D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 18 – Favorite Outsider

Of course I like modrons. In Monster Manual II they were silly-looking geometric shapes with legs, but for Planescape they were redesigned by my favorite artist to include steampunky clockwork elements. They were still silly looking, of course, but in a good quirky way.

The first chapter of The Great Modron March was the last Planescape adventure I ran. After that, 3^rd Edition came out and the modrons were no longer the primary inhabitants of Mechanus, being replaced by centaur ants and robotic giants. The boringifying of D&D’s monsters began there, and continues to this day.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 4 – Favorite Game World

This one’s easy: Planescape. Everything about Planescape is awesome: the art, the writing, the graphic design, the monsters, the NPCs, the art… All different components of the setting were cool, and amplified each other’s coolness. A demon is pretty cool in itself, but a demon drawn by DiTerlizzi talking the chant and selling you spell-keys is a whole other thing.

I saw the original boxed set on my monthly  trip to the gaming store and bought it immediately. Even then I was bored with the usual dwarves and elves and dragons, and Planescape’s weirdness was a breath of fresh air. It reinvigorated D&D for me.

The Planescape campaign I ran consisted mostly of small adventures from Well of Worlds, with freeform role-playing in the city of Sigil between. I also ran The Eternal Boundary and some chapters from The Great Modron March. I also like Harbinger House and Something Wild, but I never got around to play them. A large part of In the Abyss is basically a hexcrawl in the Abyss. It’s pretty awesome.

I think towards the end of the product line, the quality of supplements and adventures dropped a little. A Guide to the Ethereal Plane and The Inner Planes are well-done, but they just don’t do it for me. The later adventures were all “Epic Mega-Adventures”, which I don’t like because they don’t leave much room for the DM to form his own campaign: The Great Modron March, Dead Gods, Hellbound: The Blood War, Tales from the Infinite Staircase, and Faction War all have some nice ideas, but when run take over the campaign entirely.

When it came out, the tagline for the campaign setting was “Fantasy taken over the edge” and for a while that was what it did. It took fantasy to places where it hadn’t gone before. However, a funny thing happened in the years following its release: the edges shifted. Things like Githyanki and tieflings started to pop up in other D&D campaigns, and the style of D&D fantasy changed.  Now, tieflings are in the Player Handbook (even if they are nothing like Planescape tieflings).

Runners up: Spelljammer, Al-Qadim, Time of the Dragon (but not the rest of Dragonlance. Just Taladas).

Uncaged: Faces of Sigil

This book describes over 40 NPCs from the Planescape setting in detail, every one illustrated with awesome Tony DiTerlizzi art. Most of the entries are two pages, some are four. Now, 17 years after publication, those entries seem a bit long, but in 1996, game accessories were for reading as much as for gaming, so I guess it does what was expected.

There are some original, exciting NPCs. My favorites are A’kin the friendly fiend, Patch the self-aware razorvine, and Farrow, the elf with 15 personalities – one for each faction. The book doesn’t give you noblemen or important faction high-ups, but it gives you common folk who can be met on the street. Many of them provide useful services for Planescape PCs: sell the location of gates, sell gate keys, sell maps of the mazes, sell books, or sell other stuff. These are NPCs the Referee can actually use, no matter the level of the PCs.

Some of the NPCs are not very original and do not stand-out enough: Kylie the tiefling tout is a tough-talking, street-wise cliché, there is a dwarven armor smith, the rogue modron is like all rogue modrons, and Unity-of-Rings is a deva. Some don’t seem very fun: for example, if the PCs get access of Milori’s Dabus Phrasebook, doesn’t that negate the whole point of the Dabus speaking in rebuses?

Each characters’ story is connected to the others, in a network of plots and conspiracies. This makes for great reading, and after reading a few entries you will start to see how everything connects. However, there are hardly guidelines to pull the PCs into the web of intrigue. In my Planescape campaign, I mainly used the NPCs as walk-on parts: if the PCs needed the location of a portal, they would see Lissandra, for example.

Why my interest in this very cool Planescape book?

It seems to me the format would be excellent for presenting NPCs on my blog. Obviously the entries will be shorter, and they won’t have awesome DiTerlizzi art, but the NPCs will be usable in non-Planescape settings and the connections between NPCs can be hyperlinked. I think it might be pretty good.