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What crapcore said about visiting gods is right - most dieties do *NOT* like to be visited (legends of exposure to Zeus's true form burning the flesh away from his worshippers come to mind). They're just as chattery to you as they would be on the Prime - aka, communications through communions and divinations.

As for alignment, I think you may have had the wrong exposure to it. Alignment in plancescape is both more obvious and less important actually than a regular game. It becomes *more* relative, not less. I'm not sure who you played under before - but they obviously totally *missed* something.

It's one of the few settings where a player has a legit reason to know what his own alignment is - b/c the planes themselves will react to it. But because it's so well known - it's not an over riding factor at *all* - it becomes somethign of a blase 'meh - we got tons of those' response.

There's absolutely no reason to think you can resolve any problem just by doing a detect evil - not all evil people are actually doing evil, and ditto for good. Not all evil people are breaking the law - for example, there'd be *no* reason to go kill Uncle Scrooge just cause he registered on the detect evil. And you can't go evil just because of one single action either, so it's not so easy to determine the 'correct' path through a delimma. Being good or evil takes into account your motives - not just your actions.

The relativism of Planescape gets even *stronger* when you consider that philosophy is *much* more important in the planar culture than good/evil alignment. Philosophy and natural animosity is behind the Blood War. Philosophy drives much of the politics of Sigil. And philosophies are *not* nailed down in alignments.

For example: The Harmonium is about law and getting along, sounds all LG right? Well - they've got an equal number of LE too that are all for the exact same thing - "by force if nessecary". Some of the LG members are the toughest too worse than the LE ones, because "it's for your own good".

Or the Doomguard. Everything's falling apart, go entropy! Well, that sure sounds CE right? Not really. There's a sizable sect of the Doomies that think things are falling apart yes - but falling apart *too fast*, and are acting as preservationists: LG (ish).

Odd bedfellows and all - this makes alignment one of *many* character traits, not just the overriding one. I really think your previous exposure to alignment in Planescape was a little one dimensional.

The 'whole races born to Good / Evil' I assume you meant the celestials and fiends? They're not just 'born' to it. They *are* it. They are the distilled living essence of their alignment. On some level they are created by the planes and the belief of millions of Primes as much as anything else. Which means on some level, when one of them falls or rises, they're gaining their free will. (Or perhaps some adventurer swung a village somplace to a different alignment.) To be honest - of all the species 'born' to an alignement, and it's not fair to say this is just a Planescape thing - look at dragons for example - they're the ones with the best *reason* for being how they are. At least with a yugoloth they can point out that they're made of the very essence of evil. A red dragon just woke up on the wrong side of his eggshell, regardless of if he was raised by golds.

Another note - not all the planes *are* alignment based. Just the Great Wheel. Don't forget the Inner Planes, and the Transitive Planes.

You can have a planescape campaign without going to the planes. In the Planescape setting the alignment system is simply directions on a compass with vast tracks of 'grey' in between.

Archons might exemplify Lawful Good and Yugoloths exemplify Neutral Evil - but there are risen fiends and fallen celestials that make things less than clear-cut. There's a Yugoloth in Sigil who runs a shop called the Friendly Fiend. No one is sure if he's evil or not (no one has reported him doing anything evil) and he's a very polite and generous shop-keeper. The book "Uncaged: Faces of Sigil" is full of characters that aren't quite who they appear - I like it because it's very well written and also because it turns quite a few creature/alignment stereotypes on its head.

Knowing that it is possible to travel to the Outer planes and visit realms where souls travel to in the afterlife gives planars a jaded 'been-there-seen-that' attitude because they don't have to rely on faith, they've seen it first-hand. But like I said at the beginning of my post, you don't need to have planar travel as an ingredient in a planescape campaign.

Questions about if there is an afterlife can remain left unanswered, or have multiple answers that are each correct (as they are each partial views on an overall truth). Belief has power! That's one of the fundamental rules and as Clueless pointed out: in the Factions a person's alignment is secondary to which philosophy they subscribe to.

The Great Wheel is the standard view of the planar cosmology and worlds such as Forgotten Realms have a different view of how the planes interconnect. The Norse have another view and so forth. The Wheel is one of many ways to view the planes. Here is a link to a few other ways to view the planes: http://www.mimir.net/mapinfinity/index.html

The 'Rule of Three', 'Unity of Rings' and 'Centre of All' is in my opinion what gives dimensional travel in the planes its defining characteristics. There may be more planes that those in the Great Wheel and they may be represented in a variety of different ways. But it's those fundamentals that make planescape what it is for me. Belief has power, the planes are shaped by them and even if the campaign that I've run has little or no dimensional travel, those three ingredients are at the core of it all.