Planescape General and Q&A
Thread starter questions: How would you integrate the concept of druid- and shaman-style magicians in the planes, those who would draw strength from "nature" and commune with "the spirits of the land"? Dark Sun sets a precedent for doing so in the Inner Planes, but what of the Outer Planes which are already manifestations of mind, heart, and soul?
Discuss Planescape and the Great Wheel here, whether the original AD&D 2e version, the 3.X version, the 4e version (yes, it exists in 4e, down to the baernaloths, the yugoloths, the Heart of Darkness, Maeldur et Kavurik, Tenebrous, Pelion, and the Last Word all being canon as of Dragon #417), the 5e version, or your own original blend.
I am exceedingly well-lanned on Planescape canon under a holistic blend of 2e, 3.X, and sometimes even 4e lore. If you have any questions at all about the setting's lore, feel free to ask, and I will give you direct quotes and citations from as many primary sources as I can, unlike afroakuma. I will note when something is open to GM interpretation, and explicitly note whenever I give merely my own personal interpretation.
>Basic setting summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape
>Comprehensive Planescape reference index: http://www.rilmani.org/psIndex.txt
>Planewalker.com planar encyclopedia: http://mimir.planewalker.com/encyclopedia/plane
>Canonfire.com planar encyclopedia: http://canonfire.com/wiki/index.php?title=Outer_Planes
>Rilmani.org planar encyclopedia (contains unmarked fanon, so beware): http://www.rilmani.org/timaresh/Outer_Planes
>List of all the multiverse's gods (contains all gods mentioned in D&D products, but also has plenty of speculation and fanon for mythological deities and for powers with few details on them): http://mimir.planewalker.com/forum/list-dead-gods#comment-58090
Old threads with previous questions and comprehensive answers: https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/text/%22comprehensive%20planescape%22/
>>46793461
This is another line of inquiry I have fielded in previous threads.
By default, Spelljammer *is* part and parcel of Planescape. Spelljammer and every other published setting (save for Ravenloft) cover what goes on in the Prime, while Planescape describes the rest of the multiverse. Planar adventurers are going to have to visit the Prime sooner or later, and for that, a GM is well within their rights to bring in Spelljammer material.
Planescape acknowledged Spelljammer a few times, such as the mentions of crystal spheres and phlogiston in page 5 of the original boxed set's Player's Guide to the Planes, page 32 of the Planewalker's Handbook, and page 160 of On Hallowed Ground.
However, the Planescape books were always reluctant to go into detail with regards to Spelljammer elements, and for a good reason: the latter product line was already dead. Thus, the integration between the two settings was minimal, even in Prime-focused elements of Planescape.
A good example of this is the initial faction overview for the Harmonium in pages 90-91 of the Factol's Manifesto. This establishes their home world of Ortho as a single Prime world. It contains no mention of crystal spheres, spelljammers, or wildspace. Canonically, the Harmonium dominates one world in the Prime, and that is it.
(Meanwhile, Dark Sun, which *was* an active product line at the time, inexplicably received plenty of spotlight in that very entry. Apparently, people in Sigil regularly compare the Harmonium to the champions of Rajaat, as if Athas's secret history was common knowledge in the Cage?)
In other words, while Spelljammer and Planescape are canonically integrated by default, the integration is minimal, and you are going to have to do the hard work of tying together setting elements yourself. (For example: Does the Harmonium have a crystal sphere empire? Does the Elven Imperial Navy stop by Arborea often? Do the illithid travel to Ilsensine's divine realm in the Outlands frequently?)
>Spelljammer and every other published setting (save for Ravenloft) cover what goes on in the Prime
The Phlogiston is distinctly not part of the Prime Material Plane.
Do you think by making the strange and wondrous mundane that the setting really suffers for it? I find myself having difficulty making compelling adventures.
>>46793461
As >>46794636 points out, however, the benefits and disadvantages of traveling via Sigil vastly outweigh those of traveling via spelljamme. The only good reasons to travel via the latter are: (1) transporting plenty of cargo or passengers, or (2) there being no suitable portal in Sigil and no way to Greater Teleport to the area.
>>46794959
Page 10 of the original Planescape Campaign Setting boxed set's A DM's Guide to the Planes has this to say on planar natives:
>Certain rules hold true no matter what plane a being's on, be it the Prime Material, the Astral, an Inner, or an Outer Plane. The most universal of these deals with a being's home plane. Everybody's got a home plane, and it's not necessarily the place they haunt now. A prime living in Sigil still calls the Prime Material Plane his home plane. It's not where a being lives that matters; it's where he was born, hatched, or sprouted. Home planes matter because a lot of spells work only on creatures either inside or outside their home planes.
Page 8 of A Player's Guide to the Planes defines "primes" as such:
>Primes are mortal travelers horn on any world in the Prime Material Plane who have since ventured beyond their narrow realm.
>>46794959
Pages 8-9 of A Player's Guide to the Planes tells us about "planars":
>Most folks out here are planars, born and bred on the planes. Planars ain’t all horrible monsters or whatnot; that’s a mistake some green prime’s likely to make. Planars include all sorts of folks: humans, half-elves, githzerai, and the like, in addition to some more exotic types. One thought worthy of a prime is that those same humans and half-elves can’t be native to the Outer Planes. Some primes think their races are unique to the Prime Material Plane. Well, maybe that’s where humans and half-elves first came from, but these people have been living in cities and towns out here for millennia. Way back at the Beginning, humans were probably unknown out here, but with time the lost, the curious, the exiled, and the just blamed unlucky made themselves homes out here on the planes.
Finally, page 8 of the Planewalker's Handbook reiterates the above definitions:
>Planars are natives of the Outer and Inner Planes — whether they’re human, humanoid, or another shape altogether.
>... it’s crucial to know where a planar was born, because he’s extraplanar everywhere else.
Presumably, the above also extends to the Astral, the Ethereal, and demiplanes.
>Primes, who’re often unfairly tagged "the Clueless," are simply natives of the Prime Material Plane.
In other words, yes, it all boils down to any given creature's plane of birth. If, say, a guardinal or an eladrin was to give birth on the Prime, the child would be a prime and native to the Prime despite being an exemplar.
>>46795231
>>46795326
>>46795403
"The Serpent" simply being a figment of imagination of Vecna's brilliant mind is 3.X-canonically the "most likely" explanation for "the Serpent" as per pages 28-29 of Dragon Magazine #359. In my personal opinion, it is not as plausible as "the Serpent" being a true member of the Ancient Brethren, but the official stance is otherwise.
Sharlee from page 238 of the 3.0 Epic Level Handbook could have penned her own tome and, perhaps in a bit of madness, believed the inspiration to have come from "the Serpent." This entity supposedly gifted Vecna with the Language Primeval words (some might connect this to the True Words from the 2e Dead Gods: Out of the Darkness adventure) necessary to achieve his scheme, so perhaps another spellcaster could have found the same inspiration.
>>46825846
From mid-2015 to January of this year, I was running no less than four sessions of Planescape campaigns each week, under six-hour time slots. Half of them were one-on-one games.
Since then, I have slowed down my pace considerably to GMing only two one-on-one games each week under shorter time slots (perhaps 4.5 to 5 hours on average). Currently, both of my games are about playing a yugoloth lord in Gehenna, with a focus on the Crawling City introduced in page 113 of the 3.0 Manual of the Planes.
Although they have the same premise, both are under decidedly different tones. One is a wholly goofyand risquécampaign about a lord who prefers to slack off and mooch off other lords (not just those of Gehenna either), while the other is a more serious (yet still somewhat light in tone) game that starts off with the steps towards ascension and focuses more on heartfelt conversations.
>>46834475
The "Garden" of Avernus is actually a legitimate safe haven. You can read of it in pages 22-23 of Planes of Law: A Player's Guide to Law.
The baatezu appear to fear the Garden and stay away from it, even fleeing in a panic should they accidentally find themselves within its bounds. It is wholly impossible for anyone to inflict any type of violence whatsoever in the Garden. However, those who linger within it have the tendency to vanish without a trace.
The true nature of the Garden is, canonically, left as a mystery for the DM and the players to explore together.
>>46850574
The 2e Planescape stance is that the Phlogiston is effectively part of the Prime.
Pages 4-5 of the original Planescape Campaign Setting boxed set's A Player's Guide to the Planes says:
>The Prime Material is just one plane, but it contains lots of individual _worlds_. A world may be only a single planet or it may be a complete system with planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, and more. Each world is sealed like a bubble in its own _crystal sphere_, and that sphere is suspended within an amber stream called the _phlogiston_. (Those that know can travel from sphere to sphere through the phlogiston by a process known as spelljamming, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Page 32 of the Planewalker's Handbook backs this up:
>Though planars look down upon primes and their clueless ways, the Prime Material Plane cannot be completely disregarded. It's as wondrous and infinite a plane as any, with an endless variety of places to explore. A countless number of prime-material worlds float within separate vast crystal spheres, which are themselves contained in an ocean of fiery material called pholgiston [sic].
>>46850616
In my opinion, the fantastical effectively becoming the order of the day is part of the appeal of the setting.
Planescape is a setting wherein a harpy-like avoral guardinal from the idyllic plane of ultimate good can, after a hard day of work recording sensory stone B-movies for the Society of Sensation, deliberately enter a portal which actually leads to a cat cafe in the divine realm of the Egyptian goddess Bast, located in the plane of Ysgard. They can then give their order to a giant of a waiter who is actually a redeemed, insectile ice devil (gelugon) awkwardly wearing a cat ear hairband over its antennae, and while awaiting said order, rub the head of a half-pyroclastic-dragon cat under the chin.
All of the above would be just another day in the planes, and I love the setting for that.
What gives you difficulty with adventures?
>>46851115
>What gives you difficulty with adventures?
Let's take your example. Where is the conflict or drama in that scenario? What use is a cat cafe of Bast in an adventure? Or Sensory Stone B-movies? It's a funny novelty, much in the sense of Pratchett, but that's all it is, a novelty that would get old quickly.
If everything is as gonzo or silly as your example, it becomes blasé. The strange becomes mundane and loses it's charm. That's my main problem with Planescape as a campaign setting.
>>46851206
Every setting needs to establish what its "everyday life" is like to its people, so that when threats to said everyday life arise, the audience (in this case, the player) can know what is at stake.
In the example above, let us say it turns out that the avoral and the redeemed gelugon are actually friends and retired adventurers. The gelugon confides that while Bast herself has been sleeping as a cat is wont to do, things have been getting tense in Bast's realm of Merratet lately.
The goddess and the Cat Lord of the Beastlands have been engaged in a fierce rivalry over felines (as per Planes of Law: Liber Malevolentiae, page 24). The gelugon suspects that one of Bast's avatars might do something brash, and the rest of the cats here will foolishly jump on that bandwagon.
The avoral and the gelugon decide to go on "one more adventure" and do some snooping around in Merratet to figure out what is going on. Bast is sleeping, and besides, gods do not actually have that much omniscience over their divine realms anyway (the Something Wild, Well of Worlds, and Vortex of Madness adventures all include instances of Malar [lesser god], Crius [greater god], and Cronus [greater god] having their realm successfully intruded upon by prying adventurers).
After some tense infiltration scenes within the sands and thickets Merratet, evading the notice of feline sphinxes and displacer beast pack lords alike, they discover that a certain avatar of Bast has coordinated a two-pronged assault on the Cat Lord's Prowl in the Beastlands!
>>46851445
One force gunning for the Cat Lord is a more traditional army of feline soldiers. They are currently crossing the Arborea's first layer and could be routed or persuaded against their course from there.
The other is a team of "dream hunters," Bast's elite dream/fate-manipulating psionicists (as per page 119 of Planes of Chaos: The Book of Chaos). They intend on subverting the minds and fates of the Cat Lord's napping subjects, and have traveled to the Region of Dreams in the Ethereal Plane to work their scheme.
The avatar is completely unaccounted for and could be anywhere. The avoral recalls at this point that in the radiant swamp-layer of Belierin in their home plane of Elysium, there exists an extremely potent strain of catnip that could help them against all these cats. Unfortunately, Belierin is an extremely restricted area (as per page 61 of Planes of Conflict: Liber Benevolentiae), off-limits to even most guardinals, our hero included. If they want to retrieve the catnip, they are going to have to evade patrols; even if they do that or convince the guardinals to allow them passage, they will have to contend with the fearsome spawn of Belierin's terrible prisoners.
Here we have an adventure that has several interesting locations (Bast's divine realm of Merratet, Arborea's first layer, the Region of Dreams in the Ethereal Plane, the layer of Belierin in Elysium, and potentially even the Cat Lord's Prowl in the Beastlands), with various ways our heroes could go about it.
The premise is quite ridiculous, but makes sense within the context of the setting.
>>46851445
Sure, but what about when you want to do the big showpieces in a campaign, evoking great wonder? You can't really do that when that has already been established as part of the mundane life.
>>46851534
I do not think Planescape is a setting wherein being awed in wonderment by a setpiece beyond the mundane is going to happen often, unless the players are relatively new to the setting. Some settings are good at that, but the Great Wheel is not one of them.
Even with seasoned veterans of the planes (both in- and out-of-character), however, there is always something new in the multiverse that can defy their expectations.
Suppose our two heroes in >>46851531 aim for the catnip in the resplendent marsh of Belierin. They travel through colorful vistas reminiscent of Lorwyn's swamp land card, evade or persuade the local guardinal patrols, fight off some spawn of the layer's prisoners, and make it to the Nepeta cataria plant after piercing a strange veil of invisibility.
They discover that it is actually a beautiful, alraune-like treant that towers miles high! Innumerable fey live upon its leaves, from dryads to nymphs to stranger specimens like banshraes. These fairies will not assent to the plucking of catnip from their queen and master; that is why they concealed the plant from all sight in the first place.
How will our avoral and redeemed gelugon heroes resolve this situation? Will they engage in a sneaking mission and pluck some cantrip anyway? Might they try to entreat themselves to the alraune-like, titanic treant and work out a deal? Perhaps they will demand to know why the catnip must not be plucked and defeat the treant in a debate on why its fears of being plucked are irrational?
>>46851534
>>46851724
I'm going to have to disagree with the both of you here.
Planescape the setting is full of incredible vistas and grand sights, and plenty of them are in dangerous or exotic enough locations that even seasoned travelers won't have seen all of them (Planewalker is the kind of appellation that takes a lot of hard work and effort to earn). Furthermore, while the setting's "mundane day-to-day life" can be incredibly interesting, there's still plenty of mundane activity that goes on. While something like a clueless paladin from the Prime starting a fight with an arcanaloth shop-keeper isn't exactly rare in Sigil, it isn't hard to make it interesting if the player characters happen to be there.
Even outside Sigil, extreme and extraordinary events do actually happen. The Planes are actually the homes of the various outsider Lords like Barachiel and Orcus and Glasya and Anthraxus and Talisid, and when they show up and start to seriously fight it's the sort of thing that regular campaign setpieces are made of (to an even greater degree, given how much more of their strength they can bring to bear when they aren't on the prime). I've never had a problem bringing together a "setpiece" for a climactic moment/battle, and you can legitimately invoke much more powerful enemies/characters as a GM when you're on the Planes.
Really, if you're having trouble making a campaign compelling, it probably isn't the setting itself that's at fault. The same things that make regular campaigns compelling (emotional connections, risk and uncertainty, difficult challenges, entertaining dialogue etc) all work just fine on the Planes. Really, the faction system (which lets you give any monster/npc in your game multiple new ways for the players to interact with/get around) is so helpful when it comes to making compelling campaigns that I use it even when I don't run PS.
>>46852307
>While something like a clueless paladin from the Prime starting a fight with an arcanaloth shop-keeper isn't exactly rare in Sigil
One could say that having an arcanaloth for a shopkeeper at all (an extremely powerful daemonic jackal/hound/fox-person wizard) is far beyond the mundane, but your point is quite valid.
Personally, I do not think what is important is extraordinary events or vistas, but rather the player characters' ability to influence such things and make an impact on the world. That is why in the example scenario I have given above, the focus is on what the two heroes might do in order to avert the crisis.
Here is a new topic, then. Fey are an entire creature type in 3.5 and 5e and a major creature origin in 4e, and yet they have virtually no niche in the Great Wheel beyond "There is a Seelie Court in the three CG planes and an Unseelie Court in Pandemonium, but who cares what they actually do?"
In the past, I have attempted a writeup of the fey that tries to present them as exemplars of the Border Ethereal ( https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/46625839/#46626388 ), but I have been struck with a new idea. Admittedly, said idea would only work *outside* of D&D, preferably in a system wherein most monsters would have to be homebrewed anyway.
It is simple. Faeries are split between two planes:
• The somewhat good-leaning Spiritovore Court in the Positive Energy Plane, where their pixies/sprites are the xag-ya and their most powerful members are soulsippers, soulmarauders, and soulscapers (see pages 42-45 of the 3.0 Bastion of Unborn Souls adventure).
• The strongly CE-leaning Nightshade Court in the Negative Energy Plane, where their pixies/sprites are xeg-yi and their most powerful members are nighthaunts (see page 185 of Lost Empires of Faerun), nightwings, nightwalkers, nightswimmers (see page 96 of Dungeon Magazine #92) and nightcrawlers.
In between these lowest and highest of ranks are dryads, nymphs, satyrs, and the like of their respective courts.
This way, the fey become the custodians of life (the soul fonts in the Positive Energy Plane) and death (whatever lands in the Negative Energy Plane would contribute towards the inevitability that is demise). Would this be an interesting idea?
>>46853394
"These are the good fairies, and these are the bad fairies. Their stats are appropriate to [these creatures]"
It's not UNinteresting, but it's also not an uncommon split.
>>46854037
As it currently stands, the nightshades of the Negative Energy Plane are, in fact, "always chaotic evil," while the spiritovores of the Positive Energy Plane are either "always neutral" (soulsipper, soulmarauder) or "always good" (soulscaper).
Thus, while negative energy and positive energy are not, on their own, evil or good, their *inhabitants* tend to be evil or good.
Then again, xeg-yi and xag-ya are both "always neutral," so a case could be made under this setup that the nightshades are neutral up until nighthaunt rank and beyond, and the spiritovores are neutral up to soulscaper rank.
I suppose what I am trying to say is that the Negative Energy Plane and the Positive Energy Plane already have this dichotomy between their canonical inhabitants, and merging them with the fey could perhaps produce a somewhat interesting take.
In planescape, how are the different planes e.g. abyss, hell, plane of fire, ethereal realm handled? Do they all have their own crystal spheres?
>>46855011
As per pages 6 and 12-16 of the Guide to the Ethereal Plane, the Border Ethereal strictly connects only to:
1. Prime Material crystal spheres, although some might have extraordinary or distorted borders.
2. Demiplanes, although some might have extraordinary, distorted, or nonexistent borders.
3. All Inner Planes. Yes, there is a Border Ethereal version of, say, the Quasielemental Plane of Radiance or the Negative Energy Plane.
None of the Outer Planes have a Border Ethereal. The Astral Plane simply does not allow for one, since it works off a different set of rules involving astral projections.
Crystal spheres strictly apply only to the Prime Material Plane; they are what effectively contain star systems.
What happens when you cast banishment on a Cager? They are planars, but you can't teleport into sigil. Right? Does that apply to banishment?
>>46856311
Generally if people can't be sent to the right location they just end up in the Astral as the spell fails.
However, Sigil is not actually a separate Plane. Sigil is on the Outlands, and so the banished cager would just end up somewhere there.
