I've long had this idea brewing in my head, and I've finally (started) to put it to (digital) paper.
The Planescape setting makes the planes, usually only tangentially relating to the plots of ordinary campaign set in the Prime Material Plane, into detailed and fleshed-out locations in their own right.
The oddness of this is that while a normal campaign might have a villain's plan be to open a portal to a nightmarish realm of terrifying demons, ushering in an apocalyptic invasion of evil monsters, Planescape portrays The Abyss as, well, yeah, bad, but also a place with towns and inns and mortal people who just kind of, you know, live there.
Philosophically, Planescape campaigns are encouraged to be, well, more philosophical. While you certainly can fight things in them, the objectives are more up for the players to debate. Even in a cosmos built on the axes of good/evil and law/chaos, the Planescape factions present arguments that muddy the water, where a faction like the Bleak Cabal, who see existence as a curse and are found in large numbers in the lower planes, are actually very generous and kind, while the Fated have greater presences in the Upper Planes despite being basically Randian Objectivists (you'd think they'd be found in Gehenna, the plane most associated with greed). The tension between goodness and respect for others' agency is brought up by the Sect (like a Faction but no official role in the governance of Sigil) called the Order of Planes-Militant, which seeks to essentially conquer parts of neighboring planes for Mount Celestia - a plane that is, yes, very much like heaven, but doesn't it feel wrong that it should be trying to take pieces of other good-aligned planes like Bytopia or Arcadia?
Anyway, D&D campaigns famously often start in taverns, and the treatment of the planes as functional places where people live gave me the following idea: What if you started your campaign in the worst dive bar in the entire multiverse?
And by worst, I don't necessarily mean most dangerous or horrific (though it's certainly a bit of both,) but just the epitome of the kind of place where, should you find yourself drinking there, you will ask yourself very serious questions about just what went wrong in your life that you would end up there.
Cue the Rotten Dug, a bar out in the middle of the wastelands of the Plain of Infinite Portals, the uppermost layer of The Abyss.
Built inside the poorly-taxidermied corpse of some abyssal beast, the Rotten Dug is infamous for its Pus Pies, which are like little pot-pies made with the ever-oozing pus from the dead colossus (I told you the taxidermy was done poorly) that is technically edible and nutritious if you can keep it down (demons like it fine, but mortals generally only eat it if they are starving, and even that's a risk).
Run by an (abyssal) tiefling barkeep named Lavender, with a cannibal human cook named Stark, and their security guard, a disgraced, emaciated Vrock named Corvap (who responds only to threats against the staff or the structure of the building - customers are on their own,) it's the only place to take shelter for miles around (though given it's the Outer Planes, the distances aren't consistent).
I've been trying to design adventures that are more sandbox-like, as I worry my tendency is to create things that are too linear, so the idea here would be that the players begin at level 1 (might up that to level 3 just to give myself more options for monsters,) stuck like everyone else there, when a demon gang comes in looking for a guy from the Fraternity of Order who has bounties on his head from several different powerful individuals seeking him out.
In doing various quests radiating out from the tavern, they'll discover that the Guvner (a common term for members of the Fraternity) knows how to get out of the Abyss, and that he stole knowledge from a demon lord (Dagon) relating to a ritual of apotheosis, putting him in very high demand indeed.
Eventually, they'll find that he's been captured by Yugoloth bounty hunters, and will need to find some way to get him released, which will likely involve making a lot of money out in the wastelands.
One side quest I've come up with is that they meet a Yuan-Ti petitioner (the soul of a dead person - because the Outer Planes are also afterlives, petitioners are just like other NPCs here, except that they're bound to the plane). The Yuan-Ti sacrificed itself to a secret serpent god in the hopes that by giving it their body and soul, they would effectively merge with the Abyssal Serpent (think Rykard from Elden Ring, if you're familiar with that). But when they died after the rite, they woke up on the first layer of the Abyss. Now, they're looking for the correct sinkhole to jump into to take them to the proper layer with their god (the sinkholes are the eponymous infinite portals). The likely conclusion to this story is that the Abyssal Serpent isn't real, but is just Tharizdun luring people to their dooms, but I think there could be some fun philosophical questions about godhood and individuality here, so the little gut-punch ending might not even be necessary.
Anyway, my interpretation of the Plain of Infinite Portals is that it's the bleakest, most miserable desert imaginable, with demon ichor bubbling up like tar and hardpan that sends clouds of asbestos as it crumbles underfoot, with oily, sharp-leafed shrubs and razorvine growing as sparse flora. Borrowing from 2nd Edition's Planes of Chaos, it's dotted with iron fortresses, many of which have rusted and fallen to ruin. Basically, I'd give it a bit of a Western vibe, but really dialing up the wretched misery of it all (actually, I should probably watch more of the Fallout tv show, as I think that would probably have some of the vibes I'm looking for).
I've tended to think that grunge music from the 1990s seems like the right soundtrack for Planescape (I'm biased, also, because grunge/alt rock from the 90s is my childhood comfort-food music), and I recently got the album Frogstomp by Silverchair - an album whose art I remember distinctly from childhood but that I never actually listened to. There's a song off of it called Tomorrow (I think it was the album's big single) that describes what sounds like a bar down in hell, including that there's no bathroom and just a faucet with no sink with water that is "very hard to drink." I think I might work that detail into the Rotten Dug, with just a faucet that spills brown water onto the floor. I looked up the music video to it, which actually pretty closely matches the aesthetics I imagine.
Anyway, as an adventure in the Abyss, it's going to be dark and unhinged, with lots of gross-out bits and casually gruesome violence. The Abyss is a place of nihilistic violence, so I think that kind of James Gunn's The Suicide Squad feel is appropriate.
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