Planescape: Setting and System

Planescape is, by far, the most interesting fantasy world I’ve ever stumbled across. The later editions of D&D offered only the barest glimpse of this setting, with descriptions of Sigil, the City of Doors, the otherworldly Outer Planes, and the city’s enigmatic ruler The Lady of Pain.

When I finally dug deep enough into the historical strata to hit the rich vein of the mid-90s, I found a treasure trove of lore within the Planescape campaign books and accessories. TSR had invested much into their creation, detailing everything from apothecaries to crime kingpins, all wrapped in a bizarre shell of an impossible dystopian magicpunk setting. It had a feel and tone that I had only seen in novels like Perdido Street Station and Neverwhere, with a clash of cockney slang, philosophical war, and easy death. To sweeten the pot, a great deal of that lore and tone was injected into the only video game based on the setting: Planescape: Torment.

The best book I've ever played

By the time I’d decided to run the setting, the 5th edition of D&D was in full swing. The setting was all I cared about, so the system got the boot. I ran that world with 5e and had a blast doing so, but found that I wasn’t getting the tone that I had expected. Everything was combat and frantic challenges. By scraping the system it was built for, I had changed the nature of the setting.

5e’s triumph is that it makes every character feel like a unique set of skills and abilities. That character never feels like anything other than the main character, even when you’ve got another four main characters wandering about with you. The world is your playground, and the setting is the backdrop to your character’s superheroic feats and inevitable victory.

That is not Planescape’s vibe. Planescape is about fantastic places and people, but it shows those places through the lens of the ordinary. It’s where an angel and demon may share a beer, but they do so in a dive bar after having completed whatever humdrum tasks make up their daily life. Much of that life is cheap, with a major part of Sigil being depressing slums where surviving another day is the only achievable goal. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, made for a TTRPG ruleset where not getting eaten was a major accomplishment; 5e just did not translate well to that ethos.

The vibe

 

Planescape was built for 2nd Edition AD&D, with all of its quirks and assumptions about the type of characters you would have. Those characters would start off relatively powerless and certainly poor. They had to scrabble for every opportunity, and they had to be played cautiously and wisely to make it out of 1st level. A 2e character has a weapon, maybe armor, maybe a spell or two, a few hit points, and (if your DM decided to include them) a set of skills. They didn’t parade around Sigil as lords of their domain; they survived Sigil by being just a bit quicker, smarter, stronger, or luckier than the berk next to them.

This is perhaps too many words to say that I like squishy and desperate characters in my dystopian settings, but hopefully provides context for why I started my latest Planescape campaign in 2e.