Yes, I picked up Planes of Law, Planes of Chaos, and Planes of Conflict off of DM's Guild for about 20 bucks total.
To my great joy, at least so far, the books seem to be really lore-focused, with fairly little in terms of mechanical stuff - and as someone who knows very little about AD&D rules, that makes this far more useful to me.
These books go into detail about the various outer planes. I've only read some of Planes of Law at this point, but the depth of detail one gets is pretty great. In 5th Edition we've really barely gotten anything about the Outer Planes - there are a few paragraphs for each in the DMG and then a bit about them in the Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus adventure as well as some in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (specifically about the Blood War).
But these publications go deep. I don't know exactly how they were published back in the day, but Planes of Law is divided into a few pdfs - one with a broad overview and then extensive write-ups of each plane within its purview - for example, the pdf I'm currently reading is all about Acheron, and it's 34 pages, with details about the four layers of the plane (interestingly it's really only the first layer that's engaged in constant warfare) with bits about notable locations (for example, Nishrek, the home of Gruumsh and the rest of the Orcish pantheon).
While I haven't read its in-depth description, I find it interesting how even a good-leaning plane like Arcadia could potentially be dangerous, with the Harmonium presence there and the local petitioners not really tolerating anything that doesn't fit their utopian vision.
Even Mount Celestia, while purported to be one of the safest planes in the Great Ring, has a dungeon-like environment out in the holy water ocean on its lowest layer, Lunia. Also, we never encountered it in my Descent into Avernus game, but the Garden on Avernus is super creepy - a beautiful, edenic place that devils (ahem, baatezu, as we're in 2nd Edition and responding to the Satanic Panic) fear to go, and is perfectly safe if you ignore that people will disappear, their possessions set down and then a few footprints that go off about 10 feet before abruptly ending.
Planescape has a lot of strangeness to it, and I'm always looking out for the particularly weird stuff. The highlight in this regard for Acheron (beyond the "everything's on a floating iron cube" thing) are the Hassitorium - fortresses that move because people/spirits can be, as a punishment, made part of the fort itself and have to walk around, carrying it on their feet. The weak collapse and are crushed beneath the forts, but I'd definitely emphasize for party encountering one of these (such as the town of Istvarhan) that they're watching a big castle walking toward them on thousands of humanoid-sized feet.
While lore certainly gets updated between editions - we're seeing how the Spelljammer setting is transforming quite significantly in 5th Edition, replacing the Phlogiston with the Astral Plane - the stuff here is usable at least until it's otherwise contradicted (and of course, nothing is preventing you from playing with 2nd Edition canon.)
While I'm yearning to run something back in my homebrew setting after 2+ years of Ravnica, I've also become quite enamored with a few other canon settings. I've been champing at the bit to run a Ravenloft campaign at some point and make use of all the cool stuff from Van Richten's, but I think if I had to pick a setting that seemed to speak to my sensibilities the most, I think I've got to go with Planescape.
I am still very hopeful that we'll get a 5th Edition Planescape book some time in the near future (the Wonders of the Multiverse UA seemed to tease one similarly to how Travelers of the Multiverse seemed to tease Spelljammer and "Gothic Races" and "Gothic Subclasses" did with Ravenloft, so fingers crossed!) But I am gobbling up the lore of Planescape here (even if I think THAC0 is way overcomplicated and am very thankful that we simply have a +hit bonus against AC, where you want both of your numbers to be high and you want the enemy's to be low.)
No comments:
Post a Comment