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Dornath
2011-01-13, 09:50 PM
Simple Question...

What is it? I've seen it all around the forums....


Second, perhaps not so simple question...

Where can I gets me some?

Lurkmoar
2011-01-13, 09:55 PM
A campaign setting (http://www.nobleknight.com/productdetailsearch.asp_Q_ProductID_E_453_A_Invent oryID_E_0), and then there's the videogame, Planescape: Torment, (http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/planescape_torment) where you play a fellow who wakes up in a morgue...

Dornath
2011-01-13, 09:58 PM
Both of these are relevant to my interests.

Psyren
2011-01-13, 09:59 PM
Here you go (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape)

It's a campaign setting that I believe was supported up until 2nd ed. D&D. Planescape's main focus, as you can no doubt guess, was the planes themselves - specifically, the Great Wheel cosmology from Manual of the Planes that tied planes to alignments.

inb4 Lady of Pain wank

arguskos
2011-01-13, 10:17 PM
Here you go (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape)

It's a campaign setting that I believe was supported up until 2nd ed. D&D. Planescape's main focus, as you can no doubt guess, was the planes themselves - specifically, the Great Wheel cosmology from Manual of the Planes that tied planes to alignments.
It was only in AD&D 2nd, I believe. Planescape did not exist before AD&D.


inb4 Lady of Pain wank
Way to call it out, dude. Good way to avoid the thing you so obviously dislike. :smalltongue:

Aharon
2011-01-14, 04:28 AM
The setting idea itself is cool, but I wasn't that impressed by most published adventures. The setting is all about having different ideas and beliefs compete and being seen as equally worthy alternatives, and then you get adventures like "The Deva Spark", where the DM gets the recommendation to give the players more XP if they choose the good solution.

Oh, and the setting also has a very powerful being called the Lady of Pain, which apparently some posters feel is mentioned to often :smallwink:

Eldan
2011-01-14, 04:54 AM
We aren't even sure the Lady is powerful.


Anyway. Planescape is an interesting setting, but was only brought over in mangled bits and pieces to third edition. It's ruins can be seen in the Manual of the Planes and the Planar Handbook, it's barest shadow in the Dungeon Master's guide, it's reincarnation in a new and paler guise in the Fiendish Codices.

It is a setting where we are told the story of the Outer Planes, the realities beyond the veil, where the souls of mortals go when they die. Here, the thoughts and dreams of mortals are made flesh, and the belief of a man is what defines what is and can be. It is where a blade in your hand matters not a fraction as much as the thought in your head. It is where the philosopher reigns supreme above the fighter. Unless he gets stabbed by the fighter, of course.

Basically, it is set, primarily, in the seventeen outer planes as outlined in the dungeon master's guide, the planes of the alignments and the afterlife. Here, from the souls of mortals and the things they believe about the world, fantastical realms are formed, the heavens and hells of all religions. In the center of all lies the city of Sigil, the neutral ground of the planes from where one can travel to every place with a single step through the right portal.
The important facet of the setting is that everything you see is formed from and influenced by belief: if all the mortals stopped believing in hell, it would no longer exist. And so, the most significant powers are the factions, groups of philosophers that intend to sway all mortals to their way of thinking.

And yes, many of the published adventures are a bit lackluster. Many tend to end in combat, instead of debate, as promised.

hamlet
2011-01-14, 07:56 AM
Planescape's a very decent setting for a "New School" type of play (i.e., story/plot based) and somewhat less good for an Old School methodology.

It's still very fun. I ran a campaign a while that ended . . . poorly. Don't mouth off to Efreet nobles when they're trying to do you a favor. Just not wise.

If you're not interested in picking up tons of material, much of what grew into planescape can be found in the original Manual of the Planes by Jeff Grubb for AD&D 1e, easily ported to any other edition.

If you want 3.x Planescape, there's a website lurking somewhere in the interwebs that converts a lot of the material to D20 that I can't link for you because of the evil office firewall I'm behind.

Eldan
2011-01-14, 07:58 AM
That would be Planewalker (www.planewalker.com). A good site in general. However, they advanced the timeline on their own after the finished products, and I don't like all the changes. But then, I also set all my games before the faction war.

panaikhan
2011-01-14, 08:10 AM
I liked the AD&D setting, and absolutely LOVED the PC game (I still play it now and again).

With DM fiat, the party can get to ~anywhere~ through The City of Doors.
This allows to mix and match different settings (or things from different settings) quite easily. The place is absolutely littered with powerful creatures tho - if the party can't exorcise a little restraint, they end up paranoia-style dead.

Yeah, and the Lady - personally, if the DM involves her directly, he's doing it wrong. Just my 2cp

hamlet
2011-01-14, 09:26 AM
With DM fiat, the party can get to ~anywhere~ through The City of Doors.


No Fiat required. It's straight out of the books that within the City of Doors, you can find a portal to ANYWHERE. Problem is, the effort you spend looking for it and its key, you might have been better off just hopping a few connection portals elsewhere.

NichG
2011-01-14, 12:25 PM
The Infinite Staircase is also a good locale for going to lots of random places (basically its a staircase that has doors leading to anywhere there's creativity) and there is a very modular adventure based off of it by the same name.

Generally though I've had better luck running my own stuff than the Planescape published adventures. The best Planescape stuff (in my opinion) is when you emphasize the weird metaphorical nature of the planes.

For example:
I've had parties chase after a map to determination, to find someone's lost reflection, and had them been rewarded with a true lie as loot; they dealt with a deity whose following was so small that a religious schism caused the sun to go out, and carved a crucible from their own shadow to trick a night hag into cursing herself rather than her foe. They had to solve a murder mystery where a Cipher (one who believes that by acting purely without thought, the perfect set of actions can be attained) randomly killed someone and could not answer why.

Eldan
2011-01-14, 01:19 PM
Ooh. Got some details on those adventures? I'm DMing on Skype, currently, and I need a few good adventure ideas. The last one sounds especially interesting.

Zeta Kai
2011-01-14, 01:32 PM
I've had parties chase after a map to determination, to find someone's lost reflection, and had them been rewarded with a true lie as loot; they dealt with a deity whose following was so small that a religious schism caused the sun to go out, and carved a crucible from their own shadow to trick a night hag into cursing herself rather than her foe. They had to solve a murder mystery where a Cipher (one who believes that by acting purely without thought, the perfect set of actions can be attained) randomly killed someone and could not answer why.

Why oh why were you never my DM? :smallsigh::smallfrown:

arguskos
2011-01-14, 01:46 PM
Why oh why were you never my DM? :smallsigh::smallfrown:
Agreed. I want to play in games like that. Actually, I want to play at all. :smallsigh:

Zuljita
2011-01-14, 02:22 PM
the previously mentioned Planescape:Torment is a blast and an excellent intro to the Planescape universe. Available on Good Old Games (gog.com) for $9.99. I strongly believe any d&d fan should give it a whirl.

Eldan
2011-01-14, 02:26 PM
Who doesn't. I haven't played a real game of D&D for about five years. And even then... those games were quite bad.

NichG
2011-01-14, 03:08 PM
Ooh. Got some details on those adventures? I'm DMing on Skype, currently, and I need a few good adventure ideas. The last one sounds especially interesting.

I posted most of them on Planewalker awhile back: http://www.planewalker.com/forum/sigillian-detective-agency

The webspace with the detailed notes in PDF form seems to still be working even though it should have expired long ago.

There was also another campaign I ran that involved the nature of belief on the planes. The party was a travelling circus troupe on the Infinite Staircase and kept running into weird consequences of belief-makes-reality.

There was a prime material plane that consisted of a 'planet' about two hundred miles in diameter, which only supported life due to the intervention of its single deity. There was a religious schism that was starting to bring on an eternal winter, since the sun god was failing. The party impersonated agents of the deity and reunified belief (also incidentally changing the deity's gender in the process).

There was a demiplane of invention (taken from one of the Planescape setting books) that a wizard-inventor had created with a well-phrased wish, a place where all his ideas would work (i.e. permissive local physics). It had become colonized by tinker gnomes that worshipped him, and as such his personality had been eroded away by the belief of others. The party fixed it by essentially creating artificial lifeforms capable of belief and self-replication (the nanobot godhood solution), and made them believe him to be the way he used to be.

There was a place that had a fervent superstition that some horrible thing came out during the night, and so all must stay indoors at that time. The PCs arrived just as the superstition was gaining additional credence, due to a cult of Yeenoghu operating in the background and pushing it along. As such, even though there was no such thing, the belief manifested as a ripping in reality and various Lovecraftian horrors being created. One of the party members shrugged, said 'when in Rome', and basically became a Lovecraftian horror himself as part of that adventure. Oh, and permanently opened a one-way portal to the Abyss.

Ostensibly the campaign villains were a group of individuals who were trying to unravel the deep truths of the multiverse - essentially, they had come to realize that belief made reality in the Planescape, and so wanted to know what rules there would be in the absence of any belief. They found a way to bottle belief and use it as a resource. The villains were morally all over the place - an Athar who wanted to kill the gods and a Signer mad with power being the worst, but on the other hand they also had a god who was the representation of suffering (and so took all injuries and diseases of those around him into himself involuntarily) and wanted to die, and a Guvner who just wanted to know how stuff worked.

The party ended up taking out the Signer in a weird psychological manipulation battle (essentially, they beat him by using his ego to make him want to believe things that would then backfire on him like 'you don't need to force people to love you, you're so great they would do it anyhow!'), and then joined forces with the rest of the 'villains' to find out what was really going on with the multiverse. They were able to create an anti-belief box, and found that everything stopped working inside of it including basic physics, and eventually discovered/worked out the campaign's equivalent of quantum theory for belief (and concluded that they had deduced my interpretation of the true nature of the Lady of Pain without me even having had one - example of the PCs being more clever than the DM...).

Around this point, without warning, the party received a message that the Blood War had ended. The upper planes were under siege, and many gods had essentially bubbled themselves off into their particular sacrosanct divine realms to protect their petitioners. The party split a bit at this point.

The Lovecraftian-horror character decided that everyone should be a Signer and control their own belief consciously, but some of the others were a bit leery of that idea. The plan was to use a tower in Pandemonium that allowed one to talk to any being in the multiverse to simultaneously suggest an idea to all believing creatures everywhere. The party (those who supported the plan) raced against the other party members who were backed by the avatars of various evil deities that were called in to stop this from happening (since the good deities were all bubbled off or self-sacrificingly in support of the idea). Finally the Lovecraftian-horror character got to the top of the tower just to find another party member managing to appear right at his location and stand against him... at which point the other party member winked, said 'just kidding!', and held off the gods just long enough for all sentient beings to be ascended.

Dornath
2011-01-14, 05:36 PM
The Lovecraftian-horror character decided that everyone should be a Signer and control their own belief consciously, but some of the others were a bit leery of that idea. The plan was to use a tower in Pandemonium that allowed one to talk to any being in the multiverse to simultaneously suggest an idea to all believing creatures everywhere. The party (those who supported the plan) raced against the other party members who were backed by the avatars of various evil deities that were called in to stop this from happening (since the good deities were all bubbled off or self-sacrificingly in support of the idea). Finally the Lovecraftian-horror character got to the top of the tower just to find another party member managing to appear right at his location and stand against him... at which point the other party member winked, said 'just kidding!', and held off the gods just long enough for all sentient beings to be ascended.


You..... Are a GOD.

Muz
2011-01-14, 06:02 PM
I posted most of them on Planewalker awhile back: http://www.planewalker.com/forum/sigillian-detective-agency

The webspace with the detailed notes in PDF form seems to still be working even though it should have expired long ago.

There was also another campaign I ran that involved the nature of belief on the planes. The party was a travelling circus troupe on the Infinite Staircase and kept running into weird consequences of belief-makes-reality.

There was a prime material plane that consisted of a 'planet' about two hundred miles in diameter, which only supported life due to the intervention of its single deity. There was a religious schism that was starting to bring on an eternal winter, since the sun god was failing. The party impersonated agents of the deity and reunified belief (also incidentally changing the deity's gender in the process).

There was a demiplane of invention (taken from one of the Planescape setting books) that a wizard-inventor had created with a well-phrased wish, a place where all his ideas would work (i.e. permissive local physics). It had become colonized by tinker gnomes that worshipped him, and as such his personality had been eroded away by the belief of others. The party fixed it by essentially creating artificial lifeforms capable of belief and self-replication (the nanobot godhood solution), and made them believe him to be the way he used to be.

There was a place that had a fervent superstition that some horrible thing came out during the night, and so all must stay indoors at that time. The PCs arrived just as the superstition was gaining additional credence, due to a cult of Yeenoghu operating in the background and pushing it along. As such, even though there was no such thing, the belief manifested as a ripping in reality and various Lovecraftian horrors being created. One of the party members shrugged, said 'when in Rome', and basically became a Lovecraftian horror himself as part of that adventure. Oh, and permanently opened a one-way portal to the Abyss.

Ostensibly the campaign villains were a group of individuals who were trying to unravel the deep truths of the multiverse - essentially, they had come to realize that belief made reality in the Planescape, and so wanted to know what rules there would be in the absence of any belief. They found a way to bottle belief and use it as a resource. The villains were morally all over the place - an Athar who wanted to kill the gods and a Signer mad with power being the worst, but on the other hand they also had a god who was the representation of suffering (and so took all injuries and diseases of those around him into himself involuntarily) and wanted to die, and a Guvner who just wanted to know how stuff worked.

The party ended up taking out the Signer in a weird psychological manipulation battle (essentially, they beat him by using his ego to make him want to believe things that would then backfire on him like 'you don't need to force people to love you, you're so great they would do it anyhow!'), and then joined forces with the rest of the 'villains' to find out what was really going on with the multiverse. They were able to create an anti-belief box, and found that everything stopped working inside of it including basic physics, and eventually discovered/worked out the campaign's equivalent of quantum theory for belief (and concluded that they had deduced my interpretation of the true nature of the Lady of Pain without me even having had one - example of the PCs being more clever than the DM...).

Around this point, without warning, the party received a message that the Blood War had ended. The upper planes were under siege, and many gods had essentially bubbled themselves off into their particular sacrosanct divine realms to protect their petitioners. The party split a bit at this point.

The Lovecraftian-horror character decided that everyone should be a Signer and control their own belief consciously, but some of the others were a bit leery of that idea. The plan was to use a tower in Pandemonium that allowed one to talk to any being in the multiverse to simultaneously suggest an idea to all believing creatures everywhere. The party (those who supported the plan) raced against the other party members who were backed by the avatars of various evil deities that were called in to stop this from happening (since the good deities were all bubbled off or self-sacrificingly in support of the idea). Finally the Lovecraftian-horror character got to the top of the tower just to find another party member managing to appear right at his location and stand against him... at which point the other party member winked, said 'just kidding!', and held off the gods just long enough for all sentient beings to be ascended.

*crumples up his own imagination, tosses it away*

Lousy second-hand brain of mine. :smallyuk::smallwink:

afroakuma
2011-01-14, 06:06 PM
Agreed. I want to play in games like that. Actually, I want to play at all. :smallsigh:

Such lies. I remember a serpent who abandoned ship in the face of overwhelming modron numbers. :smallwink: