Gormenghast - what Planescape should have been?

[Steerpike]

Atheists in Planescape. HA!

Well, the Athar are more Maltheists/Misotheists than "Atheists."  Their idea is that the gods are frauds, that they're just powerful entities that call themselves Gods and pretend to be the creators of the Planes - that they rule by might and not by right.

If Planescape did anything, it was take the piss out of pretentiousness in RPGs

I tend to agree.  Some people seem to think that making reference to philosophy at all is automatically pretentious; increasingly the word pretentious is connected to anything intellectual or cerebral.  Planescape is often about undercutting the po-faced gravitas of D&D, and I think you're right that the illustrations were central to that.

Fairly obviously, given my moniker here, I'm a huge Peake fan - he is probably my single favorite writer of the twentieth century, with Jack Vance nipping at his ankles.  The review is a good one.

Gaming with Gormenghast as an influence is tricky.  As Rincewind points out, if you just staple on a standard plot and set it in Gormenghast it's not going to capture the sublimity of the setting.  One of the problems is language: it's impossible to imagine Gormenghast without Peake's lush, convoluted prose.  Even if you set an adventure in a giant castle, if you use workmanlike language to describe it, it's never going to have the dream-like quality of Gormenghast.

I think one way that Gormenghast can be emulated is in NPC behaviour; people in Gormenghast behave in very peculiar, sometimes inexplicable ways, from Lord Groan's Death-Owl delusions to Fuschia's introspective fantasy-world to Steerpike's mad obssessions.  The rituals and ceremonies that guide the world are arbitrary and bizarre, and yet everyone (save Steerpike and, perhaps, Titus) allows them to guide and shape their lives.  Planescape can function in the same way; each of the Planes (and Sigil itself) has a set of strange, often arbitrary-seeming rules, and their denizens are frequently pretty eccentric.

[One Horse Town]

Should I mention St...
No, not again.

Keep the faith.

[Shauncat]

Perhaps its having grown up on Vonnegut, Hitchhiker's, Monty Python, Discworld, and other farce, but I've never seen genre fiction as being necessarily an escape. Heck, strip away all the funny looking guys from the Mos Eisley Cantina scene, and you just have a scummy bar in a city with lax law enforcement.

Banality has never concerned me that much as a result. Banality + the introduction of the surreal = comedy. And comedy is definitely an element of tabletop roleplaying as I've experienced. Just look at a percentile roll-under game. In Dark Heresy, a score of 33 would be considered a human average in a rating. Now, say, a Mailman has 33 Intelligence, and is trained in Trade (Mailman). Delivering the mail is a routine task, so that gives him a +10, bringing the roll up to 43. That's a 57% chance to fuck up delivering the mail! And as far as I've read on this forum, "don't roll if the stakes aren't interesting" is Forge talk.

[RPGPundit]

Gormenghast was something I wanted to like, but didn't.  Thank goodness for Amber!

[therealjcm]

It would be easier to set a game in the world of Gloriana by Moorcock, which owes more than a little to Gormenghast.