Planescape and many old settings back as 4e settings

3 books per setting plus web enhancements. Adventure Guide, Player's Guide, and DM's Guide.

Also note, this is a list of *possible* settings to be released. It is not a certainty that Planescape will actually be published yet.

Since the 4e background of eladrins and tieflings is so different that they're essentially new creatures, it would be very difficult to reference any Planescape books when talking about them.

I'd like to see a 4e Planescape book that described Sigil, the factions, attitude, gate-towns and major NPCs, and I'd like three such books even more. I wouldn't even care so much if they used the classic cosmology or not, or if they moved the timeline forward a hundred years, just because I'd be so happy to see the above in print.

But it sounds like it'll be a long time before that happens, if ever. I think Greyhawk is pretty locked in for 2010, and there seems a good chance that Sigil will only be described in "core" materials rather than released as part of a campaign setting of its own.

I'm in favour of this. It would be great to see Planescape return with some books that could get new players involved.

A pity we will not likely see any adventure modules for it though.

I don't see how the new cosmology can do Planescape justice.

editor lady. Or she did lots of proofreading for Planescape.

Someone got a link for these shiny proposed setting books?

If these planned boks go ahead, will that effect planewalker's work at all?

Kal

If they release a Sigil hardcover, that would make me very happy, regardless of what planes they link it to.

Edit: But Shemmy's warning is well taken. I mean a good Sigil hardcover.

you'd be surprised how many minds if not hearts have swallowed Wizards advertising Lies) which they paid $20+ no less....hmmm perhaps its to justify the cost to themselves...

supposedly devils are now tempters though the pitfiend can no longer grant wishes and has lost a lot of magical power.

supposedly fey are no longer the cute and cuddly...you know, like the Queen of Air and Darkness was? :roll:

the evils gods finally have servant races....oh, you get the idea....

Ah, another narrative hook removed for the sake of the system. It's pretty much a general trend to make the game as palatable and as bland as possible.

Looking at the Phanes, who could once summon past time duplicates of your characters to fight, I see now has a ray that makes you old. Unless I missed something in those stats, that's really dull comparatively.

With a poorer cosmology and mechanics rather distinct from D&D, I have little interest.

Listen up, berk, because I'm not talking just to hear my bone-box rattle.

There are three rules to everything. The Rule of Threes, the Unity of Rings, and the Center of All.

The Rule of Threes is easy to see. There are three levels of existence: the Elemental Chaos, the World, and the Astral Sea. The World has three layers, too: World, Feywild, and Shadowfell. The Elemental Chaos has three layers: Deep chaos, the stable realms, and the Abyss. The Astral Sea has three layers too: the sea itself, the Dominions, and the trackless sky above it.

The Unity of Rings is harder to discern; you have to be a true blood to see the dark of it. It means everything that goes around comes around. Life comes from death, and death comes from life. Fire becomes ashes, which become earth, which become wood, which burn again to fire. Evil turns on itself. Day becomes night becomes day, summer becomes winter which becomes summer. They say if you travel the Astral Dominions long enough, you'll end up back where you started. They say the World is circular, like a ball. They say the Abyss devours itself like a snake eating its own tail.

The Center of All means you're not as important as you think you are. The planes don't revolve around you or your little kingdom or your little world. No matter how big you think you are, there's always something bigger. It also means you are the center of the multiverse because every point is equally the center of it all. No matter how insignificant you think something is, it just may be the crux that holds everything together, because everything is the crux that holds everything together. A butterfly's wings in Bytopia might create a storm in the Shadowfell that sweeps across the boundaries between worlds, destroying a realm in the Elemental Chaos and stirring up thoughtwinds that drive them mad in Pandemonium. This is the secret the Sign of One know, how to take advantage of the fact that they are the creators of the multiverse, because all of us are, all of the time. We dream the worlds into being.

Where is Sigil? It's in the space between night and day, between dream and memory, between thought and action, between chaos and law. It's between this moment and the next. It's between yesterday and never. It floats in the womb of unborn worlds. It's on top of infinity, and at the bottom of nothing. Some say they can see it hovering in the sky in the Astral Dominions above a mountain so high that you could climb or fall from it until the end of time or the beginning and never reach your destination; I never have, but maybe I just haven't found the right Dominion. Who knows? If Sigil is really the Center of All, it's everywhere and nowhere. You'll find its doors or you won't.

Who is the Lady of Pain? Some say she's a Primordial who betrayed her own kind to the gods, and others say she was a god who betrayed her kind to the Primordials. Some say she's nothing but an illusion, or a rumor spread to keep the citizens of Sigil in line. Others say she's an elder fey, or a human sorceress who got lucky, or a shadar-kai who stole some of the power of the Raven Queen and found a place to hide from her wrath. No one's learned the true dark of the Lady, not ever, and I don't think anyone ever will. You'd have an easier time finding the center of a ring.

Ummm..where would I find said modules?

Nice work, rip - another proof that Planescape doesn't essentially need the Great Wheel being used to work. Moreover, as Omar was persuading on his home page, also alignments can be obsolete. And why we should not combine "Wheel" (and every other cosmology) with the new conception, altogether with Astral Sea, Dominions etc.? For example describing Great Wheel as a set of permanently linked Dominions?

It won't be the same, but it still can be Planescape. What's important is the theme - and the tone of the game.

Without some sense of alignment, the game suffers imo. The idea of subjective interpretation of supposedly objective forces of Good, Xaos, etc. to me enhances the game. How does a person be Good and believe that Entropy must destroy all things? How does a Lawful Sensate feel about experiencing Chaos? Mind you there doesn't need to be the problematic issues of translating alignment into tangible player powers.

I don't doubt that Rip could make even the derivative/dull 4e cosmology into something fun, original, and worth playing in. But imo then why not expand on Monte's Countless Doorways or the White Wolf material 4e rips off?

Instead of trying to find a diamond in the rough, why not work with treasures already there?

But the alignment thing is something that really took the basics of D&D ethical system one step further I think. Loosing it is kinda sad, but there is so many other things that make up for it like the rule of threes described by rip above, the sheer mind-boggling crazyness of it all and the effortless ease the setting lets everything fit. In some way or another.

The point I´m trying to make is that Planescape is supposed to be the soul of D&D, not its mother.

My point isn't that Planescape won't work in 4e, but that I'd rather take a creative setting (even a Shadowrun or d20 modern take on Earth) and run PS in it than spend too much time trying to spice up 4e's bland ideas based on idiotic premises. In 4e planar travel is almost completely about changing scenery, they've flat out stated that things like surviving the Plane of Vacuum or the bizarre laws of the Astral are "not fun". The thoughtful ideas on alignment or even elementals have been replaced with elementals with helmets and faceless astral angels that look bored being placed in such a cosmology.

The only planes really worth using without a lot of improving are the Shadowfell and Feywild, and both those are hardly original and the former at least is much better done when it was in Wraith: TO.

All that said, I'm willing to give the new MoTP a chance to show off this childish homebrew made official but I don't have overly high hopes.

It's no trouble houseruling them back in so I'm not worried, though our group will likely downplay alignment altogether anyway.

One wonders why WotC decided to eliminate CG and LE in the first place. Isn't Chaotic Good a popular choice for player character alignment?

...You know, looking again at the 4e alignment choices, it looks like Chaotic is now conflated with Evil; there is no non-Evil choice for a chaotic alignment.

I can see unaligned as useful for defusing arguments, but really as a general guideline those two words gave you a sense of how to run the character.

I agree with you (I think it said I in another thread but not as clearly as you) that alignment shouldn't necessarily be a mechanic but instead another aspect of the game worth examining through role playing.

Allowing one to question even the Multiversal system, to attempt to answer why or why not to your posed question, is what makes Planescape so amazing and so revolutionary. Similarly with Mage: The Ascension, and in some ways many White Wolf games.

4e isn't doing anything revolutionary - that would be an examination of alignment much in the way that Vertigo comics and Moorcock examined ideas of Law/Chaos, Good/Evil. 4e is simply throwing out the baby with the bathwater and replacing it with something I personally find the "anthesisis of fun".

It was already done away with in Eberron, in play if not in text. I'm not saying everyone has to deal with alignment or objective/elemental forces if they don't want to. You never did. But removing alignment and the Great Wheel completely is an insult to the people whose shoulders they've been standing on, and even material they've hawked just a year ago.

I don't have a problem with the rules per se, though I find some changes to monsters I've seen as making them less interesting (see pitfiend). For me D&D is about options, and that philosophy is what endeared me to 3e and why 4e is so distasteful.

I don't want to go into an insane rant so I'll refrain from expounding on my dislike of the 4e design team. :oops: :x Suffice to say that Erik Mona has managed to disagree or severely criticize the works of past authors while maintaining a healthy level of respect. One of many reasons my cash will go toward Pathfinder RPG.

Unaligned can mean balancing extremes (the goddesses Sehanine and Ioun are unaligned, and both are interested in that) but it can also mean completely amoral (like the fey, who are almost all unaligned), and it can mean beings who would be considered chaotic neutral (like Kord, as he's described in 4e) or lawful neutral (like the goddess Erathis) in 1e-3e terms. It can also include beings who have decided they are "above morality" (like the Raven Queen and her followers). For whatever reason, unaligned beings don't side with either Good or Evil, but they can choose any reason they want to for this.

So basically, yeah, I think unaligned is the same as neutral. In 2e, creatures with animal intelligence or lower were sometimes given alignments of "n/a." Unaligned can mean that, too.

In any case, the "unaligned" alignment isn't different enough from the various neutral alignments in previous editions to be worth including as a tenth alignment.

I don't think there's a contradiction between what Bruce Cordell said and what I said, really. It's not the same as the neutral alignment because it contains within it the alignments formally known as lawful neutral, neutral, and chaotic neutral, as well as the "n/a" alignment that occasionally appeared.

Reading the description of "unaligned" in the new Player's Handbook, unaligned is described in terms virtually identical to how the various neutral alignments were before.