While I'm very glad I got into it eventually, I've often felt some regret that I wasn't playing D&D as a kid, so suited as it is to my desire to tell stories and then get to experience those stories as games. Admittedly, I do sometimes wonder if I would engage with the game in a way I'd find interesting now as a guy in his early/mid 30s.
The point is:
I read an article on the A.V. Club about Planescape: Torment, a game that came out in the late 90s, somewhat of a set with games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and the like. At the time, I was only just discovering JRPGs of the decade like Secret of Mana, and never actually played those titles.
But the thing is, looking at Planescape in particular, there seems to be an aesthetic that really brings me back to the 90s. I think the best way to demonstrate the aesthetic I'm talking about is just to show you:
Something about the kind of corroded stone and the font choice really brings me back. There's a kind of aesthetic that probably had to do with the early capabilities of computer graphics that I think of as "sandstone and harsh light." Similarly, Planescape Torment has a contemporaneous and often compatible aesthetic that saw a lot of grimy, metallic structures (see also: Midgar from Final Fantasy VII) that were probably popular in part because the relatively simple reflective aspects of metal surfaces were easier to render in those early days of computer graphics.
Anyway, the Planescape setting is for D&D, but it is quite different from, say, the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk in that it is not set in an earth-like world that happens to have a bunch of supernatural stuff on it, but instead puts the Outer Planes - the raw, inherently magical lands of fiends and celestials and other strange beings - as its primary setting.
Reading up on it, I found that it's considered by some to be D&D's take on the "New Weird," a broad artistic movement that seeks to replace genre cliches with new ideas, aesthetics, and tones. Planescape thus sets things far, far away from any kind of medieval castles. Things are, well, weird in Planescape's central location - the city of Sigil (which apparently is pronounced with a hard G, which infuriates me) - a ring-shaped city looking up on itself that holds portals to all the other planes and which is ruled over by the silent and enigmatic Lady of Pain - an omnipotent being who will annihilate anyone who tries to worship her as a god (that's her on the cover, both standing to the side and in statue form as part of the title.)
Anyway, "New Weird" seems to be a remarkably succinct term for my aeshetic style when it comes to fantasy. Mind you, I love Tolkien and the classic stuff, but I definitely like it when things get, well, weirder.
Actually, one of the odd things with D&D is that, following the Satanic Panic that singled out the game in particular in the 80s and early 90s, is that TSR (this was before Wizards of the Coast bought them) renamed Devils Baatorians (or I think Baatrezu) and Demons as Tanar'ri, to de-emphasize the parallels with real-world religious conceptions of, you know, evil spirits.
While there's certainly a part of me that feels this is silly - that surely people should be able to distinguish between fictional games and real spiritual truths (admittedly, as someone raised without any particular religion I never grew up thinking there were literal demons trying to corrupt me) - there's also a part of me that kind of likes this: that the audience does not simply get to rely on prior existing myths in order to contextualize what these beings are.
In large part, I think fantasy as a genre is about inventing mythology, but in a consciously fictional manner. Greek Myth, for example, was some of the foundational fantasy fiction of western literature, but the literality of it, or rather how literally people took it, is something that probably varied from culture to culture and epoch to epoch (not unlike modern religions. I certainly don't want to get too deep into this thorny subject, but existing sects of major religions today will disagree over whether stories from sacred texts are meant to be interpreted as historically accurate or allegorical tales of morality.)
But in this sense, I think that fantasy has the opportunity, yes, to rejigger and reinterpret classic mythological forms in new ways. Take A Song of Ice and Fire, for example, which presents very traditional fantasy elements - dragons and the undead - and then deconstructs the genre's nostalgic medievalism in presenting that type of society as fundamentally broken and, by today's standards, dystopian.
But fantasy also has license to create profoundly new types of myth. I don't know if there's any prior-existing mythology that has anything akin to the city of Sigil, but now that is created, it's a fantasy-myth we have the ability to interpret and play with.
I believe that there hasn't been any Planescape material published by Wizards since 3rd edition, but I'm now kind of obsessed with it. I think the next official setting sourcebook we're likely to get will be a hardcover version of the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron, which to be fair, in its Dungeon Punk feel is also very 90s (despite the fact that it came out in the early 00s, I believe.)
But I'm very curious to see if they revisit this setting. 5th Edition has been really popular, and I think it's likely to last a while - if 2nd and 3rd editions both lasted about a decade each, perhaps we'll see 5th edition continuing on into 2025 or so, or even longer. I don't know what kind of products they have coming down the pipeline.
Interviews with Chris Perkins have suggested that they're hesitant to pump out too many books - they do want to focus on quality over quantity. But I will say that I'm far more excited for sourcebooks than published adventures.
I'd love to see a series of 5th edition sourcebooks for the various major settings. But given how freaking weird Planescape is, I'm now really hoping we get one for this setting.
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