Planescape 25th Anniversary Rereading - Part I (Player's Guide to the Planes)

It occurred to me earlier today that Planescape was probably about 25 years old, and, sure enough, I have just checked the publication date - 2019 is the 25th anniversary of its initial release.

While I don't have a clear memory of buying most of the RPG books I had as a youngster, I do remember buying the Planescape boxed set vividly; I got it in a shop in Tel Aviv after badgering my parents for extra pocket money (I must have been 12 or 13 at the time), and spent the next week doing basically nothing but poring over its contents and wearing out some EPs by Therapy? I had on cassette (and what the fuck happened to them, I wonder?). I would say that I can't hear the song "Screamager" without thinking of Planescape, but the truth is I don't think I have actually heard the song "Screamager" since about 1995, so I'm not sure if that statement would actually be true.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to do a kind of Planescape retrospective on this illustrious occasion - reading the original materials and, possibly, some of the other books from my collection (I have most of the official releases) depending how it goes. And if you're all good children and sit nicely and listen, I might share with you the special Easter Egg I found at the bottom of my Planescape boxed set which I just opened for the first time in God knows how many years.

Where we'll begin is where I began all those years ago: with the "Player's Guide to the Planes" - the bit of the boxed set which players are supposed to read before beginning a campaign: as such, it's the definitive beginning statement on what Planescape is and why it is going to be worth getting to know.

A few things are immediately apparent the instant you turn the contents page and start to read the text proper:

1) The bar set by the production values on the original Planescape boxed set has still not been raised since. The unique typeface for headings and subheadings, the layout, the colour palette, the art and what the kids nowadays call "information design" are not only of the highest quality, but also hang together with a strange sort of cogency; I'm not sure why it is that Diterlizzi's pseudo-Victoriana pictures fit so nicely alongside the vaguely medieval-looking typeface and why the marble-effect background theme doesn't clash with either of those things, but the whole thing undoubtedly works, and works well. It is stunning what people who know what they are doing visually and are lavished (comparatively speaking) with money can achieve.

2) The slang/cant has not aged well. I think when I was 13 I appreciated it a lot more: opening the "Player's Guide to the Planes" and being told on the very first page "Welcome, addle-cove!" probably struck me as "edgy" and was undoubtedly completely different to every other RPG book I'd read. (I can't remember if I'd encountered Cyberpunk 2020 yet, though; it's possible.) And I still get what they were trying to do - to cast Sigil as being a kind of interplanar Mos Eisley/Victorian London with very rough edges, like a literal port to the planes, with the attitude that port cities have everywhere. But, let's face it, as a 37 year old man I now find the whole berk/basher/cutter thing more than a little cringeworthy - a deliberate attempt to appeal to an audience of teenagers being tempted away from D&D by the more "adult" (read: teenage) language and themes in White Wolf books and other rivals. "This is not your father's D&D" is the message, but from the vantage point of 25 years it feels more than a little forced.

3) The setting to my jaded eye now does not seem quite as innovative as it once did - if anything it very much undersells all the things that make it interesting. This a theme that I will undoubtedly come back to as this series of posts goes on. But with that said, it's worth pausing for a moment to put yourself in my shoes in 1994, when as a young teenager my only encounters with the fantasy genre at all had been Tolkien, Fighting Fantasy!, Warhammer, the Lone Wolf game books and novels, and, I suppose, a few comics. I was blown away by the scale and ambition and sheer differentness of what was being done with Planescape. I've now read the Viriconium books, The Book of the New Sun, Mieville, Borges, Calvino, Le Guin, and so on; I hadn't then. And still, despite the fact that the designers never quite followed through on the promise shown in those first few pages of the "Player's Guide to the Planes" (again, a theme I'll come back to), it still does show promise. There is something balls-to-the-wall about starting off a mainstream D&D product line by describing life in a city which hovers on top of an infinitely tall mountain on the inside of a giant loop which is lying on its side:

Compare that with all the mainstream D&D settings since - not to mention Pathfinder.

4) The "Player's Guide" seems to suggest a schema of travel between the planes that was quietly dropped afterwards: if you want to go from the Prime Material Plane to the Inner Planes you have to go through the Ethereal Plane; if you want to go from the Prime Material to the Outer Planes you use the Astral Plane; and if you want to travel between the Outer Planes you have to go via the Outlands or Sigil using doors and gates, or you have to physically actually go from one Plane to another by traversing the Planes in between. Perhaps I am misremembering, but I am pretty sure that later Planescape products were predicated on there being portals between Planes, so you could go from e.g. Arborea to Mechanus directly through one.

5) Tieflings. With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see why tieflings became so popular - what could be more appealing to a teenager in the 1990s than to be somebody who was part demon? - but as I recall, at the time my friends and I didn't particularly find that new PC race appealing, and it's interesting how little time and space the "Player's Guide" devotes to them. They are almost in there as a throwaway, with the really interesting introductions being the bariaurs and githzerai as PC races. They're easily skipped over. And, in fact, it's an odd choice - perhaps the only really bum note in terms of art and design - not to have explicit illustrations of any of the PC races in the book.

6) But that's easily offset by the factions. Question: How do you make the notion that the planes are literally formed by philosophical belief something that the average adolescent D&D player can understand and get his teeth into? Answer: Give them philosophical "factions" to choose from and get Tony Diterlizzi to do character sketches for each one like so:

7) Once again, the spectre of White Wolf seems to haunt Planescape, here, though: was the creation of the factions an effort to ape the by-then phenomenally popular White Wolf motif of having PCs belonging to one of a dozen or so tribes, clans or other groupings to help define their character and beliefs?