A couple days ago, I did a post about what I want to see in a Spelljammer campaign setting book. The post was motivated by the fact that it seems very likely that the next book after Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep will be such a book. Spelljammer is one of those fabled settings - one that was briefly introduced in the late 80s but faded into obscurity due to unpopularity, only for a new generation of players to find out "holy crap, there's a spacefaring sci-fi D&D setting? How is this not the setting for, like, all your books?"
I've been on record frequently about my love of mixing the peanut butter of sci-fi with the chocolate of fantasy - I mean, I, too, was obsessed with Star Wars as a kid. So I am very excited for the high probability we're getting a Spelljammer book (I'd say we have similar evidence we did that a Ravenloft book was coming when they started testing the Gothic Lineages).
But I'll be honest: there's one setting that I'm actually a little more enthusiastic to see get a 5th Edition release, and it's one that I think was more popular, at least in the 90s. And that is Planescape.
Now, as a setting, Planescape is... the narrative borders of it are a little vague. One could make the argument that the DMG already gives us a pretty big part of Planescape, which is just the description of the various planes of the D&D multiverse. In a sense, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus is sort of a Planescape campaign purely on the merits of the fact that most of it takes place on an Outer Plane (in this case, the Nine Hells.)
But Planescape has a little more specificity to it.
Planescape introduces the Outlands and the city of Sigil, along with figures like the Lady of Pain and the various factions that inhabit Sigil. The whole vibe of Planescape is far weirder than the kind of angels-versus-demons aesthetic one might assume you'd get from the Outer Planes.
One of my favorite elements of Planescape, and one that I think really shows off the look and feel they're going for, are the Dabus. Dabus are the servants of the Lady of Pain, who seem to maintain and rearrange the layout of Sigil to her liking. These beings are tall, humanoid-like figures who seem like they might have been designed by either Dr. Seuss or Jim Henson, and when they speak, rather than creating sound, they instead have speech bubbles that appear over their heads with a rebus (a pictographic cypher: the sort where the word "can't" would be depicted as a tin can followed by "+ T").
The factions of Sigil are various organizations that have wildly different views on the purpose of existence and struggle with one another for influence within the city and across the planes. Some examples include the Sensates, who think that any being should seek to experience every possible sensation they can, or the Sign of One, who each believe that the rest of existence only exists because of their imagination, and believe that harnessing that imagination can reshape reality.
Honestly, there are some strong parallels between Sigil and its factions with Ravnica and its guilds, but even as a big Ravnica fan, Planescape does pre-date it by over a decade.
Notably, Planescape was the setting that gave us Tieflings and Gith as playable races (though tieflings were more broadly "plane-touched" rather than being specifically connected to the Nine Hells).
So, with all that context, what do I want to see out of a campaign setting book?
First off, these books are meant primarily for the DM, and I think it's important to focus on adventure-building. Unlike Ravenloft or even potentially Spelljammer, Planescape doesn't have the setting microcosm options that you can see in those. While Ravenloft thrives in tightly contained mini-worlds, Planescape wants to throw the doors wide open. Even an adventure that takes place entirely in Sigil is going to make use of the whole city.
The danger with this setting is that it's a whole lot of things. The 2nd edition setting book spreads itself a little bit thin even when focusing only on Sigil and the Outlands.
So, there's even a part of me that feels like you'd want two books - one for the city and one for the Outlands (and maybe even a Manual of the Planes for 5th edition.)
But there are lots of other books to be published, so let's see if we can figure something out.
I really appreciated the way that Van Richten's Guide to Raven loft dedicated a lot of its pages to genre and tone. Really, the biggest reason to look at different campaign settings in the first place is to seek out a different tone. I think it would be good to really place a strong emphasis on how adventures in the outer planes should feel different than those on the prime material plane.
One key, I think, is that devils and demons that show up in the prime material plane are pretty much always going to be antagonists to defeat, usually without hesitation. But if you are going on an adventure in the Abyss, chaotic evil fiends are going to be the default of what you encounter while visiting, and while yes, you'll need to watch yourself very carefully, you'll also need to figure out a way to relate to and earn the trust of its denizens. I think emphasizing that good and evil (and law and chaos) are not just moral judgments, but also an inextricable element to the setting, and where balance between those elements might become more important than the victory of good over evil.
As I said before, the factions in Sigil (who have strongholds and bases in other planes,) do bear a resemblance to the guilds in Ravnica. It might be tempting, then, to structure the book in a similar way - devoting a chapter to each faction and going through plot hooks and adventures that would feature each of them. The only reason I think this structure could be a mistake is that the book might look too much like the Ravnica sourcebook. Indeed, even though the gods of Theros are cool, one of the things I found a little underwhelming about Mythic Odysseys of Theros was the way that it simply repeated that structure from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica.
I think that the Sigil factions should certainly get a good write-up in any Planescape sourcebook, but I wouldn't make it the primary focus of the book, because I think you'd wind up being forced to cut back on stuff about The Outlands.
This, of course, is always a challenge for settings that have a neat "set." In the 2nd Edition Planescape book, only 7 of the 16 Gate-Towns are described (the ones you get are Automata (Mechanus), Bedlam (Pandemonium), Curst (Carceri), Glorium (Ysgard), Plague-Mort (The Abyss), Ribcage (Nine Hells), and Xaos (Limbo)). I'd love to get details on all of these, but again, there are only so many pages you can fit between the covers before you have a weapon that does 1d6 bludgeoning damage.
Again, I think the emphasis for a sourcebook should tend to be how to build adventures that have the right feel for the setting than necessarily bogging us down with endless details about the world. So, I'd like to see a lot of guidance on how to make Planescape adventure both have that otherworldly feel and also show how philosophy truly shapes reality within the outer planes.
Now, as with any setting book, I'd also expect we would get some player options. Many classes already have kind of planar-themed subclasses, like the Horizon Walker Ranger or the Oath of the Watchers paladin. I think you could easily create subclasses themed around particular planes as well.
In the 2nd Edition Planescape book, we had tieflings and gith as playable races, along with the "bariaur," which is kind of a goat-centaur that hails from chaotic good planes like Ysgard and Arborea. I think making 5th edition Bariaurs would be a natural move, though I think we could also definitely see some other planar races and lineages.
Actually, one thing I think would be very interesting is to allow the creation of characters who are Primes, Petitioners, or Planars.
Primes are just like most D&D characters - denizens of the Prime Material Plane who have come to this wondrous and awesome realm. (And their gobsmacked reaction to the outer planes is generally why they're seen as idiotic hicks).
Petitioners are the souls of people who have died (either as planars or primes) and then gone on to the outer planes according to the gods they worshipped and the alignments they held in life. Petitioners are in the process of becoming celestials, fiends, or other planar beings. (To be fair, I think these are typically NPC-only).
Planars are humanoids who were born and raised in the outer planes, and have always lived their natural lives within the planes.
So, that might be another angle to approach playable races, maybe creating rules that alter the way that a race works if it's a planar version.
I do think that any setting book should have a bestiary filled with cool creatures, but I also think it would be good to emphasize the way that conflicts in Planescape need not be resolved purely through violence. The 2nd Edition book gives some guidance on how a DM can handle murder-hobo players, including potentially just having the big demon the players are trying to kill just ignore them and move on with its day.
Actually, a note on language:
Planescape came out during the height of the "Satanic Panic," when extreme "moral guardians" had condemned D&D as some kind of tool of devil-worship, given the presence of demonic monsters and game systems that involved summoning them (which, you know, was usually what the bad guys were doing, but don't count on reactionaries to understand such nuances). In an effort to placate the fears of parents who feared this game would turn their children into baby-sacrificing satanists, TSR made some changes to its worldbuilding, turning the Nine Hells into a realm known as Baator, and the resident Devils into "Baatezu." Likewise, demons were renamed "tanar'ri," and daemons, the neutral evil fiends, were renamed "yugoloths," which is the only one of those terms that really stuck (I think probably become daemon is way too easy to confuse with demon).
While I think it's good that sanity prevailed and people have recognized that merely portraying these evil creatures is not the same as encouraging its players to worship them, I honestly kind of like the notion that these words still exist - that maybe in their own languages, these fiends use these terms to refer to themselves. In fact, I believe that lore developed to suggest that Tanar'ri are actually only the most recent form of demon, and that earlier forms like Obyriths pre-date the Tanar'ri as earlier denizens of The Abyss.
Some of the planes have seen their names change over time. Obviously, the Nine Hells were briefly Baator (and I think are technically now "The Nine Hells of Baator,") but there were also some changes like Olympus becoming Arborea, the "Happy Hunting Grounds" becoming the Beastlands (which is definitely a good change, especially considering that the Happy Hunting Grounds were the invention of a white guy who just made it up and claimed that it was a Native American concept). Mechanus was originally called Nirvana (though I think it's still sometimes called "The Clockwork Nirvana.") And I think Carceri used to be Tartarus, while Hades was simply The Grey Waste. I think the current names are all pretty good, though I like the idea of internalizing some of the old terms and treating them not as some editorial change by the company that owns D&D, but instead just different names for the same place used in different contexts.
One of the things that's really fun about the 2nd Edition planescape book is its very 1990s "new weird" aesthetic. 5th Edition has had a pretty consistent look to it, with the exception perhaps of Eberron: Rising from the Last War (which I think re-used old art assets from previous editions). While I'd love to see Sigil and other Planescape elements rendered in 5th Edition's standard realistic style, I would hope we'd also get some other art styles in there as well. In terms of visual design, I think it's important that everything looks weird - no bureaucrat's robe, no soldier's armor, no merchant's hat should look "normal." I'm just looking at the Petitioner's section in the Player's Guide and there's a dude with a mantle that makes him look like a rhinoceros beetle and another guy who seems to be wearing some kind of slug as a cowl.
Planescape should be very, very "extra."
No comments:
Post a Comment