The Planewalkers' Diaries

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, their lives and relationships grew ever more complex. They will have already used D&D's storytelling to explore good versus evil, and bravery and sacrifice, and may have found they suddenly fancy exploring more complicated themes.Some of them will still have just wanted to kill goblins and find treasure. That's okay too.

But for a group seeking complexity, Planescape can scratch that itch. It's equal parts childlike wonder and world-weary cynicism. It takes place in an infinite multiverse where your players can be Anyone from Anywhere. As powerful as you will become, in a world full of gods and demigods, you're never going to be the biggest fish. There are fights you can't win. You have to accept the world around you on its own terms, because it isn't going to meet you halfway. You are small. Fragile, even; and in a way, that makes your heroism all the more compelling.

Planescape's scope also allows for a party more diverse than would ever be possible in a normal D&D campaign. Let's face it, you can be a gnome or a dragonborn in pretty much any D&D game. You've always wanted to play a Mind Flayer Barbarian? Let’s try it. Githzerai Paladin? Hell, let’s all be Githzerai, Planescape invented Githzerai. Tiefling? We invented that too, babe.

Gods, if it isn't a labour of love though. The books are decades out of print. Smiting Githzerai and raging Mind Flayers swinging greataxes are all well and good, but Dungeons and Dragons doesn't just happen by itself. The Dungeon Master needs to prepare games, and run them. How does Planescape fare on that front? Well, not so good. Especially not for the 5th Edition Dungeon Master. Even when you get past the differences between 5e and 2e, consistency of rules across books was clearly less important than it is today. If you want to corroborate the rules for, say, magic in the Outlands, you're going to be flicking between several books. Even portal rules are inconsistent.

There probably isn't a shortcut to learning Planescape. Running a detailed and nuanced campaign world takes time, and if you overload your players with setting lore and information, they might disengage. Be patient, explain things clearly, and build your shared world at the best pace you can manage. Luckily for me, the current pandemic has given me the time to sit down and research the setting. And I've had a copy of Dead Gods for a few years now, a classic adventure module, and I've always wanted to run it but never felt I had the time. Silver linings.

On top of all that, to a modern gamer, even one who knows both 5e and AD&D rules, adventures like Dead Gods are not really ready out of the box. They need a fair amount of DM legwork behind the scenes. But unlike learning the setting, that work I can do for you, to some extent. So if you're looking to run Dead Gods, or just browsing for Planescape ideas, I hope you find this useful. I've personally found online Planescape resources to be sadly scant, so it is my hope that this blog goes some way to broadening the discussion and wealth of ideas.

It could be that by adding to the body of Planescape resources, I'm actually just creating more reading for everyone to do. Bringing us all back to where we were at the start of this journey. Unity of Rings and all that. Best not think too much about it, or we'll all go barmy.