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2020-10-20, 07:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2020-10-20, 07:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2015
Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
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2020-10-20, 07:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2019
Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
Passages you are replying to don't explicitly say so, but I've never heard about anyone using that rule (some eschew it entirely) where it didn't cut both ways, so if you are actually moving towards something you can reach it in less time that you need to walk\fly\slither 320 miles. 2000 miles in one direction, 4d8×10 miles in the other is intended mostly to create another aspect of weirdness, not to turn portal towns into inescapable traps.
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2020-10-20, 09:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2007
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
Resident Vancian Apologist
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2020-10-20, 02:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2015
Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
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2020-10-20, 04:19 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2013
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2020-10-20, 04:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2015
Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
The way it reads to me, everywhere past (outside the circumference of) the gate towns takes the same time to get to based on distance as anywhere else normal in the multiverse. But the second you head to a gate town, the trip is super short.
That'd be just as livable as anywhere else, provided you didn't make a trip to a gate town without thinking about the fact first that it might take a lot longer to get back.
OTOH if no matter how far you go out, you can't get more than a certain distance beyond the gate towns ... that just sets an outer limit to how far away from them you can plop down and live.Last edited by Tanarii; 2020-10-20 at 04:28 PM.
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2020-10-20, 04:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
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- Paris, France
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
That's how I read it too.
That'd be just as livable as anywhere else, provided you didn't make a trip to a gate town without thinking about the fact first that it might take a lot longer to get back.
The farther out you travel, the more hostile the environment might become.
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2020-10-24, 07:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2020
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
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2020-10-24, 10:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2013
Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
The thread goes over the shape of Sigil (with some good image). It seems to be on the inside of a torus BUT has a band in the middle cut out so they can see from inside the torus to outside the torus but inside the ring.
But in 2E the torus was filled with layers.
Normally if you look out you would just see Sigil on the far side, but this thread had speculation and theories about the spire. So I was wondering if that speculation meant the spire would now pass through Sigil's ring rather than stopping short of Sigils ring.Last edited by OldTrees1; 2020-10-25 at 11:55 AM.
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2020-10-25, 11:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
That particular image is the only time I’ve seen it portrayed that way. The Planescape box set image I linked before is how I have always pictured it.
Planescape specifies that you can see the spire’s top out one side if you look up and to one side of Sigil’s streets. Apparently, Sigilites even use this for helping with directions in Sigil, with one direction being “Spireward” and the other being “Antispireward.”
I don’t have specific citations for that, though, so I could be misremembering.
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2020-10-25, 12:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2013
Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
I amended the summary post.
Honestly the "look up and to one side" applies to both models. However "Spireward" is more useful as a direction when it is not a synonym with "down". The more hollow model has 3 directions (clockwise/anticlockwise around the ring, spireward/antispireward towards the cut / center of the ring, and down/up towards/away from the shell of the torus). The more filled model has 3 directions (clockwise/anticlockwise, towards/away from the center of the ring, up/down the layers).Last edited by OldTrees1; 2020-10-25 at 12:09 PM.
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2020-10-25, 12:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
Hm.
Right, with the speculation about the Spire... I think Sigil would still be at its top. The fact that there is no top to an infinite spire is a paradox, which is intentional. (It's akin to answering "Can the god of strength and rocks make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" with "yes," and then answering, "Can the god of strength and rocks lift the rock that's so heavy he can't lift it?" with "yes.")
I'm not sure I follow you on the multiple directions with the "hollow tube" version, though.
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2020-10-25, 01:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2015
Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
If the two versions were bisecting a torus and having it on the flat surface, and hollowing out a torus and having it on the inner surface, the edges of the torus arent really spireward. Theyre rimward.
Same number of directions though.
1) around the length of the torus.
2) from the center of the city to the edge of the city
3) up/down from any given position in the city
The last one is dramatically different depending on. How flat or hollowed out the torus is.
The impression I get of the 2e one is its slight hollowed put. Not just perfectly bisected along the length, and the city on a "flat" ring surface. Whereas a "tire" would be very hollowed out. And the 5e pic is an extreme "tire", with the edges almost touching.Last edited by Tanarii; 2020-10-25 at 01:31 PM.
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2020-10-25, 02:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
That's a bit clearer, thanks.
"Spireward" and "antispireward" would be, on the "bisected torus" model with Sigil "on top" of the spire, be "down" and "up" if you're looking at it from the perspective of looking at the spire from the side. I'm explaining this poorly.
Code:O |
I'll see if I can do some artwork and share it later.
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2020-10-25, 03:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2013
Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
You can ignore that section of my post. We had already gone over it. Someone new to the thread had a question. I answered it with some thread history.
I explained it poorly. Here is another attempt.
Take a rectangle. It has length, width, and thickness.
Spoiler: Rectangle map of Sigil
Coil the rectangle so its width is almost a circle. You now have a "almost cylinder". Now it still has length (forward / backward) and thickness (up / down). However the width (left / right) has curved. What used to be left is now "spireward" and what used to be right is now named "antispireward". Why those names? That will make sense later.
Coil the "almost cylinder so its length forms a circle. Now you have the "almost torus" that we see in the torus model. Notice the "almost circle" creates a cylindrical cut in the middle of the torus. Now since the length is a circle, forward/backward get replaced with clockwise/anticlockwise.
In this configuration if you walk spireward you will end up at the cut. If you look down you will see the spire. If you instead walk antispireward, you will also end up at the cut. But when at the cut in the antispireward direction the spire would be above you instead of below you.
Most of my experience with Sigil has been from Planescape:Torment. So I don't know how much depth Sigil has, but it had some. Probably 2 underground floors minimum?Last edited by OldTrees1; 2020-10-25 at 03:58 PM.
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2020-10-25, 05:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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2020-10-26, 09:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.
In the old box sets, where Sigil was mostly a massive stone torus with a city only on one side, as opposed to the hollow tube it seems to be these days, it was said that Undersigil - the underground parts - where considerably larger than the above grounds city, but mostly empty, because there was no way for the air to circulate, so it was pretty much totally hostile to most life, except psionic rats, some fungi and the undead.
Resident Vancian Apologist
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2020-10-27, 10:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Planescape, the Outlands, and the Spire: a conceptual design experiment.