Planescape General and Q&A

Pandemonium is a pretty weird plane.

Does anyone else think that some of the outer planes feel a bit... empty? Or monotonous?

Like Limbo doesn't really reflect the various ways one could be Chaotic Neutral. I hope if there's ever a more detailed 5e planes write up, they have the 4e-style elemental chaos be a border region of the inner planes, and make Limbo weirder.

Eh, it's passable slightly-archaic slightly-nonsense slang, which is just about right for D&D. They did over use it though.

That's a tough one, given how many weird and exotic locations I've run.

I'd say that the weirdest location is one from my current campaign. A noble from a setting that was a copy of fantasy Japan (there are millions of these) was chasing after a thief who he believed had stolen a sacred sword. The thief had actually stolen a piece of the Rod of Seven Parts, and the combination of the lawful power of the artifact and the expectation that he'd see a view of the capital city below temporarily gave the noble an incredible ability to shape Limbo. He ended up creating a replica of the capital city as viewed from the mountain above, but there was a lot of information lost. Visual distortions became real geography, and the entire place was populated by slaadi/visitors who thought it'd be fun to play along.

"Does anyone else think that some of the outer planes feel a bit... empty? Or monotonous?" Mine will.....because once my players get into Sigil, they will have to figure out why all the planes and Sigil are empty. ;)

I guess my main concern is when running The Great Modron March how to keep them engaged. The later adventures tend to be focused around helping them, while the earlier ones tend to establish them as uncaring and indifferent. The main solution to this I've figured has been having a guy they're working for pay them to keep an eye on the March.

The easiest way to do this is to bring in the factions. One of the players is probably going to be a member of a faction, and in that faction you can just pull contacts, friends, superiors, allies etc right out of your ass. Maybe a faction member has a job that needs doing or is interested in recording/observing the march for some strange reason - this is a big part of what makes the factions so useful for dms.

I always felt like people focused on the least interesting aspect of Planescape. Treating it as some sort of philosophical not quite WoD wankery in Sigil (which is frankly one of the most boring parts of the planes), and overlooking the fact that the whole multiverse thing meant there was tons of shit you could explore and pillage.

I'd love to down a truly old-school location-based campaign ala Keep on the Borderlands in Planescape.

What the heck is on a "vacuum" plane?

>Does anyone else think that some of the outer planes feel a bit... empty? Or monotonous?

Flatly, there's too fucking many of them.

Non-canonically, I included a Sigilian drinking establishment called "Slumbering Mother Cat."

It is situated atop the belly of an eternally slumbering, gigantic housecat. There is no floor; people walk directly upon her soft underside. Said cat is 50% cat, 6.25% archon, 6.25% guardinal, 6.25% eladrin, 6.25% modron, 6.25% slaad, 6.25% baatezu, 6.25% yugoloth, 6.25% tanar'ri, 6.25% air elemental, 6.25% earth elemental, 6.25% fire elemental, 6.25% water elemental, 6.25% entropic, 6.25% vivacious, 6.25% dragon, and 6.25% fey.

The employees are all catpeople of various races (e.g. mortal catfolk, feline guardinals, leonals, anthropomorphic Cheshire cats, anthropomorphic displacer beasts, anthropomorphic bezekira), dressed in maid outfits. They use specialized magical equipment to extract the titanic cat's milk and pungent urine, which are charged with an eclectic blend of planar energies, and which can be distilled into individual energies. These liquids and energies are then used as the basis for myriad cocktails.

The drinking establishment's other services include:
• Petting, renting, and adopting various cats (e.g. plain mortal cats, bezekiras, displacer beasts, half-celestial cats, half-cordian cats, half-fiend cats, half-dragon cats, half-fey cats).
• Services from Bast's various priests and priestesses.
• Oneiromantic services from Bast's elite "Dream Hunters," who are unparalleled at entering the dream-demiplanes of the Ethereal Plane to manipulate and protect sleepers.
• Various portals, including a portal to Bast's divine realm of Merratet in Ysgard, and a portal to the Mountain of Ultimate Winter in the Paraelemental Plane of Ice, where words and concepts freeze over solid. The gate-key of the latter portal happens to be "being extremely cute and pretty," which is why that portal always has a long line of girls and boys trying to prove their cuteness and prettiness. Alas, the portal is one-way, and to open it is to also step through it...

Planescape is actually incredible if you do this. The locations are incredibly varied, and any decent campaign will take you to a whole bunch of unique and interesting places with grand and wondrous sights. Not to mention all the unique rules and conditions associated with the various Planes.

I'd recommend keeping the factions in-game though - they're incredibly useful for giving your players quests, resources, allies, home-bases, leads and so on. They also serve as an additional way to resolve certain encounters, and that makes it a lot easier to throw problems at the party that they can't defeat simply by going to combat (or problems where combat is far and away the worst of all possible solutions/a last resort). This can include a bunch of the philosophical wankery, but that's how it works best - as something extra on top of the interesting and challenging adventures.

Or not enough. I'd say either have 3-6 of the things or "potentially infinite, we just can't tell".

It sucks.

Pretty much an empty void.

Is there some kind of online gallery for all the art that Diterlizzi made for Planescape? High resolution would be preferable.

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More canonically (or semi-canonically, since it is only vaguely implied in the 2e Guide to the Ethereal Plane, and not explicitly stated), I have always enjoyed the surreal scenery of the Deep Ethereal.

A realm of iridescent, varicolored fog that merge all the elements. High above, a wall of colors where all the Wheel's sleepers send their minds to make dream-realities. All around, furnaces of creation, entire crystal spheres (i.e. solar systems) and demiplanes being forged from a symphony of the elements and misty protomatter.

Can you imagine how humbling it must be for anyone, even a greater deity, to float in the Deep Ethereal and witness just how many realities are being forged each second there? To glimpse the birth of a single crystal sphere must be a momentous event; can you picture viewing dozens, if not hundreds of thousands, of crystal spheres forming all around you?

Then there are the bizarre fauna, flora, and terrain features of the Deep.

Beds of chronolilies, drift like flocks of dandelions amongst the mists, tempting mortals and deities alike with visions of the future's infinite possibilities.

Ether cyclones, chaotic dances of protomatter and the many elements that could cover whole mortal nations, race through the mists, razing all intruders of lesser grit in their path.

Behemothic ether gaps, holes in the very fabric of the multiverse that suck in everything near them and send them to a place far, far beyond the places, lie in wait for foolish travelers to waft near and be inexorably drawn in.

Chulcrixes, gigantic worms three hundred feet long and a tenth of that in width, zoom through the mists, dodging ether cyclones and ether gaps alike; their black, chitinous skin secretes glistening mucous that reeks of rotten meat, and their many-pincered arms bend the fabric of ether-space as they menace those even at a seemingly safe distance.

Dharculi, slightly less titanic congeries of tentacles and drooling, toothy maws, and eyes on tendril-stalks, hunt down these chulcrixes like wolves felling an great behemoth.

Ebon tigers, great cats wholly composed of black fire that bends the "light" and shadows around them, encircle flocks of dhours, collections of strange organs and bizarre pulses of like contained in amoeba-like masses of gelatinous matter.

The Deep Ethereal is a wondrous place.

It is absolutely true that the writing quality and content amounts for Planescape's planes vary wildly.

Some planes and their inhabitants received a high-quality, comprehensive detail. This would mostly be Baator, Gehenna, and the Abyss, because the writers absolutely loved to write about the fiends. Even during the 3.5 era, Baator and the Abyss received the top-notch Fiendish Codices.

Some planes received too little detail. The paraelemental, quasielemental, and energy planes suffered vastly for this. For a plane brimming with life itself, the Positive Energy Plane sure had absolutely nothing of interest in it during 2e; it was only in 3.0 that the Positive became interesting with the introduction of soul fonts in the "Bastion of Broken Souls" adventure.

Some planes received a decent amount of detail, but much of it was simply uninspired, and it was clear that the author was trying to pad out the word count. The writeup for Bytopia in Planes of Conflict is far and away the guiltiest of this, since it manages to present the plane in an incredibly boring fashion despite its exotic layout. Limbo's entry in Planes of Chaos is another good example, as it hardly makes good use of the concept of a realm of imagination and spontaneity; it does not help that the slaadi are somewhat limited in concept and scope, even in their most comprehensive and sensible (i.e. not just "randumb") writeup in Planes of Law.

Planescape is a deeply flawed setting, and one of those flaws is indeed the highly asymmetrical distribution of writing quality and content amounts for each of the planes.

>4e-style elemental chaos be a border region of the inner planes
Do note that D&D 5e's cosmology already includes the Elemental Chaos.

Make the modrons cute, endearing, and sympathetic. Emphasize that to meet a modron of X caste is, in an oblique sense, like meeting all of the modrons of X caste. Therefore, if one modron of X caste is absolutely adorable, like a child who is in need of guidance and protection, then that means all other modrons of X caste are just as endearing.

Sigil can be very interesting, in my opinion... provided that you tone down the 90s grittiness (e.g. the "everything is smoggy and gloomy" atmosphere), significantly reduce the amount of plain old mortals around, tremendously increase the number of exotic creatures and outsiders living and commuting through Sigil, emphasize Sigil as a melting pot of all kinds of wacky races, and highlight the portals that can take anyone anywhere.

Make Sigil a campy land of monsterpeople and showcase the goofy adventures that portals can create.

The Quasielemental Plane of Vacuum is one of the least interesting areas of the multiverse, because it really is little but an empty void. Page 122 of the 2e Inner Planes book even says that it has no varied border regions, unlike most of the Inner Planes, which makes it extra dull.

According to that same book, Vacuum is home to an archomental named Sun Sing, a powerful beholder called Zal the Destroyer, one of the Doomguard's four citadels (Exhalus), and the tomb of the wizard-king S'sarkth. That is not exactly an abundance of plot hooks though.

Needs to be animu and she'd be a cutie.

Not everything needs to be animu. Planescape had some amazing maps, the best of any dnd setting IMO.

What the fuck is Ankhwugant, on Stygia? Google gives me nothing and my planar lore isn't what it could be. Looks like a random desert on Stygia? How's that a thing?

Ankhwugaht. H not an N.

rilmani.org/timaresh/Ankhwugaht

That helps. Many thanks.

>Do note that D&D 5e's cosmology already includes the Elemental Chaos.
Hopefully that will force them to do something more interesting with Limbo. Like maybe some more interesting natives and some "layers" (probably more like "regions", given chaos and all that).

Personally, if I was going to make Limbo more interesting, I'd make the works of shapers/anarchs a lot more durable... but they'd slowly change and shift over time once they're abandoned. Limbo should have a lot of dissipating and mutating chunks of previous works floating about it, which provides a much more interesting location for adventures in my opinion.

Maybe not things that were built in Limbo, but things that have drifted there from other planes, after being forgotten/disregarded for long enough that they no-longer have any place or meaning in anyone's formalised system of the world.

What's wrong with things that have been "built" in Limbo?

Seeing a slowly degrading and constantly shifting/warping remnant of an arena/combat-area designed for a fight between githyanki and slaadi could be really interesting.

Recently ran an 16 hour Planescape campaign in Pathfinder as part of a 24 hour gaming charity gig. I wrote the campaign, but I had my box of Planescape books by my side the entire time; I used the old maps, used pictures for examples, and even managed to find a website where a guy had managed to convert a whole lot of Planescape creatures into Pathfinder.

By the time we finished my part of the night and it was time for the next DM to step in, 2 of the players were flat-out refusing to step through the portal that would return them to their home plane, they wanted to stay and have some more fun. But thanks to some clever bullshit and the DM's freight train, we managed to get the game moving along.

Who said that the new shit is better?

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The Pathfinder planar cosmology doesn't strike me as particularly odious, but Planescape as a setting is just so wonderfully fleshed out and designed that I really can't stop myself from going back to it. It isn't exactly hard to add a new setting to it either.

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Previous campaign.

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I'd just like to add that the yugoloths make for incredibly good villains. They're exactly what you'd expect from something that's pure, distilled E, and as long as you don't play them as simplistic brutes they can be incredibly engaging adversaries, especially from behind the scenes.

Also, your players will love dealing with arcanaloths.

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I do apologize for the lack of timely responses. I have been quite distracted by other matters as of late.

Ankhwugaht is the divine realm of Set of the Egyptian pantheon, who was an intermediate deity in 2e and a greater deity in 3.X.

Ankhwugaht is described in page 91 of 2e's On Hallowed Ground:
>Set's realm on Baator is called Ankhwugaht, a burning desert in the midst of the snow of Stygia. The center of the realm boasts a huge black pyramid that seems to cast a shadow across the entire land. The petitioners are completely untrustworthy, but they have a strange sense of honor, and they won't go back on their sworn word. 'Course, getting them to swear in the first place is another matter entirely.

The entirety of page 21 of Planes of Law: Baator contains another description of Ankhwugaht; I am not typing that out.

Pages 28-29 of Planes of Law: Baator detail a small adventure based around Ankhwugaht. The realm is important to the Lower Planes, because within it grow the flowers called "Desert's Night," one of the only cures for Styx amnesia. Unfortunately, Ankhwugaht has downright terrible security, because intruders can barge right in to kill inhabitants and steal Desert's Night. That is what happens in this adventure.

Ankhwugaht's awful security proves to be its undoing a second time during the course of the 2e adventure, Dead Gods, wherein Orcus/Tenebrous enters Set's realm to steal some Desert's Night. He murders many inhabitants, including Nekrotheptis Skorpios, top proxy of Set. Set cannot defend the realm at all.

By the time Set becomes a greater deity in 3.X, Ankhwugaht is upgraded into an ecumenopolis, as described in page 59 of the Fiendish Codex II. One tiny snippet tells us:
>Ankhwugaht sits on an expanse of earth that has been scoured of all fertile soil by eons of glaciation. No ground can be seen, however, because obelisks and pyramids occupy every inch of the surface.

I wonder if Set has improved the security in Ankhwugaht 2.0.

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One major issue with Limbo is that the Deep Ethereal is already the plane themed around infinite possibilities, potential, and transforming imagination into tangible creation. The Deep Ethereal and Limbo are both churning oceans of rainbow-colored creation-stuff, criss-crossed with raging elements and surreal inhabitants and terrain. Limbo's version is less interesting from a metagame perspective, and less reliable from an in-universe standpoint.

If someone wants to create a demiplane or a new form of life, why bother with unpredictable Limbo and its transient creations? Just head on over to the Deep Ethereal and work its.

It does not help that Limbo's exemplars, the slaadi, are somewhat limited in concept and scope, even in their most comprehensive and sensible (i.e. not just "randumb") writeup in page 71 of Planes of Chaos: The Book of Chaos (not Planes of Law, as I had erroneously stated here ).

What does everyone think of the idea of casting Limbo as the plane of creativity, imagination, and spontaneity... and as the bridge between the Outer Planes and the Deep Ethereal? Limbo could be the source of physical reality in the Outer Planes, as protomatter-fogs roil into the Limbo and spill over into the rest of the Great Ring. Protomatter-shapers could visit Limbo as a high-risk, high-reward option; the whole plane tingles with creativity and imagination, the wondrous creations made in Limbo are prone to spontaneously "evolving" in unexpected ways.

>Also, your players will love dealing with arcanaloths.

My Planescape campaigns have an anime aesthetic, and thus my arcanaloths are anime-style [hound/jackal/fox]-[boys/girls].

Perhaps it is because I have a knack for describing them in an appealing way, but arcanaloths are by far the most popular PC race in my campaigns.

Here now are a list of all of the PCs I have ever GMed for in Planescape:

Peafowl the goddess
Iseri the half-arcanaloth, half-leonal‡
Astolfo the ancient Baatorian, Shuten-doji the oni, Vala the cervidal†
Nevenoe the succubus
Fenn the mortal werewolf, Hiromi the mortal kitsune‡, Nana 1.0 the arcanaloth‡, Sybyl the Abyssal al-mi'raj†
Oro the vivacious vulpinal‡
Astra the lesser constellate cat†, Liriel the throne archon
Noirel the ultroloth
Nana 2.0 the arcanaloth‡
Varvara the loup-garou†
Chessie the Cheshire cat†
Anja the arcanaloth†
Tomoe the divine kitsune‡
Roxy the blink dog†
Emi the arcanaloth‡
Nox the arcanaloth‡
†Kemonomimi
‡Fox-kemonomimi

This is a total of 22 characters across 16 games. Of those 22 characters, 5.5 of them (25%) have been arcanaloths, 15 of them (~68%) have been kemonomimi, and 8 of them (~36%) have been fox-kemonomimi.

Not a single one of the characters above belongs to a D&D core race (e.g. human).

What's wrong with Sigil?

>anime-style
Yeah most of us don't care, especially when comparing to Tony D's art.

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I highly respect Tony DiTerlizzi's art, but it does not quite fit the style of the campaigns I try to run.

The tokens look better when zoomed-in to their proper resolution.

I am sure that most people asking to play with you are the kind of people that actively seek anime kemonomimi games which gives you a reputation for anime kemonomimi games which creates a vicious feedback loop of fluffy tails. No escape from this.

Some people just don't like cityscape games.

Wouldn't that disrupt the Wheel by making Limbo a border plane?

Now that the old plane of shadow has been replaced with the Darkbad*, maybe Limbo could steal some of its shtick: decaying remnants of the once-real?

*A very good idea, it's much more playable.

Sigil can easily be run with less philosophical baggage. Planescape: Torment might have been a bad influence in that regard, but you can just have the players deal with the parts of the city that aren't devoted to philosophy/the factions. There's a lot of variety when it comes to stores, business establishments and so on when you're in Sigil, and you can conceivably come up with a place that sells or does practically anything.

Bump this with anything
Give me ideas for scenes the PCs find as they travel across Elysium, taking in the sights

>Wouldn't that disrupt the Wheel by making Limbo a border plane?
It would not so much be a transitive plane as a "shortcut" from the Deep Ethereal to the Outer Planes, in this reimagining of the Ever-Changing Chaos.

Personally, I do not think there needs to be both a Negative Energy Plane and a Plane of Shadow(fell). They both overlap heavily in the "dark and gloomy world of shades and undead" department.

Limbo needs a high-risk, high-reward appeal for prospective reality-shapers, which is what I suggest in .

I personally deemphasize the factions, save for the few I think are well-written, such as the Believers of the Source, the Harmonium, and the Society of Sensation. I stick to my own tenets of running Sigil () as a campy land of monsterpeople and wacky portal adventures, and it has been a hit every time.

Reading through pages 46-64 of Planes of Conflict: Liber Benevolentiae should give you many ideas on Elysium.

As per 48, travel in Elysium is facilitated by good deeds, and the plane's probabilities align themselves so as to give travelers opportunities to do good. Realize that Elysium's exemplar race, the guardinals, are a nomadic people. This means that they exploit Elysium's "travelers' way" in order to help themselves and everyone else on the plane. The more the guardinals travel, the more opportunities for good they spot, and the more they can strengthen the plane's society.

So, what you should definitely do during the PCs' journey is emphasize opportunities for good deeds.

If you want to emphasize the bucolic, Golden Sky Stories-style comfiness of Elysium, think of everyday problems you might encounter in an idyllic town or suburb. Give them a planar twist and raise the stakes.

If you want to highlight the good-hearted, fairy tale-style, "valiant heroes vanquishing evil" adventure of Elysium, then it is simply a matter of directing the PCs to vile-hearted intruders to fight.

As they travel along the swamps of Belierin, they come across an abandoned fortress, sticking out of the water at an odd angle. The place is in an advanced state of disrepair, but the party can hear an angelic voice calling out for help from within.

As they get closer and investigate, they discover that a celestial is imprisoned within the base of the tower, forgotten by time. They claim to have been trapped in there by the cell's former occupant - but are they telling the truth? And even if they are...that doesn't necessarily mean that they haven't Fallen from their previous heights.

The PCs come across a petitioner whose cat is stuck in a tree!

The petitioner belongs to some exotic mortal race. The cat is a talking tiger and Beastlands petitioner, who was the Elysian petitioner's pet in life.

The tree is the World Ash, Yggdrasil. The cat is up on a branch, surrounded by ratatosks. The ratatosks ask the tiger riddle after riddle. The tiger is not a bright one and can solve no such riddles, but its pride demands that the cat stay on the branch until it solves at least one riddle!

How will the PCs get the cat down? The obvious answer is to climb/fly/teleport up to the branch, convince the tiger to let the party give it hints, and wait until the cat uses a hint to solve a riddle. Perhaps the PCs can talk the cat into coming down another way?

~

On a moonlit night, the PCs come across an encampment of guardinals. They are all quite exhausted from having partied hard, yet they cannot sleep because of the tremendously loud, canid howling from the nearby hill!

If the PCs investigate, they discover a moon dog and a lupinal engaged in an awooooooing contest. They are trying to court a flying, bunny-eared angel of the Shinto god Tsukuyomi, whose divine realm is on Elysium's moon!

The PCs had best entreat the dog, the wolf, and the rabbit-aasimon carefully, because they all seem profoundly drunk and rowdy. The dog and the wolf, in particular, seem like the type to fight to protect the honor of their prospective lover! Perhaps curing their drunkenness could help?

How "evil" do you make the Lower Planes in your campaigns? I've done my best to make them exceedingly nasty and dangerous places where the rules of nature encourage and reward evil behavior/patterns of thinking in a self-reinforcing way... but I also make sure to throw in plenty of luxury and decadence in the right places, to make sure that people actually have a reason to go there (other than enjoying suffering, whether it's dealing it or receiving it). A lot of people seem to forget the temptation aspect of evil, and that can really contribute to the image of the entire lower planes as a giant dungeon filled with random monsters.

I like to present the Lower Planes as "whimsically evil," in the manner of Touhou's man-eating youkai.

Yes, fiends enjoy steaks and burgers of larvae (i.e. Lower Planar petitioners). They often trade in souls. Their households include many a slave. Their furniture is ofttimes crafted of sapient bones and skin. I mention these frequently, as prominent background details, sometimes edging into the foreground in cases like a fiendish friend taking someone to a larvae steakhouse.

However, in the front and center foreground, I make fiends evil only in a cartoonish, misguided, misunderstood, desperate, and/or oblivious sense. Background details can imply heavy amounts of malice and cruelty, but in the foreground, I present them in a more sympathetic light.

A recurring theme in my games is, "No one is truly evil, not even the vilest of fiends. There is always either something that can make someone realize just how much suffering they are causing, or an insecurity that can be soothed in order to talk someone down from extreme courses of action. Redeeming people is hard yet always possible, and getting them to tone down their misdeeds is considerably easier."

Suppose there is a greater succubus who has been kidnapping paladins and monks with vows of chastity and beguiling them into breaking their vows. In my campaigns, it is likely that the succubus will have a deep insecurity prompting her to do so. Perhaps she failed to seduce a chaste paladin in a high-profile incident that got uploaded on sensory stone, making her a laughingstock among other succubi.

The succubus could be confronted about this insecurity. She could be convinced to put it behind her, or to get back at other succubi (turning fiends against other fiends) in a more direct fashion. The demoness could even be persuaded to take up a full-time, productive job somewhere.

Actually redeeming the succubus will be a long and arduous task, but getting her to tone down her actions will be far easier.

That strikes me as an approach that's good for some of the aspects that players are more likely to encounter, given that a lot of groups will have people who really can't either take or enjoy a full-throated depiction of absolute evil.

That makes some sense because while fiends may be literally made from the evil matter and essence it still does not mean that they are unreasonable. Discrete acts of villainy are or at least should be done for a reason. Presenting fiends in a bit lighter, a bit more human way is probably necessary if they are to be interacted with on more levels than begrudging cooperation.