Bleak Generation

Here's my take on a 5e conversion/update for Warp Sense , the most essential spell for a Planescape campaign. Might change it at a later date - not entirely happy with the "At Higher Levels" part - but then again, I might not. Part of the spell requiring you to use your movement is a bit of an oddity, but I think it's a fun idiosyncrasy to carry over from the original. Warp Sense 2nd-level divination (ritual) Casting Time: 1 action Range: Self Components: V, S Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute For the duration, you sense the location of up to two planar portals within 60 feet of you. If there are more than two portals within range, you sense the nearest two. When you detect a portal in this way, you learn whether it is one or two-way, and can use your action and all of your movement to learn either the portal’s destination plane, or the key required to use it, if any. Determining either requires a DC 13 ability check using y...

Looking to unpick how to run Dead Gods in 5e D&D, but don't know where to start? Start here. First things first. Realistically, I wouldn't recommend Planescape or Dead Gods for a first-time DM. Trying to stay on top of the adventure and the world is enough work without having to learn the rules of the game as you go. If you and your group all played Planescape: Torment and loved the world and know it well, then that's a bit different. Otherwise, run a simpler adventure or two first, and get to the stage where you're confident with the rules. Done that? Okay. So, obviously you have the adventure itself . I have a ringbound Print on Demand copy, which is fantastic, although 9 pages out of the 170+ have scanned badly, and some are illegible. Some copies of the pdf have this problem and some don't, so check before you buy. Either way, the illegible pages are all detailed in this useful free 5e conversion by Jarred Caldwell. It seems as if this pdf was formally a pa...

Planescape. It's a hell of a setting. Hell, it's Nine Hells of a setting. The best setting? Why the hell not. The context of Planescape may be of some interest, as far as the history of Dungeons & Dragons goes. In 2020, D&D is probably more popular than it’s ever been. Its popularity has gone in peaks and troughs. If nothing else, the period that gave us Planescape is an artistic peak; a period where TSR took a series of artistic and commercial risks. While these risks left us with wonderful things like Planescape, Al-Qadim, and Dark Sun, they ultimately led to TSR’s downfall a few years later. All the same, the people playing D&D back then included a lot of mature players who could’ve been playing since their teens. Such people would’ve done the dungeon crawl, the quest across Fantasy Medieval England, the epic save-the-world-and-ascend-to-godhood shtick a few times. These people will have grown up playing D&D: enjoying their hobby, while away from the table, t...