I realize I've probably visited this topic before, but I think that it bears some looking into again.
As I've written in recent days, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space is a mixed bag. I think that the product is not necessarily what players expected it to be, and while what is there is great, it's missing a lot of the elements that I think people wanted from a campaign setting book. Apart from the Rock of Bral, there's not much "setting" to the product.
Planescape, as a setting, is arguably far weirder than even Spelljammer. But the thing that, to me, strikes me as the biggest challenge to getting the setting into 5th Edition is that there are two very big elements to the setting that could both take up an entire lengthy book.
As I see it, these elements are The Factions and The Planes.
The Factions
One of the most iconic things that Planescape introduced was its Factions. These are massive organizations that have members spanning the various planes of the D&D multiverse. The Factions are all unified by a shared philosophy. For example, the Athar believe that nothing fundamental separates the gods from mortals, and that divine power is achievable for anyone who works hard enough at it. The Guvners believe that the universe fundamentally adheres to foundational laws that determine everything that happens, and that if one were to master all those laws, one would be omnipotent.
The Factions are found in the various planes, with bases and headquarters usually in planes that fit with their alignment - the aforementioned Guvners like the Lawful Neutral clockwork plane of Mechanus while the Athar prefer the Astral Plane, pointing to the husks of dead gods as evidence that these so-called Powers aren't all that they claim to be.
The Factions are particularly prevalent in the city of Sigil, which is the central hub of adventure for Planescape. The city is filled with portals to every other plane of existence, which allows parties to just find the right portal and go have an adventure on one plane or another and come home to relax and look for their next quest.
The original "Planescape Campaign Setting" box set really focused on Sigil and the Factions, along with a description of The Outlands, the True Neutral plane that Sigil ostensibly exists within (though one can only reach it through portals, so for all practical purposes it's its own plane.)
A 5E Planescape book could easily follow this model, maybe focusing in on Sigil as a city of adventure - I believe that the critically-acclaimed CRPG Planescape: Torment takes place entirely (or at least predominantly) in Sigil.
However, the reason I'd recommend they don't simply do this is that, well, it's very, very similar to the other "city dominated by factions defined by radically different philosophies" setting book: Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. Indeed, I think a lot of people have suggested that Sigil may have served as a major inspiration when Magic the Gathering introduced the plane in 2005 (this was after Wizards of the Coast took over D&D, so it wasn't like anyone would sue them).
I think if I weren't in the middle of a Ravnica campaign that had been going for over two years, I'd be more excited about a Faction/Sigil focus for Planescape. I don't know how popular Ravnica has been as a setting, honestly. I'm just the one who's been deep in it since 2020 (and planning for the campaign started well before).
Still, I cannot imagine a D&D sourcebook for Planescape (for a new edition and not as an add-on) that doesn't involve Sigil or the Factions. I just think that it'd probably be best if the book is not so Faction-focused as GGtR is on its guilds.
The Planes
The thing is, there's an absolute ton of stuff that Planescape has to cover, because there are 17 planes that one needs to cover - and that's just the Outer Planes! We mustn't forget that there are the Elemental Planes, and also the Feywild and Shadowfell.
2E D&D also had a bunch of quasi-elemental planes and such - but I'd leave those out and just focus on the four elemental planes. Then, I'd want to touch on the Ethereal and Astral planes (technically, Spelljammer now takes place entirely in the Astral Plane, with Wildspace being the overlap between the Astral and Prime Material.)
Breaking it Down by Page Count
That's a ton to cover, but I think there's a model that we can look at to try to do the planes some semblance of justice. Regular readers of this blog would not be shocked to discover that, yes, it's Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.
Van Richten's has a number of Domains of Dread that they go into detail about, dedicating roughly 6 pages on average for each of them. These descriptions give you a summary of the vibe of the place, details about its Darklord, and ways you can make an adventure set there that feels very much "of the domain."
I think a similar model for planes would be fantastic.
Ok, so how many pages are we looking at, then?
For the Outer Planes, including all 16 on the rim of the Great Wheel and then the Outlands, that means 102 pages.
Now, let's add similar entries for each of the four main elemental planes and then also the Feywild and the Shadowfell. That gives us 36 more, for a total of 138 pages dedicated to the planes.
The Astral and Ethereal Planes are more transitional planes, and so I think you could get away with just giving them 2-3 pages each. We'll be conservative and say 2, so now we're up to 142 pages.
Now, let's go back to character creation. We're likely to get new backgrounds and feats (as seen in the Wonders of the Multiverse UA). There's also possibly a new race with the Glitchling. There is not, however, any indication of a new subclass (there are giant-themed ones coming in Bigby's, and perhaps a whole swath of new ones in the Book of Many Things).
Van Richten's has 26 pages dedicated to character creation - unless we're missing something big, that's probably more than what we need for a Planescape book to cover the background, feats, and race. But let's just make that room here. So, this puts us up to 168 pages.
Now, the Factions. The most obvious analogue here is the Guild sections in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. The full "Guilds of Ravnica" chapter is 70 pages, so an average of 7 pages per guild. However, this is more the player-facing side of the guilds. Chapter 4, Creating Adventures, is another 50 pages, with sections on how to make adventures centered around each guild.
Personally, I think that if we give the plane descriptions as cited above, there will be plenty of fodder for adventure stuff. The treatment of renown might also not be as big of a deal, and the backgrounds seem to be generic for all the factions, rather than a separate one for each. So, honestly, I think we could probably cover each faction in 5 pages a piece.
But how many factions are there? In 2nd Edition, there was a storyline called the Faction War that saw the factions leave Sigil, many disbanding or getting wiped out. So, do we just move forward in Planescape without those factions? Something tells me that, like how 4th Edition broke the Great Wheel cosmology, people would much rather go back to what came before. So, let's assume that we're going with all 15 of the original factions. At 5 pages per faction, this would take 75 pages.
So, now we're at 243 pages, and we're starting to get a pretty hefty book.
Next, we've got to talk about the Bestiary. While 5E has given us a pretty healthy number of outer-planar beings (Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes was kind enough to give us at least one monster from Pandemonium and one from Acheron, as well as plenty more demons, devils, and yugoloths,) there's lots of other weird stuff from Planescape that I'd be eager to see.
The bestiary in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica is 45 pages long. The section in Van Richten's is 33 pages. Obviously, Boo's Astral Menagerie is 64 pages, but that's an outlier (for those complaining, not entirely unjustifiably, about Spelljammer's relative thin-ness, I do think we got an absolutely stellar - pardon the pun - monster supplement). So, let's assume something closer to Van Richten's in length. That puts our page count at 276.
Ok, then what about treasure and spells? One would have to assume there are some crazy magic items out on the planes. Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, which I think is one of the most treasure-rich setting books if memory serves, has a 16-page chapter for treasure. This puts us up to 292.
Oh, and I almost forgot! Sigil! Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica dedicates 22 pages to describing the Tenth District. Eberron: Rising from the Last War spends 32 pages describing the metropolis of Sharn. These are the two most detailed descriptions of specific urban spaces in 5E, so I think we could cover Sigil in a comparable span of pages. Let's take the average and say 27 pages to describe Sigil.
Throw in, say, three pages for spells and we're at 321.
So, this would definitely put the book on the hefty side of things. But books of this length are not unprecedented. Explorer's Guide to Wildemount is 304 pages. Eberron: Rising from the Last War is 320 pages.
So, yes, by this very guesswork-heavy method, we've produced a page count that would make this the longest setting book in 5th Edition.
But honestly, shouldn't it be? I mean, Planescape is the ultimate big D&D setting. And I think I've been pretty thorough here in what a Planescape book should entail.
I don't know what to expect next year when the book comes out. I'm sure we'll start to get a better sense of it about a year from now. But I really hope that they go all-out and truly bring as much of this setting to 5th Edition as they can. Much as Ravenloft can be thrown into other campaigns by having a brief side-adventure into the Domains of Dread, many campaigns (especially those going into the higher levels) take sojourns into other planes. We saw in Critical Role's first campaign several trips to other planes - going to the Nine Hells to permanently kill a Rakshasa that had been plaguing them (and coming closer to a TPK than they ever would again,) and going to Elysium to prove worthy of their patron gods to get the power necessary to seal Vecna beyond the Divine Gate. That campaign was, of course, the original Exandria campaign, but stuff from Planescape made it into the game as well.
This could be a fantastic book, and a great one to go out on as we move on from 5th Edition to whatever they're calling One D&D. This is another setting I think there will be a lot of hype for, and I hope they can do it right.
Obviously, take all my math here with a huge grain of salt. We don't know what the book will prioritize, and indeed if it's just going to be a single book (though as I've said before, I think the decision to make Spelljammer a box set rather than a single volume feels like it constrained the product too much. 64 pages was plenty for Light of Xaryxis and Boo's Astral Menagerie, but I think the Astral Adventurer's Guide wanted about 50-60 more pages for examples of Wildspace systems. I wonder how much of that was a creative decision from the D&D team and how much of it was because of Hasbro pressure - the company that owns Wizards of the Coast.
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