What Makes Planescape Planescape?

'There's always somebody bigger than you.' While there is some 'killing stuff' in Planescape, it's a very political/philosophical setting.

If you're a 20th level whatever, you can still get absolutely melted by a ticked-off Faction, a Power, the schemes of fiends, or whatever. Even if you are a Power, other Powers can knock you off, and lots and lots of other stuff out there is actively working to counter your plans.

This is in constrast with a lot of Prime Material settings, many of which are more dungeon-crawling-focused.

I think the "always someone bigger than you" philosophy, though pretty central to Planescape, needs a note of caution for DMs who don't want bored players. It's also important to make sure that, in their immediate environment and especially if they play it smart, a PC can be pretty sodding big. The "always someone bigger..." idea is there so that PCs don't, as the boxed set warns, beat up Thor and use Mjolnir as their croquet mallet, and to force them to play a more cerebral game. But Planescape always treads a narrow ground between using that idea to make the game more interesting and cementing the NPCs of the world in such unassailably fixed positions of power that the game has no room to change and the PCs can't accomplish anything beyond restoring the status quo at the behest of big-name characters from the books. The danger is there in every campaign setting, but we Planescapers should be careful not to fall too deeply in love with our wonderful NPCs. The PCs are the ones who really count.

If I haven't alienated my fellow hobbyists enough already, I'm going to commit further heresy: I don't think Planescape necessarily needs the Great Wheel. I think some of the Great Wheel's locations are pretty iconic to the setting, but I don't see why it couldn't be reorganized, even to something more like the proposed 4E cosmology. What I would propose in that situation is to make the Outlands take the place of the Prime Material. The Prime disappears, the setting ceases to be an umbrella for every campaign setting, and the Outlands become more like a "normal" fantasy world, with great human kingdoms and all that. As well as its Planescape iconic locations. Then you have their Feyweld, which has some aspects of Upper Planes/Planes of Chaos and the Positive Energy Plane. The Shadowfell acts like a distortion of the Prime, and also takes some of the roles previously served by the Ethereal, the Grey Waste, funky demiplanes, other Lower Planes, some Negative Quasielemental juju, and obviously the Plane of Shadow. The Astral Plane now encompasses whatever Outer Planes you feel are important, this time as individual world-sized domains (still plenty big) that are reachable from your classic silvery giths-in-space Astral plane, now with 40% more flying galleons. Then that Elemental Chaos place now has a huge mixture of elements, encompassing a big Limbo-equivalent soupy mess of elements. Meanwhile, elementals gather together in continent-sized domains where the influence of a powerful archomental purifies the plane into a single dominant element (where you put anything that you would have put on the equivalent infinite Inner Plane). And somewhere in that swirly mess is an infinite pit called the Abyss.

I don't think that using even the heretical 4E cosmology would make your campaign "not Planescape" (whatever that would even mean). You'd just condense the number of infinite spaces, so that the space allotted to each region of your campaign is more densely packed with plot, rather than being infinitely huge and having interesting points with great swaths of nothing in between.

I agree about Planescape's "normalizing" exemplar races. "What do archons do for fun? Nobody knows..." works for a standard campaign, where you're most likely to see them only as the result of a summoning spell. But in Planescape you can go visit angels in their homes, and you have to figure out how all these different beings fit together, reconciling their mythic presentation with some kind of in-game "reality."

Rhys, point. You can change around the order of the planes, create new NPC's, change the nature of reality and all that jazz, and still retain a Planescape-like feel by paying attention to the important points such as the ones Duckluck mentioned. Indeed, mirroring the importance of belief, if you could get the majority of people to accept this as the new canon, it will become Planescape.

Fortunately or not, that is highly unlikely. There will always be people (and I must, to be realistic, include myself in this group) that will remember the original Planescape and prefer it to these changes, even if they are far more logical, fun, or simply refreshing. Just take a look at the number of people who still hate the Faction War change, and that's one that was entirely official and explained quite adequately in-game, not to mention seemingly planned for from the start.

I thought about it, and decided what I would do if Planescape officially (both via WotC, which has already happened, and Planewalker, which you seem to be suggesting) jumps the shark and changes its cosmology with little or no explanation. If the new proposed cosmology is interesting and different enough from Planescape to be, for all intents and purposes, a new and unrelated setting with a similar style, then I might adopt it into my sphere of interests. However, I will still retain the original Planescape as a seperate setting in my mind. I am a worldbuilder at heart, and I am hard put to abandon the ones I have become interested in.

I am not trying to say that the idea of replacing the Planescape cosmology with a new one is a bad thing, but keep in mind that such a step would lose many fans that will stick with the original.

What? Did I completely misunderstand something and make a fool of myself again?

Yeah, the fact is we like the Great Wheel. That's why we're here. It will take more than WotC abandoning the setting to make us turn our backs on decades of setting history.

In the beginning I came to like Planescape by playing PS:Torment. Before that I thought it was just another of TSR’s glorious attempts to make even more money. (Shame on me.) So I am sort of a late developer and missed most of the stuff that is canon to PS. The great wheel and such doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t think it’s essential to the setting. (With emphasis on the word “wheel”, not confusing it with “planes”.)

Planescape is surreal. It’s like stepping into one of Dali’s paintings. The Planes are much more surreal than the Tolkien oriented stuff like Forgotten Realms. (One might argue that PS is Moorcock and “New Worlds” oriented.)

And what would PS be without modrons ?

The Great Wheel existed before Planescape, so the Wheel by itself does not make a campaign "Planescape"; I'd say Sigil and the Lady, the Cant, the Factions (even if banished), and the general attitude present in Planescape material (hard to define, but you know it when you see it...) Sigil is the primary new element that diferentiates Planescape from the pre-Planescape Great Wheel... Without Sigil, what would the Factions fight over? Where would the Cant come from? And of course, no Sigil, no Lady of Pain... of course the art is important too in establishing the unique "feel" to Planescape material... somehow reminds me of Dr. Seus in some elements...

What can I say: just becaose the official "basic" setting of 3rd and 3.5h edition of Dungeons and Dragons was Oreth that does not mean that we are obliged to play our campains there. So just becaouse 4th edition will have new rules, new official setting and new official cosmology we are not obliged to use them in our games.
From what I have seen in Star Wars Saga Edition, 4th ed. will probably have some good rules changes but that alone is not enough to change entire setting we know and love.

I dont know any details of this new cosmology, but in my mind I treat them as alternative planar cosmologies that coexist with great ring, like Eberon cosmology, or Forggoten relams cosmology, or Dark Sun, etc...

So, what we are facing here is similar to "Old Gaming Console System Syndrome..." The new gaming console is out and is faster, better and stronger than our old consoles and it has prettier eye-candy games, and we all like to give it a shot, but what we are actualy want to know is can we play our old games in new system? Then we find out (surprise, surprise) that the new system dont support old games.
Than we have two options either play new games on new system and old games on old system or we wait so that emulators and patches are written so that we can play old games on new systems.
Yes that stinks, but this is gaming industry (wich RPGs are part of it), and gaming industry constantly evolves and changes. I mean gamers had similar debates when 3rd edition came out (at least they gave us back then some sort of conversion manual), and probably we will have similar debates in future (when 5th edition comes out)...

Also like Rhys said what truly makes setting is its Icons, and if setting loses it Icons it becomes something elese like: LOTR in Forgotten Realms, Lightsabers replaced with magical wands, and Great Cthulhu with fluffy bunny (*shiver*). Problem is that Planescape has many Icons that define it (Sigil, Lady, Factions, dark humor, quotes...), heck Planescape even adopted things that no one wanted because they were too silly and turned them into Icons (like Modrons).

Well, enough ranting from me. What I´m trying to say here is that Planescape is ultimate campain setting. It basicly contains entire multiverse and beyond. It is also wery adaptable: you can add panes and races and new craetures or you can remove them (and that happened in Planescape, a lot). But Planesape has it´s feel and soul and familiar elements that makes it Planescapish. Without them you have just another planehopping or planewalking campaign but that is not Planescape.

Squaff: Good point. WotC's 4e is like the rpg equivalent of the Playstation 3 - very expensive and generic, but offering lots of improved graphics / stats. Planescape, on the other hand, would be more like the Nintendo - unconventionally fun and with less overclocked but more fitting and unusual graphics / stats. Yeah... I own a Wii, with all its backward compatible glory. I don't regret it for a second.

Zeniel: That was... touching. Honestly.

Completely agree dire lemon. And If Bethesda ruin fallout3. I'll burn down their studio.. :mrgreen:

'Zimrazim' wrote:

I'm missing the days when D&D was Gary Gygax and a couple of his buddies.

You mean you miss the time before Planescape? trans_:d

Yes, Ao works in mysterious ways.