Thursday 23 December 2021

The Unbearable Lightness of Planescape

The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with Kundera's famous riff on Nietzsche's myth of eternal return. As Kundera's narrator points out, we don't (at least as far as we know) live our lives over and over again. Instead, we only live once. 

Because we only live once, we have no way of knowing whether any decision we have made was the right or wrong one, even after the fact. We can never know what would have happened if we had acted differently. This, the narrator suggests, liberates us. We can never really blame ourselves for any decision we make, because we never act with foresight. If we had chosen differently, things could have been worse, and there is never any way of knowing.

But, the narrator goes on to observe, as well as being liberating, this fact that we only live once makes our lives ephemeral: we can't go back and correct our mistakes, with the benefit of hindsight. Every decision we have made stands, and cannot be undone. It would be one thing if our lives were a rehearsal before the main event, so we could make a better go of it second time around. But since that's not the case, our lives are 'unbearably light' - we cannot blame ourselves for anything we have done, but nor can we right all of our many wrongs. In the end, since we only live once, 'we might as well not have lived at all'.

It must be pointed out that although Kundera writes in the first person here, the argument is being made by an unreliable narrator and the whole point of the novel (spoiler alert) is that this nihilistic notion must be utterly refuted. But there is something to this idea that total liberation is attendant on existence being ultimately futile. Absolute freedom presumes there being absolutely no constraint on one's field of action, which means absolute absence of consequence. But the consequence of that is an 'unbearable lightness'. Where our actions have no consequence, we might as well not act, or exist, at all.

I was thinking about this while looking through old Planescape materials yesterday. There is something intangible, airy, ineffectual about Planescape. Yes, the art is beautiful, the production values second to none. Yes, it has a mood and a tonal palette that is totally different from any other fantasy setting. Those qualities impressed me as an adolescent. But now it feels inconsequential, in all senses of the word - like a museum piece, to be regarded and admired, rather than a real world to be explored. Nothing going on within it really seems to matter. 

The problem, I think, is that in an infinite multiverse in which anything can happen, one slips easily to the conclusion that nothing might as well happen. What, ultimately, are the consequences to anything one does? A character dies, another comes along, totally different to the one before; one location is explored, another multitude of others presents itself; one level of the Abyss is visited, and an infinite number more await; the cosmic ballet goes on - and the setting remains, held in a ball of infinitely large aspic. 

It is a little like the experience I now have whenever I put on Netflix or another streaming service. A million options present themselves, and ennui sets in. It's not as simple as 'analysis paralysis', though that's part of it; it's something deeper. It's that, given so many options, the very act of choosing itself becomes diminished. If one can watch only four channels, as was the case when I were a lad, the choice is imbued with significance: you might end up watching something bad, and missing something good. If one can watch more or less anything, and switch between them at will, the choice becomes so insignificant and devoid of consequence that it hardly feels worth being made. If one can watch anything, why indeed watch anything at all? If one can play any sort of campaign in an infinite multiverse, why play anything at all?

28 comments:

  1. What worked in the past was making the issue affect the local base of operations (a.e. Sigill) and make the multiverse a place to find things to solve it with.

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    1. Agreed. The infinite setting is a backdrop to whatever is going on that's of particular interest to the game. I don't feel adrift looking at it any more than I would looking at the giant maps of Greyhawk or Faerun (although I haven't run in those settings).

      If you allow the players to freely roam the multiverse I can see how it could very easily become dreary as they pass through endless improvised locations. I prefer to treat Sigil like hub island in Myst; you take a portal to a location on another world, but then you go back to Sigil to find another portal to somewhere else. That allows for a large number of extraplanar locations while still keeping them tied together.

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  2. I know nothing about Planescape, but your unpacking of the Unbearable Lightness, which I've not read in nearly 30 years, made me think of Alan Moore's Jerusalem, which takes almost an opposite perspective: in a block universe, what you do matters because you are doing it, in that moment, for eternity.

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    1. I think that is what Nietzsche was getting at?

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    2. Ah, nice! Even longer since I've read Nietzsche (and then only a little), I've had a possibly irrational prejudice against him in recent years. Should probably revisit him.

      Don't know whether you've read Jerusalem? I'd say it's worth it. Yes, it's long but... have you ever read the Lord of the Rings 😂

      My friend Ben wrote an interesting review here: https://thequietus.com/articles/21230-alan-moore-jerusalem-novel-review-working-class-mythology

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    3. I believe the point of the "myth of eternal return" is to suggest that one should live one's life as though one will have to repeat it over and over again, infinitely. In other words: make sure it is so full that you wouldn't mind endlessly repeating it.

      I have never been able to get into Alan Moore. I do know of Jerusalem and once entertained thoughts of buying it!

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  3. Why should the setting be changed? For me the infinite planes were the terrain and the campaigns were about the players journey or about unpicking mysteries among the constants - the Blood War cannot be affected by mere mortals, the chaos of Limbo corrodes all it touches, etc.

    Like Everest - you don't go there to change the mountain, you go to test yourself against the greatest challenge of its kind.

    I think the unbearable lightness, the infinite possibility is what makes Planescape fun!

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  4. Sadly, the problem with Netflix is not the infinite choice. There were so many great films made in the 20th century that I will never get around to seeing, but they are not on Netflix. Instead Netflix gets the dregs. An infinite variety of options of D-list films and television.

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    1. Haha, yes, you might be right about that.

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    2. Right off the top of my head there is Taxi driver, Seventh, Shining, Deliverance and Blade Runner on Netflix. For modern arthouse there is The lighthouse, Curtiz (about the refugee Hungarian director who directed Casablanca), Mank (about the not so refugee screenwiter who worked for Orson Welles), Ruben Brandt (brand new Hungarian animation worth a crash course in modern art) and the big Lebowski. There are oh so nerdy camp adventure trashies like the Italian wonder Raiders of Atlantis, early movies of Alain Delon, and film noirs from the '50s. But I guess it's easier to whine than to actually take a look.

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    3. That was a nice post until you spoiled it with the last sentence.

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  5. Whoa, that's deep. Because the _one_ campaign you choose will be hopefully fun, and character death still hurts (at least to me, if I invested any time, effort and roleplaying in it). There, wasn't that difficult, was it?

    (And why play D&D? Or any rpg at all? If a character dies, another comes right along! And nothing changes! The horror, the horror.)

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    1. And if you're just going to make such an obvious point in so sarcastic a fashion, why comment at all?

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  6. While Planescape is a setting with theoretically infinite possibilities across a multitude of planes, worlds, and dimensions, its central city, the very hub of the cosmos just happened to be the Elemental Plane of Starbuck Baristas (earplugs and weird moustaches very much implied). That's either way too funny, or unfathomably depressing.

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    1. Yeah, although it's worth remembering that it was made in the mid-late 90s, when that look was thought of as being 'edgy' and avant-garde and hadn't yet become the awful cliche it now is.

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  7. Btw have you ever ever played anything in it? Demons are still demons, whether they have piercings or tattoos or not.

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    1. Of course - I played it on numerous occasions as a teenager.

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  8. I guess I am in agreement Xaosseed because, from what I recall from refereeing Planescape, the point was: "What will your story be in the cosmic ballet?" A sort of Individual Existentialism.
    Will you save those children from the demons that kidnapped them through the cosmic landscapes? Will you forge your own success or die being incapable of defeating your enemies? Will you get involved in the cosmic battles on the astral plane or flee from them? what faction will YOU join? Will you get back to your home plane? And if so, will you go back to your family and the things you know or will you stay and be a part of these larger things you could not conceive of before?
    In the grand scheme of things, everything is fine. The demons will stay in the lower planes and the upper planes also will be around, but consequences and things matter because they are happening to YOU or, more accurately your player character.
    Granted, this is coming from memories of playing the game 10 years ago and patch-working a lot of the setting from hearsay.

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    1. That's my point, really. Infinite possibilities but no underlying structure for it to riff on. It needed the Kevin Crawford treatment - a framework within which to work.

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    2. Can you give a glimpse of what kind of structure you might have wanted? I'm a big fan of Worlds Without Number - are you thinking of generator tables for wherever you end up in the planes?

      Saying I liked Planescape and was able to squeeze good times out of it is not to say I can't get behind an even better version.

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  9. Di Terlizzi's watercolor art style is truly one of a kind in D&D and may be partly responsible for your impression.

    I also get the sense in the D&D cosmos that the so-called outer planes sit uneasily because they don't contain even a fraction of the possibilities that the many campaign worlds and their alternates present. Outer planes for a system of three, six, thirty-six universes are no problem but outer planes for an infinity of cultures, tech, and magic systems seem kind of outmatched.

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    1. Yeah, there is a case to be made that it is all rather banal in the end. Just different shades of the Forgotten Realms.

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  10. I don’t know Planescape, I have not read Kundera, and any Nietzsche I may have perused was long ago forgotten.

    But I understand ennui. Or, at least, I’m familiar with it.

    D&D is, more than anything (perhaps), a matter of ACTION and activity, not thinking and considering. Some will surely disagree (the folks who appreciate a big fat spellbook maybe) but I find it works best with something for the players to DO, not just experience (listening to box text, enjoying the aesthetics of a setting, fiddling with the kewl powers). All that is just…superfluous, really, to what the game is all about.

    Isn’t that the reason that stuff is called “fluff?”

    You can’t live off fluff…it’s not substantive in the way the hard mechanics (and the interaction of those mechanics with each other) are. It’s non-nourishing. Ennui to me is malnourishment (or caused by malnourishment).

    An inter-planar campaign can be plenty of fun. Planescape, though, appears to be about something other than running a D&D campaign. It’s about manipulating mythos and setting material to make something cool and worthy of being admired. D&D is not about admiring something. That is too passive to be meat and potatoes.

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    1. I very much agree with the point. D&D thrives on being practical, on a decisive approach, and dies when too much planning, character development, and philosophising are involved. These elements have a place in the game, but once they come to dominate, D&D's advantages evaporate and its flaws come to the fore.

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  11. Interesting idea to give the Planes the Kevin Crawford treatment. The one thing that might be of interest is Emmy Allen's Gardens of Ynn, which did incorporate a system for exploring an area without boundaries but with distance from a point of egress affecting the intensity of the random encounters (a gate or somesuch). If you can make a game about exploring space you can make a game about exploring other dimensions.

    For practical purposes, an entire fantasy planet, or even a continent, is much too large for a single group to ever fully explore. Yet it does not provoke the type of ennui that you describe, while the thought of Planescape seemingly does. Perhaps it is because the characters are dwellers in a universe inhabited everywhere by powers that are vastly beyond their scope?

    Merry Christmas!

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    1. I think the Gardens of Ynn approach would really work well for the Inner Planes, but yes, the Planes need the Kevin Crawford treatment, and it's something I was thinking about for a long time some years ago (called "There is Therefore a Strange Land").

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  12. Is Planescape (or perhaps Troika, I suppose) the ultimate setting for Dostoyevsky's Underground Man? To be eternally indefinite, and therefore unlimited... free from the quiddities and aboutnesses of small-minded settings.

    Apropos of Christmas, from a monotheistic perspective an omniscient being unconditioned by time (as its creator) would know everything all at once, cognizant of temporal relations but above them. Therefore everything you do stands eternally before the Godhead, and that one awful thing that you did that one time exists with glaring offensiveness for all eternity.

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