"Sundering" Planescape

I really wish I liked Planescape, but I don’t. Let’s see if I can fix it.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT PLANESCAPE?

• IT’S ECLECTIC. The primary draw of Planescape is the near-surreal variety of experiences it can offer, especially those well outside of the standard purview of dungeon fantasy. There is nothing outside of Planescape’s purview, and a campaign on the cosmic scale promises an endless variety of novel experiences.
• IT’S PHILOSOPHICAL. It’s difficult to adventure in Planescape without making choices about what you believe and why. A party, over the course of a campaign, is implicitly challenged to carve out an ethical niche in the cosmos, which is delightfully fertile ground from which the more cerebral possibilities of roleplay can sprout.
• IT’S ACCESSIBLE. Through a Planescape campaign, interplanar play that’s typically locked behind a high level becomes accessible to any party. Like a game that starts with domain play (our beloved), it takes a pleasure that by default arises out of a long-running DnD campaign and presents it to anyone who wants to enjoy it.

WHAT’S NOT GREAT ABOUT PLANESCAPE?

• IT’S SPRAWLING. With an endless and easily-accessed multiverse, it’s hard to delineate the known world from the unknown world, and the early game from the late. This also makes it difficult to make small stakes still feel meaningful in the shadow of the leviathan of infinitude.
• IT’S REDUNDANT. Especially because of the constraints of the ninefold alignment chart, the obligation to arbitrarily fill out existing matrices creates natural redundancies in the worldbuilding. What’s the difference between Arborea and the Beastlands, the Doomguard and the Bleak Cabal?
• IT’S HYPEREXOTIC. The sheer number of genuinely original features of Planescape’s world makes explaining it to a neophyte an act of endless onboarding. Barring individual research on the setting, there’s next to no grounding of common understanding from which a table can work together to make sense of each other and the world they’re creating.

Now, I’m certain that a smarter, more creative DM could circumvent these issues without having to restructure the Planescape canon. But this is my take on the matter: a Planescape whose central conceits can be clearly communicated in three bullets, a Planescape with the capacity to  fruitfully constrain a party’s interplanar antics, a Planescape not yet oversaturated by the need to fill every niche.

In 1917, the US joined the Great War, the last mother crumples a salt-stained telegraph delivered by a smartly-dressed hero, the last priest’s rosary falters in his trembling hands, the last soldier’s eyes stop twinkling as he white-knuckle grips his childhood best friend rotting alive in a backwater trench, and the corpse of God falls out of heaven and crashes headsfirst into the Western Front. That was a decade ago.

Everyone who could make the pilgrimage without being blown to bits by their neighbors built a metropolis in God’s ribcage, and named it Sigil. Sigil is the only city that matters; the rest of the world, far as anyone knows, is still an endless morass of smoking mortar shells and mud-caked, mist-drenched wasteland. The Temperance League instituted a prohibition a couple years back, which you obey if you’re poor and smart.

God bled all over the cosmos. This vanishingly rare and unspeakably valuable ICHOR serves as fuel for interplanar zeppelins called spelljammers. Without ICHOR, you have to navigate the cosmos long way round, through natural gates and wounds between dimensions. Sigil stripped God’s flesh from His bones long ago, milking it for the ICHOR necessary to establish a spelljammer flotilla and a cluster of pancosmic colonies called Gate-Towns, so all the remaining ICHOR is sequestered in the least penetrable crannies of the multiverse.

Next up: a primer on the seven outer planes. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.