Dominaria United and My Weird Mind-Meld with the Creatives over at WotC

 As has been the trend for the past few Magic sets, Dominaria United is coming with a series of short fiction that tells what's going on in the expansion.

This post contains SPOILERS for those bits of web fiction.

As a return to Dominaria (most recently done five years ago, at the 25th anniversary of MTG) there have been a lot of old names popping up. The past two stories have had Karn as the viewpoint character, and the threat is the oldest big bad of Magic's lore, the Phyrexians.

What's funny is that for the past two years and change, I've been running a D&D campaign set in Ravnica, which was first introduced when I was in college, playing Magic Online using a PC emulator on my Macbook (it wasn't pretty, but I loved the set).

Given that I was going to let players be members of any guild, and the party has a Rakdos Bard and an Orzhov Cleric (who's currently a Warlock - it's complicated) and thus we were going to have a party with full-on evil characters, I wanted to bring out a villain that even a serial killer cannibal (the Bard) could find reason to fight against, and that's Phyrexia. The plot of this campaign has been all about the Phyrexians.

And I planned this in 2020, before Kaldheim had Vorinclex show up on another plane, meaning the last anyone had heard of the Phyrexians was New Phyrexia, which came out in 2011, nearly a decade before my D&D campaign started.

What's fun and a little spooky is that the Magic story has been working in parallel with a lot of the ideas I've got. Though I only just introduced it (to only one party member,) I've intended for the finale of the campaign to involve using the Golgothian Sylex on New Phyrexia to defeat them. The Sylex was used by Urza to end the Brothers' War, and was a card from Antiquities - really the first MTG set to start to flesh out Dominaria as a setting (also, it was a set hoser - removing all cards from its own set from the game, which is something that they also did in Arabian Nights but never did again). Well, it turns out that in the current story, Karn the Silver Golem intends to use the Sylex to do precisely that.

The Phyrexians were not exactly a deep cut, just an old one. But when I was playing around with Ravnica as a setting, I toyed with the idea of another deep cut. I made a Half Elf Dimir Shadow Sorcerer who got his powers when he was possessed by a fragment of an ancient necromancer. This being's soul was shattered to pieces back in the pre-Mending days before it was impossible for non-Planeswalkers to travel between worlds.

The figure in question was Lim-Dûl, one of the villains from Ice Age - the first true "Block" in Magic (though the third part wouldn't come out until over a decade later). This was a fairly deep cut - he hadn't been mentioned after Alliances, the follow-up to the Ice Age set, and the Magic story moved on with more recurring characters like the Weatherlight Crew.

Following the Invasion block, there were two blocks focusing on new characters on the continent of Otaria, but then Magic started hopping between planes, leaving Dominaria behind for the most part, and there weren't really many recurring characters until the introduction of the new Planeswalkers, which became a new card type. One of the most popular among them is Liliana Vess, the necromancer anti-hero.

Liliana's story involved a mysterious figure called the Raven Man, who haunts her across planes, driving her to greater mastery of necromancy. And for years, there has been some tin-foil-hat speculation that the Raven Man might be various known figures, such as Urza or Yawgmoth. But another contender that was suggested was Lim-Dûl. I wrote about it in this post. Well, as of the third part of the Dominaria United plot, it looks like those theories were 100% correct.

Yes, the Raven Man is, in fact, a fragment of Lim-Dûl's soul or consciousness that rested within an artifact buried on the Vess family estate. It's been Lim-Dûl all along!

When Nicol Bolas reemerged as a villain in Shards of Allara, and went on to become the big bad of Magic for several years, culminating in War of the Spark, I was kind of blown away. I've had a Chronicles version of Nicol Bolas since 1998, and built my deck around him (a deck I'm certain wouldn't be very good by today's standards).

I get frustrated with Magic as a game sometimes, feeling that it's always had a bit of a pay to have a chance to win structure, and that the lore doesn't really get reflected in gameplay most of the time. But it's also been a huge influence on my fantasy tastes since I was 8. So I'll confess, all this deep lore coming back is really hitting me in the nostalgia.

Fated Raiding and Burnout

 For some reason, the advent of Shadowlands Season Four hasn't really gripped me.

The biggest change here, with this mid-patch seasonal shift, is that earlier raids from Shadowlands are now on a weekly rotation where the bosses are tougher and the rewards are better. "Fated" raids, including the world bosses associated with those raids, drop better stuff than what was in Sepulcher of the First Ones prior to this patch (SotFO is also on the rotation). Also, some dungeons have been taken out of the Mythic + system while others from expansions past have been added in.

In principle, I love this.

I did a little LFR in 9.1 and saw the first wing of Sanctum of Domination, but I think it was around then that the scandal at Blizzard broke, and I took some time to wrestle with my feelings about the game. When I stepped back in with 9.2, I played a bit and then Elden Ring came out, drawing me away before the Sepulcher raid came out on LFR, so I didn't get into it.

As such, I've actually wound up seeing roughly the same amount of raiding in Shadowlands as I did in BFA.

Part of this, of course, is that LFR is not a great way to experience this, and I don't have the social energy to organize my guild to run raids anymore (and the guild has mostly dried up at this point).

But I also think there's this issue with revisiting old content, which is that it shines a light on the treadmill element of gearing in WoW.

There are aspects to how getting higher item level gear in WoW feels good. The raw numbers are kind of whatever - I think ever since they started doing item and level squishes, the numbers you put out feel pretty arbitrary (it's hard to get excited about doing over 10k dps when two expansions ago you were doing over a million). But as things like Haste and Crit go higher (and if your mastery is one that feels really noticeable) things start to feel really cool - on a Frost Mage, when you get your crit up to around 33% and all your Ice Lances are critting, that feels awesome.

I'd also say that tier sets are great for this purpose - assembling your bonuses can feel really great - depending on the set. For example, the 4-piece Retribution bonus causes Art of War to reset Wake of Ashes 50% of the time instead of Blade of Justice. Wake of Ashes does immense damage and gives you 3 Holy Power, making this feel like a massive boost to your rotation.

The Creation Catalyst, which lets you transform helmets, shoulders, chestpieces, gloves, and pants into tier pieces at the same item level, is a great way to make gear exciting (it is limited to pieces from specific sources, though - it'd be nice if my 252 gear from Zereth Mortis world content could be upgraded, instead of having to use the 246 ones from Sandworn relics).

But I had this realization when this patch came out that I really didn't care much about getting better gear at this point - doing the content for that gear. I mean, this is the last real phase of Shadowlands before the next expansion, meaning that I'll likely be replacing all of this stuff with leveling gear or maybe early max-level dungeon gear not long after the expansion comes out.

WoW, and I'd imagine a lot of similar MMOs, are sort of built to be the one video game you play (admittedly, it's less of a time vortex when you aren't an altoholic like me - with my Druid hitting 60 a couple weeks ago, now that you can trade Sandworn relics between your characters, I have every class' 4-piece tier set).

I started playing WoW in 2006 - just about four or five months before Burning Crusade came out (so yes, I do remember a time when only Alliance could be Paladins, but I didn't hit the level cap until it was 70, and even then only in the fall of 2007. Leveling used to be way slower).

And, honestly, I think Dragonflight looks very cool. I also thought Shadowlands looked very cool (and given my taste for really heightened, out-there big-concept fantasy, the concept of it really fell into my wheelhouse) and while I think it was better than BFA (and would have been a lot better if they'd kept up with the patch cadence, but then, no one planned for Covid-19) I must admit that it's not going to be remembered with the best of them.

I remember feeling real burnout in Warlords of Draenor - I liked Mists of Pandaria all right, but I certainly didn't love it the way some do (I place it at #3 expansion after Legion and Wrath,) but I was starting to fade.

Then, Legion was excellent - not only did I find the story compelling, the new class fun, and the artifact weapons and individual class hall stories really cool, but my guild was also much more active (we downed the first boss of Antorus in the first week, which I think was a first for our guild, which has always been very casual). Legion reinvigorated my love for the game (it was also an escape from some very painful stuff happening in my personal life).

Given how long I've been playing WoW - I started at 20 and I'm now 36 - I've often wondered about what it will be like when I finally hang up my hearthstone for good. I guess I'm more in a place right now where I can imagine myself stepping away for extended periods of time. I don't know that I'll skip a whole expansion - I think I'm probably going to get Dragonflight when it comes out and roll myself up a Dracthyr Evoker - but I think I've already begun to release that fear of missing out that is perhaps one of the more dangerous elements of MMO design.

It's not the end of the world if I don't see every raid boss, and I don't get all the gear I want.

Honestly, this has kind of been my practice even since late Legion. I did see the whole raid in LFR, but I didn't really re-run it after I got Argus down - I might have done it on a few key characters who I feel really would have wanted to be there for that (certainly my Argus-born Draenei Death Knight.)

The greatest strength and greatest weakness to the MMO-RPG is the way it keeps you moving along (I realize that this is sort of the opposite of the Fated issue). Azeroth has been transforming for the last 18 years within WoW. The way my Protection Paladin main plays today is almost completely different than how it did when I had my first (terrible) experience raiding Karazhan. And I like following the plot, even if it's definitely hit that comic-book like structure where it's just different arcs instead of building to one grand epic conclusion.

But it's getting easier to feel like I will be able to pick things up again even if I miss a chunk.

The Insanity of Hadozees' Glide

 Now that some of the D&D online community have gotten their hands on Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, we've got a sense of some of the racial traits for the six new playable races in the set. Revisions have been made from their Unearthed Arcana, Travelers of the Multiverse versions. While I'm very glad to see the Giff look a lot better now (including a racial proficiency with firearms,) the Hadozee actually have the most mind-mending and potentially broken change.

As a Hadozee, which are humanoid monkeys with large membranes they can deploy like a flying squirrel, you get a climbing speed equal to your walking speed, and furthermore, when you fall, you can unfurl your membranes to slow your descent.

This has two benefits. The obvious one is that you can use a reaction to avoid taking any falling damage from any height (though, given Spelljammer, I might rule that only works if there's air to slow you). However, it also lets you move five horizontal feet for every vertical foot you descend.

At no cost to your movement.

That right there is what makes Hadozee by far the most mobile race in the game - assuming there are vertical surfaces or platforms to jump from.

I will say, I got this from a YouTube video from Nerd Immersion, and there's a part of me that wonders if the ratio is flipped - that you only get one foot horizontal for each five feet vertical. But I suspect that it is what I previously thought.

What this means, then, is that with your 30 ft. movement speed - which also gives you 30 feet of climbing speed (and more if your speed is boosted) you can climb up a wall 30 feet up, push off, and glide 150 feet.

Yes, that means you could cover a distance that would take most characters three turns to make, two of which they spend dashing, and you'd get there in one and still have your action.

The thing that's utterly bonkers about this is that, because it doesn't cost any of your movement - which other forms of travel like long-jumping do - it means that, rules as written, as your height increases, your speed increases, because all that movement takes place within the 6 seconds of a single round.

In theory, from a high enough tower, a Hadozee could break the speed of light.

So... I suspect we might get some errata for this.

Planes of Chaos

 I technically haven't read through the entirety of Planes of Chaos, but I got through the DM guide and moved on to the player's guide, which sometimes has new stuff, but largely retreads the information available to the DM in an abridged manner.

Overall, my feeling is that the Chaotic planes (The Abyss, Arborea, Limbo, Pandemonium, and Ysgard) don't have quite the same "hook" feeling of the Law planes - this might be that, due to their chaotic nature, these planes don't have any real central organizing principle, the way that, for example, Baator (the Nine Hells) are all built around the archdevils and their hierarchy.

I also think that it's here that a lot of actual world mythology comes into play - and while I'm a huge myth buff, I tend to prefer a sort of reimagined, "inspired by" use of that mythology in my fantasy fiction. I'd rather see a new patriarchal god ruling over a pantheon than just come right out and have Zeus show up.

Indeed, Ysgard in particular feels mostly dedicated simply to the Norse pantheon, with only one or two sections that aren't just realms like Muspelheim or Nidavellir. Likewise, Arborea's first layer, Arvandor, is half a feywild-like realm of elves and half just flat-out Mount Olympus (though Olympus, like Yggdrasil, is also presented as one of the interplanar objects that can be used to traverse them - Olympus's lower regions are found in Hades, naturally).

Ysgard, at the very least, has a cool planar structure, like Acheron's cubes or Bytopia's mirrored realms. The plane is made up of earthbergs that float in space, their bottoms (or, in one layer, their tops) covered with molten lava and fire.

Given my preference toward novelty, I found I liked the concept of Pandemonium and Limbo more appealing. Pandemonium exists entirely in tunnels that run through solid rock, with gravity always pointing to the closest wall, and howling winds that leave peoples' minds shattered. Limbo is a soup of ever-shifting elements, and the only way anyone can survive there is by shaping reality around themselves through force of will.

The Abyss is interesting in that it's obviously a terrible place, the home of demons, but in the absence of the ever-present infernal regime found in the Nine Hells, it seems like someone could potentially navigate it with greater ease (though the demons would still come and try to kill you in most cases). Unfortunately, the guide here doesn't describe the Gaping Maw, which is Demogorgon's domain, and apparently during 2nd Edition they had one of the drow pantheon take over Thanatos, which is Orcus' domain.

I think in 5th Edition stuff like Minsc and Boo's Journal of Villainy, Pazuzu's position as the first demon lord and ruler of the 1st layer (the Plain of Infinite Portals - which is a cool location that also works as a kind of hub to get around the Abyss) isn't really mentioned - I think they even give him a different layer under the name of Pazrael. There's none of the lore around Pazuzu being an Obyrith rather than Tanar'ri - I wonder if that distinction came about later, as here I think Tanar'ri is just their term for demons to try to avoid moral guardians from attacking them.

The Planes of Chaos also place the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of the Fey within these planes - the Seelie tend to show up in Arborea while the Queen of Air and Darkness rules in Pandemonium. The Feywild wouldn't be officially introduced until 4th Edition, which is obviously where both Fey courts would show up now.

I'm now moving on to the Planes of Conflict, which I'll write about when I get through the planar descriptions (this one has six, rather than five).

Anticipating Spelljammer's Imminent Arrival - Let's Check Out the Table of Contents for Each Book!

 I realize I've been on a bit of a Planescape kick lately (inspired in part because of the hints that we might be getting some 5e Planescape content next year) but we mustn't forget that in only ten days, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space will be arriving at game stores.

I've got mine pre-ordered, basically since they announced a release date three months ago.

Some D&D... "influencers" (God I hate that term - very dystopian) have gotten their hands on copies of the books and I've seen the tables of contents for them.

The whole box-set is relatively small - each book is only 64 pages, meaning a total of just 192 (for comparison, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft was 256 pages, with just a low-level intro adventure in the House of Lament, rather than a full third of it being adventure content).

Still, quantity is not necessarily quality (though I loved Van Richten's). By looking at the tables of contents, we can get a bit of a sense of the focus of the books.

The Astral Adventurer's Guide is the main rules sourcebook for the setting.

After a few pages of intro, we start with character creation. Two new backgrounds are introduced: Astral Drifter and Wildspacer. As we've seen, Spelljammer now takes place in two realms - Wildspace and the Astral Sea. Wildspace is still within the Prime Material Plane, and is basically like real outer space but with a lot more stuff in it. The Astral Sea is part of (more or less the whole of) the Astral Plane, and serves a bit as the "hyperspace" that you'll need to cross to get between different Wildspace regions. Notably, in the Astral Plane, there's no aging or need to eat, drink, breathe, and I think sleep. And it's god dead gods drifting eternally.

Next, there are the playable races: Astral Elf, Autognome, Giff, Hadozee, Plasmoid, and Thri-Kreen, which we've known about since the Travelers of the Multiverse UA.

Chapter two is "Astral Adventuring," and takes up the bulk of the book.

This covers the broad rules of how Spelljamming works, first in Wildspace, explaining the way that ships create gravity planes and how objects carry air envelopes. Then, it explains how the Astral Plane works, along with some info on creating Wildspace systems.

There are spells and magic items, though it doesn't seem like a ton of either.

The bulk of this chapter is about the different types of Spelljamming ships, and rules about how ship-to-ship combat works. There are 16 ships in the book, with deck plans. As I'm given to understand, ship combat is simplified compared to how it works in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, with the ships largely acting as platforms that might have weapons on them, but players can rely on their own character class abilities - sure, you can launch a trebuchet to strike the other ship, but you can also cast fireball.

Finally, Chapter Three is a couple-page description of the Rock of Bral, a famed Spelljammer location.

Boo's Astral Menagerie is the monster book for the setting, giving us a pretty substantial number of creatures to face out in Wildspace and the Astral Sea.

There are NPC stat blocks for each of the new playable races. And then there are a ton of creatures with weird names that mean nothing to me, like a B'rohg or a Reigar.

In total, we seem to have 72 stat blocks, and the only reprint would be the Chwinga (seen in Tomb of Annihilation and Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden). This include wyrmling/young/adult/ancient variants on the Lunar and Solar dragons.

This is actually, I think, a little meatier than most campaign setting bestiaries, and sits as a separate book so you can allow your party to check if they've got all their Hadozee racial abilities written down while you pull up the stats on a bunch of Vampirates you're attacking their ship with.

Light of Xaryxis is the adventure that comes with the box set - a more extensive adventure than the usual intro ones that starts at level 5 and goes to 8. I'm not going to get into the chapter names because A: it won't mean much and B: it could spoil things.

    So, my sense of how they're approaching Spelljammer is very homebrew-focused. This seems to be focused more on the "how" than the "what," which honestly appeals to my DM style.

That being said, reading through the Planes of Law, Chaos, and Conflict (well, I haven't finished the second one yet) does make me feel like it'd be nice to get a bit more content out of WotC - obviously, the approach they've taken in 5th Edition has worked quite well for them, but it is perhaps a little sad that there's not a lot of revisiting of the stuff they've already introduced. This is also the first setting book that hasn't given us a new playable subclass, and I'd hoped we might see something new, for instance, for the Artificer.

Still, I'm really eager to integrate the concept of Spelljammers into my homebrew setting - as a setting, Spelljammer has the potential to "plug in" to other settings pretty easily. In some ways, that makes this a more useful thing than other sourcebooks for those of us who like to homebrew our campaign worlds.

Adaptation and Focus: Converting Planescape to 5th Edition

 A couple years ago, I downloaded the PDF of Ravenloft: Realm of Terror, the original campaign-setting sourcebook for the Ravenloft setting that was published in the early '90s for 2nd Edition D&D.

And it was really disappointing, frankly. For such a popular setting, the details were sketchy, and it felt like the writers occasionally forgot they were making a horror setting - one region, for example, is basically described as just having a lot of Drow. Now, I don't know, maybe teenage D&D players in the early 90s might have found Drow terrifying, but it didn't really live up to expectations.

Thus, I was really happy to see how 5th Edition's Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft overhauled the setting in a lot of great ways. One of my least favorite elements of 2nd Edition Ravenloft was the idea of "The Core," which placed each of the domains of dread on a contiguous landmass (or on islands off the coast,) essentially making Ravenloft just another world that happened to be very spooky. 5th Edition's change here instead turned the domains into islands of reality floating in the mists, isolated in such a way that enforced the idea of being trapped. The implication, as I see it, is that most people in each domain aren't even aware of other domains. They just know that this land is where they live and where they're stuck.

By contrast, reading the 2nd Edition Planscape content, I haven't really seen a ton that I'd change all that much. Sure, there are some updates that I'd make: given that the Satanic Panic has run its course, I think it's fine to identify the archdevils who rule the layers of the Nine Hells (which they have in the 5th Edition DMG) and we can use terms like Devil and Demon, rather than having to insist on Baatezu and Tanar'ri, respectively (though in my headcanon Baatezu is the Infernal word for Devil and Tanar'ri is perhaps the Abyssal word for Demon).

As a matter of personal taste, I'd de-emphasize the presence of real-world mythologies in the setting. I think it's fine if we retain the canon that, for example, the Greek Gods mostly live on Mount Olympus in Arborea, but I'd rather keep things fully fictional, with more of a focus on figures like Gruumsh, Corellon, etc. I think this is particularly important when it comes to religions that are still commonly practiced - most Westerners I think can feel comfortable cavorting around with Zeus and Thor, but placing Hindu deities in there at a time when there are 1.2 billion members of that very active and modern religion risks getting things wrong and disrespectful in a pretty bad way. (While the D&D team has been trying to address their previous missteps in cultural representation, this seems like something it wouldn't be that hard to avoid by simply not getting into it).

What I might do, though, is expand the pantheons of various humanoid races - 2nd Edition still carried with it an assumption that Orcs, Goblins, and such were inherently prone to evil (hell, that was even true in early 5th Edition) and so I'd love to see, for example, new Orcish gods found on the upper planes. (I could actually imagine that some Orcish god of honor and valor would be a really strong fit for Mount Celestia).

One thing that I think could be a tricky thing to pull off is the treatment of planar effects. In the 5th Edition DMG, they suggest that even if you're going to invent your own planes, that there should be some mechanical effect on play there to enforce the idea that you're in a different universe. For example, on Mechanus, damage for attacks and spells is always the average (if you're doing 1d10+3 with your glaive, for example, that amount should aways be 8 on Mechanus, or a crit for 14, and a base 3rd level fireball or lightning bolt will always do 28 damage to creatures that fail the saving throw).

The Planescape books get very crunchy when it comes to these kinds of restrictions. Spell keys and Power keys are the types of objects you'll need to carry with you into the planes to access certain types of magic. For example, because the Outer Planes are ultimately planes of thought and philosophy, while the Inner Planes (like the Elemental Planes, of which there are a whole lot in 2nd Edition) are the planes of physical material, a lot of times any kind of elemental magic requires some special item to work on the Outer Planes. Similarly, deceptive spells like those in the Illusion school simply don't work on Lawful planes like Mechanus.

I think I'd maybe pull back on some of these restrictions. I think it makes perfect sense that the planes would affect how magic works, but I might change immunities to something like resistance - maybe saving throws against illusion magic in Mechanus is made at advantage, for example.

Another striking absence in Planescape is the Feywild and Shadowfell - these planes were only introduced in 4th Edition (Ravenloft as a setting was in the Ethereal Plane, rather than the Shadowfell,) but I think their role within the planar system could be interesting. One of the ideas in Planescape is that "Primes" (aka those who are from the prime material plane) are regarded as ignorant and clueless compared to the "Planars" (mortals who were born and raised in the other planes). But given the Shadowfell and Feywild are closest and most similar to the Prime Material Plane (at least in theory) I wonder how Planars feel about folks from those planes - is an Eladrin from the Feywild considered clueless, or are they embraced as someone who truly knows what's what?

One of the things that gives Planescape a lot of its tone and flavor is that the text is all written in this odd lingo that's loosely based on Cockney slang. People are referred to as Berks, Bloods, or Bashers. The generally accepted knowledge about a place is called the Chant of it, while the secrets that only a few people know and most merely speculate about is the Dark of it. If you get yourself killed, that's winding up in the Dead-Book. And talking, particularly to excess, is rattling your Bone-Box.

In general, 5th Edition has separated out in-character text from more neutral text - books like Xanathar's Guide to Everything have virtual post-it notes written by the Xanathar, commenting on things, but the actual main text is all from a kind of omniscient and impartial perspective. I suspect that a 5th Edition Planescape sourcebook would likely stick to the more recent format, which could be clearer though maybe a little sad.

Another thing that gives Planescape a really distinctive feel is that throughout the entire Planescape line in the 1990s, the artist Tony DiTerlizzi did literally every piece of art (except, I think, for some of the cover art and the iconic Lady of Pain face that I think was actually constructed out of metal and photographed to create the Planescape header).

The Factions of Planescape are a big part of the setting as well, though I've found they're not quite as similar to the Guilds of Ravnica as I'd worried they might be. In Sigil itself, they play a big role, but as soon as you go adventuring among the planes, you're likely to only encounter one of them on any given plane. Whereas on Ravnica basically everything is going to involve one Guild or another (or often two clashing with one another,) the Planescape factions can act more like the factions you'd find in any other D&D setting - just as you encounter the Flaming Fist and the Order of the Gauntlet while exploring Chult in Tomb of Annihilation, your travels to Acheron might involve meeting with (and likely fighting/fleeing) the Mercykillers. But you can have plenty of other encounters with other planar denizens.

I think the main thing that will make any 5th Edition sourcebook significantly different is that WotC's attitude toward D&D has been far more quality-over-quantity. TSR's attitude toward its settings was that they'd produce entire product lines - the PDFs I've gotten for Planescape are the equivalent of four whole 5th Edition books, and I don't even have all the sourcebooks, not to mention the published adventures. (For example, there's a book about Sigil and another one that's about the Inner Planes that I don't have.)

For 5e, I wouldn't expect us to get more than one publication, and while they're clearly experimenting with new ways of publishing things - the Spelljammer box set coming out this month being an example - I don't expect WotC to pump out a whole lot of books dedicated to Planescape during this edition.

So, any sourcebook they do produce is going to have to cover a huge amount of ground - again, we're talking about 17 outer planes, the city of Sigil, and then the Inner Planes. Frankly, I would not be shocked if a 5th Edition Planescape downplayed the Inner Planes in favor of really focusing on the Outer ones, which I think are probably considered more iconically linked to the setting. Indeed, I could even imagine focusing almost entirely on the Outlands, though I think that'd be a shame because the whole premise of the setting is traveling between planes.

The angle of attack I'd take is to get into the vibes of the planes more than simply listing existing locations. Each of the Outer Planes is infinite in physical space, so it should be clear to DMs that they can make up whatever they want to put there - simply give them the appropriate building blocks with which to build appropriate stuff in those settings. Places in Arcadia should feel very orderly, with the partial goodness of the plane manifesting in the fact that the orderliness is meant to serve a greater good, but the stronger emphasis on law presenting the opportunity for danger and adventure when the party doesn't necessarily follow all the rules. I'm currently reading the section on Arborea, and even though this plane is just as good as it is chaotic, it's still got plenty of dangerous monsters, and even the good-aligned denizens might be overcome with passion and still pose a threat. Really, it's that the reasons why a monster might attack you in Arborea is different than why one might in Mount Celestia. And, of course, all the lower planes are terrible, bad places to be, so plenty of opportunity for conflict and danger - but on Acheron the danger is being conscripted into some hopeless army where desertion gets you summarily executed, whereas in the Abyss, demons are just going to hunt you down and torture you for the fun of it.

I do think there's a decent chance they're working on a new Planescape book, and it's something I'd be very eager for them to do. But whatever scope they decide on, it's going to be a big project.

Planes of Law

 Whew!

For 20 bucks, I got a pretty hefty amount of lore. I've now read through the Planes of Law supplement from 2nd Edition Planescape (well, I think I still need to read through the monster descriptions, but I've gotten through all the plane-specific stuff.)

Luckily, for a 2nd Edition book, this is really lore-focused, and while there's talk of spell types and things like spell keys and power keys and such that I really don't understand at all, overall it's mostly just descriptions of the planes.

Planes of Law covers five of the outer planes - Acheron, Arcadia, Baator (the Nine Hells,) Mechanus, and Mount Celestia.

Given that 5th Edition has only really gone into detail about the Nine Hells and a little in the Abyss (I think they're the only two that get descriptions of multiple layers in the Dungeon Master's Guide,) it's nice to get a little more detail for places like Arcadia and Acheron, which I could imagine being sort of swept aside especially because they occupy a sort of hybrid ground between alignments.

Indeed, Arcadia actually has some really cool intrigue - of its three layers, the third one has actually gone missing, absorbed into Mechanus. The explanation for why is a great example of how you can make dangerous antagonists even in the upper planes - the details of which I won't spoil here.

A fair number of the regions described in the plane descriptions are actually about deities from real-world mythologies. For example, Heliopolis is the realm of Osiris, Ra, Isis, and Horus, and sits within Arcadia. I think more recent D&D stuff has tended to de-emphasize the existence of real-world mythology in its canon.

As an aside, a long campaign I was in had, as one of its central plots, the fact that our paladin worshipped Athena, despite being from the Forgotten Realms. Rather than simply having Athena influence another world, though, our DM created a complex interplanar conspiracy involving people who wanted to conquer Toril and made the paladin's mentor some kind of odd construct - one of many.

Of these five, I actually think the physical structure of Acheron is the most interestingly outlandish - a realm of giant iron cubes (and other shapes, but mostly cubes) that bang around across the plane. Here one also finds Hassitorium, which are moving fortresses that can move because failed soldiers are magically bound within the walls, meaning you could have the party see one of these fortresses moving toward them on hundreds of normal human-sized feet.

I will say that the mechanics of the planes make the idea of a D&D afterlife a little less comforting - even in the Seven Heavens, you might get killed by a rockslide (though petitioners - the spirits of dead mortals who go onto the planes, will become one with the plane when they die there, which is ultimately the goal most of them strive for). Still, you need stakes for these locations to be the settings for the stories you tell. Essentially, each plane really asks you to commit to a philosophy. Heaven's not the reward so much as signing up for a difficult and long journey to perfection.

Likewise, of these five, I really think the Mount Celestia's the only one that really seems all that appealing of a place to wind up - even though Arcadia leans toward good, there's a bit of a cultish authoritarian thing going on there. Mount Celestia, being just as lawful as it is good, also demands a lot of its inhabitants, making me wonder if Elysium's really the best place to wind up.

One thing that's interesting about the book is how clearly it was written in the wake of the Satanic Panic. D&D had become this lightning rod for people worrying that young people were worshipping the devil (while I think most people were just concerned with the ideas that the game was giving kids, rather than thinking that the spell descriptions were literal and real, some nut-jobs genuinely did think that the game taught kids how to summon demons). TSR, the company that owned D&D at the time (I believe Wizards of the Coast, which made Magic the Gathering, bought it in the late 90s) was trying to at least de-emphasize any explicit references to demons and devils, and I think it's also for this reason that the books speak of "powers" rather than "gods."

Indeed, the description of Baator (which, to be fair, gets parenthetically referred to as the Nine Hells) claims that the Lords of the Nine are mostly unknown except for Levistus, and presents it as a huge mystery as to who is actually in charge of them. Of course, in 5th Edition, we've got a definitive list. Here, Devils are "Baatezu," and Demons are "Tanar'ri." Apparently prior to these changes, what we now know as Yugoloths were originally, confusingly, called "Daemons." That one stuck. I'm actually tempted to keep these terms if I were to run a Planescape game - indeed, in my headcanon, the Infernal word for devil is baatezu. The Abyssal word for demon could then be Tanar'ri (though I might not go with this latter possibility as I think it's potentially really interesting if Obyriths and Tanar'ri are separate types and generations of demons).

Each plane section has a few adventures, though these are very sketchily outlined - which I imagine would be a bit of a pain for someone running this back in the day, but its sketchiness actually makes translating the adventures (really just outlines that are one or two pages long) into 5th Edition potentially a lot easier.