Affliations around Sigil 80 years later?

You really should check out what they've done over at Urban Planescape. The UPS people decided to bring the factions back in and have wars and stuff, and they have a timeline you can use and everything. I'm not saying that what you've done is bad, just that a lot of the work has already been done for you if you want to use it.

It seems to me that the Sodkillers/Sons of Mercy dynamic immediately following the Faction War wasn't sustainable - the Sodkillers sold law only to the highest bidder, and the Sons of Mercy didn't have the authority necessary to make a real difference. With the Fraternity of Order banished and the dabus awkwardly handling trials, the whole mess was intended to illustrate the lawlessness and upheaval that Sigil still had to go through before it again had a fully functioning society.

Primarily, at least one of these factions has to gain some measure of legitimacy. You can't have Law without the weight of official sanction. Until a group becomes a real arm of the city's government, they're just like anarchs in Limbo, imposing a facade of stability that's actually just another flavor of chaos. Perhaps a society can survive that way, but those who champion Order will not permit Sigil to become an anarchist-libertarian experiment, not for long.

The city's government, to have any real authority, must have a monopoly on the use of force. Therefore there cannot be rival "arrest guilds" undercutting one anothers' flavors of justice. Decisions must be made.

80 years later, things should be very different. I can think of a few different possible scenarios:

- A decade or so after the war, the Sons and the Sodkillers can no longer tolerate one another at all, and their rivalry degenerates into open war. Both are banished from the Cage. Entirely new factions gain authority over the city's order.

- The two factions realize that they're both incomplete without their other halves - Justice cannot exist without Mercy, and Mercy cannot exist without Justice. They reunite under a leader more sane than Alisohn Nilesia was.

- Alisohn Nilesia returns to the Cage, takes over the Sodkillers, and has the Sons of Mercy quietly "disappear" until they no longer exist in any meaningful sense. The Sodkillers gain official jurisdiction over all three wheels of order: arrest, judgment, and punishment.

- The two factions manage to come to terms with one another. While they do not reunite, they are no longer enemies. The Sons of Mercy gain power over arrests, the Sodkillers over punishment, and a new faction gains power over judgment (or the Guvners come back in some form - maybe the Mathematicians schism from the main group in order to have a presence in Sigil, or maybe a rogue modron evolves the the point where it is able to handle all the trials in the city at once).

- Sigil splits into two independent governments, one that the Sodkillers police and one that the Sons of Mercy police.

I think that while it's not by any means necessary or desirable for Sigil to return to the status quo after the war, eventually things should get to the point where the new order is as iconic, philosophical, and otherworldly as the old. Most of the guilds are, at this point, too mundane for Sigil.

Incidently, I don't see a psionic guild on your list. Should there be one?

That might work. Along the lines of rival police departments.

It didn't have a mayor, prime minister, or chief executive, but it had a government. That's what the Hall of Speakers was (and arguably, that means the Signer factol was the prime minister, albeit a very weak one). The representatives of the factions at the Hall of Speakers was exactly like a parliament, voting on and ratifying laws.

Far from only making "some kind of general edict or guidelines," they made actual binding laws, codified laws on things like tax codes, zoning laws, salvage rights, and which religions were illegal to worship. While it was something of a chaotic, fractious place, they got things done.

After the war there's the Sigil Advisory Council, which was too weak immediately following the war to really count as a government, but might have evolved into one.

Maybe the Incantifers. Or the Clockmaker's/Mechanic's Guild. Or the SoXanites. If the trains go into other planes, the Gateseeker's Guild would be involved.

Maybe the Ring-Givers, because the trains always return to the station they left from. Maybe they didn't always - maybe sometimes they left the station and got stranded on other planes or in Sigil Below when a section of tunnel unexpectedly became a portal. So they brought in the Ring-Givers to ensure that the Unity of Rings was always maintained, and Sigil wasn't constantly leaking trains. Nowadays, while trains don't always take the routes they were intended to take (and in fact sometimes run through extremely bizarre locations), they eventually find their way home. No matter what.

Another question: how do the future-Sigil people distinguish between the Seekers (Spelljammer faction) and the Seekers (Mind's Eye faction)? Or are they the same thing now? I would just have them merge, personally. Both groups are seekers of knowledge, after all.

Or they could be trying to create a tenth layer of Hell and install Moloch as the Arch-duke. I've always liked the idea of Moloch being out there somewhere raising an army to facilitate his return, and it seems like a band of pirates and mercenaries would be the perfect people to hire.

Allies? Preposterous! They both want order, yes, and they both want everyone to have their kind of order, but they have too different kinds of order, and they are both too aggressive to back down. Unless one of the groups coopts the other, I can't see them doing anything besides fighting over which definition of order is right. Also, what with the Harmonium's expansion into other spheres, they are likely to come into conflict over territory as well as ideology.

That's true enough, but the Guvners are just trying to understand the law, and Red Death enforce it. Neither one of them is a direct threat to the Harmonium's power because, while their ideology is similar, their goals are different. Instead the Harmonium views them as tools, weapons in the fight against chaos. I think the Tenth Pit could be viewed the same way, but they probably won't be for long. Their goals are too similar. I sort of see the Tenth Pit and Harmonium as being in a perpetual cold war, fighting for the hearts and minds of the people of a nation, plane, or sphere and moving on when one side wins. Even if the two groups are technically at peace they will never be more than allies of convenience fighting off chaos while they search for holes in the other's armor.

"Why yes, cutter, we most certainly will embrace your cause. Now excuse us while we spread harmony to those bashers over there. Never mind any screaming you may hear, that's just the sound of progress."

This is the Harmonium we're talking about, not the Planes-Militant. The Hardheads have always had evil members, and they've never seemed to mind the screaming before, not when they ethnically cleansed their homeworld of elves and fey, not when they set up concentration camps on Arcadia, and not when some of them brutally beat up every Indep they saw. They have good members too, of course - probably an equal number - but they're hardly going to refuse to associate with a lawful group just because their methods are bloody. If anything, I suspect the Tenth Pitters will learn a lot about evil from the Hardheads, rather than the other way around.

Of course either timeline you use, 80 years is probably way too soon for them to have trains and such. If you figure that Sigil was at approximately late renaissance (15-1600's) during the Faction War, because they had guns, but most people still used crossbows and such, then 80 years later would be probably be early industrial revolution at the latest. We're talking seed drills and flintlocks here. Of course, things on the planes tend to move a little quicker, but still, that doesn't make up for the fact that until this point, the technology has been developing at a rough parity with the real world and suddenly they are advancing forward hundreds of years in one life-time. Urban Planescape, for instance has Sigil taking 500 years to get to modern technology from where it is now. This plan would have them covering two-thirds of that distance in 80 years. Seems a bit, um, fast.

It doesn't lead to a contradiction if the destination of Sigil's portals controls technology. You can't literally have an average level of tech if the planes hold infinitely many worlds at each level.

You could use that principle in your personal system or find the right sources to follow. (I ignore Planescape canon whenever it suits me.) On the other hand, the scientific method seems too general to ever stop working completely.

I don't see the dabus acting as arbiters for more than a year or so. That's simply not what their role is; it is theirs to care for Sigil itself, not for its people. That they interfered at all with the politics of the city is a shockingly uncharacteristic thing for either them or their mistress. Neither they nor the Lady cares anything for the people of the city - they want to prevent utter anarchy and lynch mobs, sure, but they'll transition to a mortal court as soon as possible. If the people of Sigil aren't willing to make and enforce their own laws, they deserve what's coming to them. It's not the nature of the Lady of Pain to choose sides between law and chaos, and that's what forcing her dabus to act as the city's court forces her to do. The dabus are neutral, not lawful neutral, and it's not in their nature to concern themselves overly with laws either.

That's true. My opinion, however, is that if Sigil's citizens don't step up and create such a thing, the Lady of Pain won't coddle them for long. The dabus justices are an emergency measure only; after the immediate shock of losing all three factions of the Wheel of Law is over, they'll start leaving their temporary positions in the City Court. The people of Sigil can begin replacing them as they leave or not - why should the Lady of Pain intervene to give order to a society that doesn't value it enough to create something as fundamental as a functioning court system? Her Serenity is not Sigil's baby sitter.

Rogues other than Fell? What have they done to earn this status? Or are you suggesting they abandon their roles as the mysterious custodians of Sigil simply because they enjoy being judges too much to stop?

It's possible, I guess, though I think it humanizes them too much.

Of course not; I didn't mean to imply that. What I meant was that as a non-lawful race, the dabus aren't particularly inclined to go out of their way to create order. While every justice need not be lawful, the institution of law and justice is most definitely a lawful one.

The most recent issue of the Lady's Sharper Eye has an article on that subject.

That's a cool idea.

I like the sentient alleyway, personally. I don't think the Lady of Pain should get in the way of a cool idea when it does no harm to the city. If it began rampaging or devouring neighborhoods, sure, she'd maze it, but the Lady isn't interventionalist enough to worry about the occasional sighing sidestreet.

I seem to remember a type of fey in Cityscape that reminded me of the Alley of Lingering Sighs.