A lot of things have happened since WotC's release of their 5th Edition Planescape box set, and so I sort of lost track of the fact that I started reviewing its three constituent books.
In broad terms, I think that this set is far more useful than the Spelljammer set, which wasted (or perhaps filled) far too many pages of its Astral Adventurer's Guide with ship deck plans I was unlikely to use. Spelljammer was a wasted opportunity to expand and modernize the Spelljammer campaign setting (and I fear might consign it to another 30-year gap for its next update) while the Planescape set does actually feel like it gives you some meat to work with.
That being said, I will still prefer the earlier 5E style of campaign setting book - a thick volume with exciting character options (read: subclasses, races, and even a whole new class in Eberron's case) and lots of adventure hooks but perhaps only a low-level intro adventure to give you the setting's vibe (which I think Van Richten's and Eberron do very well - Ravnica's intro adventure is oddly divorced from guild politics, which is a strange choice).
But, though I hope that future setting books will return to the earlier model (even if they are divided into box sets) we have the rather intriguing Turn of Fortune's Wheel, which...
I guess I'll give my overall impressions up front. Turn of Fortune's Wheel is an amazing skeleton for a campaign. But if you want to run this, you should not run it exactly as written. There are too many gaps here, too many shortcuts. This could have been an amazing full adventure book, but confined to its few pages as one third of the box set, the thing is basically written in fast-forward.
That said, the hook to it is super cool, and I think in the hands of a DM who is willing to do a lot of their own work on creating more content and crafting things for the players, you could have a hell of a campaign.
There is a central conceit here that I'm tempted to put into a spoiler cut, but it's also kind of the crux of the adventure, so let's just get it out of the way:
Your players' characters, until the final chapter, cannot permanently die. Furthermore, the adventure is written in such a way to almost ensure that your party will die early and often.
The characters are affected by a multiversal glitch that causes alternate-timeline versions of them to pop up when they die.
As an aside, before I settled down and wrote a far more reasonable backstory, my very first D&D character was originally written to have three different personalities that shifted in and out. One was what the character actually wound up being, a well-meaning young nobleman who became obsessed with an incomprehensible being from beyond reality, and another version that was a straight up serial killer (also driven mad by his connection to this Great Old One) and a third version that I honestly do not remember. My best friend, who also DMs a lot, told me (rightfully) to simplify that premise.
But this adventure is kind of built for that - and the characters can shift classes and even races (though the latter will require a bit more of an explanation on how that happened). If you have players who are altoholics (see the name of the blog) this is actually great.
Now, you could argue that this diminishes the stakes of the story, but I don't think that's really all that true. There are different stakes - such as figuring out which of these versions is the "truest" version of them, and also the end result of the adventure, which can potentially cause huge shifts in the nature of all the cosmos.
Structurally, the intro owes a lot to the beloved Planescape Torment, and so the players all wake up on slabs in Sigil's Mortuary. This is also where the comically deadly elements of the campaign are introduced, as level 3 characters are sent forth into what is basically a meatgrinder, with hostile Demiliches, a room that incinerates them, and generally a vibe that wouldn't look out of place in the Tomb of Horrors, except that each death merely reveals a new variant (or returns to a previous incarnation).
The party encounters some of Sigil's factions and then gets a job from Shemeshka, the arcanoloth casino owner. Shortly, they leave Sigil and are sent to travel to the various Gate Towns.
Each gate town visit is its own mini-adventure, with stops at 7 out of the 16 towns, which are, as written, probably not going to take very long.
The last stretch takes the party to the Spire at the center of the Outlands and then to the realm of a Beholder deity, the latter of which happens only after the party leaps ahead to level 17 (which I think is also a nod to Planescape Torment, where the final part of the game allows the player to gain many levels before facing the final adversary).
Like Sigil and the Outlands, there's a distinct lack of planar travel in this Planescape adventure, but at the very least we get the flavor of different planes thanks to the Gate Towns.
Still, the structure here is fairly episodic, with a plot conceit justifying the journey to the various Gate Towns. Again, I think that you'd probably want to flesh out both traveling across the Outlands (and there is a section with events that might take place during that travel) and Sigil, and maybe find deeper things to do in the Gate Towns.
Having to squeeze this into a book that's less than a 100 pages, there's some good hooks, but I'd highly recommend building in substantial character-specific quests and side-adventures into this.
I'm not someone who runs published adventures, even if I have almost all of the 5E publications, so take my stances with a grain of salt. If I run a Planescape campaign, I'll almost certainly just do my own thing (and it'll definitely involve traveling to many different planes). But I could imagine both playing and running this to be fun - if the effort is put into fleshing it out.
The natural point of comparison is with Spelljammer, and I think that my issue with Light of Xaryxis was that they really leaned into this kind of 1940s-style serial sci fi vibe - Buck Rogers on one hand and John Carter of Mars on the other. I don't really get why that "planetary romance" style of adventure is pushed so hard with both Spelljammer and Starfinder, when I imagine that most peoples' larger sci-fi points of reference are more along the lines of Star Wars and Star Trek. The former of those was admittedly an evolution of those Buck Rogers-style stories, but there have been generations of post-Star Wars sci-fi created that feel more likely to strike a chord with players.
Planescape, on the other hand, is kind of right as long as it's weird, and I think this adventure does manage to embrace the true oddness of the setting, and encourages a different perspective on what stakes mean for a D&D game.
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