Imagining Oribos... as Sigil?

There were two major areas in Shadowlands that the Blizzcon announcement didn't show us at all.

While we saw the four leveling zones - Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, and Revendreth (I just realized something - my Worgen Warrior, Ardten... he's probably got to pick the Ardenweald covenant, right? I mean, it's literally his name - I wanted just "Arden" but that was taken) there were two areas they spoke about that we did not get to see.

The Maw sounds like it's going to basically be the Antoran Wastes of the Shadowlands - a super-dangerous place with no real safe spots and not really a ton of structured storytelling as much as just danger around every corner (I do hope that we get Suarmar-like endgame stories in the other zones though.)

But the other intriguing one is Oribos.

Oribos is apparently a city at the center of the Shadowlands, and it's here that every mortal soul is taken to be judged instantaneously by the central figure known as The Arbiter, who then assigns them to the proper realm of the Shadowlands. While the Arbiter sits in the center of the city, the rest of the city apparently is a gathering place for "soulbrokers" and other planar travelers.

And that really got me thinking about Planescape.

So, in the cosmos of D&D, one of the major campaign settings is all about adventures on the Outer Planes. If you think of the idea of Heaven and Hell, imagine instead that there are 17 planes, each representing different alignments (like Lawful Good or Chaotic Neutral) as well as planes at the sort of half-way points between close alignments (like Acheron, which is between the Lawful Neutral plane of Mechanus and the Lawful Evil plane called the Nine Hells, and is thus the sort of "Lawful Lawful Evil" plane.) The 17th of these planes is at the dead center, the True Neutral plane called the Outlands.

While in most adventures the important aspect of these planes is that they're were "outsiders" like fiends (chaotic demons, lawful devils, and other variations on that theme) and celestials (like angels) come from, the other function that they serve is that they are the various places mortal souls go after death. If you were a lawful good person, you're probably going to wind up in one of the three Lawful Good planes, depending on how lawful and how good you are. It's also generally where the gods live - and a devoted follower of a god will often find their way to that god's realm within those planes.

In the center of the Outlands is an infinitely tall spire at the top of which is a big ring, the inside surface of which is the city called Sigil.

Sigil is a very strange place, with several factions that represent various strict philosophies. Ruling over Sigil is a being that might be the most powerful entity in the entire D&D multiverse - the Lady of Pain. The Lady is emphatically not a god (and those who attempt to worship her find their flesh very suddenly flayed from their bones) and any god that attempts to enter her city will find themselves and everyone who worships them suddenly suffer a bad case of nonexistence.

D&D has several official campaign settings. Most of them take place in your standard physical reality with cities and mortal people and such. The Planescape setting starts you off right away in the Outer Planes, and even details how the locals think of those from the Prime Material Plane (they call them "Primes") as basically backwoods ignorant hicks. Sigil is not the entirety of that Planescape setting - indeed, despite sort of being in the Outlands, it can't actually be reached physically even from the True Neutral plane - the only way in or out of Sigil is through portal doorways - but it's definitely an iconic part of the setting.

Initially, the Shadowlands seemed to be Warcraft's equivalent of the Shadowfell - a dark reflection of the Prime Material Plane just beyond normal reality filled with undead and monsters. But it seems as if the Shadowlands are really more closely related to D&D's outer planes.

And that makes me really wonder: is Oribos, the city at the center of the Shadowlands, going to be the equivalent of Sigil, the city at the center of the Outer Planes?

And does that make the Arbiter the equivalent of the Lady of Pain?

Naturally, Blizzard needs to keep things different in order to avoid getting sued by Wizards of the Coast. But every fantasy RPG has taken at least some inspiration from D&D. And the Planescape stuff is so cool that I feel like it's a pretty good thing to steal from.

My hope is that Oribos is going to be a very weird-feeling city. We've had plenty of hub-cities before, but even the floating city of Dalaran is still ultimately just a normal town enchanted to float by mortal mages.

I know that having Oribos a giant loop would probably be close enough to actually get a plagiarism lawsuit, but I'm very excited to see what kind of bizarre citizens we encounter there. I'm sure we'll see plenty of Kyrians, Necrolords, Night Fae, and Venthyr there. And just in terms of character models that might be what we get. But I would be super-jazzed to also see other sort of extra-planar beings there as well. Could we encounter demons there who are not all about the Burning Crusade but are instead just there to do business in the soul trade? Or perhaps Val'kyr, who after all are known to journey back and forth from the Shadowlands freely (probably popping in to talk with their forebears from Bastion.)

The Planescape setting was considered part of a movement in the 90s called the "new weird" that included grunge and alternative rock and other kind of inventive post-modern subversion of established genres. I would love for Oribos to feel like a really weird and alien place - like the Troll market from Hellboy 2.

I can't wait to see what this place is like, and also to find out what the Arbiter is like. Given their simple "the something" names, I imagine she has some relationship with the Jailor, but the nature of that relationship is a big question mark, given that we really have little more than their names at this point.