Bleak Generation

  Our adventure began in The Fat Candle tavern, a pub lit by a solitary candle the size of a tree trunk. The perfect place for a clandestine meeting – if you don’t mind drinking in near-darkness. The heroes’ contact was Mazatl, one of 12-Bar’s friends in the Mercykillers. Mazatl, a half-elf with one arm, had previously tasked the party with retrieving a shipment of weapons which had later turned out to be aberrantly sentient. Mazatl asked the party to unearth why the Athar and the Signers were at each other’s throats over some church in the Lower Ward, and what some Anarchist called Hulester had to do with it all. The party headed off to the Lower Ward, arriving in the evening near the Ubiquitous Wayfarer, a tavern famous for its collection of portals and a statue that tells riddles. M’narr impressed onlookers by immediately solving the riddle set by the statue, and was bought several rounds of peach wine as a reward, despite his insisting that he didn’t drink. He did use his n...

  This is a tricky start for a DM, let’s be honest, especially if it’s your first time running Sigil like it was mine. I hadn’t been up to my eyes learning all the Planescape lore, I’d probably have sexed it up a bit more, but you can’t have everything. All the same, my first way to involve the players was to help them make the adventure's NPC contact rather than do it myself. I got the players to name: What their last mission from their contact was;   What unexpected thing happened on the quest;   What was an unusual thing you remember about the NPC? (Recommended for the DM who enjoys improvisational comedy). That was it. But you could use race/class/a secret/what happened when you got drunk with them etc. I used a fun tavern, too, the Fat Candle in the Clerk’s Ward, not far from the players’ apartment. If your players are a long way from the Lower Ward, get them investigating things fairly quickly with quick access to Tea Street Transit’s pony cabs, or a sedan chai...