I'm running a solo game for my wife that takes place in Sigil, the city of doors and looking for advice and ideas.
Right now, she's the daughter of a keymaker and it's fairly slice of life. She doesn't even have stats yet. Later on down the road we will be using 5e and I wanted to plan some grandiose.
My question is, what kind of overarching plot should I do? Should it involve "The Lady of Pain" or something else like a multiplanar threat? Should I keep the majority of the campaign in Sigil or have it be more a locale of the week type of deal?
What kind of ideas work best for a solo game? What should I avoid? She's enjoying the slice of life stuff so far but I want to start laying the groundwork now for something more substantial.
Any suggestions on solo games or games set in Sigil would be appreciated.
If she doesn't know shit about Planescape, the traditional approach would be to have her be a clueless Prime who falls through a gate by accident. But it sounds like you've already started and she's already either from there or not from there.
Doesn't seem like she wants or needs an epic campaign with a cosmic-level threat. Maybe just something that introduces the various factions and gives her the chance to join one. Maybe her shop has become the middle of a turf war.
Thomas Hughes
[Part 1/2]
I ran a campaign in Sigil once. The party was hired to "steal back" a statuette from some cultists' warehouse and hand it over to the representative of an obscure temple.
In reality, the party had stolen the statuette FOR the cultists without realizing it. Their fixer (Shadowrun style) was a shapeshifter and faked his own death by only appearing in the guise of a specific man he'd known for quite a while, then killing the guy and leaving his body for the party to found.
The statuette was from another multiverse and its presence made the wall between multiverses weaker. The cultists worshiped nightmarish eldritch monstrosities from this other multiverse and intended to create a tear, allowing an infinite number of them to pour through into the city of doors and out into this multiverse's many planes.
Meanwhile, a bugbear who was a member of the sect that believed their own will and belief could shape reality wanted to bring back Aoskar, so he was helping the cultists with the intent of revealing to the city that Aoskar could save them if only they believed hard enough, with the situation dire enough that even the Lady of Pain wouldn't dare object.
MEANWHILE, the temple, of a god of logic, was working on a backup plan that would basically be creating a backup of the entire multiverse with an added anti-virus mechanism intended to save it from the eldritch monsters.
Jace Rodriguez
[Part 2/2]
The players didn't know that THEY THEMSELVES were the anti-virus, for the original multiverse had been destroyed and the beginning of the campaign was the beginning of the universe, which then stretched forward and backward.
Aoskar was going to be resurrected, and at the end, tell the PCs that they all had heroic souls and would be reborn in many worlds, past and future, always to meet up again and again to save the day, always feeling a strange sense that they somehow knew each other, and that their heroic souls resided on a realm to which even he couldn't open a door.
But the PCs died and the multiverse ended.
---
Feel free to use this or ignore it or whatever you like. Just if you want to blow somebody's fucking mind, why not go full threat-to-all-of-existence + meta-narrative on them?
I'm a sucker for met a shit. If you hate this, that's fine.
Isaiah Mitchell
I actually did something a lot like this, like uncomfortably close. Solo game where the Lady of Pain becomes the patron for the character. Planes hopping is kind of a tough idea to wrap your head around if you aren't too deep into stuff like this, I would make it stay in Sigil and have the factions of the planes running work against each other behind closed doors and all that.
In my campaign of the City of Brass of the Plane of Fire and Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls were at ends with each other, with it ending with the destruction of the Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls.
Maybe a Slaad from Pandemonium starts trying to buy Keys to planes and places of interest and her father doesn't trust him.
Isaac Sanchez
Yeah I plan on keeping it slice of life until she's ready to move on but I like to plan ahead. I want to have stuff going on in the background so if she ever gets interested in the going ons around her I'm ready.
To elaborate: Her father makes keys to portals in the city. She's playing the adopted teenager and she doesn't know anything about the inner workings of Sigil (both in/out of character).
So far she's just had a few games with her and her childhood friends getting into mischief.
Jaxson Bell
I definitely like some of those ideas, I might appropriate some of them for later use.
Yeah my original idea was something along the lines of her father created a skeleton key that opens any portal in the city. Factions find out about it and one of them kills her father and takes it. She would then go on a search through underbelly of Sigil and get embroiled in the clan politics.
Ethan Sullivan
Is there a list of clans/descriptions that are in Sigil or is it something you have to bullshit? I've always been interested in it.
Landon Walker
If he makes keys to gates, he has to know where the gates are and what the keys need to be. This will require a lot of information-gathering. There could be an adventure based on that. Could be sneaking into a library, breaking a well-traveled planewalker out of the Harmonium's prisons or the Bleak Cabal's gatehouse, or just interviewing the cagestruck homeless folks who are afraid of passing through anything that might be a gate to figure out how they got here.
I would continue with the slice-of-life and short plots in Sigil until your waifu has a feel for the setting and has established some goals and relationships with NPCs. Then you can look at your waifu's progress and decide what kind of conflict and antagonist would motivate her character to action. You also should use your own knowledge of your waifu to create an antagonist she would find compelling, interesting, and a worthy adversary.
Take what she finds interesting in the setting and make it play a larger role. Trim the parts she is not interested in. Tailor the overarching story to her as you go along. There's no need to write up an epic overarching plot right now. Introduce elements she might be interested in, observer, and then give her more of what she likes.
Xavier Thompson
Planescape has an unfortunate tendendy toward what one of my players calls "Twilight Zone shit." Twilight Zone shit is a plot dictated by weird supernatural forces that are entirely outside of the PCs' control or understanding. The players quickly realize that what they do doesn't matter and that fate (i.e. the DM) is just fucking around with them. It happens a lot in horror campaigns, too: the Dark Powers of Ravenloft are the gods of Twilight Zone shit. Planescape should have mysterious elements, but the plot of the campaign itself should not be one of them. The stuff outside the players' control or understanding should be in the background and not standing directly in their way.
John Gomez
My players were politicking their way through the city's ranks, doing jobs for different factions and snubbing others, and anything they did could have wildly affected the way things turned out. I don't think the fact that I told you a bunch of meta stuff is enough to assume that I was dragging them around by hooks in their taints.
Jaxon Allen
>PCs are lied to about their mission right from the beginning, with nobody available to give them a straight answer so they can properly get into the campaign or understand something is wrong >end up stealing an item that destroys the cosmos by being out-of-place, lol, that'll show those players >withhold even more critical information from them about what's going on >keep trolling them like this until they quit on you before you can foist a Mighty Max-style non-ending on them.
I hope you don't think you're a good DM.
Noah Watson
>NPCs can't lie to player characters >mystery is bad The players figured out what was really going on pretty quickly, and absolutely loved it when they figured out their former boss had faked his death. The key here is that they KNEW things weren't what they seemed to be, and were working with the information they had while also trying to get more.
It's alright if it doesn't appeal to you, but you seem pretty offended that a game could ever be anything besides straightforward.
I've also played in games with them and DMed for them before and since then, asking for feedback after literally every session and encouraging them to be open with what they do and don't like. "Too much mystery and intrigue" is never a complaint.
Josiah Bell
Remember child, where we live. Remember you are a keymaker.
The key fits the lock. The lock fits the door. The door fits the cage. The cage fits the ________
Adam Martin
The only conclusion where the Lady of Pain becomes your patron is where you get flayed or mazed.
You absolutely should not use the Lady willynilly, She should only be a background force and appear very rarely.
The Lady would've prevented all that.
Caleb Wilson
>The Lady would've prevented all that. It's canon that a group actually does want to resurrect Aoskar and she hasn't killed them all yet. She's not actually full-on omnipotent.
