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.

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.