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potatocubed
2010-08-12, 06:01 AM
"Give me a long enough lever and a solid enough place to stand, and I can ruin everything."

So, last night I started playing in a Planescape game. I thought I'd write it up, in part to practice my writing and in part to share the joy of Planescape with these forums.

We're using a semi-homebrew system from Planewalker, which adapts oWoD Mage to the Planescape setting. It's a bit of an experiment since we don't know how well the system will work. We're all quite experienced gamers but I think I'm the only one who knows both the Planescape setting and the Mage system inside-out.

Dramatis Personae
Baru is a goblin psion and small-time criminal, played by yours truly. I recycled him from a Planescape play-by-chat, since he never really got a chance to spread his wings in that one. He's a member of the Sign of One, a faction of solipsists - he's not really a solipsist but he does have a raging ego, so that more or less works out.

Ariadne is a "hot chick with a big sword". She's an impulsive warrior woman with red hair, many many weapons, and remarkably keen senses. She is a member of the Transcendent Order, a faction which believes in action without thought (sort of).

Harris is a tiefling sorcerer (I think), a master manipulator, and invulnerable to normal weapons - although we don't know this last part IC yet. He's a member of the Doomguard, a faction who like to further the cause of entropy and the eventual destruction of everything.

Akroth is what the setting refers to as a 'basher'. He's got a sword. He's got armour. He hasn't shown off what he's capable of yet, so that's all I know. He claims to be a member of the Fated (a faction that's all about being 'strong' and taking whatever you can get your hands on) but he's totally an Anarchist (a faction of anarchists, naturally, who can 'disguise' as other factions). I don't know this IC and he's being cagey about it OOC, but I know the signs...

Session 1: A Gentle Introduction
In which we are recruited for a simple task, and do anything but.
It's a dark, smoggy night in Sigil, the doughnut-shaped city at the centre of everything, when five people meet at a statue in the Lady's Ward - the posh bit of the city. They have been charged by their factions with a task of utmost importance: securing the Archon's Trumpet inn so that their faction high-ups can have a secret conflab.

Except... that's not how it happened. Harris recruited a bystander to go in his place, in case the setup was a trap. Baru loitered in a nearby alley - you don't get to adulthood as a goblin without a bit of caution! - but was spotted by Ariadne and Akroth, who chased him down said alley and threatened him with violence. When our Guvner contact showed up (exactly on time) to give us the details, we were all somewhere else.

An exemplary start!

The Guvner - a short, moustachioed guy with a pocket watch - was very precise about how late we were and very vague about just what was going on. We were to make sure the inn was secure by checking the meeting room and making sure that there weren't any saboteurs or anything. We were also to keep out any members of factions who weren't supposed to be there, although we weren't told who was supposed to be there - only that we couldn't stop them from arriving.

So Baru suggested burning the place down. Nothing more secure than a building that doesn't exist, right?

This suggestion was outvoted.

So we took a short stroll across the plaza to check out this inn, and discovered that behind all the smog and shadows it was, in fact, a hotel. A ginormous hotel. A ginormous, swanky hotel, catering only to the rich and powerful.

It's worth pointing out here that three of our four PCs come from the Hive Ward, the scummiest bit of Sigil, and one of them is a goblin. We are a little out of place.

Baru got a little heat trying to get in, but solved that by waving his faction badge around. The staff at the Archon's Trumpet had orders to let the factioneers in, no matter what they looked like. On the inside the place is a) huge and b) full. We've only got an hour to research these people and check the room, so we're going to have to move quickly.

We report to the bartender and owner, an aasimar named Cell who's pretty much radiant with power. Also, hotness. (It turns out he's a planetar's son, but we don't discover that until later.) He's not happy with us tramping about the place, but he's been paid a staggering sum of money to allow it, so. Ariadne tries to chat him up and fails in spectacular fashion. (Not a social skill to be seen on her character sheet...) She does, however, attract the attention of a guy further down the bar who is totally not a fiend, honest, and they get to chatting. Ariadne tries to pump him for information with her nonexistent social skills, he tries to get her into the sack with his mind-control smile but is thwarted by her strong willpower (and lucky dice rolling).

Meanwhile Harris goes to work reducing our pool of potential suspects. With a word here and a comment there he slinks through the room like a balor's fart, invisible, toxic, and generally killing the mood. Pretty soon he's got the place pretty much down to us and a few others (*cough*namedNPCs*cough*). Akroth approaches one of the persistent patrons, a man described as "totally average" and playing with a deck of cards, and sits down for a game. Turns out the man is a Xaositect - a member of a faction dedicated to pure chaos - and his deck of cards is unlike any Akroth has ever seen before. Each card is unique, and none are recognisable: some are covered in pictures, or they've got things stuck to them, or they're oozing, or they've got holes in... the variety is endless.

The game is... chaotic. ("Spiders erupt from its knees." "Spoony!") Akroth wins, after a fashion. His prize is half the deck and having his skin turned purple for a couple of hours. We also learn that the Xaositect has two glass eyes, although that doesn't seem to stop him from wandering about the place like a seeing person.

And where's Baru while all this is going on? Baru is checking the kitchen. He went with the intention of getting fed - he's been living on nothing but rat for weeks - and discovered a shifty-looking waiter. Ambushing the waiter in a dark corridor, Baru grilled him on what was going on, why so nervous, you're sweating like a man on fire, have you set the place on fire, why would you do that? The man was not intimidated enough to reveal anything (or intimidated at all, really) but he was surprised enough to drop his tray of tasty comestibles, which was the main thrust of the plan anyway.

Face and pockets stuffed with tasty comestibles, Baru headed to the wine cellar to find an accompaniment. He also found some cranium rats (psychic rats with a hive mind that gets more intelligent and more powerful the more rats there are). Baru and cranium rats are a natural fit, since they're both small, psychic, and verminous. Negotiations ensued ("What does the Collective want?" "The Collective wants cheese.") and Baru persuaded the rats to keep an eye on the shifty waiter for him.

We reconvene at the bar. We've used up about half of our allotted hour and achieved... very little. While Baru, Ariadne with Not-A-Fiend's room key ("I never did get his name, did I?") and Akroth the Newly Purple, decide that maybe they should get on with things, Harris has gone to work on an abishai and what I suspect is a cambion, who are apparently enemies above and beyond the call of the Blood War.

As the rest of us go to check out the meeting room, he is busy using his silver tongue to persuade some unfortunate drunk to try to steal the cambion's sword on the grounds that his beer will taste better when stirred with 'demonic steel'.

In all fairness, this isn't such an outlandish suggestion - there are plenty of stranger liquors on the Planes than ones that react well to Abyss-forged stirring implements. Using a sword to stir your drink is a bit much though.

The meeting room is totally mundane except for the wards on the walls. No magic can get in or out. It had some cheesy nibbles laid out, which Ubar requisitioned for use in getting on the good side of the Collective later on.

Just as we get done stealing the nibbles checking out the meeting room, and just as Harris' unwitting victim is about to commit suicide-by-cambion, the building shakes. Light flares outside and for a moment all the shadows seem a bit... bladed. Ariadne rushes to a window and looks outside, only to find that where outside used to be there is now a wall. The front door is the same.

We've been mazed. :smalleek:

...and that was the end of the session. Cliffhanger!

(Note for Planescape noobs: The ruler of Sigil is the Lady of Pain, an enigmatic sort whose power exceeds even the gods. When she's hacked off with someone, she banishes them to the mazes - which is exactly what it sounds like. Now we're stuck in this extraplanar maze until we figure out how to get out, which will probably be something to do with working out why we ended up here in the first place and fixing it.)

Eldan
2010-08-12, 06:02 AM
Aww. You brought Baru back in. :smallredface:

Bibliomancer
2010-08-12, 06:55 AM
Interesting, overall.

One question springs to mind, though:

What level are you?

Apart from that, its interesting to see that you managed to get 4 adventurers together who actually bother to have a faction/cause/backstory/character concept with any PvP occurring (excluding the chasing-a-goblin-down-an-alley part).

Eldan
2010-08-12, 06:58 AM
Well, these aren't actually D&D characters, but adapted World of Darkness characters, so they don't actually have levels.

Bibliomancer
2010-08-12, 07:01 AM
Well, these aren't actually D&D characters, but adapted World of Darkness characters, so they don't actually have levels.

Interesting. I don't have any World of Darkness experience, which was part of the reason I missed the acronym.

How does the spellcasting system work, then? Or CR?

Additionally: many people know that the Lady of Pain uses Maze, and its an 8th level spell. You might not, in fact, be trapped by the Lady hersel (who almost certainly has better things to do). One of your superiors might be a 15th level wizard, using Maze as a defensive spell.

Eldan
2010-08-12, 07:58 AM
The Lady's mazes really don't work like a maze spell. For one, it doesn't end after ten minutes, and allows more than one creature at a time (or at least this one does, I'm not sure about the Lady ever mazing several people at once in the same maze).

potatocubed
2010-08-12, 08:58 AM
How does the spellcasting system work, then? Or CR?

It's a totally non-D&D system, so there is no CR. Just... things. The GM has to eyeball difficulties, which can take some practice.

Spellcasting is based on nine spheres (rated 1-5) which govern the sort of effects you can use - you can start reading minds at Mind 2, for example, or controlling minds at Mind 4. The spheres are Correspondence (distance - useful for using other magic at range), Cosmology (planar structures), Entropy (fate and chaos), Forces (zap), Life (also undeath), Matter (transmutation), Mind (also illusion), Prime (metamagic) and Time.

For more elaborate spells, you start using multiple spheres simultaneously: Forces 3 will let you sling a lightning bolt; Forces 3 and Correspondence 2 will let you curve one around a corner to hit someone you can't see. Add Time 2 and you can have your bananabolt fire off in half an hour, when you're safely elsewhere. And so on.

In this system everyone has spheres, even non-spellcasters, to reflect the ability of belief to influence the planes. If you want to play a non-caster, you just focus your points into non-magic stuff and refluff your magic as something else - being hard (Life), moving quickly (Time), acute senses (one dot in pretty much any sphere) and so on. It's not a perfect system, but we'll see how it shakes out.

EDIT: It occurs to me that I didn't explain that very well. Basically, you can create any sort of effect you can imagine with magic, provided you have the requisite levels in the right spheres.