Bleak Generation

So now we have our three planewalkers. How do they know each other? Ragados had been a Harmonium officer to many years prior to leaving Arcadia. When he did leave, he ended up between the two gate towns of Arcadia and Mechanus. The Modrons started their march early, this is known, and 12-Bar (former name unknown) had been one of the first to fall in that great expedition. Unlike the other Modrons though, his body had not immediately fallen to dust. So Ragados cracked open the hood to see what was inside. Not liking Modrons (The Harmonium recently lost a plane of Arcadia to Mechanus and is fucking desperate to get it back), Ragados had planned to patch up the Modron and send him on his way. Ragados gave the Modron a sense of smell and taste, and fixed him up. Opening his singular eye to a small, heavily armoured gnome standing over him, smelling flowers on the breeze, tasting the grass, a rogue and deeply curious modron was born. Back in Sigil, they founded a company together:...

With a Planescape game, the party don’t have to be exactly philosophically aligned, but at the very least they shouldn’t be completely philosophically opposed. For me though, that kind of thing can wait until after everyone’s decided on a race and class at least. Sure, we may tell stories with this game, but it is, at heart, still a game. Chris has played and run a lot of D&D before but never played a wizard, and it was finally the time. He saw that Githyanki made mechanically strong (and narratively interesting) wizards, so he picked Githyanki. “Githyanki? Aren’t they kind of the bad guys?” Fuck you.   You can * not* be a Githyanki wizard in any other game that exists. So ya boi’s a conjurer in a breastplate. Andres is the only player who’s played Planescape: Torment, and had found an online supplement of 5e Planescape races. He likes the look of a Rogue Modron, so that’s who he is. A modron. We decided on monodrone rather than quadrone aesthetically. (They’re cuter.) H...

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...