the mini-adventures without the overarching plot. A problem arose when I realized that some of the adventures don't even have their own goals, let alone conclusions, when used alone. I dropped that one quickly.

Tales of the Infinite Staircase was one of my favorites, next to Dead Gods, but I can see how it might be a problem if you want to keep things based in Sigil. It's good for rootless wanderer PCs, and I thought the way that you could play the adventures in any order was clever.


Modron March (or rather, segments of it), was one of my least favorite. The first few adventures are spent demonstrating what a menace the GMM is, and then they start expecting the PCs to help them when someone starts experimenting on them. It sounded to me like there was not a deep grasp of player motivation there...

 

[Oryan77]

Nice responses guys. Good summary Oryan77. Could you elaborate on the Afiliations system you use for faction membership? Is that a newly published game mechanic? I'm not familiar with it.

As mentioned, the affiliation system is described in the PHB2 book. It's a pretty simple mechanic to add into your game. At first glance it looks a little complicated, but once you read how it actually works it's pretty simple (and fun).

The way it works is a player needs to perform specific actions to gain points in the affiliation. Once he's reached a certain number of points, he raises in rank and gains the bonuses for that rank in that affiliation.

JustKim who just posted earlier is the person that created the Faction Affiliations I found. I have to give him props; he did a great job & it must have taken a lot of time to create them. You can find his writeups here:
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=2870758

I copied his info, stuck it in an excel file and formatted it up all pretty-like with colored boxes and an easy to read layout. I had to remove a few of his criterion because I don't use some of the material he uses for that stuff. And I tweaked/added/removed some of the special abilities. I reworked a couple of the Bleakers insanity features just to spice it up a bit more. But I left most everything untouched so far. I still have several factions to tweak...mostly just trying to add more criterion to replace the ones I removed.

JustKim did great in keeping things related to actual 2e Faction fluff from Factol's Manifesto & PS Player's Guide.