The Dark Heart of Planescape

The Planescape campaign setting was described by its own creator Monte Cook as being self-consciously 'edgy', as a response to the vaguely grimdark turn taken in the world of RPGs in the mid-late 90s with the advent of the World of Darkness games (among others). Seen from the perspective of 2023 it looks very tame, but at the time it certainly struck me as being much more 'grown up' than what I was used to - although I was of course only a teenager at the time, and easily impressed by self-conscious 'edginess'.

The implications of the setting, though, were much more genuinely 'edgy' than I think Monte Cook or his co-designers were ever really consciously aware, and I have come to think of Planescape as perhaps the darkest fantasy setting of them all - pregnant with bleak import about the nature of reality and the lengths to which human beings will go in the name of constructed meaning.

Planescape, it will be recalled by those familiar with it, was based on the idea that all of existence is encompassed within a multiverse of many different planes. There was a jumble of concepts underlying this, but the one which was emphasised most strongly in the material was that these planes were related to one another by belief and alignment. Each of the outer planes was dominated by, and in a sense created by, a sliver of alignment ('Lawful neutral evil', 'Chaotic good neutral', etc.), which was where humans and demihumans of that alignment went when they died; where gods of that alignment lived, and so on. And changes in the alignment of the inhabitants of a place would actually cause its physical character to change, so that shifts between planes were possible: if enough people in one region of the Lawful Good plane became Lawful Neutral (or whatever), then the entire region would move from one plane to the other.

This was supposed to create the vague impression of conflict, evangelism, and philosophical debate continually unfolding across the planes, with each one constantly expanding or shrinking as the vagaries of prevailing belief changed from moment to moment, but as was (sadly) the case with everything in the Planescape line except the art and production values, the execution was a bit half-baked. The only time this idea was really treated with any seriousness or detail was in relation to the Blood War, wherein the Lawful Evil plane of Baator and the Chaotic Evil plane of the Abyss struggled for domination across the 'evil' lower planes. Otherwise the concept was just one in a long list of nice ideas which Planescape threw out there for individual DMs to puzzle through as they saw fit.

The political anthropology underpinning this concept was, however, fascinating if thought about in any depth. First, it is highly suggestive of the thought of the Nazi constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt, and the mostly French thinkers who drew inspiration from him and other Nazi thinkers in the middle-late part of the 20th century. To paint with a very broad brush, Schmitt understood human beings to be engaged in a life-and-death struggle over the most basic beliefs. In a pluralist, liberal democracy an attempt would be made to cover this struggle with fig leaves like general elections, freedom of expression and so on. But when the chips were down and an issue was at stake which spoke to a matter of intense conviction, those fig leaves would be blown aside as by a gale and fierce, winner-takes-all conflict would ensue. Politics was in the end, famously, a matter of friends against enemies - and what was 'political' was any issue (economic, legal, theological, artistic, etc.) which had come to be characterised by a friend/enemy distinction.

This has clear echoes in the work of thinkers such as Derrida, Baudrillard, and Fish, who eschewed foundational or rational explanations for political arrangements. For these thinkers - again, painting with a broad brush - it is not possible for human beings to get at the underlying objective reality through language, and since our thought derives from language, this is tantamount to saying that we cannot reach objective agreement through the application of reason. In other words, it will never be the case that we can reach any satisfactory political modus vivendi through the application of reason. Politics will ultimately to an extent always mean might making right: those who shout the loudest, and control the levers of power, get to make the political settlement, and that is that. Again, liberal democracy is a pipe dream: we have pluralism only insofar as there is not genuine disagreement. When there is genuine disagreement, a shouting match ensues, and to the victor in that shouting match go the spoils.

This sounds quite a bit like the metaphysics of Planescape. And it is what makes the setting so full of ominous portent. It is no accident that Carl Schmitt was a Nazi. The whole point of seeing the world in Schmittian terms is that all societies sit at the brink of tumbling into political violence and ultimately chaos. The violent potential implicit in the friend/enemy distinction can only be suppressed by a homegenizing, authoritarian state - but even such a state will have to rely to a certain extent upon violence so as to exclude the 'enemy' (and this violence may itself tip over into literal genocide). The idea that appeal to 'reason' will stave off this unpalatable conclusion is for the birds; there is no objective reason, or at least no form of reason that can access what is objectively true or real. 

Planescape's planes, then, if we take the premises of the setting as givens, would themselves be strongly characterised by brutally authoritarian efforts to manage friends and enemies and to exclude the latter; and they would also be the scene of continual life-or-death struggle over the substance of reality: the very moment the inhabitants of the Neutral Good plane feel themselves to be threatened by the shifting of perspectives and beliefs among some sector of the population, would be the very moment that forcible eviction would at the very least be on the table - ideological purity would literally be necessary for survival. And at the same time, genocidal war - the expunging of people holding belief X so that the people holding belief Y can metaphysically annex their land would be a fact of life wherever one plane abutted the other. In notionally 'good' planes genocide might take on the character of crusading war or mass conversion - that is perhaps something to discuss in the comments - but across the piece the implications are nighmarish. This is not so much an 'edgy' setting as one steeped in horror - something much more genuinely within James Raggi's 'fantasy fucking Vietnam' ballpark than Monte Cook's.