[Kickstarter] Project Eternity by the autors of Planescape Torment

And Chris Avellone, Josh Sawyer, and Tim Cain.

My favourite (digital) game developer. Even when Black Isle/Obsidian isn't working on Planescape, and their Planescape content is probably still higher than any other developer out there (Torment, Mask of the Betrayer, and parts of both Icewind Dale games), they always manage to deal with their subject matter in a way that meshes well with Planescape. Vying factions, gray-and-gray morality, a certain brooding atmosphere-- in some ways, they hark back to the nineties, part of the same wave, culturally, that gave us Planescape and White Wolf's World of Darkness and the whole cyberpunk movement.

Torment and Mask of the Betrayer are out-and-out Planescape games. Even if Mask never visits the Outlands, the centrepiece of the game is Toril's Wall of the Faithless, which has got to be a hot topic to those Sigilians who have heard of it. How can the powers do that? How can they have the right to remove anyone from the cycle of reincarnation, the chance at the True Death, the opportunity to experience more of the multiverse, or to receive their just reward in the heavens or hells, for no greater crime than not believing in the gods?

But Torment and Mask are each a whole post unto themselves. One of the consistently recurring themes is that of being an outcast, the stranger on the outside looking in, whether as a clueless amnesiac in Torment or as a pariah bearing a terrible curse in Mask. The events of Icewind Dale are set in motion by an age-old vendetta between a tanar'ri and baatezu which has seen the latter and eventually both exiled to the ass end of the Prime. Icewind Dale II's Legion of the Chimera is an army of half-breeds led by a pair of brother-and-sister cambions, living in a ruined elven citadel on the verge of being sucked into Limbo, and bearing a deep grudge against the mortals of the Ten-Towns who cast them out in the cold. The stories take place a hundred years apart, but visit many of the same places, and speak to the same shared history. Even the lightest brush with the Blood War has altered the course of history on this Prime for centuries to come.

In Alpha Protocol you're a burned spy, especially good if you want to tap into the Psychomachia, the cold war between the heavens and hells over the dispensation of souls named in Dark Roads & Golden Hells.

In Knights of the Old Republic II, you're *the* Exile, a once-great Jedi general stripped of his powers and thrown out of the order for making the call to use a doomsday device which rendered an entire planet unlivable. The game is about learning what you've forgotten, and is interesting from the perspective of what it might be like to be a mage or cleric, or more aptly, a paladin, cut off from the source of his powers, and made to realize just how much she relied on them. Your party in the game may consist of an evil wookiee bounty hunter (a real dissection of the whole 'noble savage' ideal), a rogue interrogation droid (one of those black needle-orbs from the first Star Wars), three-and-a-half droids, two assassins, two blind women, and two former Sith among others (one of the droids is also an assassin, and one of the blind women is a blind Sith assassin who might be in love with you). The villains include personifications of Pain and Hunger, embodied in Darth Sion, a broken, scarred husk who cannot die because he simply refused to do so, and Darth Nihlus, a black-clad figure described as a gaping hole in the living force-- in the fabric of magic-- who can teach others how to cloak their presence from others accustomed to seeing through the force. The latter is also seemingly incapable of speaking except through distorted telepathic syllables. I like to think that he is speaking in an eldritch language, capable of being felt and known without being understood, of giving imperatives by twisting the listener's mind, wrenching their neurons into shape. Imagine someone casting greater and lesser versions of Power Word Pain every time he spoke-- like that.

In Fallout 1&2, you wander as an outsider to all the towns outside your hermetically sealed vault, or isolated tribal village. Oddly enough, perhaps in all of Black Isle/Obsidian's games, the player avatar who is least likely to be an outcast and is instead welcomed most everywhere he goes is the Courier, from Fallout: New Vegas, if for no other reason than he or she is a courier, a messenger not to be shot. That's alright, though, because the game makes up for it with the central characters of each of the add-ons.

In Old World Blues, the brains of geniuses survived the apocalypse, storing themselves in jars and now long since driven mad by isolation, living in enforced seclusion because they believe the rest of the world is dead and empty, an illusion created by their enemies. In Dead Money, four survivors haunt a ruined fantasy resort town together, built-up around a palatial Old World casino blanketed under a killing haze of rust-tinted chemicals, unable to escape the web of greed and death that surrounds the lost treasure buried in the casino's vaults. In Honest Hearts,there is the Burned Man, a former man of the cloth who has committed atrocities in the name of restoring order to the land, who now seeks not redemption so much as a proper accounting of his sins, fighting now to protect the very tribes which he once sought to conquer.

In Lonesome Road, the last of the add-ons, you walk in the footsteps of a man who has dogged your footsteps from the beginning of your story. The Courier is a purely accidental hero or villain, someone who came into the story by accident. This isn't her home, he has no ties to Vegas or the conflict brewing between Caesar's Legion or the New California Republic. He's not a refugee from one of the local Vaults, or a sister scribe in the Brotherhood of Steel. You're given a job, and it gets you killed, or would have, had the bullet in your head gone just a little to the left. It got everyone else killed; the only one left alive is a fellow courier, who refused the job. You're given a wholly clean slate for your PC in-game, and there's nobody around telling you what to do. If and when you get involved in the main plot, it is entirely by your own choice. In Lonesome Road, you meet that courier. You find out why he's been searching for you, and what he thinks of you now that he's found you. You find out how you were responsible-- once again, completely by accident, for the utter annihilation of a miles-long stretch of the Wasteland. And all you did was deliver a package. You didn't know what was in it, but did you care? And if you didn't, are you not complicit? Aren't we just as responsible for the things we don't do, as well as the actions we take?

All it takes for evil to triumph, as they say... Obsidian games are usually all about making choices, about getting involved, about not being passive.

At any rate, the Fallout series interests me as a world that has been destroyed, and on the infinite planes, over tens of thousands of years, with the Blood War raging all over the multiverse, with the linger skirmishes of the Dawn War, with the Psychomachia whispering along in the background, and the struggle against the machinations of Elder Evils and star-gods-- things must get broken all the time. With all those dead worlds out there, Fallout really works for me as a story about the outcomes of great powers clashing. There is horror in exultation ("I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds..."), as well as beauty in desolation.

I can talk a lot about Obsidian/Black Isle, I mean, a LOT. Buy this game, if you have any interest in games.