So, not long from now, we'll be getting our 5th Edition Planescape box set. While there's a lot of wariness around, well, just having a box set for a campaign setting rather than the thick books we got earlier in 5E for places like Ravnica, Eberron, or Ravenloft (and I know some people didn't like Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, to which I respond "what is wrong with you?") I do think some of the recent previews have reassured me that there's some substance here, including (admittedly only two pages) for each of the Gate Towns in the Outlands, unlike Spelljammer, which truly lacked most of the "setting" to the setting (beyond the Rock of Bral).
One of the cores to the Planescape setting is its Factions. As someone running a long campaign set in Ravnica, I've been dealing with a similar concept - a bunch of philosophically distinct groups that represent certain worldviews.
But I've been thinking more and more about the way that the various planes work and the various ways that the factions see things, and it calls into question one of the fundamental principles of D&D's cosmology:
Are we sure that the planes are really based on alignment?
Obviously, on a meta level, they are. Indeed, some have complained that the in-between planes like Arcadia or Carceri are almost redundant - characters are typically described in a kind of 3x3 grid, where each position is basically a set of coordinates: Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic, and Good, Neutral, or Evil.
But the planes don't totally represent those forces precisely. Acheron is the plane of war, but its position and historical "official" alignment is lawful neutral/lawful evil. And sure, the organization of armies and military hierarchy is surely a lawful one, but the actual practice of war is one of the most chaotic things in human experience. That order serves, if anything, to impose some degree of order upon a chaotic thing.
In contrast, Carceri is the Prison Plane, and is aligned as Neutral Evil/Chaotic Evil. But isn't a prison, a place where one's existence is regimented and controlled, more of a lawful kind of thing?
There are certainly some factions that seem to have particular alignments: the Mercykillers are pretty obviously lawful evil, believing in draconian punishment and oppression as the only way to enforce order (and therefore justified) and so their place on Acheron makes a certain sense - their real goal is law, but they use evil eagerly as a means to achieve that.
But then you have people like the Fated - a group that basically believes that the rich and powerful have every right to exploit others and take from others, which I would say puts them in a kind of neutral evil/lawful evil kind of alignment, yet their home plane is not Gehenna, the plane of greed, but instead Ysgard, which is the chaotic neutral/chaotic good plane. (Maybe the original designers were fans of Ayn Rand and wanted to place such a worldview in a more flattering position. As someone born during the Reagan administration and who has thus never lived in a country with a healthy social safety net, I am not a fan of Objectivism.)
The notion of the Great Wheel suggests that these planes all exist in an alignment relationship to one another, but it might actually make more sense if we think of them all independently as simply representing what they really focus on. Gehenna is a place of selfishness and greed, and that means its indigenous fiends, the Yugoloths, are all about profiteering in the Blood War. But we don't necessarily need to then say that it occupies this specific place between the Nine Hells and the Abyss (indeed, given its position you might assume they favor the Devils over the Demons because they're next-door neighbors).
A lot of this ambiguity is part of the 2nd Edition books that established Planescape. The books emphasize that the "Great Wheel" model points to the shape of the Outlands as evidence of its truth, but that critics of this theory say that the shape of the Outlands was the first inspiration for the theory, making the whole thing kind of circular logic.
But if we accept the idea that alignment, as a way of categorizing moral and ethical worldviews, is actually just a system imposed upon a much more nuanced cosmos that's more open to interpretation, well... Honestly I think that makes things a little more Planescape.
We'll see if 5E's release tries to iron out the wrinkles in the setting. The fact that designers have been referring to Sigil as the center of the multiverse while in 2nd Edition one of the three major rules of the universe was that there was no singular center to the multiverse does make me worry that things are getting simplified.
The weirdness of Planescape is not just that there are strange creatures popping up in Sigil. It's that the underpinnings of the epic struggles between light and darkness on the Material Plane are exposed as far thornier, ambiguous ones out here in the Outer Planes.
I will say that I really think we could use a 5E Manual of the Planes. The Gate Towns will be useful to give us a flavor of the planes, but in the absence of a whole Planescape product line like TSR released in the 90s, we could use a revisit to the planes themselves, both for conventional campaigns where traveling to them is a climactic moment and for Planescape ones where you're hopping from the Abyss to Bytopia at level 1.
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