So following Anarch's and Rip's comments [url=/forums/ *** viewTopic.php?intTopicID=904]here[/url], I've begun wondering what a post-FW Planescape setting would look like in which the (now dispersed and somewhat de-powered) factions chose to continue the kriegstanz. Here are a few thoughts:
- The new kriegstanz is not confined to Sigil. It can take place across the planes, in gate-towns, citadels, divine realms, and anywhere or anytime the factions consider something worth fighting over. This means that it is more likely to glancingly touch on the lives of average planars, but less likely to interfere on a regular basis.
- The war is likely fought for much the same reasons - disagreements over belief, attempts to control the tools of influence, and personal disagreements and hatreds stemming from earlier conflicts. Having faction higher-ups spread across the planes (and so not screaming directly in each others' faces) reduces this, but as the factions settle into their new homes and begin spreading webs of communications and influence the old rivalries start to stir once more.
- The new kriegstanz is likely to be more liable to erupt into open bloodshed than the old war. Since face-to-face encounters are shorter and sharper than in the past, the temptation to gain an advantage with bared steel or spell is that much greater. The more dispersed nature of the conflict also reduces inhibitions - in Sigil, you had to worry that the people of the street you brawled on would denounce you a week later, but when the entirety of the planes is your battlefield, why care?
- The main aggressors in the new conflict include the Harmonium, the Fated, the Athar, the Merkhants, and possibly the Dustmen and the Doomguard. Ragers, Sodkillers, and some Sensates, Xaositects and Ciphers also intervene in a more individual and disorganized manner.
- In addition to faction conflicts, the new kriegstanz also features a fair amount of outside intervention, as exemplar beings and divine powers seek to use the widening battling to their own ends. Deities like Loki, Hermes and Set get involved almost immediately, as do the yugoloths; Primus, the archons of the Mount, and the baatezu and tanar'ri take longer, but choose to meddle as well. Eventually, even the archomentals get involved. And while the rilmani are suspected of playing, nobody is ever quite confident enough to say so openly.
I think this has some possible promise. Anyone else interested in nailing down some specifics of what makes a post-FW kriegstanz tick, the terms on which it's fought, and the fallout on the planes as a whole?
Part of the thing that makes the kriegstanz the, well, kriegstanz is precisely that it can't ever escalate to open war because of the nature of Sigil and the Lady. [Or at least, so people think/thought.] In order to encapsulate the feeling of the kriegstanz, then, you'd have to arrange for this kind of hostile peace/Cold War mentality to break out in the planes and I don't see how that would come about. To me, the other Outer Planes are about not only the incarnation of particular moral and ethical philosophies but, by and large, taking them to such an extreme (an "exemplification", if you will) as to find other philosophies intolerable. As long as the Blood War rages, then, outright conflict between the various philosophies seems inevitable -- and, from a design standpoint, desirable.
Put another way, the only way a kriegstanz/Cold War type scenario can unfold is by either internal or external pressure, and the existence of exemplar philosophies pretty much eliminates the former possibility. [Although see below.] As for external pressure, absent The Lady or some other overpower-esque being dictating what can and cannot be done, I don't see that happening either.
Now, the one possibility that occurs to me isn't so much the battles of the exemplars and other paramortals as it is the kriegstanz of the gods. This meets my criterion above by the simple virtue of the fact that, as near as we can tell, the gods are frightened of death and are possessed of the means to destroy one another. If something like this were to emerge and the Planes weren't rife with the kind of lunatic warmongers who'd cheerfully nuke all of existence rather than let One Of THEM live another moment... then, I could see a kriegstanz emerging.
With all that said, I eagerly await those more knowledgeable and devious than I to show me the error of my ways