So I've had this monster-hunter character floating around in my head for a while.
I'm planning to play the character in Adventurer's League, which as a restriction that you can only do "PHB+1" characters - in other words, the race and subclass have to, at most involve one book other than the player's handbook.
The character is supposed to be a kind of witch-hunter, Van Helsing, Witcher-type character. A sort of dark man who does dark deeds that need doing. (My homebrew setting has a faction called the Nachtjagers who perform this function in the vampire-controlled region of the Empire.)
My initial thought was a Fallen Aasimar Vengeance Paladin.
Alternatively, I've had a Variant Human Monster Slayer Ranger.
I actually came up with slightly different backstories for each - the Ranger is Neutral Good, and has a wife and two kids who are being held hostage in a sort of gilded cage situation by the nobleman (who is probably in some sort of cult) whose werewolf daughter the ranger killed in self-defense.
The Paladin is Lawful Neutral, and witnessed his village and family destroyed by abyssal cultists and a massive Goristro, and whose angelic guide fell battling said demon and was their spirit was tainted in the process (hence the Paladin being a Fallen Aasimar.)
So I've now written up level-1 character sheets for both characters, and I'm trying to decide which of them I'd like to play first.
One thing that's motivating me is a discovery about the nature of Slayer's Prey, a Monster Slayer feature. I realized that it only grants bonus damage once per turn, which throws some of my thoughts about using crossbow expert to hit as many times in a turn as possible with a hand crossbow somewhat into disarray (Hunter's Mark would still give every hit 2d6 damage, so it still might work as a build.) I'm sort of leaning, then, toward the paladin.
One tricky thing is that in adventurer's league (and the way my friend who often runs AL games runs her home game) is that any heavy armor class needs to save up a ton of money to get plate armor (my poor level 5 fighter is still going around in chain mail, but thanks to the defensive fighting style and a +1 shield, he's actually at 20 AC.) And given that the paladin would very much be built around using a two-handed weapon (I usually go for Mauls, but flavor-wise a Greatsword feels better for this one) he's going to be stuck at 16 AC for a good long while.
So I think I am leaning toward the Paladin for now. I think if another friend ever gets around to running Curse of Strahd, I'll strongly consider the Ranger variant.
One thing I needed to figure out was a deity. I've decided to go with Kelemvor, who is a lawful neutral death god (he's detailed in Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, which of course came out before Xanathar's. I'm sure that he'd be listed more specifically as a Grave god now.) I imagine that this character (his name is Rackham Moore - the Ranger is Atrus Moore... though now I kind of like Atrus better for the Paladin...) was meant to serve some more clearly benevolent deity, but chose Kelemvor after his angelic guide was defeated.
Given that the paladin is very grimdark, I think I need to come up with an angle to make him fun for the other players and the DM. One way is to simply lean in hard on the absurdity of how grimdark he is. I guess I'll work it out at the table.
Saturday, August 31, 2019
Friday, August 30, 2019
Upper Planar Villains
I've often talked about how I prefer Magic's five colors over D&D's alignment system. A big part of that probably has to do with the fact that I was first introduced to the five colors when I was eight, and while I already knew about alignments long before I started playing D&D, I didn't actually play the game or really delve into the lore (like knowing, for example, that there's a difference between Devils and Demons) until I was 29.
But I also think that there's an inherent limitation when you make the concepts of good and evil a literal, quantifiable thing in your game. Angels (and other Celestials) in D&D, except those who fall (and typically become fiends) are literally good - as in they are, by their very nature, benevolent.
And I think it's for this reason that while the Monster Manual has something like a dozen devils and demons each (and five or six Yugoloths,) they only have three types of Angel.
Because the expectation is that you're not going to be fighting angels, typically.
Now, to be fair, there are opportunities for your party to encounter a hostile angel.
The most obvious way is if your party is evil - while I think it's definitely rare to run an "evil campaign," the rules of the game don't really do anything to prevent it. I'd say it's more of a challenge to build a satisfying narrative in which the players are evil, fighting against good.
The next way, and one I think is probably far more common, is to have the players fight an angel (or other celestial) over a misunderstanding. As a spoiler for my own players who I'm pretty sure don't read this blog, there's a region in my world that has a hidden enclave of angels trying to subtly fight against the cult that basically destroyed the world's previous global civilization. Given that this region is in a larger area that is basically full-on Mad Max, I think the party will at some point encounter a character who seems to be just another wasteland warlord but is actually a Deva who has been charged with preventing people from finding the angelic enclave. (And could easily become a party contact/ally if the party plays their cards right.)
But borrowing from other games, I think there are ways we could play with the idea of "good."
Before we do, however, I think it's notable that usually, the way you make traditional "good" characters into villains is by making them actually lawful. Because our culture (and indeed most cultures in settled civilizations) often links good with lawfulness, it becomes easy for lawful evil characters to use their lawfulness as a way to portray themselves as good. Think about how often people have justified brutal treatment of individuals or entire populations by claiming that they are merely enforcing the law against criminals.
But we've got Lawful as an element in D&D already - Lawful Good celestials like angels are not just lawful, they're also good. If you want a callous legalistic bureaucracy, you've got Mechanus for that. If you want a dystopian authoritarian police state, you've got the Nine Hells. Mount Celestia is, explicitly, good.
So I'll be honest, we might not actually find a compelling way to make villains out of the upper planes.
But let's look elsewhere for inspiration:
The Diablo series by Blizzard is in some ways infuriating to me, given how its moral universe is so simplistic - there's evil, with demons and the Burning Hells, and good, with angels and Heaven. Humans in Diablo are the de-powered descendants of the Nephalem, who were the offspring of angels and demons who tired of the Eternal Conflict and created the world of Sanctuary. The Nephalem were incredibly powerful, and by Diablo III, the player characters are the first humans to recover their Nephalem power, making them more powerful than angels or demons because they combine both. It also means that humans have free will, with the ability to choose between good and evil.
Now, Reaper of Souls, the expansion to Diablo III, introduces a really fascinating wrinkle to the lore. Its villain is not a demon - not Diablo for the umpteenth time (though he/she was the big bad in the main game) but rather Malthael, one of the archangels.
Malthael, long aloof, found a way that he could suck the demonic aspect of human souls out, which would have the acceptable-to-him consequence of destroying all of humanity's souls. Malthael wants to end the Eternal Conflict once and for all, taking advantage of the fact that the 7 great evils (the demonic equivalent of the archangels) were trapped in the Black Soulstone.
So the villain's great plan in Reaper of Souls is actually to defeat evil once and for all. And from a certain angle, it actually makes perfect sense - after all, if demons are fundamentally evil, ridding the world of any demonic essence would mean ridding the world of evil entirely - and the end result would, in Malthael's mind, just be angels going around being good.
But in looking at good and evil in this way - treating them as physical substances that can be strained out, separated, and contained or even destroyed - Malthael actually winds up performing acts that are far more evil than what we've even seen the demons do.
And while you could simply replicate such a plot, adapting it to D&D, I think the broader lesson from this is that you can have a conflict between simplicity and nuance.
I think there are a lot of different definitions for humanism, but the way I think of it is that it's a worldview that embraces humanity as flawed, sure, but capable of bettering ourselves - it's not that we can truly rid ourselves of all of our faults, but that we can learn to manage them or redirect them into productive uses. Humanism, in this way, requires a nuanced view of people and a respect for the complexity of the world.
In my mind, true goodness requires one to embrace this nuance and complexity, and to make the effort to understand and empathize even with those who do things you think are wrong.
Thus, when coming up with D&D villains from the upper planes, a way you could manage this is by having celestials who are so used to perfection - distilled "good" behavior - that they become intolerant of anyone who fails to live up to their standards. And I believe that this could work well for both Lawful Good and Chaotic Good characters - a Chaotic Good villain could be something like a radical environmentalist who sees any harm caused by humanoids trying to build up the safety of a civilization as unforgivable.
Given the structure of the D&D multiverse, it would be a challenge to make your campaign's big bad an upper planar entity, but I think if you make it less a conflict between total good and total evil, and more a conflict between absolutism and nuance, you might have some room to work with.
But I also think that there's an inherent limitation when you make the concepts of good and evil a literal, quantifiable thing in your game. Angels (and other Celestials) in D&D, except those who fall (and typically become fiends) are literally good - as in they are, by their very nature, benevolent.
And I think it's for this reason that while the Monster Manual has something like a dozen devils and demons each (and five or six Yugoloths,) they only have three types of Angel.
Because the expectation is that you're not going to be fighting angels, typically.
Now, to be fair, there are opportunities for your party to encounter a hostile angel.
The most obvious way is if your party is evil - while I think it's definitely rare to run an "evil campaign," the rules of the game don't really do anything to prevent it. I'd say it's more of a challenge to build a satisfying narrative in which the players are evil, fighting against good.
The next way, and one I think is probably far more common, is to have the players fight an angel (or other celestial) over a misunderstanding. As a spoiler for my own players who I'm pretty sure don't read this blog, there's a region in my world that has a hidden enclave of angels trying to subtly fight against the cult that basically destroyed the world's previous global civilization. Given that this region is in a larger area that is basically full-on Mad Max, I think the party will at some point encounter a character who seems to be just another wasteland warlord but is actually a Deva who has been charged with preventing people from finding the angelic enclave. (And could easily become a party contact/ally if the party plays their cards right.)
But borrowing from other games, I think there are ways we could play with the idea of "good."
Before we do, however, I think it's notable that usually, the way you make traditional "good" characters into villains is by making them actually lawful. Because our culture (and indeed most cultures in settled civilizations) often links good with lawfulness, it becomes easy for lawful evil characters to use their lawfulness as a way to portray themselves as good. Think about how often people have justified brutal treatment of individuals or entire populations by claiming that they are merely enforcing the law against criminals.
But we've got Lawful as an element in D&D already - Lawful Good celestials like angels are not just lawful, they're also good. If you want a callous legalistic bureaucracy, you've got Mechanus for that. If you want a dystopian authoritarian police state, you've got the Nine Hells. Mount Celestia is, explicitly, good.
So I'll be honest, we might not actually find a compelling way to make villains out of the upper planes.
But let's look elsewhere for inspiration:
The Diablo series by Blizzard is in some ways infuriating to me, given how its moral universe is so simplistic - there's evil, with demons and the Burning Hells, and good, with angels and Heaven. Humans in Diablo are the de-powered descendants of the Nephalem, who were the offspring of angels and demons who tired of the Eternal Conflict and created the world of Sanctuary. The Nephalem were incredibly powerful, and by Diablo III, the player characters are the first humans to recover their Nephalem power, making them more powerful than angels or demons because they combine both. It also means that humans have free will, with the ability to choose between good and evil.
Now, Reaper of Souls, the expansion to Diablo III, introduces a really fascinating wrinkle to the lore. Its villain is not a demon - not Diablo for the umpteenth time (though he/she was the big bad in the main game) but rather Malthael, one of the archangels.
Malthael, long aloof, found a way that he could suck the demonic aspect of human souls out, which would have the acceptable-to-him consequence of destroying all of humanity's souls. Malthael wants to end the Eternal Conflict once and for all, taking advantage of the fact that the 7 great evils (the demonic equivalent of the archangels) were trapped in the Black Soulstone.
So the villain's great plan in Reaper of Souls is actually to defeat evil once and for all. And from a certain angle, it actually makes perfect sense - after all, if demons are fundamentally evil, ridding the world of any demonic essence would mean ridding the world of evil entirely - and the end result would, in Malthael's mind, just be angels going around being good.
But in looking at good and evil in this way - treating them as physical substances that can be strained out, separated, and contained or even destroyed - Malthael actually winds up performing acts that are far more evil than what we've even seen the demons do.
And while you could simply replicate such a plot, adapting it to D&D, I think the broader lesson from this is that you can have a conflict between simplicity and nuance.
I think there are a lot of different definitions for humanism, but the way I think of it is that it's a worldview that embraces humanity as flawed, sure, but capable of bettering ourselves - it's not that we can truly rid ourselves of all of our faults, but that we can learn to manage them or redirect them into productive uses. Humanism, in this way, requires a nuanced view of people and a respect for the complexity of the world.
In my mind, true goodness requires one to embrace this nuance and complexity, and to make the effort to understand and empathize even with those who do things you think are wrong.
Thus, when coming up with D&D villains from the upper planes, a way you could manage this is by having celestials who are so used to perfection - distilled "good" behavior - that they become intolerant of anyone who fails to live up to their standards. And I believe that this could work well for both Lawful Good and Chaotic Good characters - a Chaotic Good villain could be something like a radical environmentalist who sees any harm caused by humanoids trying to build up the safety of a civilization as unforgivable.
Given the structure of the D&D multiverse, it would be a challenge to make your campaign's big bad an upper planar entity, but I think if you make it less a conflict between total good and total evil, and more a conflict between absolutism and nuance, you might have some room to work with.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
The Shape of the Outer Planes
If you look in the Monster Manual, the letter D chapter is utterly massive. And that's not that strange when you consider the broad categories of creatures that start with D. This letter holds Dragons, after all, with ten color variations and four age-ranges for each color for a total of 40 dragon types (before you even get into variant templates like Dracoliches and Shadow Dragons or lesser dragons like Dragon Turtles.) You also get the two most iconic types of fiends - Devils and Demons.
Fiends make for good villains - after all, they are defined by the fact that they're evil. My basic understanding of fiends is that denizens of the lower planes are, inherently, fiendish. Even beings that one would think would be some other creature type, like Night Hags deviating from their Fey kin or Tiamat, the Goddess of Evil Dragons, turn out to be fiends when they live in the lower planes.
Given that the game's tendency to have heroic figures facing dangerous threats, it makes sense we'd have a larger rogues' gallery of evil creatures. Fighting a fiend never carries much inherent moral complexity given that these creatures are literally an embodiment of evil.
Given D&D's famous alignment system, it also sort of makes sense that the kind of primary combinations of moral/ethical alignment get the most attention amongst the fiends. Devils, being at the direct intersection of lawful and evil, and demons, being at the direct intersection of chaos and evil, are pretty good poster children for how that alignment system works.
Now, we also have other types of fiends. To fill out the ranks, Yugoloths (in earlier editions called simply "Daemons" - I believe that the term Yugoloth was introduced the same time that Devils were renamed Baatrezu and Demons were called Tanar'ri as a concession to the Satanic Panic, though given how similar Daemon and Demon sound and are spelled, it makes sense that they kept the alternate name after those sorts of concerns died down) represent Neutral Evil. But my understanding is that it doesn't quite break down just that simply. After all, there are 7 Lower Planes. The Nine Hells of Baator and the Abyss are the most storied among them, being the planes of Devils and Demons respectively, but I think each actually has its own type of fiend. Yugoloths, for instance, don't live in the dead-center Neutral Evil plane, but instead in the slightly lawful-leaning Gehenna (which is basically between the Nine Hells and Hades.) That leaves Acheron, Carceri, Hades, and Pandemonium without an iconic fiend.
Now, to be fair, Hades does have its Night Hags, but given that there's only a single stat block for such a creature, it's not really the most satisfying.
One question I often have regarding the planes is whether we should be looking at the great wheel as a circle or as a square. Let me explain what I mean by that:
If it's a circle, it means that the "Neutral X" or "X Neutral" planes, namely Mechanus, Hades, Limbo, and Elysium, are actually the most distilled and profound expressions of their main identity. This would make Hades more evil than the Abyss or the Nine Hells.
That doesn't totally feel right - it's hard to imagine that any plane is actually more evil than the Abyss - but the alternative also has some odd consequences:
If it's a "square," you can imagine that Mount Celestia, Arcadia, Mechanus, Acheron, and the Nine Hells are all equally Lawful, and they only differ in degrees of good and evil. This also feels sort of inaccurate as well, as Mechanus seems so much more dedicated to the concept of Law than, say, Mt. Celestia.
Is it possible that we're looking at some other shape? Given that Mechanus and Limbo are neither upper nor lower planes, perhaps they have some special status.
It is also, perhaps, important to think of Neutrality, in these cosmic alignments, as being not a lack of something but a positive, active choice. The existence of the Outlands, for example, in the Planescape setting, suggests that one can pursue neutrality with some level of gusto, rather than simply invoking it as a way not to take a position. This, then, perhaps gives places like Hades or Mechanus a strong identity without taking away from the Nine Hells. Mechanus is a place is emphatically amoral, not moral or immoral. Similarly, Hades emphatically rejects the industrial orderliness of the Hells but also the unpredictable disorder of the Abyss, and as such revels in its Grey-ness (Hades is often called the Grey Wastes.)
However, if we use Neutrality as its own active choice (and even kind of divide it between Moral Neutrality and Ethical Neutrality - sidenote: I'm using "ethical" as shorthand for the Law/Chaos spectrum, even though I think in real-life ethics are a big part of being a good person - but that might just be because I'm a lawful person,) what that does do is that we find a more complex relationship between the sort of "minor" outer planes. By these I mean the ones that are more strongly aligned with one spectrum than the other. For instance, let's look at Ysgard. Existing between Limbo and Arboria, Ysgard can be referred to as either the most chaotic of the upper (good) planes, or it's a chaotic neutral plane with a slight inclination toward good.
But, essentially, it seems that Ysgard is more chaotic than it is good. It's strongly aligned with chaos, but only marginally aligned with good.
Maybe.
Again, it depends on the "shape" of the planes. It's possible that you conceive of every upper plane as being equally good, with just different quotients of law and chaos. Alternatively, everywhere from Bytopia to Gehenna is equally lawful, with just different quotients of good and evil.
But it can't be both.
Because it it was both, then there really wouldn't be any difference between, say, Pandemonium, the Abyss, and Carceri, because all three would be chaotic and evil.
Now, to be clear, the ambiguities here are A: very granular. In the long run, each of these planes just has its own cool flavor that you can play with, and exactly why, for example, something between Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil is a big prison plane is less an obvious consequence of the alignment as much as it is a cool concept (frankly, I'd probably flip Acheron and Carceri, as a prison seems more lawful than an endlessly raging battlefield), and B: easily explored in-universe by scholars of the multiverse. Fantasy, of course, is distinct from Science Fiction in large part due to the unexplained nature of how things work. Why the planes should take these particular forms is something the players could explore, and indeed, you could have some character theorizing about this "shape of the multiverse" question who sends a high-level party on a fact-finding mission through the outer planes in an attempt to answer those questions.
Taking the DMG's "Building a Multiverse" chapter to heart, my own D&D setting has its own outer planes, though I've been exploring, particularly after seeing how Eberron does its ones, finding new ways to order things - like having an unknown number of outer planes that don't all work quite like the ones in the Great Wheel cosmology. In fact, I began by actually using the 5 colors of magic from Magic: The Gathering (this was before Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica came out), creating 1- and 2-color planes, though it was relatively easy to plug these into the sixteen slots of the Great Wheel (the Black/Red one, for example, is basically the Abyss with a different name - Tartarus.)
Fiends make for good villains - after all, they are defined by the fact that they're evil. My basic understanding of fiends is that denizens of the lower planes are, inherently, fiendish. Even beings that one would think would be some other creature type, like Night Hags deviating from their Fey kin or Tiamat, the Goddess of Evil Dragons, turn out to be fiends when they live in the lower planes.
Given that the game's tendency to have heroic figures facing dangerous threats, it makes sense we'd have a larger rogues' gallery of evil creatures. Fighting a fiend never carries much inherent moral complexity given that these creatures are literally an embodiment of evil.
Given D&D's famous alignment system, it also sort of makes sense that the kind of primary combinations of moral/ethical alignment get the most attention amongst the fiends. Devils, being at the direct intersection of lawful and evil, and demons, being at the direct intersection of chaos and evil, are pretty good poster children for how that alignment system works.
Now, we also have other types of fiends. To fill out the ranks, Yugoloths (in earlier editions called simply "Daemons" - I believe that the term Yugoloth was introduced the same time that Devils were renamed Baatrezu and Demons were called Tanar'ri as a concession to the Satanic Panic, though given how similar Daemon and Demon sound and are spelled, it makes sense that they kept the alternate name after those sorts of concerns died down) represent Neutral Evil. But my understanding is that it doesn't quite break down just that simply. After all, there are 7 Lower Planes. The Nine Hells of Baator and the Abyss are the most storied among them, being the planes of Devils and Demons respectively, but I think each actually has its own type of fiend. Yugoloths, for instance, don't live in the dead-center Neutral Evil plane, but instead in the slightly lawful-leaning Gehenna (which is basically between the Nine Hells and Hades.) That leaves Acheron, Carceri, Hades, and Pandemonium without an iconic fiend.
Now, to be fair, Hades does have its Night Hags, but given that there's only a single stat block for such a creature, it's not really the most satisfying.
One question I often have regarding the planes is whether we should be looking at the great wheel as a circle or as a square. Let me explain what I mean by that:
If it's a circle, it means that the "Neutral X" or "X Neutral" planes, namely Mechanus, Hades, Limbo, and Elysium, are actually the most distilled and profound expressions of their main identity. This would make Hades more evil than the Abyss or the Nine Hells.
That doesn't totally feel right - it's hard to imagine that any plane is actually more evil than the Abyss - but the alternative also has some odd consequences:
If it's a "square," you can imagine that Mount Celestia, Arcadia, Mechanus, Acheron, and the Nine Hells are all equally Lawful, and they only differ in degrees of good and evil. This also feels sort of inaccurate as well, as Mechanus seems so much more dedicated to the concept of Law than, say, Mt. Celestia.
Is it possible that we're looking at some other shape? Given that Mechanus and Limbo are neither upper nor lower planes, perhaps they have some special status.
It is also, perhaps, important to think of Neutrality, in these cosmic alignments, as being not a lack of something but a positive, active choice. The existence of the Outlands, for example, in the Planescape setting, suggests that one can pursue neutrality with some level of gusto, rather than simply invoking it as a way not to take a position. This, then, perhaps gives places like Hades or Mechanus a strong identity without taking away from the Nine Hells. Mechanus is a place is emphatically amoral, not moral or immoral. Similarly, Hades emphatically rejects the industrial orderliness of the Hells but also the unpredictable disorder of the Abyss, and as such revels in its Grey-ness (Hades is often called the Grey Wastes.)
However, if we use Neutrality as its own active choice (and even kind of divide it between Moral Neutrality and Ethical Neutrality - sidenote: I'm using "ethical" as shorthand for the Law/Chaos spectrum, even though I think in real-life ethics are a big part of being a good person - but that might just be because I'm a lawful person,) what that does do is that we find a more complex relationship between the sort of "minor" outer planes. By these I mean the ones that are more strongly aligned with one spectrum than the other. For instance, let's look at Ysgard. Existing between Limbo and Arboria, Ysgard can be referred to as either the most chaotic of the upper (good) planes, or it's a chaotic neutral plane with a slight inclination toward good.
But, essentially, it seems that Ysgard is more chaotic than it is good. It's strongly aligned with chaos, but only marginally aligned with good.
Maybe.
Again, it depends on the "shape" of the planes. It's possible that you conceive of every upper plane as being equally good, with just different quotients of law and chaos. Alternatively, everywhere from Bytopia to Gehenna is equally lawful, with just different quotients of good and evil.
But it can't be both.
Because it it was both, then there really wouldn't be any difference between, say, Pandemonium, the Abyss, and Carceri, because all three would be chaotic and evil.
Now, to be clear, the ambiguities here are A: very granular. In the long run, each of these planes just has its own cool flavor that you can play with, and exactly why, for example, something between Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil is a big prison plane is less an obvious consequence of the alignment as much as it is a cool concept (frankly, I'd probably flip Acheron and Carceri, as a prison seems more lawful than an endlessly raging battlefield), and B: easily explored in-universe by scholars of the multiverse. Fantasy, of course, is distinct from Science Fiction in large part due to the unexplained nature of how things work. Why the planes should take these particular forms is something the players could explore, and indeed, you could have some character theorizing about this "shape of the multiverse" question who sends a high-level party on a fact-finding mission through the outer planes in an attempt to answer those questions.
Taking the DMG's "Building a Multiverse" chapter to heart, my own D&D setting has its own outer planes, though I've been exploring, particularly after seeing how Eberron does its ones, finding new ways to order things - like having an unknown number of outer planes that don't all work quite like the ones in the Great Wheel cosmology. In fact, I began by actually using the 5 colors of magic from Magic: The Gathering (this was before Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica came out), creating 1- and 2-color planes, though it was relatively easy to plug these into the sixteen slots of the Great Wheel (the Black/Red one, for example, is basically the Abyss with a different name - Tartarus.)
A Foray into Classic
Well, I figured I might as well give it a shot.
I rolled up an undead Warlock and began playing through a bit of the starting experience. There were a few ways that I expected things to be different - no heirlooms, no streamlined abilities, old graphics, no mapping of quest objectives.
Here are some of the things I hadn't really thought about:
There's no open-tapping, meaning that you really have to hit an enemy before any other players do if you want credit. This naturally slows questing down significantly if other players are nearby.
Quest tracking is different - sometimes in subtle ways. For instance, if you track a quest, the incomplete objectives are grey while the completed ones are white, instead of vice-versa (meaning that the things you're actually more interested, like how many Mindless Zombies you still need to kill, is harder to see than the Wretched Zombies you've already filled your quota on.)
Mana runs out FAST. Basically, between each zombie you fight, you either need to sit a moment to recover or just prepare to do some stabbing with a dagger. I now remember why I played almost all Melee characters in the early days... (Though getting the Imp has made things die quickly enough that I don't go OOM as quickly.)
The game just generally goes at a much slower pace - and frankly, I think that this more than anything is what a lot of players were looking forward to. I played for maybe an hour and am still in Deathknell. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if I hit level 6 before I leave (I'm level 4 now.) With equivalent quests but with all the modern systems in place, I'm sure I would have been out of there in about 20 minutes.
There are largely cosmetic UI elements that I had forgotten about - we've seen changes to, like, the font that displays your health and mana, or the shape of enemy health bars, or the vastly, vastly different character screen (complete with prominent displays of your various magic resistances.)
I really don't know how likely I am to play through this much farther, but while I had some resistance to the obsession and skepticism to the rose-colored glasses people seemed to look back on Classic with, I do think it's kind of exciting to have this as a sort of museum piece. Games are getting to be an old enough medium that it seems important for us to preserve the various evolutionary steps they take.
Actually, I think that Classic also gives us a very clear look at how far WoW has come in its decade and a half. A lot of people complain that it's just the same game it was in 2004 and I've got to say that it really, really isn't. Some changes have been fantastic (hero classes, new races, more diverse specs and broader viability, etc.), though some of Blizzard's experiments have been less successful (Garrisons, Azerite Armor...)
But now that this exists, I think that in a way we will no longer have to hear people pining for the "good old days." Likewise, we can see how people compare the Classic and "Live" experience and perhaps reintroduce good elements that have been lost over time to the main game.
I'll confess that I've been very unmotivated to play BFA - I haven't actually beaten all bosses in any of the LFR versions of the raids (much less the Normal+ modes.) But that's not to say that we haven't had great recent stuff lately - Legion is my favorite expansion they've done, and I'm hoping that the expansion they announce in about two months and change will be similarly exciting (and good - here's hoping that the "good-bad-good-bad" pattern benefits 9.0!)
I rolled up an undead Warlock and began playing through a bit of the starting experience. There were a few ways that I expected things to be different - no heirlooms, no streamlined abilities, old graphics, no mapping of quest objectives.
Here are some of the things I hadn't really thought about:
There's no open-tapping, meaning that you really have to hit an enemy before any other players do if you want credit. This naturally slows questing down significantly if other players are nearby.
Quest tracking is different - sometimes in subtle ways. For instance, if you track a quest, the incomplete objectives are grey while the completed ones are white, instead of vice-versa (meaning that the things you're actually more interested, like how many Mindless Zombies you still need to kill, is harder to see than the Wretched Zombies you've already filled your quota on.)
Mana runs out FAST. Basically, between each zombie you fight, you either need to sit a moment to recover or just prepare to do some stabbing with a dagger. I now remember why I played almost all Melee characters in the early days... (Though getting the Imp has made things die quickly enough that I don't go OOM as quickly.)
The game just generally goes at a much slower pace - and frankly, I think that this more than anything is what a lot of players were looking forward to. I played for maybe an hour and am still in Deathknell. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if I hit level 6 before I leave (I'm level 4 now.) With equivalent quests but with all the modern systems in place, I'm sure I would have been out of there in about 20 minutes.
There are largely cosmetic UI elements that I had forgotten about - we've seen changes to, like, the font that displays your health and mana, or the shape of enemy health bars, or the vastly, vastly different character screen (complete with prominent displays of your various magic resistances.)
I really don't know how likely I am to play through this much farther, but while I had some resistance to the obsession and skepticism to the rose-colored glasses people seemed to look back on Classic with, I do think it's kind of exciting to have this as a sort of museum piece. Games are getting to be an old enough medium that it seems important for us to preserve the various evolutionary steps they take.
Actually, I think that Classic also gives us a very clear look at how far WoW has come in its decade and a half. A lot of people complain that it's just the same game it was in 2004 and I've got to say that it really, really isn't. Some changes have been fantastic (hero classes, new races, more diverse specs and broader viability, etc.), though some of Blizzard's experiments have been less successful (Garrisons, Azerite Armor...)
But now that this exists, I think that in a way we will no longer have to hear people pining for the "good old days." Likewise, we can see how people compare the Classic and "Live" experience and perhaps reintroduce good elements that have been lost over time to the main game.
I'll confess that I've been very unmotivated to play BFA - I haven't actually beaten all bosses in any of the LFR versions of the raids (much less the Normal+ modes.) But that's not to say that we haven't had great recent stuff lately - Legion is my favorite expansion they've done, and I'm hoping that the expansion they announce in about two months and change will be similarly exciting (and good - here's hoping that the "good-bad-good-bad" pattern benefits 9.0!)
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Where Else to Delve with D&D 5E?
With an official Eberron book coming out in just a few months, Wizards of the Coast has started to push into settings that aren't in the Forgotten Realms.
Now, to be fair to Wizards, there were a couple adventure books that came out over the years that went elsewhere. Curse of Strahd was 5E's foray into the Ravenloft Setting. However, it was built far more as a stand-alone adventure rather than a full Ravenloft sourcebook. Other than generally advising players to make human characters and suggesting the Barovia is kind of locked away by the Mists, as well as introducing the Vistani (and, uh, maybe we could do some work on the Vistani to make them a little less like a lot of stereotypes of a historically oppressed real-world ethnicity,) it doesn't go into a lot of detail about how you might make your own Ravenloft campaigns in other domains of dread (though to be fair, Barovia is certainly the quintessential one.)
Last year we got Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, which as an old-school Magic player, I found very exciting. Ravnica worked I think very well as a new D&D setting because it's such a different kind of locale than any that had existed before (though I will say, reading about Sigil and its various factions does suggest some shared DNA.) GGtR is absolutely a sourcebook through and through, and it's the kind of book I'd really like to see more of.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh is technically the first 5E book set in the Greyhawk campaign setting, but a little more like Curse of Strahd, it focuses primarily on an out-of-the-way small town rather than giving you an overview of the world. That being said, Saltmarsh isn't quite a pure adventure book like its spiritual predecessor, Tales of the Yawning Portal, given the details on Saltmarsh itself and the extensive expansions to naval exploration and combat (including some formalized rules for vehicles.)
Eberron: Rising from the Last War appears to be a hybrid sourcebook and adventure book. I imagine the campaign detailed within is going to be more extensive than the one-shot Krenko's Way adventure in GGtR, but it also appears that there will be similar "sample building maps" like the various guild-associated adventure locations in the Ravnica book for things like airships and lightning rail trains. Eberron is apparently going to be over 300 pages, which means we should have room for both the big campaign and a lot of other useful stuff.
Given that Wizards' philosophy with 5E is fewer publications, but with a very solid quality floor, I imagine we aren't going to get a huge number of hardcover adventure books in any of these settings - indeed, I doubt we'll see any other big Ravnica books unless its popularity soars - and while I think a lot of people have enjoyed Ravnica as a setting, I don't think it has overtaken the Forgotten Realms or anything like that for D&D players.
But there are a lot of settings that would be very cool to see updated for 5E.
Now, to an extent, in a lot of cases you could just go and find old sourcebooks. I've been reading the 2E Planescape Campaign Setting book as a PDF, and while there are some mechanical aspects that are incomprehensible to me as someone not versed in 2nd Edition rules, the ideas within it of its various locations, people, factions, and kind of narrative planar mechanics are all stuff I could pretty easily adapt to 5E.
But stuff like monsters, spells, magic items, and special rules are things that a dedicated 5E sourcebook could provide. Hell, Backgrounds as a thing I think were not something in any previous editions, and while I do think for the most part they're really story prompts, the mechanics baked into them could give you some interesting things to play with in a different setting (Ravnica made background a pretty huge choice - though to be fair I think you could also use existing backgrounds and simply have a guild-affiliated character gain renown with their chosen guild.)
So what settings would be the most exciting for us to explore?
I'll confess here that most of my familiarity with these settings is through online research, and not any actual experience. But here's my take, trying to focus on the major settings. I'm going to leave out Eberron given that we're obviously about to get a big book for that.
Dragonlance: My sense of this is that it's the most classically Tolkien-esque fantasy world, with a strong sense that good is good and evil is evil, with knights in shining armor and all that. I think there's definitely room for that in D&D, but I also think there's not a ton that players would need to learn about it to run something set there.
Greyhawk: We've got Saltmarsh, and my sense of this one is that it's the cynical, muckier setting, but again not all that different in terms of its general medievalism.
Forgotten Realms: Naturally, we've got enough set here.
Dark Sun: With its post-apocalyptic vibe, I think you could definitely give us some new monsters and I'm curious about the lore. But I think the really exciting thing to add here would be psionics. Long ago they did an Unearthed Arcana for the Mystic Class, and while a player played one in a one-shot and it was absurdly overpowered, at least at level 1, an exploration of new types of magic would be a good impetus to also introduce this setting.
Ravenloft: Curse of Strahd gives us the tone and the general sense of how difficult it is to escape the Demiplanes of Dread, but I could also imagine having a more general sourcebook. I know someone preparing to run a Ravenloft campaign, and it seems like the old lore really makes it out to be its own kind of world with a map, but I'd like to see how that idea has evolved, given how Curse of Strahd suggests the demiplanes are really more kind of pocket dimensions all stuck somewhere in the Shadowfell (actually, I'd love some official stuff about the Shadowfell proper as well as the Feywild.)
Spelljammer: It might have a dumb name, but Spelljammer's science-fantasy stuff seems like it could be really fun. We've gotten elements of it like the Neogi and Giff in Volo's and Mordenkainen's, but mechanics for how a spelljammer ship works and the idea of all these other worlds even within familiar crystal spheres could give people a lot of material to work with.
Planescape: I'm going to be very curious to see to what extent Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus really fleshes out what it's like to be in the Outer Planes, but in 5E there's not a lot there to really get into what a plane-hopping campaign would be like. And Planescape's focus on the Outlands and Sigil already gives you a pretty sizable location for more "normal" adventures, even if the planar nature of the place means even normal stuff is going to be super-weird.
I know there are other settings like Birthright and Nentir Vale and such, but I know so very little about those that I can't really comment on them.
I think Wizards, with its quality-over-quantity ethos this edition, is probably not going to repeat itself too much. After Out of the Abyss I doubt we're going to get another big Underdark adventure.
As a homebrewer I really prefer when they come out with sourcebooks over adventure books, and it looks like with Saltmarsh and Eberron, they're kind of leaning toward melding adventure books with sourcebooks. From what it sounds like, the Eberron book is going to be the kind of book I hope to see them keep coming out with. But I also think that it's about time in the 5th Edition lifecycle for us to start getting the really weird stuff.
Now, to be fair to Wizards, there were a couple adventure books that came out over the years that went elsewhere. Curse of Strahd was 5E's foray into the Ravenloft Setting. However, it was built far more as a stand-alone adventure rather than a full Ravenloft sourcebook. Other than generally advising players to make human characters and suggesting the Barovia is kind of locked away by the Mists, as well as introducing the Vistani (and, uh, maybe we could do some work on the Vistani to make them a little less like a lot of stereotypes of a historically oppressed real-world ethnicity,) it doesn't go into a lot of detail about how you might make your own Ravenloft campaigns in other domains of dread (though to be fair, Barovia is certainly the quintessential one.)
Last year we got Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, which as an old-school Magic player, I found very exciting. Ravnica worked I think very well as a new D&D setting because it's such a different kind of locale than any that had existed before (though I will say, reading about Sigil and its various factions does suggest some shared DNA.) GGtR is absolutely a sourcebook through and through, and it's the kind of book I'd really like to see more of.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh is technically the first 5E book set in the Greyhawk campaign setting, but a little more like Curse of Strahd, it focuses primarily on an out-of-the-way small town rather than giving you an overview of the world. That being said, Saltmarsh isn't quite a pure adventure book like its spiritual predecessor, Tales of the Yawning Portal, given the details on Saltmarsh itself and the extensive expansions to naval exploration and combat (including some formalized rules for vehicles.)
Eberron: Rising from the Last War appears to be a hybrid sourcebook and adventure book. I imagine the campaign detailed within is going to be more extensive than the one-shot Krenko's Way adventure in GGtR, but it also appears that there will be similar "sample building maps" like the various guild-associated adventure locations in the Ravnica book for things like airships and lightning rail trains. Eberron is apparently going to be over 300 pages, which means we should have room for both the big campaign and a lot of other useful stuff.
Given that Wizards' philosophy with 5E is fewer publications, but with a very solid quality floor, I imagine we aren't going to get a huge number of hardcover adventure books in any of these settings - indeed, I doubt we'll see any other big Ravnica books unless its popularity soars - and while I think a lot of people have enjoyed Ravnica as a setting, I don't think it has overtaken the Forgotten Realms or anything like that for D&D players.
But there are a lot of settings that would be very cool to see updated for 5E.
Now, to an extent, in a lot of cases you could just go and find old sourcebooks. I've been reading the 2E Planescape Campaign Setting book as a PDF, and while there are some mechanical aspects that are incomprehensible to me as someone not versed in 2nd Edition rules, the ideas within it of its various locations, people, factions, and kind of narrative planar mechanics are all stuff I could pretty easily adapt to 5E.
But stuff like monsters, spells, magic items, and special rules are things that a dedicated 5E sourcebook could provide. Hell, Backgrounds as a thing I think were not something in any previous editions, and while I do think for the most part they're really story prompts, the mechanics baked into them could give you some interesting things to play with in a different setting (Ravnica made background a pretty huge choice - though to be fair I think you could also use existing backgrounds and simply have a guild-affiliated character gain renown with their chosen guild.)
So what settings would be the most exciting for us to explore?
I'll confess here that most of my familiarity with these settings is through online research, and not any actual experience. But here's my take, trying to focus on the major settings. I'm going to leave out Eberron given that we're obviously about to get a big book for that.
Dragonlance: My sense of this is that it's the most classically Tolkien-esque fantasy world, with a strong sense that good is good and evil is evil, with knights in shining armor and all that. I think there's definitely room for that in D&D, but I also think there's not a ton that players would need to learn about it to run something set there.
Greyhawk: We've got Saltmarsh, and my sense of this one is that it's the cynical, muckier setting, but again not all that different in terms of its general medievalism.
Forgotten Realms: Naturally, we've got enough set here.
Dark Sun: With its post-apocalyptic vibe, I think you could definitely give us some new monsters and I'm curious about the lore. But I think the really exciting thing to add here would be psionics. Long ago they did an Unearthed Arcana for the Mystic Class, and while a player played one in a one-shot and it was absurdly overpowered, at least at level 1, an exploration of new types of magic would be a good impetus to also introduce this setting.
Ravenloft: Curse of Strahd gives us the tone and the general sense of how difficult it is to escape the Demiplanes of Dread, but I could also imagine having a more general sourcebook. I know someone preparing to run a Ravenloft campaign, and it seems like the old lore really makes it out to be its own kind of world with a map, but I'd like to see how that idea has evolved, given how Curse of Strahd suggests the demiplanes are really more kind of pocket dimensions all stuck somewhere in the Shadowfell (actually, I'd love some official stuff about the Shadowfell proper as well as the Feywild.)
Spelljammer: It might have a dumb name, but Spelljammer's science-fantasy stuff seems like it could be really fun. We've gotten elements of it like the Neogi and Giff in Volo's and Mordenkainen's, but mechanics for how a spelljammer ship works and the idea of all these other worlds even within familiar crystal spheres could give people a lot of material to work with.
Planescape: I'm going to be very curious to see to what extent Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus really fleshes out what it's like to be in the Outer Planes, but in 5E there's not a lot there to really get into what a plane-hopping campaign would be like. And Planescape's focus on the Outlands and Sigil already gives you a pretty sizable location for more "normal" adventures, even if the planar nature of the place means even normal stuff is going to be super-weird.
I know there are other settings like Birthright and Nentir Vale and such, but I know so very little about those that I can't really comment on them.
I think Wizards, with its quality-over-quantity ethos this edition, is probably not going to repeat itself too much. After Out of the Abyss I doubt we're going to get another big Underdark adventure.
As a homebrewer I really prefer when they come out with sourcebooks over adventure books, and it looks like with Saltmarsh and Eberron, they're kind of leaning toward melding adventure books with sourcebooks. From what it sounds like, the Eberron book is going to be the kind of book I hope to see them keep coming out with. But I also think that it's about time in the 5th Edition lifecycle for us to start getting the really weird stuff.
Monday, August 19, 2019
Eberron: Rising From the Last War
Wizards of the Coast just announced today the official release of a new sourcebook and adventure: Eberron: Rising From the Last War.
This book will apparently include the information of the PDF-only Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron while including an adventure as well as, I believe, a monster bestiary. It appears to be a kind of merging of campaign setting source book and adventure book.
Given that Eberron is probably the official setting closest in tone and feel to my own homebrew world, I'm pretty excited to see this. It also shows that Wizards is branching 5E out of the Forgotten Realms some more, which I'm sure a lot of players are happy to hear (we've done the Sword Coast to death, haven't we?)
The adventure apparently takes place in the Mournlands, the remains of the kingdom that was suddenly annihilated at the end of the Last War.
Eberron is a Magepunk setting, meaning that the magic used there is practical and has provided an alternate path to the kind of technological society that we have. It's also less hard-lined on things like alignment - there are good-aligned beholders and liches there! The general idea is that simple magic like cantrips and ritual spells are commonplace - your local baker will probably have the flavoring-food aspects of Prestidigitation, for example - but that more advanced magic is extremely rare, meaning that player characters are exceptional individuals.
I had to stop myself from immediately pre-ordering the book on Amazon, as I'm tempted to go for the alternative cover at my local game store (though I think those are more expensive, so... we'll see.)
Perhaps the most exciting announcement is that the book will bring the Artificer, the first fully-fledged new class introduced to 5E since the Player's Handbook. If it's anything like the Unearthed Arcana version (one would expect it to be,) it's a sort of half-caster like the Paladin or Ranger with an extremely versatile set of tools and spells (and unlike Paladins and Rangers, they get Cantrips, so you can actually play it as something like a pure caster.)
Eberron also comes with a number of playable races.
Changelings are essentially the playable race version of doppelgangers, with some limited shapeshifting abilities.
Shifters are quasi-lycanthropic, humanoids with animal attributes that they can "shift" into for various bonuses.
Kalashtar are humans who have fused with dream-beings from the realm of dreams - basically benevolent eldritch abominations that fled their nightmarish counterparts.
And then there are my favorite (possibly my favorite D&D race period,) the Warforged, which are golem-like magical robot people.
Additionally, there are things called Dragonmarks, which are affiliated with various powerful Houses that exist between the world's various kingdoms. Dragonmarks serve as a special subrace for player characters that are members of those marked houses, including for some races that don't have subraces.
Anyway, I'm going to contemplate whether it's worth getting the fancy alternate cover or if I'm just going to enjoy the peace of mind knowing that it's pre-ordered.
This strikes me as a must-have 5E book.
This book will apparently include the information of the PDF-only Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron while including an adventure as well as, I believe, a monster bestiary. It appears to be a kind of merging of campaign setting source book and adventure book.
Given that Eberron is probably the official setting closest in tone and feel to my own homebrew world, I'm pretty excited to see this. It also shows that Wizards is branching 5E out of the Forgotten Realms some more, which I'm sure a lot of players are happy to hear (we've done the Sword Coast to death, haven't we?)
The adventure apparently takes place in the Mournlands, the remains of the kingdom that was suddenly annihilated at the end of the Last War.
Eberron is a Magepunk setting, meaning that the magic used there is practical and has provided an alternate path to the kind of technological society that we have. It's also less hard-lined on things like alignment - there are good-aligned beholders and liches there! The general idea is that simple magic like cantrips and ritual spells are commonplace - your local baker will probably have the flavoring-food aspects of Prestidigitation, for example - but that more advanced magic is extremely rare, meaning that player characters are exceptional individuals.
I had to stop myself from immediately pre-ordering the book on Amazon, as I'm tempted to go for the alternative cover at my local game store (though I think those are more expensive, so... we'll see.)
Perhaps the most exciting announcement is that the book will bring the Artificer, the first fully-fledged new class introduced to 5E since the Player's Handbook. If it's anything like the Unearthed Arcana version (one would expect it to be,) it's a sort of half-caster like the Paladin or Ranger with an extremely versatile set of tools and spells (and unlike Paladins and Rangers, they get Cantrips, so you can actually play it as something like a pure caster.)
Eberron also comes with a number of playable races.
Changelings are essentially the playable race version of doppelgangers, with some limited shapeshifting abilities.
Shifters are quasi-lycanthropic, humanoids with animal attributes that they can "shift" into for various bonuses.
Kalashtar are humans who have fused with dream-beings from the realm of dreams - basically benevolent eldritch abominations that fled their nightmarish counterparts.
And then there are my favorite (possibly my favorite D&D race period,) the Warforged, which are golem-like magical robot people.
Additionally, there are things called Dragonmarks, which are affiliated with various powerful Houses that exist between the world's various kingdoms. Dragonmarks serve as a special subrace for player characters that are members of those marked houses, including for some races that don't have subraces.
Anyway, I'm going to contemplate whether it's worth getting the fancy alternate cover or if I'm just going to enjoy the peace of mind knowing that it's pre-ordered.
This strikes me as a must-have 5E book.
Planescape and a Prime-Less Campaign
Most D&D campaigns are set on worlds that are largely the same as ours. Yes, they have magic, but the magic is extraordinary and interactions with the grand cosmic forces of the multiverse are usually subtler (at least to begin with) than the interactions of ordinary peoples.
I got the 2nd Edition Planescape Campaign Setting book on DM's Guild (as a PDF, because I think print copies are like a hundred bucks) and I've been reading through it.
Now, there are sometimes references to 2nd Edition rules that mean very little to me (like "THAC0," which I eventually figured out was "to hit at AC 0" - a strange notion given that in 5th Edition it's literally impossible to have an AC of 0, or even less than like 6, I think unless you're an inanimate object) but most of it is lore, describing the primary location of the setting - the Outlands, which is the True Neutral outer plane.
The whole notion of Planescape is that the Prime Material Plane, where most of the D&D worlds are, is largely set aside. Instead, you navigate life in the Outlands and the city at its center that may also be its own plane given you can only access it via planar portals, Sigil (also known as the Cage.)
What I think is really interesting about the Planescape Setting is that there's almost a conscious effort to keep things from being normal. Yes, there are taverns and inns and shops and such, but in a place like Sigil, beings from all the outer planes are constantly coming and going, and given its emphatic neutrality, all visitors are supposed to be treated the same - meaning that if you're a healer there, you might be expected to treat demons just as well as you'd treat an angel.
As a side note, one of the consequences of this setting coming out I believe first in 1989 (this book was published in 1994) is that mention of "devils" and "demons" was considered too risky given the singular fixation the Christian Right had on D&D as a gateway to... whatever bullshit they thought kids would get up to. So Wizards renamed Devils as Baatrezu (I wonder if this is when they made the Lawful Evil plane "The Nine Hells of Baator" and Demons as "Tanar'ri." I believe it's also at this point that Daemons were renamed Yugoloths, though that name seems to have stuck (probably because having Neutral Evil fiends sound so similar to Chaotic Evil ones was confusing.) While I, of course, think that the social movement that pushed them to make these changes was and is toxic and horrible, given the disorienting nature of Planescape, it actually kind of works for the setting to give you less established cultural notions to judge the bizarre monsters you encounter there.
And bizarreness feels like a really good vibe for this setting. I'm reminded a bit of the sort of alien space stations and hubs that you find in Rick & Morty - places where you're an outsider and you've just to go figure things out and catch up.
And this notion is enshrined in the way that the setting divides humanoid characters.
Primes are people from the Prime Material Plane, meaning that they are from more Earth-like worlds (including Earth - early editions apparently talked a lot about real-world mythologies, where Thor is like, a big D&D deity) and in Sigil, they're known as "Clueless." In fact, Prime is kind of a derogatory term, because some of the basic principles of the outer planes have to be explained to them. For example, if people of a certain philosophy occupy a part of one Outer Plane, over time that area will actually shift and become part of the plane where that philosophy and alignment is prevalent. Meaning if you camped out in the Abyss long enough in a well-ordered, benevolent kingdom, that area would at some point get taken and become part of Mount Celestia. To keep the Outlands True Neutral, a lot of places - particularly its "gate towns" where there are gates to the other outer planes, need some kind of balance to keep the town from slipping into its affiliated plane.
Planars are humanoids who are from the Outer Planes, and have always dealt with stuff like that. It's not exactly clear to me if these people have just always been there, or if they died and successfully assimilated into their appropriate plane. I actually think they're the former, though I don't really know how they interact with those who have gone on to these planes in their afterlife.
Petitioners, I believe, are the souls of the dead who are now attempting to go to the plane that suits them best.
I think this opens up a ton of ideas when it comes to campaigns and characters. Even if you primarily set your campaign in the prime material plane, you could have a planar character - like Strix from Dice Camera Action.
But I think by avoiding the Prime Material all together, you could have a campaign where weird and unexplained things happen constantly - the DM should have a sense of the logic behind it, but the players might be playing Primes, and thus not have the context to know, say, who "The Lady" is (to their peril.)
My homebrew setting has its own Outer Planes, but I never thought to create a True Neutral Plane. I suspect that if the players ever get to the Outer Planes (currently their world is very firmly locked away from the Outers, but that is likely to change at some point I'll keep vague on the off chance one of them reads this) I imagine I'll borrow a lot of ideas from Planescape.
In fact, while Sigil is fairly cool, I think the Gate-Towns are the most interesting aspect to the setting for me. Each is like a microcosm of its associated outer plane, but with that required counter-balance. For example, Automata, affiliated with Mechanus, is incredibly orderly and rigidly scheduled, but underground there are gambling halls and taverns and all sorts of chaotic debauchery there to ensure that the town doesn't get absorbed into the Clockwork Nirvana.
That kind of planar mechanics stuff feels like it could be a really cool opportunity for adventures. Maybe you get hired on the down-low from a bunch of Githzerai monks who want to claim a piece of territory for, like, Bytopia, and they set about just meditating somewhere and your job is to hold off the demons or slaadi who are trying to balance them out. Or even crazier, maybe you need to protect a group of pacifist celestials who want to project Neutral Good in an area that Yugoloths are trying to claim.
While grounded fantasy can make for compelling stories, it's sort of a more interesting challenge to take something bizarre and heightened and see if you can make something relatable with it.
I got the 2nd Edition Planescape Campaign Setting book on DM's Guild (as a PDF, because I think print copies are like a hundred bucks) and I've been reading through it.
Now, there are sometimes references to 2nd Edition rules that mean very little to me (like "THAC0," which I eventually figured out was "to hit at AC 0" - a strange notion given that in 5th Edition it's literally impossible to have an AC of 0, or even less than like 6, I think unless you're an inanimate object) but most of it is lore, describing the primary location of the setting - the Outlands, which is the True Neutral outer plane.
The whole notion of Planescape is that the Prime Material Plane, where most of the D&D worlds are, is largely set aside. Instead, you navigate life in the Outlands and the city at its center that may also be its own plane given you can only access it via planar portals, Sigil (also known as the Cage.)
What I think is really interesting about the Planescape Setting is that there's almost a conscious effort to keep things from being normal. Yes, there are taverns and inns and shops and such, but in a place like Sigil, beings from all the outer planes are constantly coming and going, and given its emphatic neutrality, all visitors are supposed to be treated the same - meaning that if you're a healer there, you might be expected to treat demons just as well as you'd treat an angel.
As a side note, one of the consequences of this setting coming out I believe first in 1989 (this book was published in 1994) is that mention of "devils" and "demons" was considered too risky given the singular fixation the Christian Right had on D&D as a gateway to... whatever bullshit they thought kids would get up to. So Wizards renamed Devils as Baatrezu (I wonder if this is when they made the Lawful Evil plane "The Nine Hells of Baator" and Demons as "Tanar'ri." I believe it's also at this point that Daemons were renamed Yugoloths, though that name seems to have stuck (probably because having Neutral Evil fiends sound so similar to Chaotic Evil ones was confusing.) While I, of course, think that the social movement that pushed them to make these changes was and is toxic and horrible, given the disorienting nature of Planescape, it actually kind of works for the setting to give you less established cultural notions to judge the bizarre monsters you encounter there.
And bizarreness feels like a really good vibe for this setting. I'm reminded a bit of the sort of alien space stations and hubs that you find in Rick & Morty - places where you're an outsider and you've just to go figure things out and catch up.
And this notion is enshrined in the way that the setting divides humanoid characters.
Primes are people from the Prime Material Plane, meaning that they are from more Earth-like worlds (including Earth - early editions apparently talked a lot about real-world mythologies, where Thor is like, a big D&D deity) and in Sigil, they're known as "Clueless." In fact, Prime is kind of a derogatory term, because some of the basic principles of the outer planes have to be explained to them. For example, if people of a certain philosophy occupy a part of one Outer Plane, over time that area will actually shift and become part of the plane where that philosophy and alignment is prevalent. Meaning if you camped out in the Abyss long enough in a well-ordered, benevolent kingdom, that area would at some point get taken and become part of Mount Celestia. To keep the Outlands True Neutral, a lot of places - particularly its "gate towns" where there are gates to the other outer planes, need some kind of balance to keep the town from slipping into its affiliated plane.
Planars are humanoids who are from the Outer Planes, and have always dealt with stuff like that. It's not exactly clear to me if these people have just always been there, or if they died and successfully assimilated into their appropriate plane. I actually think they're the former, though I don't really know how they interact with those who have gone on to these planes in their afterlife.
Petitioners, I believe, are the souls of the dead who are now attempting to go to the plane that suits them best.
I think this opens up a ton of ideas when it comes to campaigns and characters. Even if you primarily set your campaign in the prime material plane, you could have a planar character - like Strix from Dice Camera Action.
But I think by avoiding the Prime Material all together, you could have a campaign where weird and unexplained things happen constantly - the DM should have a sense of the logic behind it, but the players might be playing Primes, and thus not have the context to know, say, who "The Lady" is (to their peril.)
My homebrew setting has its own Outer Planes, but I never thought to create a True Neutral Plane. I suspect that if the players ever get to the Outer Planes (currently their world is very firmly locked away from the Outers, but that is likely to change at some point I'll keep vague on the off chance one of them reads this) I imagine I'll borrow a lot of ideas from Planescape.
In fact, while Sigil is fairly cool, I think the Gate-Towns are the most interesting aspect to the setting for me. Each is like a microcosm of its associated outer plane, but with that required counter-balance. For example, Automata, affiliated with Mechanus, is incredibly orderly and rigidly scheduled, but underground there are gambling halls and taverns and all sorts of chaotic debauchery there to ensure that the town doesn't get absorbed into the Clockwork Nirvana.
That kind of planar mechanics stuff feels like it could be a really cool opportunity for adventures. Maybe you get hired on the down-low from a bunch of Githzerai monks who want to claim a piece of territory for, like, Bytopia, and they set about just meditating somewhere and your job is to hold off the demons or slaadi who are trying to balance them out. Or even crazier, maybe you need to protect a group of pacifist celestials who want to project Neutral Good in an area that Yugoloths are trying to claim.
While grounded fantasy can make for compelling stories, it's sort of a more interesting challenge to take something bizarre and heightened and see if you can make something relatable with it.
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