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Yora
2014-01-02, 10:14 AM
Something I always wanted to do is to run a Planescape campaign. The books are great and the setting is amazing, but since most players in my current group are very new to RPGs and I also want to put my homebrew setting to use, I've been keeping that plan on hold for now.
But one big problem I see with the setting is how to run it in a way that really makes it's unique traits relevant and gets them to shine. Running a standard city adventure and simply replacing elves with eladrin and half-orcs with baatezu seems like a huge waste of potential, severely underusing what the setting has to offer.

BWR
2014-01-02, 10:42 AM
The thing to remember about Planescape is that it's about exploration, philosophy, discovery and most importantly, a sense of wonder.
It's about being able to throw the most amazing things imaginable at your players and not have it ruin the game world. It's about mysteries and secrets and things people are not meant to know. It's about hidden conspiracies and the power of belief to physically change the world. It's about testing the PCs' beliefs and having them come out changed, possibly stronger.
It's about being able to let your imagination run wild. It's about thinking differently.

It's not just a dungeon crawl or a wilderness adventure with unusual scenery. There may be such elements there, but they are more the backdrop to the more important things.

It really does work best if the players are familiar with the 'average' D&D world, with good demihumans and bad humanoids and reclusive mages and disease/famine running rampant despite a plethora of level 5+ clerics. So start off with your homebrew setting. You can always get them to Sigil later if you so want.

Brookshw
2014-01-02, 04:07 PM
Great idea for a thread Yora! Planescape has long been my favorite setting :smallbiggrin:

BWR already nailed a lot of the setting material regarding belief, philosophy, exploration so a tip of the hat to him!

Wonder and fantastic locations are great. Anything can exist, nothing is too improbable not to happen somewhere. NPCs and various beliefs are great to fluff the setting with though I feel to some extent this is more of a setting for RP as opposed to hack and slash game play. You can do either sure, but personally speaking the setting loses some of it's flair if you aren't emphasizing the nature of belief (something I admit I don't feel I do very well). Knowledge of the setting is important for the players and the nature of it, a good pre-campaign discussion is worth it's weight in gold.

Throw out the notion (mostly) of immediately hostile opposition and assumption of predefined roles. Doing business with Devils and Demons while a Celestial sips some strange concoction a few seats down the bar and some bizarre green skinned giant bard is singing some ballad in the corner is perfectly acceptable.

The factions are great though they weren't well defined in 3.0/3.5. The planar handbook does something to revive them.

From my own campaigns I like to start with some form of question that I want to explore. In my longest PS campaign I started the question of "Do we accept limits/fate and what are the nature of such?". Through out the course of the campaign we had Celestials and Gods arguing both sides, same for the big evil factions. In the campaign we just wrapped I asked the question "what do we sacrifice for love?". Interestingly enough I had one player OOC threaten to destroy the entire campaign if something happened to their IC child so I guess that answered that question to some extent. The play style of the group should probably be taken into account, find a question that can engage the party, even if they don't know that you've posed it.

And as always have fun with the setting, it can be anything, anywhere. The planes are infinite and anything can happen. Great for sandbox adventures, you can dangle a great variety of plot hooks everywhere for everything!

For resources I recommend planewalker.com

Further edits likely forthcoming

Eldan
2014-01-02, 04:27 PM
There's one basic concept I have when running Planescape. It's about the mundane and the amazing or unusual.

Basically, this. In Planescape, in an amazingly magical place, you may (often will) find normal people, doing mundane things. And the other way round, in a mundane place, you will find amazingly magical creatures. The amazingly magical creatures can have absolutely mundane, even boring, motivations. And the other way around, again.

Mix and match the two.

The Citadel of Azure Flames that stands on the Edge of Oblivion above the Sea of Aeons has a janitor. That janitor has a little yappy dog.

You step into a bar, and in the corner sits a general of the nine hells, Lord over 8000 devil legionaires, having a glass of fine red with a nice young lady.

The City of Six Thousand Towers has travelled the lightning fields of the Whispering Desert for longer than even immortals can remember. Two locals are loudly complaining about the new tobacco tax.

Your local barber is an ettercap who can only communicate via hand signs. In his spare time, he collects rare orchids.

The red phantom stalking the streets of the Bazaar is a dead baker who can not pass on because he really wanted to find out his neighbour's peach cake recipe before he died.

That's mostly just an element for scene description, of course. But it sets the tone and occasionaly helps you come up with some really memorable NPCs and some unusual sidequests.

Ionbound
2014-01-02, 09:36 PM
I've never played or run Planescape, but I've looked into it and know about the setting, and I think what makes it unique is the freedom to...there's not really a word for it, but I think the closest would be "shenanigans". So long as you can back it up, you can do just about anything to anyone. A memorable example from the Spoony Experiment is Tandem trying to "have some fun" with some unidentified daughter of Zeus. Of course, he couldn't back it up and got tossed off of Olympus, but that's the other part of the fun. :smallbiggrin:

NichG
2014-01-02, 09:40 PM
I ran a Planescape campaign once that was about a travelling troupe of performers who basically traversed the Infinite Staircase, going to all sorts of different planar metropolises, demiplanes, prime worlds, etc. It worked pretty well to give the idea of 'every place is completely different and idiosyncratic'. They performed for demigods in Arborea, ignorant Primes in a world so small that when there was a religious schism in their worship of the sun god, the world started to cool down and become uninhabitable, a world of tiny island nations amidst great seas populated by the Sea Dragon Kings of chinese mythology, a city made entirely from the imagination of a powerful Signer, a world where the locals believed strongly that anyone who went out at night would be swallowed by hideous beings from beyond creation (and whose belief was strong enough to create said beings), and so on.

Rhynn
2014-01-02, 10:03 PM
A cynical world-weariness is essential to the tone and style, IMO. Any cutter is going to have a "been there, done that, seen it" attitude to sights that would make a Prime berk fall on his knees and cry at the beauty or the horror of it.

You also need to mix in, in Sigil or anwhere else that Planars (not petitioners) congregate, a lot of Victorian London, with tarts, knights of the post, cant, smoke, poor and dirty people, and human (or non-human) misery, with crumbling tenements, dirty alleys, dingy bars (even if the bartender is an efreeti), and so on. You can also use a similar style in a lot of planar settlements, particularly in the Lower Planes.

Eldan
2014-01-03, 06:49 AM
A cynical world-weariness is essential to the tone and style, IMO. Any cutter is going to have a "been there, done that, seen it" attitude to sights that would make a Prime berk fall on his knees and cry at the beauty or the horror of it.

That's mainly Sigilians, though. There's plenty of very enthusiastic planars, too.

jedipotter
2014-01-03, 01:25 PM
But one big problem I see with the setting is how to run it in a way that really makes it's unique traits relevant and gets them to shine. Running a standard city adventure and simply replacing elves with eladrin and half-orcs with baatezu seems like a huge waste of potential, severely underusing what the setting has to offer.

Planescape is a great setting. Baatezu don't ''replace'' half-orcs, as the two are nothing alike. You won't find a group of baatezu eating and drinking at a tavern, for example.

But the best thing about Planescape is the fantasy extremes you can go too. Most settings are locked into the ''Lord of the Rings'' dirt poor reality, where just about everything is ''just like Earth around the 12th century''. And you can't really go too far past ''old Earth'' without changing the setting. Worse you can't add ''common'' fantastic stuff without the players demanding to know about it ahead of time, and ruining the fun of the game. For example, if you have moneylenders that use undead as enforcers, the players would want to know about that before they ever encountered them. It ruins all sorts of plots, as the players know everything ahead of time ''Oh if I go to the House of Aylt I can get a free wish, but it will cost a level...ok, I won't go there.''

At best the players will just avoid anything ''bad'' and just have a bland game. A worse, they will use there automatic insider knowledge to over prepare for everything and automatically win.

But Planescape is different. Every doorway is an infinite distance away from everything else. So you can have a demon city where the demons, say, randomly eat any human not wearing black three times a day. And the characters can just walk into the city not knowing that (Though granted, too, you need to fix the knowledge planes cheat where one roll lets the player know everything in the multiverse).

Brookshw
2014-01-03, 01:57 PM
Planescape is a great setting. Baatezu don't ''replace'' half-orcs, as the two are nothing alike. You won't find a group of baatezu eating and drinking at a tavern, for example.


Quibble: by Canon you do in fact, much like a very nice loth that runs a shop in sigil while another is the head of organized crime.

SmartAlec
2014-01-04, 08:10 PM
Belief is the most important thing there is, and i often introduced secret penalties or unfortunate happenstances to fall upon characters who had weak personal convictions or none at all, while characters with strong concepts to serve as their bedrock were treated with respect by fiends, celestials and other beings able to sense such things. It didn't matter what the beliefs were - just that characters had them.

Because that's how it is - if you're weak in belief, then you're going to be pushed around by the universe in small, awkward little ways. The Factions are often played up in my games, as reservoirs of belief that folks can become part of and stand on a metaphysical equal level with planar creatures. After all, there's hundreds of Gods - but only 13 Factols.

That's one of the reasons I really like the setting, it's written into the basic concept that roleplaying becomes prominent. The mechanical side of the games takes a bit of a back seat.

Pokonic
2014-01-04, 10:29 PM
I like to keep a 'mundane fantastic' approach when dealing with Planescape. Sigil is a fascinating place that functions as a waypoint for almost everything imaginable. Go nuts.

Yora
2014-01-05, 06:42 AM
I see how the planes are what they are because of belief, but how exactly would it affect PCs on the individual scale?

BWR
2014-01-05, 07:23 AM
Have you read the core boxed set? The basics are there. (Note: I'm not trying to be rude, but I've noticed a number of people claim to like something without having actually read much, if any, of the primary sources)
For one thing, Faction abilities. I never liked the fan conversions that made you spend feats on Faction abilities. Give them to PCs when they join as a bonus. Possibly make some improved variants that can be purchased as feats.
Also, the "Planewalker's Handbook" has some ideas about how to implement this called Belief Points. It was a rather simple rules-light system that relied a lot on roleplaying.
There was also an interesting conversion to Mage: the Ascension (http://www.planewalker.com/sites/default/files/Planar-Mage.pdf) which might be of interest.

jedipotter
2014-01-05, 08:41 AM
Quibble: by Canon you do in fact, much like a very nice loth that runs a shop in sigil while another is the head of organized crime.

But a fiend does not run a shop ''just like a human or dwarf'' unless your in a video game. A fiend has different goals in life then a mortal. Ton Smithwire, a 30 year old human shopkeeper, is nothing like Garrnto, an immortal fiend shopkeeper. And the fun part is the twist, why does a fiend run a shop? And the twist can be anything, including fantastic things.


I see how the planes are what they are because of belief, but how exactly would it affect PCs on the individual scale?

Belief Points from 2e work great (aka action points in 3E). But it really depends on the players. Some players like belief, alignment , morality and such.....but some don't.

SmartAlec
2014-01-05, 08:48 AM
But it really depends on the players. Some players like belief, alignment , morality and such.....but some don't.

If they don't, then they're in the wrong setting, for sure.

Yora
2014-01-05, 08:59 AM
Alignment in Planescape is weird.
On the one hand, alignment is meant to be super important and a defining character of the planes.
But on the other hand, both the society of Sigil and the Factions very much subvert alignments and completely blurr things by making the different planar beings cross paths and mingle like its a completely ordinary thing.

In some ways, it seems like Planescape is the D&D setting in which alignment matters the least.

NichG
2014-01-05, 09:21 AM
I don't know if its necessarily a good idea to actually have a solid, mechanical representation of the effects of belief on an individual level. That potentially makes it too concrete (I've run campaigns in Planescape both where belief was and wasn't a mechanical feature of the game - it doesn't ruin it to have it be mechanical, but it does change the feel a bit).

What I'd do is, as GM, work each character's beliefs into the story and more importantly into the world. Have a character find out that what they believed/expected/feared was true actually is. Have this happen more in accordance to the strength of the belief than how feasible the idea is. Maybe even have something happen after the fact that hints at the possibility that the PC's belief changed reality - nothing too overt or too common.

My favorite example is 'Adahn' in Planescape: Torment. When you talk to people sometimes you get the chance to lie about your name and tell them that its Adahn. If you do this enough, near the end of the game you can return to the bar and find that there actually is an Adahn there. If you have a high wisdom, you can say something like 'hey, do you have that magic item you were holding on to for me?' and of course he has one and gives it to you.

Edit: Agreed about alignment, but in a 'kind of' way. Alignment provides a backdrop to make the beliefs in Planescape stand out in contrast. The importance of the factions is highlighted by 'our faction ideas are more important to us than the cosmic war between alignments that is going on all around us'.

SmartAlec
2014-01-05, 09:33 AM
Alignment in Planescape is weird.
On the one hand, alignment is meant to be super important and a defining character of the planes.
But on the other hand, both the society of Sigil and the Factions very much subvert alignments and completely blurr things by making the different planar beings cross paths and mingle like its a completely ordinary thing.

In some ways, it seems like Planescape is the D&D setting in which alignment matters the least.

The alignment conflicts matter everywhere except Sigil, which is an anomaly. The city would be a roiling battleground continually fought over by the forces of the Planes, if not for the Lady of Pain. There should be a feeling of culture shock from travelling from Sigil to the Planes.

BWR
2014-01-05, 09:40 AM
Indeed there are a number of PS DMs that ignore alignment altogether. I like to think of it as the one setting that actually bothers to take a proper look at alignment. At least potentially, since not every game will make a big deal of it.
The philosophy aspect is the attempt to find out what the alignments actually mean. What does it mean to be Lawful? How is Good not the same as Nice? Can studied neutrality be an actual belief rather than moral and intellectual cowardice?

Look at it like this: alignment is an actual, metaphysical aspect of the reality of the Great Wheel cosmology. It can be detected, affected and influenced. Alignment is in many ways the result of belief and belief put into action.
Belief can change the multiverse (at least the Outer Planes - the other ones are a bit iffy), and collective belief can have long-lasting and far-reaching consequences beyond what an individual can achieve - thus gods. Above gods, from all the various beings that can believe, belief coalesces into the various Outer Planes. They are the way they are because so many beings have believed them to be in that way. Evil exists because some beings want power at the expense of others. Good exists because some beings want to help others, often at the expense of themselves. Law exists because some beings think everything needs to be orderly and strictured. Chaos exists because beings recognize that not everything makes sense and they want to be free. Neutrality exists because not everyone cares enough about the extremes to make a difference, or because they believe in the Golden Mean.

The current system keeps running because of inertia. There are so many beings that are used to the way things are now that they keep the status quo going, usually without quite realizing it or because they realize they can't change things. If you get enough beings believing the same thing you can change reality. You get enough beings believing you can tear down the current shape of the Outer Planes and reshape it. Good luck actually managing it, though.

At least that's my take on it.

Yora
2014-01-05, 09:44 AM
When I still used alignment in my games, I treated it as a way of thinking, not a defined set of behaviors.
When a chaotic evil character is faced with a descision, it will be based on what benefits him right at that moment. If he can get away with it he does not care if it causes problems for others and it doesn't matter if he chose differently the last three times he was in a similar situation. That does not mean that he will go for the option that includes the most sensless slaughter and suffering.

Good: Help others in need, even if you have to make personal sacrifices.
Evil: Think of your own benefit first and don't be stopped by others suffering from it.
Law: Act consistent with the rules by which you think everyone should play.
Chaos: Decide spontaneously based on what would get you the best result in this specific case right now.

It can be made into a major factor for the behavior of characters without predetermining what they do and what they think. Extremely lawful characters will always want to have everything planned in advance and react very badly every time someone steps out of line, while very chaotic characters never have any real plans before they jump into the action. Lawful characters could be very tidy and chaotic ones quite messy. I think this can quite well be played up to the extreme, which in Planescape it should, but still allow for different and even opposing alignments to meet and interact. But I would very much stay away from playing alignment as opposing teams in which everyone is either with us or against us.

Eldan
2014-01-05, 09:51 AM
Alignment, perhaps, should be seen not as "these are my morale standpoints" and more "these are the planes my soul is aligned with". After all, after death you go to your most closely aligned plane, unless you worship a god. So, someone's who's lawful good is someone who would fit in most on Bytopia, Arcadia or Celestia.


I see how the planes are what they are because of belief, but how exactly would it affect PCs on the individual scale?

Several ways. For some, you may take inspiration from Torment. There's a scene where a city shifts from the Outlands to Carceri and the player has to shift it back by changing people's minds. That is a canon thing that happens every so often in Planescape. A good example are all the outland gate towns. Most have a political faction that tries to move the city to the corresponding plane and one that wants to keep it out of there.

The example that comes to my mind, since I ran the Great Modron March, is the gate town to Mechanus. There's a very lawful city council, but also a council of anarchy, that tries to keep the city just chaotic enough to prevent it from slipping. Then comes the question, of course, of "why are they doing that here, instead of just moving to Limbo, if they like chaos?"

Then, there's the motivations various antagonists might have. It's not necessarily money or even just power. It's promoting your faith and philosophy. Desire and the Dead, available on Planewalker is an interesting case. The basic story is that a powerful Sensate creates an item that lowers people's inhibitions when they are exposed to it and makes it hard for them to supress their emotions and not immediately act on them.
She then gives it to a group of Xaositects and tells them to go annoy the Dustmen with it.
So, the story starts with just some Dustmen who behave strangely, weeping or crying in the streets. Then things go to hell once several undead, who joined the Dustmen to keep their unsavoury hungers in check with emotionlessness and meditation, are exposed and start rampaging.
So, yes. Part of the motivation is that she wants to weaken a rival power group. But even more, she wants to show the world how powerful emotions are. Because the more people believe that, the more powerful her group becomes and the more the universe itself aligns itself with that idea.

SmartAlec
2014-01-05, 09:53 AM
This (http://www.pathguy.com/planes.htm) I found a good read, as far as the alignment underpinnings of the Planes go.

Ionbound
2014-01-05, 10:49 AM
You know, I've been thinking about this, and really there's no way to describe Planescape in a way that does it justice other than running it. Shame I don't have any experience at DMing, otherwise I'd run one.

jedipotter
2014-01-05, 12:07 PM
I go by:

Good: Do what you think is right, always.
Evil: Do what you want for yourself, irregardless of anything else
Law: Act consistent with the rules by which you think everyone should live by.
Chaos: Decide spontaneously based on nothing or something. Maybe.

My Law and Chaos don't follow the D&D definitions of ''acting boring'' and ''acting cool''. My version of Law is more like Obsessive Compulsion Disorder. Lawful folks do the same things all the time, at the same times. Unless they have a set reason to change things. Chaos is just pure random.


I don't like the idea that people are ''alignment-less'' and can just pick and choose tiny bits of each alignment and be one big happy vague gray area. In my view, a person grows into an alignment and does not get much choice.

Rhynn
2014-01-05, 01:41 PM
Alignment in Planescape is weird.
On the one hand, alignment is meant to be super important and a defining character of the planes.
But on the other hand, both the society of Sigil and the Factions very much subvert alignments and completely blurr things by making the different planar beings cross paths and mingle like its a completely ordinary thing.

In some ways, it seems like Planescape is the D&D setting in which alignment matters the least.

Planescape alignment is potentially confusing because Good & Evil are not at the heart of it. The conflicts are mostly about Chaos (anarcy) & Law (oppression): see the Blood War, the Harmonium, etc. None of the Factions of Sigil, for instance, are really about Good or Evil. The Harmonium is LG/LN/LE. (Of course, the fact that the Harmonium's actions are affecting, possibly damaging, their "allied plane", may be telling.)

But ultimately, it's not about "Law against Chaos", it's about specific conflicts, like the Blood War, the war between the Upper and Lower Planes, and so on.

This being Planescape, neither the side of Chaos nor the side of Law is usually very nice, or objectively correct: mostly, both are too far to the extreme of their side for their desired end result to be desirable for anyone else....

Brookshw
2014-01-05, 01:46 PM
While were on this topic here's an obligatory plug for shemeska's story hour (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?77613-Shemeska-s-Planescape-Storyhour-(Updated-08-Nov-2013)) Great read :smallbiggrin:

andresrhoodie
2014-01-05, 02:14 PM
I've run planescape twice over the years.

First time was a stargate style game. Basically a small city on a doomed world was saved by their gods and transported to outworld, right on the edge of sigil.

The gods who did it were fairly minor as gods go though and the destruction of so many of their temples and worshippers knocked the stuffing out of them.

Basically the way I worked gods was that they gain power from worship and actions relating to their portfolio within a certain radius of ground consecrated to them.

So there were two elements to the game. Firstly the mortal players who were total fish out of water and attempting to save their civilization by exploring new worlds and planes to find a new safe home for their town and people.

And 2ndly to re-power their gods by consecrating new ground to those gods and finding ways to keep the land for them after doing so.

It turned out pretty fun.

The other one had the PC's as escaped petitioners from various planes who managed to free their souls and find their way to sigil where they ran into each other and learned that with time and by gathering spiritual energy they can move themselves up to being a being of higher power.

There were lots of ways to gather this energy but the fastest was to steal it from other outsiders.

We had 2 tracks, regular xp for class level and spiritual exp. You leveled up like normal with the regular XP. But the spiritual xp allowed them to change their form and choose new outsider powers or actual shifts of body form. Anything from special qualities and defenses to supernatural or spell like abilities.

I really didnt bother to balance that part at all but it turned out fine anyway. All the enemies were naturally pretty powerful and so was the whole bunch of characters. And no one really tried to munchkin it, they just wanted things that seemed cool and fit their concept.

One twist of that game too was that everytime an outsider was destroyed it wasnt really killed. It lost one level of spiritual power and the abilities that it gained with that level and reformed within a few days. Ths included the PC's of course.

That whole campaign got really crazy but it was a lot of fun.

SmartAlec
2014-01-05, 02:14 PM
I go by:

Good: Do what you think is right, always.
Evil: Do what you want for yourself, irregardless of anything else
Law: Act consistent with the rules by which you think everyone should live by.
Chaos: Decide spontaneously based on nothing or something. Maybe.

My Law and Chaos don't follow the D&D definitions of ''acting boring'' and ''acting cool''. My version of Law is more like Obsessive Compulsion Disorder. Lawful folks do the same things all the time, at the same times. Unless they have a set reason to change things. Chaos is just pure random.

That's the fun thing about this setting, you get to experience all manner of alignment flavours and explore what they mean. Just to take Law for an example, we've got:

- Bytopia; natural harmony, following the laws of the seasons and a strong personal commitment to a work ethic

- Celestia; the pursuit of justice and the belief that law should be the tool of those that seek to do good

- Arcadia; social harmony, the concept of the perfect community where all follow the rules with good-natured optimism

- Mechanus, pure law; the communistic approach of the hive-mind, the rejection of non-conformity

- Acheron; the law as a tool to absolve responsibilities, for all those who said 'I just followed orders'

- Baator; the essence of using law as a tool of control or domination, and the concept of tyranny: 'what I say goes'

- Gehenna; gang mentality, the law of the mob and the concept of the criminal 'code of conduct'

Travelling in any of those planes, a lawful character is going to have to look at what they believe and examine it in contrast to what they see in these places. Who are you, really? And that's before we get into Sigil and the Factions.

Rhynn
2014-01-05, 02:21 PM
Travelling in any of those planes, a lawful character is going to have to look at what they believe and examine it in contrast to what they see in these places. Who are you, really? And that's before we get into Sigil and the Factions.

That was an awesome summary, and yes, you can't reduce Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil to a single definition in Planescape; that's sort of the point.

Also,


- Arcadia; social harmony, the concept of the perfect community where all follow the rules with good-natured optimism

Arcadia is the plane that the Harmonium is allied with, right? The one where part of it is being torn apart to move over to Mechanus (or was it even one of the Lower Plaes) because of their methods and actions?

Planescape is, in a way, about the conflict between cosmic ideas and their human* application, about what you say and what you do, preaching and practicing...

* Even when it's not humans, but fiends, angels, etc. That's possibly part of why even the most supernatural creatures can be (but are not always) so mundane in Planescape: so that they can be stand-ins or metaphors for humans.

Tragak
2014-01-05, 02:33 PM
Personally, I see Law vs. Chaos in terms of loyalty, rather than spontaneity: Chaotics want the world to revolve entirely around real people rather than imaginary titles; Lawfuls want to build systems that can withstand the whims of any one miscreant that doesn't know what he's doing.

Planning ahead vs. acting on impulse seems more like an intelligence issue to me than an ethical issue. I imagine that there are Chaotics that can make brilliant plans for building a more individualistic future, they just give their personal friends more involvement in making the plans than they give to some governor half a continent away. Likewise, I imagine that there are Lawfuls that don't bother making any plans because they feel it's their duty to wait for instruction from a superior.

Rhynn
2014-01-05, 02:48 PM
I actually think Planescape needs to be underpinned, at least in part, by AD&D 1E / 2E alignment (there's differences, but they're not huge). Reading those sections in the PHB and especially the DMG would be useful. Law & Chaos are real philosophies about the fundamental nature of the cosmos - ordered or unordered. They aren't the only views around, and not necessarily the most correct ones, but I think it's important for the DM, at least, to see how Chaos & Law were portrayed as something more than personality traits in D&D.

CombatOwl
2014-01-05, 03:00 PM
Something I always wanted to do is to run a Planescape campaign. The books are great and the setting is amazing, but since most players in my current group are very new to RPGs and I also want to put my homebrew setting to use, I've been keeping that plan on hold for now.

If they're new to RPGs, don't. Planescape requires a lot of setting knowledge to play correctly. Having everyone be clueless primes sounds like a way to go, but it results in confusion as often as not. By nature, planescape campaigns desperately require self-direction from the group. They need to arrive at their own reasons for doing things, and that's hard if they're all clueless primes wanting to go home (because it means that all they need to do is find a Good character who can cast Plane Shift and bring them home).

Let the players read over the campaign setting and let that percolate for a few weeks or months beforehand. Planescape is the sort of setting that a lot of people find interesting, because of the artwork in the books if little else.


But one big problem I see with the setting is how to run it in a way that really makes it's unique traits relevant

The traditional way (of course) involves a three-fold effort.

1) Never under-utilize the role (and power) of belief. That's really what Planescape is about. It's about ideas, about belief, and (to some degree) about faith or the lack of it. It's about people believing things so strongly they shape the world around them. The planes, the factions, the gods, etc. All of them are powered by what people believe, and even on a personal level belief is supposed to shape the lives and destinies of planar characters.

2) Things should rarely be definite, change should always be possible. That's a key theme in Planescape too. There are very few things in the setting that are permanent. Even the most well-crafted Maze has a way out, though the individual trapped may be too self-absorbed and blind to see it. Mystery and wonder is essential. Nothing should be what you expect. Invent things as you need them. Use impossible scenes and mindbogglingly huge areas. The setting is supposed to be a place of infinite possibilities, so throw the unexpected at the party.

3) Characters should choose their own path. Let the party direct themselves. Insist that the players, when developing a character, give you a real motive for doing things other than "I want loot and XP." Making the most of planescape requires player involvement. It's not just the DM's job to make the setting interesting. Given the personal nature of the setting, it's really the player's job to tell their own story. Insist that players give you at least some background, and a rough outline of what their character is trying to accomplish in real terms.


Running a standard city adventure and simply replacing elves with eladrin and half-orcs with baatezu seems like a huge waste of potential, severely underusing what the setting has to offer.

Absolutely. Planescape used as a setting for "loot and XP" type adventures is a misuse of the setting. It's as bad a choice for that sort of game as Dragonlance.

Rhynn
2014-01-05, 03:05 PM
Planescape is the sort of setting that a lot of people find interesting, because of the artwork in the books if little else.

Tony DiTerlizzi's art pretty much defines Planescape, for me.

Another_Poet
2014-01-05, 03:14 PM
Until I read this thread, I always thought Planescape sounded... well, not that great. I thought I knew what it was about, and that it wasn't my cup of tea. That's now changed. Thank you, Planewalkers.


Your local barber is an ettercap who can only communicate via hand signs. In his spare time, he collects rare orchids.

It's best if you bring a picture of the haircut you want....

SmartAlec
2014-01-05, 03:15 PM
Arcadia is the plane that the Harmonium is allied with, right? The one where part of it is being torn apart to move over to Mechanus (or was it even one of the Lower Plaes) because of their methods and actions?

That's the one; the third layer of Arcadia just fell into Mechanus because the work being performed in the Harmonium 're-education' camps there had managed to shift the overall feeling of the layer to something more appropriate to Mechanus.

The Gate-Towns on the Outlands run on the same principle. They're settlements on the very edge of the Outlands that act as gateways to the other Outer Planes, but they maintain their presence on the Outlands by being just slightly out of sync with the plane. The gate-town of Mechanus, Automata, is a rigidly run and policed bureaucracy, but it has a small but significant underground anarchic 'rebellion' that keeps it just chaotic enough to avoid sliding into Mechanus proper. The rest are similar...

Rhynn
2014-01-05, 03:27 PM
The Gate-Towns on the Outlands run on the same principle.

Yeah, the Gate-Towns are obviously placed in the setting to act as sort of low-level ideological battlegrounds for the PCs to dive into and affect, their actions deciding which way they slide. It's quite a neat idea.

Eldan
2014-01-05, 03:41 PM
Until I read this thread, I always thought Planescape sounded... well, not that great. I thought I knew what it was about, and that it wasn't my cup of tea. That's now changed. Thank you, Planewalkers.

Can I ask what you thought Planescape was about and why you thought it wasn't interesting?

Yora
2014-01-05, 04:41 PM
I would say a quick look at the basics sound just like ordinary D&D on the planes with a central city that makes no sense and is all about "look at me, I am so random".
Which isn't precisely wrong, but doesn't even come close to scratching the surface.

The more and more I think about it, I am wondering why even run Planescape in AD&D? Combat plays such a small role in the setting and the best stories are those that completely ignore any conventions of level-appropriate opponents, that it might actually work much better to run it in Fate or Savage Worlds, or a game like that.

Tony DiTerlizzi's art pretty much defines Planescape, for me.

He is Planescape. You could do a masters thesis in modern art on how much a couple of ilustration come to define a literary work. (Only other example that comes to mind is Howe/Lee for Lord of the Rings.)

Another_Poet
2014-01-05, 05:02 PM
Can I ask what you thought Planescape was about and why you thought it wasn't interesting?

Sure. I knew it was about hopping about the various planes of the D&D cosmology, but I thought the feel would be very different than what everyone's described here. I didn't realize the underlying presumption that belief has created everything, even the planes and the alignments, and that those adventuring cross-planes are effectively relying on individual and collective belief to create or change reality.

Thus, the idea of demons and celestials hanging out in bars seemed forced and hard to believe, and the whole idea of taking on and defeating gods just felt cheap. I sort of assumed it was just a hodge-podge of different D&D worlds thrown together in a sort of poor man's Dr. Who.

But the way everyone has described the sense of wonder, and the philosophic undertones of the belief economy, makes it seem really intriguing and full of depth instead. Sort of like the difference between a stoner saying, "Dude, what if the world is like, a computer?" versus watching the first only Matrix movie.

Eldan
2014-01-05, 05:12 PM
I can only recommend Planescape: Torment, unless you have an (understandable) aversion to old RPGs with more text than most novels. The game's only downside is that no one can run a Planescape campaign that's as good, so they'll look a bit pale in comparison.

NichG
2014-01-05, 05:32 PM
The more and more I think about it, I am wondering why even run Planescape in AD&D? Combat plays such a small role in the setting and the best stories are those that completely ignore any conventions of level-appropriate opponents, that it might actually work much better to run it in Fate or Savage Worlds, or a game like that.


I would say that you at least want a system where its possible to communicate various levels of danger to the players. You have to be able to give them a cue 'this thing can really mess me up if I'm careless' versus 'this thing is for swashbuckling' versus 'I can beat this thing, but it may have consequences for me'.

A system that is too abstract may make it hard to give the players a 'visceral' consequence. In D&D, if something e.g. causes level drain or causes stat drain or something like that, then the direct attack on the character's abilities helps the player feel some aspect of the threat in a visceral way, and sometimes you want something like that (other times, you want to make it look like they got away with something scotfree, except for the fact that their shadow has a chunk missing from it now).

I think having those 'visceral' dangers helps give contrast to the existential dangers - especially if the players know the standard ways to fix themselves up from the various types of 'game-mechanical' injury, but the existential consequences don't budge or stop being important.

SmartAlec
2014-01-05, 05:34 PM
... and the whole idea of taking on and defeating gods just felt cheap.

Planescape agrees with you. Although many gods have stats, the Planescape approach is that the stats are for when a God is outside of its own domain. On its own turf, a God is invincible, as it has complete control and awareness over the environment and anything or anyone in it. That's why they prefer to work through proxies, rarely move around, and never visit each other.

It's a general rule for Planeswalkers to never mess or even deal with a God, or as they're called in Planescape parlance, a Power.

Come to think of it, one thing that strikes me about the setting is that it's got a very BIG feel about it. You're often made aware of how small you are, how large the universe is, and how complicated life can be when you're a wanderer with a tendency to get involved with other people's schemes and counter-schemes.

Rhynn
2014-01-05, 05:45 PM
The more and more I think about it, I am wondering why even run Planescape in AD&D? Combat plays such a small role in the setting and the best stories are those that completely ignore any conventions of level-appropriate opponents, that it might actually work much better to run it in Fate or Savage Worlds, or a game like that.

AD&D isn't exactly a combat-focused system. If I wanted a combat-focused game, I'd use either The Riddle of Steel or Dungeons & Dragons 4E (with heavy houseruling to make fights shorter).

Ultimately, though, Planescape mashes together all the D&D settings. If you can convert all those settings into another system, more power to you (and I understand what with Fate, that's not too time-consuming), but that's probably more front-loaded work than just using the existing material.

Then again, there are games that do D&D better than AD&D, in my opinion. Adventurer Conqueror King, Labyrinth Lord (if you feel like AD&D, there's the Advanced Edition Companion), and so on... heck, Dungeon Crawl Classics might fit Planescape better than many other things (maybe the initial gauntlet is a bunch of Prime berks being thrown into a weird planar dungeon and having to find their way into Sigil).

Edit: And yeah, you don't generally take on Powers in Planescape - it's definitely not a default part of the setting - although I see nothing wrong with running Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits as your "introductory" adventure for Planescape... maybe even doing the whole GDQ campaign and then transitioning to Planescape with powerful characters who can actually travel anywhere in the Planes.

Mind you, the Powers actually seem to have a fairly small role in Planescape, in general. Groups like the Factions, the Tanar'ri and Baatezu, and the Yugoloths, are more significant. My impression and interpretation is that the Powers are mostly constrained by their own nature, restricted to their portfolios, really powerful inside their own domains (IIRC there's a specific term for a deity's part of a Plane?), and interested primarily in affairs on the Prime Material worlds where they are worshipped.

BWR
2014-01-05, 06:06 PM
Planescape agrees with you. Although many gods have stats, the Planescape approach is that the stats are for when a God is outside of its own domain. On its own turf, a God is invincible, as it has complete control and awareness over the environment and anything or anyone in it. That's why they prefer to work through proxies, rarely move around, and never visit each other.

It's a general rule for Planeswalkers to never mess or even deal with a God, or as they're called in Planescape parlance, a Power.


Actually, 2e in general didn't bother stat'ing gods. Gods were beyond mortal rules. Even books like "Faiths and Avatars" only give stats to avatars. Stats were, to quote that book, meaningless once you got that powerful. they had the demi/lesser/intermediate/greater distinction to give a rough indication of relative powerlevel amongst gods, but that was it.
Since gods were so far above mortals, their plots tend to be a bit beyond mortals as well, which is why most of the stuff focused on Factions and somewhat less powerful groups (like the Lords of Nine, who rule an entire plane and have the local gods toeing the line...did I say less powerful?). There are several adventure seeds about god plots and descriptions of divine realms in the various supplements, so it's not like they were totally ignored.

Also, I think the designers intentionally shifted a lot of the focus away from gods because godbothering, in both directions, was done to death in just about every campaign setting (apart from Dark Sun because DS rocks). Gods are there, but what about all the other fun things you can meet?

CombatOwl
2014-01-06, 06:32 AM
The more and more I think about it, I am wondering why even run Planescape in AD&D? Combat plays such a small role in the setting and the best stories are those that completely ignore any conventions of level-appropriate opponents, that it might actually work much better to run it in Fate or Savage Worlds, or a game like that.

Planescape would work just fine with Fate or Savage Worlds. Fate especially. Though 2e also works pretty well.

Tragak
2014-01-09, 01:10 PM
The named power players that everybody has heard of - the gods, the Demon Lords of the Abyss, the Dukes of Hell - are immortal, regardless of whatever their stat-block says.

The point is not that you can't kill them. No, you can kill them dozens of times over if you get lucky enough; the point is that it doesn't matter if you kill them, because nobody else will believe they are dead.

There are billions of mortals in the Material Plane, trillions of Outsiders in almost every single one of the other Planes, and an infinite number in The Abyss, and every single one of them believes in the current set-up, whether they like it or not. If you want to change the set-up, then you will have to do something dramatic enough to prove your point to every single one of them. Secret assassinations and grudge matches mean nothing if your foe comes back to life simply because you didn't prove to enough people quickly enough that you killed him.

So does that mean that you have no hope of changing anything in the Planes? No, that would be too easy, too merciful. You have something infinitely worse than that: false hope. The knowledge that people have changed the Planar battlefield, and the inability to recognize that you will almost certainly not be one of them.

Demogorgon was not always the Prince of Demons, Lord of The Abyss, and when he challenged the previous ruler, the entire universe – good or evil alike, lawful or chaotic – was feeding the demon who came before, yet Demogorgon won. Billions of mortals, trillions of Outsiders, and an infinite number of demons believed that he who came before Demogorgon was the absolute ruler of The Abyss, yet Demogorgon changed the mind of every single one of them.

So what happens if you kill Demogorgon, yet the entire rest of the universe still believes he is alive? What happens is that Demogorgon is still alive, and he remembers when you killed him. The half of him that values “helping myself” will take it as an infinitely personal insult that must be repaid in kind when he gets the chance, and the half of him that values “hurting others” will think that you were so much fun to play with that he will expect a re-match when he gets bored.

This is why even Grazz’t and Orcus, the two Demon Lords that the universe believes have the best chance of standing up to Demogorgon, must use massive armies instead of personal grudge matches: even if Orcus "loses" a battle, then the only thing that he has truly lost is millions of soldiers that believed his army to be capable of losing the battle.

Because that is the most poisonous thing about the Planes: if you believe for half a second that you will fail, then you will fail, and any sane being in the universe knows that he will fail every once in a while, leaving the Planes to be ruled by the insane.

NichG
2014-01-09, 01:29 PM
I dunno, there's plenty of leverage on the Planes to change things with. Orcus/Tenebrus and the whole Modron March thing, for example, all came about due to possession of the Last Word. Granted, thats something that'd be hard for PCs to keep control of - it was rotting Orcus away, and he was pretty close to a deity when he was using it.

One way to change the planes without changing belief is to find those few things that have power independent of belief - there aren't many, of course, but they do seem to exist.

Rhynn
2014-01-09, 01:53 PM
Nothing in the Planescape canon suggests that it's as simple as "belief is reality", IMO; given how deities explicitly work, it's a more complicated (sublimated?) process, where the case is more that belief is power.

For instance, the Harmonium believes really hard that they belong on Arcadia, but their actions are tearing Arcadia apart.

Tragak's interpretation is certainly one possible interpretation, but I don't think it's strongly supported by the supplements and rulebooks themselves. I could be wrong, of course, and not recalling some key pieces of text.


Because that is the most poisonous thing about the Planes: if you believe for half a second that you will fail, then you will fail, and any sane being in the universe knows that he will fail every once in a while, leaving the Planes to be ruled by the insane.

That's certainly not how things work in Planescape...