Rincewind's Guide to Enjoying Planescape:

Step 1: Go to your nearest library and read Paradise Lost
Step 2: Pester your geek friends to borrow you Sandman.
Step 3: Change the setting to fit your vision
Step 4: Profit

The key to Planescape is that while the absolutes of alignments exist, their servants (or our perception of them, at least) may still be flawed. Then again, I've never bothered much with factions as described. The way I saw Sigil, it was The City from Thief, sitting in the middle of the Planes, with Magic the Gathering's approach to Planes (infinite planes, with Great Wheel serving as border planes of the universe), a universe where all myths and laws of alignments work, with players being an equivalent of a planar A - Team/Dogs of War, hopping in and out of various conflicts.

Honestly, I just wanted a setting when one session the players can fight a demon in Abyss, and the next session they're off in the Land of Chocolate trying to save Sultan of Toffee from being eaten by an invasion of Giants, who turn out to only do that because some asshole stole their golden egg laying duck. And to their characters, that was simply how life was. So I'd say that Planescape had a lot, to me at least, of wasted potential - the idea of taking the cosmology was good, the idea of plane - hopping was good, there just lacked that "coolness" factor, which I think'd be better than pseudophilosophical ponderings about, as noted, a 2400 year old philosophical concepts.

QuoteAnd "berk" isn't an expletive.

QuoteBerk is a noun, not a verb, and refers to a fool.

Berk is rhyming slang. 'Berkeley Hunt'. For those of you who are not familiar with it, [Cockney or East End (of London)] rhyming slang is usually a two word phrase that substitutes a single word that it rhymes with, and it is normal to further obscure the meaning to the uninitiated by not saying the whole phrase, hence it does not actually rhyme. To use a fairly recent addition to the canon as an example, Curry = Ruby Murray; in usage = "Ruby", as in, "after a few pints of cooking lager I always fancy a nice Ruby"

Berk = Berkeley Hunt = C**t.

So definitely a noun, not an expletive. Despite what is stands for its a mild and widely acceptable term in British English.

Quote from: RPGPundit;710424It intentionally pushes the idea that Archetypes can't be allowed to be Platonic Ideals, they have to be sullied somehow, they have to be in some way less than they're cracked up to be, and you're "cool" if you're all cynical at the idea of being impressed by grand notions.

I think this is true but also intentional. At the same time, I also agree that it's best not to assume that Planescape is the sole, exclusive way to run the planes and there should be scope for a Planescape campaign which restores that sense of wonder.

I have been considering the following tweaks for my own D&D multiverse; how would you feel about this?

- The primary thrust of the campaign, at least at lower levels, isn't exploration of the Outer or Inner Planes - it's exploration of alternate Primes, with all of the occasional weirdness that implies. (Running into your Evil Alternate Self is a professional hazard of a planeswalker - and some unlucky ones even discover that their evil selves outnumber their good selves, which causes no end of crises of faith...)

- Sigil is explicitly not a part of the Outer Planes but a strange sort of interzone between the planes. The smart money is on it being a particularly odd alternate Prime, because the majority of its Doors open onto other Prime Material Planes and magic mostly works as you'd expect it to on the Prime in Sigil. There are portals to the Inner and Outer Planes, but the keys for those are substantially rarer and unlike the portals to the Primes they don't simply open for anyone who has the key - access to transcendent realms is still a difficult and rare thing.

- The majority of the weirdness of Sigil arises from the interaction of uncountable Primes, with influence from the transcendent realms existing but being more subtle.

- The primary squabbling of the factions is over access to the transcendent realms, with each faction having its own interpretation of What It All Means. Whoever controls the gate doesn't control the nature of the transcendent realms, which implicitly resists such easy summation, but they do control which people get to visit them via Sigil's portals - and, naturally, if you control the way people interact with the transcendent realms, by that token you control the zeitgeist of the Prime Material Planes.*

*Alternately, there is actually one true correct faction - the Guild of Crossed Axes, who believe that the cosmos is ordered as it is to reflect ultimate meta-conflicts between Law, Chaos, Good and Evil. Evidence for the Orthogonal Guild being correct includes the fact that the alignment axes don't actually change when one faction or the other gets the upper hand, whereas in conventional Planescape you'd really expect the whole Law/Chaos/Good/Evil thing to be more mutable if philosophy really did determine reality.

How would that sound to you?

EDIT TO ADD: It occurs to me that a big issue with Planescape is that it wants to do all that funky Mage: the Ascension perception-and-belief-make-reality stuff with its whole "philosophers with clubs" idea, but it screws up a little by applying the concept to a multiverse where actually there are obvious objective truths which don't actually change. For instance, Gods can come and go based on who believes in them, fair enough, but Law and Chaos and Good and Evil are undying and the Outer Planes are directly tied in with them, right to the point where if a part of the Outlands gets sufficiently Evil it slips into the appropriate lower plane. That's clear, demonstrable, and empirically repeatable proof that Law and Chaos and Good and Evil are actual things in this cosmos, which implies an objective reality untouchable by the factions' philosophy. Were I to run Planescape my temptation would be to either embrace the postmodern entirely, ditch the D&Disms,  and have the characters wandering through a cosmos which genuinely does remould itself to fit whichever faction(s) is/are currently on top on Sigil, or make it clear that the factions are to a large extent bunk, a reaction by jaded people who've had too much exposure to the majesty of the Outer Planes and spent too much time trying to work out what it means as opposed to accepting it for what it is.

Quote from: RPGPundit;710424It turns Divine Realms into kingdoms with politics, commerce, bureaucracy, agendas, that are all on a "human" level (that is, while perhaps they market in "souls" or "emotions" or "doodads" or whatever instead of wool and spices, at the end of the day its entirely comprehensible what's going on); it makes Planes into countries. HUMAN countries (even if the "humans" in question are goat-people or mechanical cubes or whatever).

So, kind of like Chinese mythology then. I am OK with that.

Quote from: RPGPundit;710424It intentionally pushes the idea that Archetypes can't be allowed to be Platonic Ideals, they have to be sullied somehow, they have to be in some way less than they're cracked up to be, and you're "cool" if you're all cynical at the idea of being impressed by grand notions. You shouldn't believe in grand larger-than-our-little-lives forces, you should believe in utterly human 'ideologies' instead.  Its a cheap cynical subversion of the "religious" concept of the Planes in favor of first-year college ideas about "philosophy".

I'm OK with you not liking what Planescape did to the planes. But suggesting they've been "sullied" and "less than they're cracked up to be" and that the setting is "cheap" and "cynical"? Geez. You sound like me coming out of the Abrams Trek movies, and that's not a compliment.

Quote from: Rincewind1Step 1: Go to your nearest library and read Paradise Lost
Step 2: Pester your geek friends to borrow you Sandman.
Step 3: Change the setting to fit your vision
Step 4: Profit

Yes!

Quote from: Rincewind1The way I saw Sigil, it was The City from Thief, sitting in the middle of the Planes, with Magic the Gathering's approach to Planes

YES!

Quote from: WarthurThat's clear, demonstrable, and empirically repeatable proof that Law and Chaos and Good and Evil are actual things in this cosmos, which implies an objective reality untouchable by the factions' philosophy.

Said like a member of the Fraternity of Order!

You make a good point, though.  There are absolutes in Planescape, they're just frayed around the edges and there's a lot of "wiggle room" to remake things according to belief; it's also an objective reality that the Planes can be remade according to belief and/or willpower.  On some level the mashup between the Moorcockian/Judeo-Christian morality thing and the postmodern perception-is-reality stuff is batshit insane, but what I like about Planescape are the incongruities and strange juxtapositions - Norse Gods rubbing shoulders with Yugoloth mercenaries, Devils drinking and debating with rogue robots, an imp that runs an extradimensional butcher's shop... like I said earlier, the bizarre and the banal.  The moral/spiritutal/comsological contradictions are in some sense clearly a flaw, but they also provide another incongruity rich with dramatic tension.  The interactions between representatives of the absolutes and those with agendas that aren't defined strictly in relation to those absolutes can get pretty interesting.

Quote from: The ButcherSo, kind of like Chinese mythology then. I am OK with that.

Not to mention Norse mythology, where the gods are caught up in all sorts of political struggles between different families of deities and/or giants that periodically switch sides in a mess of feuds, intermarriages, vendettas, and alliances, often displaying extremely "human" motives, from extreme pettiness to mischief to lust to drunken pride.  Sure we can read characters like Loki and Thor as archetypes, but they're not just archetypes, which is exactly Planescape's strategy.  The Gods in Planescape are still the Gods, they're just also caught up in the weird vicissitudes of transplanar politics.

Or the Celtic myth cycles that are all about invasions, displacement, and political struggles for territory.

Quote from: RPGPundit;710423In a way, the biggest problem with Spelljammer is that it ended up too tied with the idea of using it to interconnect the various pre-existing settings, when what it should have had was awesome random-generation rules for new star systems and the stuff to be found there.
But alas, it was the 90s.

RPGPundit

That was definitely one thing it missed out on, a good tied in starsystem building system. But Star Frontiers lacked that as well.

Quote from: RPGPundit;710424It intentionally pushes the idea that Archetypes can't be allowed to be Platonic Ideals, they have to be sullied somehow, they have to be in some way less than they're cracked up to be, and you're "cool" if you're all cynical at the idea of being impressed by grand notions. You shouldn't believe in grand larger-than-our-little-lives forces, you should believe in utterly human 'ideologies' instead.  Its a cheap cynical subversion of the "religious" concept of the Planes in favor of first-year college ideas about "philosophy".
RPGPundit

Part of this was that TSR was at the time way too self conscious of all the anti-D&D mother groups bitching about the players slaying demons and meeting gods.

So demons and devils and angels and all that got renamed and the outer planes became alien planets where its shown that they aren't really all that impressive. Just another jaunt, a ho-hum city of weird people.

Listen to the outlands CD, They might as well be describing Greyhawk or Faerun, etc. Just another hive of scum and villainy.

Sure you could strip all that off. But then that is 75% of the planescape material out the window. You could also play up the gods more, and some tried. But then you get the disparity between the setting outlook and that.

Does anyone remember Lankhmar – City of Adventure.  It was a d&d setting based on Fritz Leiber's Fafnir and the Grey Mouser novels.  The setting was awful to role play in.  magic was so rare that the rules were all spell casting times went up one category.  An instant spell took a round, a round spell took a turn to cast, and so forth.  Its probably my least favorite setting.

Spelljammer was pretty bad too.  It was ok when it first came out but then lost its charm.  Its explanation of physics was comical.

Jungles of Chult and Maztica were ok as visiting locales, not so much for a whole campaign.  

Birthright was a cool concept, bad execution.

Lankhmar was bad because its a low magic setting?

Quote from: Louchavelli;723736Spelljammer was pretty bad too.  It was ok when it first came out but then lost its charm.  Its explanation of physics was comical.

Its explanation of physics was a sloppy but mythically resonant and gutsy 'fuck you' to killjoy hard-science game lawyer wankery. I kind of admire it for that.

Quote from: TristramEvans;723739Lankhmar was bad because its a low magic setting?

Lankhmar was bad because it was decent setting for a novel, but the rpg never grasped the beauty of the setting.  The magic deficiency merely exasperated how poorly they captured the setting.

This was during the days of 2nd edition and if memory serves me right, this product was released when TSR was on its decline.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;723757Its explanation of physics was a sloppy but mythically resonant and gutsy 'fuck you' to killjoy hard-science game lawyer wankery. I kind of admire it for that.

I can see your point.  I was fine with the magical explanation of how things work and didn't focus too much on that.  What made me laugh was how falling damage was explained.  the example they used was a fighter loaded with hit points can jump off a mountain, land, and then get up and join a fight.  They writers realized that didn't make sense and explained that it was written that way for the sake of easy rules for gaming.

We played it for a bit, but as said, it lost its charm after a bit.

Quote from: RPGPundit;524197So which one was it, out of all the ones they made?  Which was the worst piece of shit in the bunch?
 
Blackmoor?
Gygax-era Greyhawk?
Tekumel?
Mystara?
Kara-tur?
Dragonlance?
Forgotten Realms?
Ravenloft?
2e-era "From the Ashes" Greyhawk?
Al-qadim?
Hollow World?
Dark Sun?
Spelljammer?
Planescape?
Birthright?

I'm sure there's a few I'm missing in that list.  Say which one you thought was a total waste of paper that the designers should be shot for having written.

RPGPundit

From that list, definitely Spelljammer for me.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;723757Its explanation of physics was a sloppy but mythically resonant and gutsy 'fuck you' to killjoy hard-science game lawyer wankery. I kind of admire it for that.

Dude, its fantasy. Of course it is going to be magic-based, mythically resonant, and have sloppy physics. Being a "gutsy 'fuck you' to killjoy hard-science game lawyer wankery" wasn't even a design consideration.

Wanna see totally wrong but internally consistant and therefore awesome Victorian steampunk style science? Check out GDW's old Space:1889 game. Watch as insufferable prats choke on the ether and its uses.

Quote from: jeff37923;723820Wanna see totally wrong but internally consistant and therefore awesome Victorian steampunk style science? Check out GDW's old Space:1889 game. Watch as insufferable prats choke on the ether and its uses.

Why did Space: 1889 still have land armies, when you could just fly over (eg) Sudan in your Liftwood fliers and machinegun the fuzzy-wuzzies from on high? That was my problem with the setting - being able to deploy Liftwood fliers over land changes so much that the designers didn't seem to consider. I've thought of running it with Stargate type interplanetary tech; maybe restrict Liftwood to Mars only.