A while ago I got Planescape: Torment on Steam, but like with Baldur's Gate, I found the weird real-time combat with pausing, rather than what would seem a much more logical turn-based system, to be too frustrating for me to get through, which is a shame given how revered those games are, and how much I'd like to check them out. I felt a desire to give PT another shot, though I encountered some weird Steam issues with accounts and the fact that I got a new computer in the spring that made me give up without being able to play the game.
I've spoiled myself a lot on the plot of Torment, which has an interesting focus: despite being in the most epic realm of D&D, the story seems to be a very personal one - your character, The Nameless One, wakes up with no memories on a slap in a morgue staffed by the undead, and then you proceed to journey around Sigil and other parts of the outer planes in an attempt to discover who you are and what has happened to you.
The Outer Planes in most D&D campaigns are at best hinted at, serving as distant realms of the gods. Most campaigns resolve on the material plane, and the arrival of something from the Outer Planes might be a pivotal, climactic event.
But the Planescape Setting puts those things front and center, and Sigil is a city in which the mundane and the otherworldly coexist.
Again, in most D&D campaigns and campaign settings, you basically only need to remember that the good deities and angels and such come from the upper planes and the bad ones come from the lower planes. Even an outer-planar adventure like Descent into Avernus still more or less plays the Nine Hells fairly straight - it's Hell, there are demons invading and devils who are basically just as bad defending it, and yeah, you get some Mad Max-style vehicles, but beyond that it's mostly a straightforward "things are bad here."
Planescape, perhaps because it focuses so much of Sigil and the Outlands, (the former of which is sort of in the latter, though also sort of not) which are True Neutral spaces. This means fiends and celestials and all manner of creature can show up, but also dispels the potential misconception that the Prime Material Plane is the True Neutral plane. This is just as out-there and otherworldly as any of the other outer planes, but without an obvious moral/ethical bent, it instead moves along a kind of z-axis toward weird.
As an example, there's a side quest in Planescape Torment (again, I've spoiled myself a lot on it) in which you meet a sentient street within Sigil. That's already pretty weird, with the street speaking to you through creaking lamp posts and shifting bricks that work in tandem to create intelligible speech, but more than that: the street is pregnant, and you can serve as a midwife.
While I might place a story like Alice in Wonderland as more of a Feywild-style story, there's a similar sense that real-world logic doesn't apply, and you need to take semantics and the framing of a dilemma into account in order to solve it. I do love the way that Planescape really emphasizes how belief informs reality within the Outer Planes. The outer planes are places made of thought and ideas, and as such, the thoughts and ideas of people within them literally determine reality. Apparently there's another point in the game in which you can debate a member of the "Sign of One," (who are essentially an alliance of solipsists) and, by believing hard enough that they don't exist, cause them to cease existing.
Planescape's art design in the sourcebooks was informed by some of the popular "alternative" culture of the 90s, including grunge rock. I grew up on that stuff, and so there's a very special place in my heart for that look and feel. (Truth be told, I don't think I actually got into Nirvana until I went to high school in 2000, but I'd been listening to alternative rock since 1997, when we lived in Palo Alto, CA for a year and our main radio station was KOME, which I only recently found out shut down basically right as we came back to Massachusetts.)
I get a very kind of grungey and sort of Jim Henson-y vibe from the way Sigil is described. The various creatures one sees there I could imagine being best thought of as big muppet-like designs, especially the weird Dabus, who speak in rebuses that appear as physical dialogue bubbles near their heads.
There's also a kind of aesthetic that I think was common in video games of the late 90s that involved a lot of simple architecture made of sandstone or metallic materials, I think largely because that was easier to render with early 3D rendering software. The music from the game also has the hallmarks of late 90s video game music, clearly using MIDI synthesizers, and you'll hear some of the same metallic clanks as percussion in the soundtrack that you famously do in Final Fantasy VII's main battle music (which came out a couple years earlier.)
Indeed, I suspect that the reason for FFVII's sort of industrial/sci fi aesthetic might have had to do with the ease of making such environments with late 90's software.
This might not strike others with as much nostalgia as it does with me, but that specific era of computer games was during formative years for me - even if I never played Baldur's Gate or Planescape Torment then, it all rings a familiar bell.
I know that the outer-planar, less solidly real D&D settings put some people off - I know some people are even weirded out by Ravenloft's comparably more grounded spin.
But my take on fantasy is that I want things to go very deep into the otherworldly. I can enjoy a grounded fantasy story like Game of Thrones just fine (though preferably with an ending made by creative leads who are still actually interested in telling the story) but as I see it, you might as well go for broke if you're doing fantasy.
And that doesn't mean you can't tell very human stories - fantasy allows you to blur the line between the metaphorical and the real-within-the-story.
Anyway, give me a 5th Edition Planescape book!
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