First of all, Happy Holidays everyone!
I wasn't playing a lot of AD&D back in 2nd Edition, since I was just getting started and wasn't really organized. So I missed out on the more eclectic campaigns like Dark Sun and Planescape. Now that I'm invested in 3.5 and mwbeeler is nice enough (or wicked enough) to have me in his Dark Sun pbp, I'd still like to give Planescape a shot. I have the pdf Planescape box set and I take it Manuals of the Planes and maybe the Planar Handbook would be a decent update? I also remember an OGL supplement along those lines, too. Does anyone have further recommendations or experiences? Advice for running my own really sweet Planescape campaign?
If I were maybe, tentatively, someday thinking about doing a Planescape pbp, would anyone be interested?
Happy holidays to you too, James. I've never played or DMed a Planescape game, but I do have all of the boxed sets and a few of the sourcebooks and adventures. I also have the 3rd ed Manual of the Planes and Planewalker's Handbook, neither of which I've looked at in great depth... but I'd say they barely scratch the surface of the Planescape setting, as described in the 2nd ed products.
I'm not sure what the OGL product you're thinking of might be... but if you do start a PbP, I would be interested in joining... so save me a spot! That would be a great way for me to get to experience Planescape, as well, as I don't think I'll ever get the opportunity to do so in a tabletop game...
Good luck!
Thanks, guys. It may be months before I can actually run one, since I want to be really familiar with the setting and running a play-by-post and then have a really well-written campaign. I don't expect to be able to run a Planescape game in real time at my game table, since my players are into the game I'm running and there's only two of them, so it seems like this is the only place to do it.
I'm running a planescape game right now. Short description:
Using the Illumian (Races of Destiny) mechanics, the PCs are unique beings created from the shattered essence of Fell, the Dabus who worshipped Aoskar the Portal God. The Lady of Pain, inscrutable as she is, was indeed the one who killed Aoskar, and "punished" Fell.
But this is all merely the prologue to a much larger story.
Agents of Tharzidun have, over the years, retreived most of the petrified heart of Aoskar from his blade skewered diety-corpse in the deep Astral. They plan to corrupt the fragments in Tharzidun's name, hoping the resulting energies will weaken planar boundaries enough that their master might slip free of his inescapeable prison.
Enter the PCs. Through their unique nature and heritage, they can not only sense the locations of the shards, but can use them to travel to the general proximity of others. Only one problem: this is portal magic at its most raw and unstable, and they are creatures undefined by any rules except those which apply to Fell, and by proxy, the Lady herself. And reality prefers to be undisturbed when possible, so when they travel through the fragment-portals, they come out....changed. Their bodies reconfigured to match the normal denizens of the area, their minds filled with the collective racial experience of their current form.
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So thats it. Its basically Planescape + Kingdom Hearts. This game is basically to let my more advanced players get their "I wanna play a ____" out of the way. But so far its working well. They've been in mostly "normal" material areas so far, so nothing odd, but we just hit the mountains, and the party now consists of a goliath archivist, a shifter shadow adept, an earth elemental templar (variant paladin), and a whisper gnome barbarian/rogue (my powergamer too, yeah, thats going to be ugly, he gets the short end of the stick next portal).
Its going to be fun once it goes planar, because as long as the overall ECLs are balanced, I can turn them all into things normally beyond the scope of standard play. Like efreet and fire elementals and such. Plus, turning into "adapted" critters means more hostile planes can be played sooner.
And its been a blast to root through all of the great Tharzidun stuff that Paizo has put out too! I've been using the eye king template from Green Ronin as a great "WTF!" monster whenever Tharzidun cultists are congregating. Last one was a wolf-eye king, with ray of enfeeblement and touch of fatigue rays, and a cause fear main eye. Good stuff.
RPG Superstar 2013
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i have run a planescape campaign that spanned a little over a year, and then a better one that was a little over two years.
that second one started with thirteen players. five people made characters and showed up on starting night without asking me. you should have seen that table! ha!
my first campaign was okay, but it was more a novelty. rather than having a controlling set of stories with adventures mixed in, we just sort of tooka tour of the planes and played loosely linked adventures, with plenty of downtime for them to be involved in sigil. i was new to running weekly campaigns back then, and really learned a lot.
my second campaign wasmuch more triumphant, and would have been much more so but that i had to move for work. but i kept 6-8 players for over two years. then i killed off the campaign to move again, and started work on my most ambitious campaign to date: the millenium game (d20 modern/xfiles/magic-returning-to-the-world before there was d20 modern). that one lasted about a year, and had lots ofplanar influence in its main story, but no one got that far. i really miss that game, it had badass potential. maybe some day.
my first advice for planescape is limit your scope at first. you can get lost very easily. secondly, be sure during planning that your characters are making a difference. not in my campaign, but outside of my campaign i kept hearing that players didn't want to try planescape because it didn't mean anything. you can't sav the world, there's always a bigger fish, etc. i paid attention to that in my game. the ultimate goal was for the pcs to save sigil - and maybe the planes as we know them, but the story is way too complicated to work out in these boards. maybe some day i'll get back to running six month, canned campaigns and not have to work so hard. i dunno.
i did make great use of faction war and dead gods. warning: dead gods will change your campaign, your ideas about dnd and such. it's that good. you will also learn a lot of references that still exist in the modern game and will create a compelling cosmology for your future capmaigns. for example, the world of renais exists in any dnd game i run. there is overlap with acererak, orcus, primus, etc. the game is thick with references and powerful encounters. get that product today if you can.
i even had the privelege of exchanging a few emails with monte cook during the adventure set up and such. he was cordial and had good advice, but i bet mostly his secretary was emailing me and the other 99 dms running his more ambitious projects at the same time.
hehe. after that summer, i shook bruce cordell's hand and told him he was going straight to hell. i was prepping RTH to run while planning the millenium game. that was a pretty good year. : }
anyhoo: you can do sort of a survey of the planes, or you can have a controlling story and include side treks: sort of a planar adventure path. or, if you have the nuts, you can set a very very ambitious and complicated plot. someone (can't remember who - it was the guy that introduced me to bruce cordell) made the statement 'i dont know how, but the yugoloths just sort of took over'. they were heavy in my game, sending the pcs on missions to swing the balance of blood war battles to improve their mettle, then having a hand in dead gods, then trying to use the events of faction war to overtake sigil itself, locking the lady into one of her own prisons by manipulating her lawful nature. sort of by confusing the robot, you know?
anyhoo, players made great use of the planewalker's handbook, and the boxed sets all have pretty rich material and adventure ideas. some of the adventure ideas are silly, so be judicious.
finally, since everything has to be converted anyway, consider taking a long look at effective character levels for monster races. i believe some of them are wrong for higher level play: a rakshasa sorc7 is cooler than a sorc14, but not as cool as a sorc21 at all. someplayersmight really dig the oportunity to play something weird, and you're going to have to be comfortable with ECLs.
hope that was helpful. long live the erinyes!
I ran 2 campaigns under 2e and one recently under 3.5. I tend to play up the belief is power bit. You get enough people beliving something and it will happen.
In my last game, one of the players was a Githzerai. He was on a personal quest to learn the truth about Gith. I worked his story into my main plot that lead the party to eventually finding anf freeing Gith. It was a cool side plot that played well against the main story villans - the ilithids and their Far Realm masters.
Needless to say, I made Gith a more tragic figure. The stories told about her had been twisted a bit over the years. It made for an interesting tale. She was still brutal and ruthless, but not evil. A few of the PCs noticed that she had some unusual abilities. Because of the beliefs of both the gith'yanki and gith'zerai, she had a rank 0 divinity.
I just finished running one about a half a year ago. It was fun. 3.5, picked up a generation or two after faction war, ended up with the PCs becoming a new faction that served the lady of pain directly to bring the old factions back to Sigil so that the Lady could regain her fading sanity.
As it happens, I am planning for a pre-Faction War Planescape campaign and am very excited as PS is my very favorite setting. I recommend that you check out planewalker.com if you haven't already and get a hold of the 2e Planescape boxed set if at all possible. The Manual of the Planes is approximately useless and the Planar Handbook isn't much better. The folks on planewalker will be more than happy to help you out, though some of them are a bit canon-crazy. (I'm adding a bit of TS uniqueness to my PS game, which seems to be really confusing some posters over there.)
I have a Outer plannar Planesscape type adventure on DM tools...
I used alot of the planescape stuff in it- Especally the Merykillers...
Factol's Manifesto is almost vital in fact. In the Cage is variable in quality. Faces of Sigil is amazing.
I didn't run a Planescape game until thrid edition came out, and it went for about five years. It might just be me but I would (and did) set it before the events of the faction war. For me Sigil, the real Sigil, is full of the Factions and that's what made Planescape great. I also found the factions to be a great reason for the inclusion of certain prestige classes which led to some good role-playing (if you wanted to join prestige class x than you had to try and join faction y).
The only pitfall that I found difficult was limiting the player's movements in a city as big as Sigil and controlling gp limits for spending (these things are very easy to control in another campaign but Sigil has no limits). I had the characters start out in the Hive and then progress to the other wards of the city (Clerk's, Market, Lady's, Lower) as the campaign went on (with judicious side-trek's to the Outer Planes and Outlands as well). Having a campaign centered on a strong overarching goal helped to keep the players focused and motivated as well. Essentially I tried to make knowledge and secrets (the 'dark of it') the major rewards.
Some people thought that the whole 'cant' thing was silly but my players and I always got a kick out of it, it helped make the game seem a bit different than other games having NPCs call you a 'sodding addle-coved berk'.
Oh yeah, you might also want to pick up the 3.x edition god book (Legends and Lore? I can't remember)to include the full gamut of religions and powers - another thing that makes it stick out from other games.
Thanks everybody! I guess I'll give the Planar Handbook and Manual of the Planes the laugh for now and go for the 2nd edition pdfs. I've got the boxed set as a pdf, so I'm going for Dead Gods, The Planewalker's Handbook, Factol's Manifesto and Faces of Sigil. I'll hopefully be writing my own campaign when I'm ready, but these should be good resources along with that website.
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 4, RPG Superstar 2011 Top 16
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Planescape is by far my favorite campaign setting. I'm currently running the STAP as a PS campaign. You can read about it in the Campaign Journals board under Swords vs. the Savage Tide: A Planewalkers Tale.
I would also recommend the Planewalker's Handbook for your players as it is mechanics light and oh so flavorful! The MotP and the PlH aren't bad resources as they have the relavent 3E mechanics for the planes. Don't use the original Planescape rules for magic and such as they are cumbersome and only hurt the players. However use of the flavor of how magic works on certain planes is a good idea. Examples... on Ysgard any PC that uses magic to influence the weather should be confronted (eventually) by either a Cleric, Servitor, or Proxy of Thor. On the Beastlands you could make any flying spell work only if a Caster Level check DC 20 is made.
In any case enjoy the setting! It is by far one of the richest of the 2E settings by far.
After having recently picked up a copy of Expedition to the Demonweb Pits I was very happy to see that ti is essentially a Planescape campaign and probably the closest we will get in 3.5.
I loved Planescape back in 2nd Edition and think it's too bad that it wasn't carried over. I ran a very entertaining short campaign about the Blood War, utilizing the information in the Blood War boxed set. We went from 1st to about 12th level with that one. I started by getting the characters from my world to Sigil and then began to get them into the Blood War and then hit them with some of the big reveals that the boxed set has. All in all it was good game, even if the bugbear fighter ended up submerged in the river Styx.
Haven't run one, though my brother had this awesome campaign idea for it, but it never really got off the ground (sadly). I can pull off the quasi-cant that's presented in the 2e books. :P
I'm currently running one for a couple of guys in our group. I basically turned it over to them. They're playing an evil party--a human assassin (specifically a ghost-faced killer) from the Plane of Air and a tiefling (Logokron-blooded) powerbroker from Sigil.
The powerbroker has a long vendetta against the Fraternity of Order whose membership he once pursued, but was furious when they offered him only an entry level position. Now he's contracted the killer/infiltrator to help punish them for the slight. They have discovered a mage by the name of Mandrake who is in deals with the Guvners to acquire the formula for becoming a lich in exchange for full rights to visit her singularly impressive library. The plan is to sabotage the effort so they recieve the visit to the library, or at least insure that the Fraternity never sees it. A web of intrigue is in the works, ranging from a fourth dimentional lumi citadel (a grand antiprism called the Perfectionarium--apparently designed to focus all the light in the multiverse into one beam) in Mechanus to a dead half-goblin courier in the worst parts of ragpicker square. They've been chased by half-golems, romanced by night hags, had limbs chewed off by infernal flesheating translator bugs, and come near to taking a pair of garden shears to the wings of a fallen astral daeva. All in a day's work.
Well, I'm still reading up, but it's pretty cool and I definitely want to do a game set there at some point, maybe a pbp because I don't really imagine my RL group going for it.
So, if anyone's interested in someday doing one with the incomparable baby-in-a-jar at the helm, let me know here.
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"Nemesis" by Chris Perkins is the sequel to "Umbra," also by Chris Perkins. "Nemesis" is one of the best modules Dungeon Magazine EVER printed.
Also, get "Dead Gods" by Monte Cook. Even if you don't run it; it's a GREAT read. Dungeon 116 has a write-up on it; I think they listed it as like the 13th or 14th best adventure.
-W. E. Ray