Tools for Planescape and Sigil

AD&D 2nd Edition heralded the Age of the Campaign Setting, and with it came an endless parade of unique ideas and overfilled splatbooks. That collection is a goldmine, a rich vein of pure imagination that can and should be pulled from the ground.

For me, the best of the lot is Planescape. It’s a wild setting with incredible locations, bizarre characters, and fantastic ideas. However, the act of getting these things to the table is a daunting task. There’s so much to remember, so many pockets of brilliant worldbuilding spread across so many sources, that it can become paralyzing. And that’s just for Sigil!

To mitigate that, I use tools. Here are some of the resources I have found invaluable for running the setting, along with one which I created myself.

 

2e Sourcebooks

There’s no substitute for the original material. Of course, there’s a boatload of it, but here are a few select titles that I’d recommend to get the most out of the setting.

Planescape Campaign Setting
Obviously.

Uncaged: Faces of Sigil
A collection of NPCs in Sigil, ranging from inconsequential yet interesting weirdos to the most powerful figures in the city. These characters are fully formed with motivations, rivals, quest hooks, and (if needed) stats. The characters in this book make Sigil come alive, and every NPC I’ve pulled from this book has been a favorite with my players. This is a must-get. 

In the Cage: A Guide to Sigil
A breakdown of the individual wards and the adventures to be found there. Fantastic reading and a fantastic resource for the city itself. If you really want to know the wards, you should grab this one.

The Factol’s Manifesto
All of the factions, their leaders, and the dark of their activities in Sigil and beyond. The factions and their philosophies are the beating heart of Sigil, and this book gives you the tools to run them properly. In short, it does for factions what Uncaged does for NPCs. 

The Planeswalker’s Handbook
A guide to Planescape for players, specifically those running planar characters, written by Monte Cook. The book is nearly as complete a Planescape resource as the Campaign Setting box set, and outside of that starting point it is probably the best general sourcebook for the setting. It’s worth a read for the random Tiefling tables alone.

 

Websites

Interactive Map of Sigil: The City of Doors
A zoomable map of Sigil with 308 location tags. Each location can be expanded to find its sources and page numbers, along with occasional short descriptions, relevant NPCs, and affiliations. Locations are searchable in a sidebar. During sessions in Sigil, I have found this map to be indispensable.

 

Planescape Full Index
An exhaustive catalog of locations, NPCs, events, and anything else you could imagine that was ever connected to Planescape. Every entry is tagged with sources and page numbers, making things a cinch to find. It’s all plaintext with simple tags; hit Ctrl-F and go. The wiki it’s hosted on isn’t bad, either.

 

The Planar DM
This site is packed with additional resources. It even has the poster maps! A particularly useful find is the spreadsheet of “100 Planescape Adventure Hooks”. It looks like the author had high hopes for the site, but it doesn’t appear to have been updated in some time. Such is the fate of all, as shall be this blog’s fate, but I’m grateful for what was left behind.

Videos

YouTuber Wade Allen is completely killing it with his Planescape videos. They clock in at one to three hours, and cover everything from the basics of the setting to specific planes. While long-form videos aren’t an in-the-moment resource, I’ve found them useful to throw on during my commute to remind myself of information I’ll need for upcoming games and to discover things I had completely missed. 

Sigil Random Event Tables

Sigil is big. Really big. There are so many possibilities in the City of Doors that it can become easy to gloss over the day-to-day events that occur around the characters. These tables help add some random flavor to the Cage.

Sigil Encounters by Sasaki-
Shared via Reddit. These are 2d20 tables for each ward, giving specific events or people. Some of the events are references to Planescape: Torment (not a bad thing), others are very simple (“A poet”), but some are pure gold (“An explosion is heard from the Great Foundry, everyone is silent for a while then resumes daily life”).

Sigil Random Encounter Tables by toskabak
Another share via Reddit. These are d100 tables for each ward; the post does a good job explaining how they’re to be used. The original tables are for a Sigil modified for this user’s campaign (he adds in an “Almsman’s Ward”), and are formatted awkwardly on the site, so I’ve created a spreadsheet with these tables for easier use. They served my campaign for many sessions.

Sigil Random Encounter Tables by Kirchh
Hey, that’s me! The limitations of toskabak’s tables led me to create my own tables, which I have spruced up for your use. The tables are split into Who and What tables for each ward, with a larger Cager Table for non-ward specific needs. An Undersigil table is also included.

Whenever the PCs enter a ward, roll on one or both of these tables. The What tables provide overly generalized prompts that can apply in many different ways. They’re meant to give you ideas and inspiration; the generated results should be applied however you see fit.

I’ve created two PDF versions of the table. One is styled in the manner of the original books, or as close as I can get, in an attempt to ape a style which I adore. The other is a simplified version if you want the material but aren’t thrilled by my design choices; it’s also a much smaller file size. Or you can just use the spreadsheet.

These tables aren’t perfect, but in my own game, they’ve been useful to add to the bizarre flavor of Sigil. I’ll share one example:

The PCs were making their way to the Market Ward, hoping to hit Tivvum’s Antiquities before Alluvius Ruskin closed shop. I rolled on the What table and got 3: Fire. Okay, there’s a fire in the Market Ward. I rolled 11 on the Who table, which sent me to the Cager table, where I got 15: Fated. Hmm. What would the Fated have to do with a fire?

Then I remembered Marcus Licinius Crassus, who started the first Roman fire brigade. His firefighters would rush to a burning building and do nothing, while Crassus negotiated with the owner to buy the building for meager sums; he’d only fight the fire if they sold. Yeah, that sounds like the Heartless.

The party rushed to the flames to find a well-dressed Fated factotum negotiating a good price with the frantic owner, as the assembled firefighter/wizards did nothing but watch the building burn. Of course, my party is filled with Fated members and thieves, and they were in a hurry, so they admired the factotum’s ingenuity, picked a few pockets of the gaping crowd, and moved on.