On Ontology (Geddit?) and Postmodernism

Wyzard wrote a comment on this post that I think deserves a wider audience than being stuck at the bottom of a 40-comment long thread:

Being an avid Planescape player from the early-mid 90's, I thought that campaign setting had a robust take on what alignments meant... after all, the very substance of the Outer Planes was made up of the belief/consciousness of the Multiverse's denizens. A couple of things to consider: Order/Chaos wasn't much of a moral axis than an ontological one.

Lawfulness reflected one's belief of reality being externally/objectively based/defined/grounded; one's viewpoints, perspectives, understandings derived from truths outside of oneself. [The Lawful Neutral plane of Mechanus expressed such qualities in a number of ways, such as the environmental effect of all spoken languages from any tongue being understood identically by all.]

Chaos indicated that one's belief of reality was primarily (or even solipsistic) self-created, subjective definition/genesis, intuitionally granted, etc... or the existence of an objective universe isn't considered important and/or knowable. [The Chaotic Neutral plane of Limbo was a maelstrom of constantly changing elements, a soup of possibility that only took solidity with one's thought/willpower.]

This strikes me as a very elegant and, philosophically, quite interesting approach. What I like about it (and actually, what I liked about Planescape) is that it is completely, and in fact sensibly, incoherent.

Which is to say, there's something pleasingly postmodern about the notion that there is no Truth, just many approaches to it. You might even call it radically postmodern, in that it doesn't just deny that we can know what the Truth is; it implicitly says: there is no Truth, just many truths; deal with it. But the incoherence isn't just pleasing in that sense - it also makes the game work. It says to the players nothing less than the following: "We, the designers, take no position on religion or morality or philosophy or ethics. We're just giving you a toolkit to have fun with. If this involves killing orcs in dungeons, fine. If it involves actual semi-serious battles of beliefs, that's fine too. Go for it, and remember, we don't care what you think." And that's great.

D&D: postmodernism but with orcs. Of course, I knew this years ago, but I believe in the value of repetition.

Old School Planebox and The Abyss as Megadungeon

When Planescape first came out, dungeon crawling was probably at its absolute nadir of popularity: this was the mid 90s, when the World of Darkness was in vogue and everything had to be edgy, story-driven (i.e., largely railroaded) and infused with angst, drama and meaning. So the idea that you could use it for old school dungeoneering was never made explicit in the published materials; I think the designers wanted the players to do more "mature" things with the setting, whatever that meant.

But dungeoneering is certainly implied in the Planescape if you look for it. Planes like Pandemonium and Baator basically are big dungeons, and Sigil is the start location for an old school-type D&D campaign par excellence - a place where you can buy and sell anything, go anywhere (if you know the right people and can find the right portal keys) and get involved in politicking and advancement. The pattern, I suppose, for this sort of campaign would be:

• Start in Sigil. Use it as a base for dungeoneering exploits throughout the multiverse.
• Make lots of money, gain levels.
• Get involved in politics and advancement, reach higher echelons of a faction if that's your thing, start branching out into the belief-oriented specifics of the setting.
• Create your own realm somewhere, except you can do it anywhere in the multiverse if that's what you fancy.

Which is really exactly the same pattern that a typical fantasy sandbox campaign takes, with a few bells and whistles. Call it Planebox, because, let's face it, it's fun to say.

The ultimate Planebox megadungeon is, of course, The Abyss. The Abyss is the Chaotic Evil plane, ruled by the Tanar'ri (okay, okay... "demons"), but absolutely infinite in scope: there are countless layers of The Abyss, each of which is infinite in its own way. There is literally no constraint on the imagination of the DM in coming up with whatever the hell he wants within this plane; it can be as fantastical or mundane as he desires, and there is no requirement whatsoever for any of it to make sense - listen, this place is infinite. Do you want an entire dungeon that is really a forest, but the branches of the trees are all actually snakes? Do you want a dungeon that is actually the digestive tract of a gargantuan whale swimming in an infinitely large ocean? Do you want a dungeon that is made out of mirrors and populated by glass golems? It's all there and more. Best of all, for the adventurer, anything that you could possible desire is in there somewhere: the only problem being that you have to negotiate an infinite amount of Chaotic Evil entities and an infinite amount of hostile environments to get it.

BECMI Rogue Modron Class

Prime Requisite: Intelligence and Constitution
Other Requirements: Intelligence of 9
Experience Bonus: +5% XP for Intelligence 13-15; +10% for Intelligence 16 or greater
Hit Dice: 1d8 per level up to 9th; +3 hp per level thereafter
Maximum Level: 9
Armour: Modron Armour only [see below], shields permitted
Weapons: Any
Special Abilities: Modron Toughness [see below], 30% resistance to illusions, charms, sleep and fear spells, and energy drains; 1 in 3 chance of detecting secret and hidden doors.
Experience Levels: As Elf
Saving Throws: Modrons use the Elf saving throw table

Modrons are clockwork contraptions native to the plane of Mechanus. Their head and body is composed of a cube-like box, to which are attached spindly arms and legs. Ordinarily they are utterly focused on law, stability, conformity and obedience, but very occasionally something goes awry in the highly ordered mind of one of their number. Such an unfortunate is immediately cast out from Mechanus and left to wander the universe. It then becomes known as a Rogue Modron.

Rogue Modrons are still, by comparison to other races, obsessed with rules. Indeed, it is difficult for most non-Modrons to notice a difference between a Rogue and an ordinary example of the race. If there is anything which separates Rogues, it is a certain curiosity about the universe. Once they have left Mechanus their minds seem to open up slightly to the possibility of other ways of being, about which they have hitherto had no interest.

Rogue Modrons do not believe in luck or emotion. They are robotically focused on whatever course of action they wish to pursue, and almost impossible to dissuade once their minds are made up. They try to rationalise everything they come across in terms of strict logical arguments, and cannot understand anything that cannot be explained in such terms. They appreciate magic, however, which they can pursue as a kind of science.

Special Rogue Modron Characteristics

Armour and Modron Toughness: Rogue Modrons have a natural Armour Class of 8 due to the hard outer casing of their box-like body. However, they cannot wear the ordinary armour which other races make. Instead they must either have specialist armour fitted, or discover a suit of (incredibly rare) Mechanus-made Modron-armour. Modron armour improves Armour Class to 6, but costs at least 200 gold pieces if it can be found at all.

Modron Minds: Modron minds are difficult to fool. Rogue Modrons have a 30% chance of resisting spells which rely on mind-alteration, such as sleep, charm person, or those which cause illusion. They are also excellent at cataloguing and analysing physical reality, and have a 1 in 3 chance of spotting secret or hidden doors. However, Modrons also suffer difficulties when reacting to sudden changes. When they are surprised, they remain that way for two rounds instead of the usual one. Modrons also find it hard to communicate with others, and any party containing a Rogue Modron must take a -1 penalty to rolls on the Monster Reaction Table.

Magic: Modrons progress in magical ability as does the elf class. They can choose spells from the following list:

Level 1

Analyze
Detect Magic
Floating Disc
Hold Portal
Light
Magic Missile
Read Languages
Read Magic
Shield

Level 2

Continual Light
Detect Invisible
Entangle
Invisibility
Knock
Levitate
Locate Object
Web
Wizard Lock

Level 3

Create Air
Dispel Magic
Fireball
Fly
Haste
Hold Person
Infravision
Invisibility 10' Radius
Lightning Bolt
Protection from Normal Missiles
Water Breathing

Level 4

Clothform
Dimension Door
Ice Storm/Wall of Ice
Massmorph
Polymorph Other
Wall of Fire
Wizard Eye

Level 5

Cloudkill
Contact Outer Plane
Dissolve
Feeblemind
Hold Monster
Magic Jar
Passwall
Telekinesis
Teleport
Wall of Stone

Borgesian Bibliophiliac Megadungeon

In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ...

- From The Library of Babel

All this talk about megadungeons has me thinking about Borges.

Long term readers of this blog will know that I'm a bit of a Borges nut. The man was one of the very few writers who I would describe as a genius, and one of even fewer I would call visionary. His ideas are like drugs for anyone with an imagination.




In May last year, when Monsters & Manuals was knee-high to a grasshopper, I had an idea for a campaign based on Borges' Library of Babel. You can read the original post in its entirety here, but to sum up:

The Library of Babel is a Universe of books. In it are exactly 25^1312000 volumes. Each book contains exactly 410 pages, and each page contains exactly 40 lines of 80 characters. No book is the same - their contents are made up of random letters, spaces and punctuation marks.

Now, most of the volumes are of course gibberish - just garbled text. However, it is also the case that the library contains some books of coherent text, by virtue of the fact that it contains every conceivable combination of letters, characters and spaces. Indeed, it contains not only every novel ever written, but some novels that have not yet been written; it also contains all variations on those novels - so that not only is a complete copy of, say, The Catcher in the Rye hidden somewhere in the middle of one of its volumes, but there is also somewhere a Catcher in the Rye with one different letter somewhere in the text, one with two different letters, one with three... And of course another one with one other different letter somewhere in the text, and one with two other different letters... And the same for every novel ever written. Every non-fiction book too, of course. And, more interestingly for our purposes - every spellbook.

You can probably see where I'm going with that.

The point of the Library of Babel, however, is that there is no catalogue. The books not only contain random text; they are also organized randomly. Whole sects of people live in the library, trying to make sense of it and quantify it, but the task is too great. They disagree not only on the system they should use, but also on the very philosophies underpinning the system; some go so far as to believe that even the random volumes - which make up the overwhelming majority of the Library's books - contain hidden meanings which, once deciphered, will unlock the key to a new reality.

This is perfect for a Planescape campaign, in which the characters are sent to recover a single mighty spell book from the Library. How do they find it amidst the effectively almost infinite shelves? How do they make sure the copy they have is perfectly correct, and not one of the multitude of volumes which contain one or two crucial mistaken characters somewhere in their midst? How do they deal with the mysterious denizens of the Library's honeycomb hallways and archives: the different sects and cults and philosophers, and the monsters who prey on them? How do they find their way around its labyrinthine shelves? What arguments occur between the Bleaker who revels in the apparent meaninglessness of the place, the Godsman who believes it will reveal the path to Godhood, and the Sensate who wants to read every one of its volumes?

What a good idea this is for a megadungeon, even if I do say so myself. I might even use it to meet Amityville Mike's challenge.

The problem with the Library of Babel as a megadungeon is that its appearance and layout is uniform. It is more like a maze than a dungeon because everything in it is more or less exactly the same. The only things that distinguish one area from another are the inhabitants and the contents of the books - which are rendered almost indistinguishable all the same by their incomprehensibility. And without landmarks, finding a way around could become a chore beyond all reckoning.

How best to get around this problem is something to think about.

Weekend Thoughts - Tentpole Dungeons and The Changing Face of the Future

I'll continue the alignment rundown tomorrow, but I just wanted to jot down some thoughts I had over the weekend, while alternately hungover in bed or on the train to and from London. The first relates to what Greyhawk Grognard refers to as Old School Campaign Tent Poles - that is, megadungeons which function as tentpole adventuring locales for a campaign:

Adventurers are free [he writes] to delve into its mouldy depths if they choose, but they're just as free to poke around in the local town or city, hie off into the wilderness, or explore smaller dungeons that the DM should properly have waiting for those eager for a change of pace.

But what I think is important is that the tent-pole dungeon is there, for those days when the PCs weary of tracking down clues and following whatever plots they have been pursuing throughout the campaign. The tent-pole should, I think, be a sort of refuge from such things, existing in the world but not of it, a place where the PCs can set aside their plot-induced cares and just go someplace, kill things, and take their stuff.

This sort of thing is enough to get the pulse of any DM (or player, really) racing: doesn't it just make you want to get up right now, grab some graph paper and a pen and start mapping?

James Maliszewski writes that "2e was an era that moved away from tent pole megadungeons as a principle of setting design" and I agree with him, but I also agree that "most of the 2e settings could be retooled to support a tent pole megadungeon" - which sounds like a task I'd like to work on someday, specifically for my favourite setting of Planescape. Indeed it strikes me that Planescape is one of the more obvious megadungeon-friendly 2e settings; not only do you have the Mazes, Sewers and Hive in Sigil, you also have the 16 gate towns in the Outlands (each of which could have a uniquely flavoured megadungeon under its foundations), the Spire (with an infinite pit at its foundation?) and an endless multiverse in which to plonk down whatever you like. You could even envisage entire Planes as megadungeons - what else is the Abyss, after all, but an infinite labyrinth full of monsters, death and treasure? Ditto Pandemonium.

*

My second thoughts for the weekend related to Cyberpunk 2020 and alternate visions of the future. Some time ago I was thinking about this in very vague terms, and actually wrote a post about it - as well as starting off an interesting (for once) rpg.net thread. At that time, I was thinking in terms of what was realistic - i.e. what we might reasonably expect the future to be like from our current standpoint, as opposed to that of the 1980s. But I recently read Pashazade, a book by John Courtenay Grimwood, which had been sitting on my shelf for years. It is the first part of the Arabesk Trilogy, and is set in an alternate future (rather than alternate past), where WWI never got off the ground and the Ottoman Empire still exists. The action centres around Alexandria (El Iskandriyah) in the mid 21st century, and the setting is like a William Gibson novel but with North African Islam as its backdrop rather than LA or Japan. The book isn't great, but the setting is, and it got me thinking about non-European and non-Japanese cyberpunk futures. India, Brazil, Russia and China are obvious candidates for future Megapowers, and near-future games set in worlds dominated by one or the other (or all) would just be fantastic to create and play games with.

Once again I regret there isn't enough time to do all of these potential projects and keep abreast of work and a social life. How unfair that we don't have a few extra hours each day.

BECMI Planescape

One thing I've often thought about is making a BECMI D&D version of Planescape. It wouldn't require a heck of a lot of work at first glance; alignment is easily expanded on from the Law/Neutrality/Chaos three-way matrix, and things like hit dice and armour classes don't really change. The only major task would be reworking the races and classes - but as soon as I start to think about that, I realise that it in fact the whole thing is a heck of a lot of work.

It's also a bit intellectually dubious, really. I like race-as-class in BECMI because it's part of the humanocentric viewpoint encouraged by the designers. There might be dwarf clerics and elf thieves and halfling druids, but they are otherworldly, remote, and fantastical. The only dwarves, elves and halflings who humans regularly encounter are the occasional, and highly unusual, adventurer - who is always of a certain archetype because the others of his or her race just don't go adventuring.

Planescape isn't humanocentric, though; and moreover it is infinite. The BECMI view that dwarf clerics (or whatever) do exist but never adventure doesn't work with Planescape because in infinity anything is more or less possible. There will be one adventuring dwarf cleric somewhere given that there are an infinite amount of dwarven clerics. (The true possibilities of infinity are, I fear, never properly realised in Planescape. I'm going off on a tangent here that I'll probably expand upon in another entry, but in the multiverse, it should be possible to encounter literally anything that is possible; it is the one place in, I believe, all of roleplaying where the Infinite Monkey Theorem could be put into practice. See this old entry for more thoughts on such matters.) This is even truer with level caps: you're telling me that in an infinite multiverse there isn't a single dwarf who ever reached level 20?

Nevertheless, it seems like a fun exercise. What would tiefling, aasimar, bariaur, modron, genasi, githzerai and planar half-elf classes be like? What would their spell lists and saving throws be like? What about their abilities? And what about factions?

All thoughts I which I ruminate over in idle moments.

Pandemonium Cigarettes

Pandemonium is a plane of few pleasures. Something in the very air of the place sews misery, mistrust, madness and sorrow. But the inhabitants of its endless tunnels make do with what small amusements they can come up with. One of those is the Pandemonium Cigarette - which can also be found in some specialist shops in the Lady Ward of Sigil, where the rich wives of the cage's highups are always looking for some new, exotic titilation.

What's special about a Pandemonium Cigarette is that you never know what you're going to get before you light it up. The evil Chaotic Neutral nature of their plane of origin seeps into them somehow. They all look the same - a rather grey, drab bundle of herbs bound in a tight filter. But the results of smoking one are usually different.

Pandemonium Cigarette

Cost: In Pandemonium, 1sp for a dozen. In Sigil, 2gp for six.

Effects: When a character smokes a Pandemonium Cigarette, the DM should roll a d20 and consult the following table. The effects last as long as the cigarette - d4 minutes.

1 - The smoke tastes of strawberries. No additional effect.
2 - The cigarette billows huge amounts of smoke uncontrollably. An area two yards in diameter from the smoker is immediately filled with a thick, cloying gas.
3 - The cigarette burns extremely quickly. The smoker must make a save against dexterity with a +3 modifer to throw away the item before the flame reaches his or her lips. Failure results in loss of a hit point.
4-7 - The cigarette makes a soft, crackling sound in which can be heard the distant sound of chuckling laughter.
8-11 - The cigarette makes a soft, crackling sound in which can be heard the distant moans of a terrified child.
12-15 - The cigarette makes a soft, crackling sound in which can be heard the distant screams of a madman.
16 - The cigarette emits a green glow, which illuminates an area three yards in radius from the smoker.
17 - The cigarette's smoke has a peculiar effect on surrounding members of the opposite sex, whose reaction adjustment to the character is improved by +2.
18 - The cigarette's smoke has a peculiar effect on surrounding members of the opposite sex, whose reaction adjustment to the character is reduced by -2.
19 - The cigarette contains a mild narcotic which reduces the character's attack rolls by -1 for d4 hours, but gives them d3 bonus hit points for the same period.
20 - The cigarette tastes like dung. The smoker must make a saving throw vs. poison or spend two rounds uncontrollably vomiting.

With thanks to Matt for the idea.

I am a fanboi

It can't be said often enough just how wonderful and evocative the artwork for Planescape was. It's a recurring theme in this blog, I know, but what can I say? When you love something this much you just have to talk about it, and anyway, poring over my Planescape collection is sort of homework for my pbp game, right? So I have an excuse, right?

This is my all time favourite. I just want to step through the page and walk into that scene:



You know what I mean?

A Big Plug

Apologies if this is a non-topic, non-quality blog entry. But Scott managed to pull this off - and anything he can do, I can do too, dammit!

I'm going to run a PBEM Planescape campaign. It'll be done via yahoogroups, which I've been using to run another PBEM game for about three years now, and which has generally been satisfactory. (Also, I'm not good at setting up forums and the like, because of my strong technophobic streak, and having game turns emailed to me is much easier to keep track of than visiting a forum every couple hours.)

And I'm open for applications. Email me if you want in, at jean.delumeau THAT SWIGGLY MARK THING gmail.com.

The Crunch Bit

2nd edition AD&D, as God meant the game to be played, although seeing how little difference there is between 1st and 2nd edition AD&D I might be willing to accept 1st edition classes, magic, and so on with a few tweaks. I'm not big on playing the rules exactly as written, anyway.

I have essentially all the brown complete handbook series, plus various other sourcebooks, so feel free to go hog wild on kits and the like. However, this is going to be a game for Primes - we're going for a Strangers in a Strange Land theme here - so no planar stuff is allowed. (A corollary of this is that people who don't know their Planescape arses from their elbows are more than welcome to join.)

Mechanics-wise, we're going for old school starting-at-level-one 3d6-for-stats. I'll have you make those rolls, and other very important ones, via an online dice roller. Generally in-game rolling will be done by me, though. As Planescape is a tough setting for 1st level characters, I won't enforce stat class restrictions. I will enforce level limits, though, and although I'll be as fair as possible, I won't pull punches regarding character death.

Game wise, I'm big on combat, exploration, swashbuckling action, and weirdness. Angst and emo, not so much. I like character development and I like a good stories but I don't like those things to be predetermined. Ideally, they'll arise during the course of play.

There's no metaplot here or big story arc - the planes are infinite, you've just arrived, and the multiverse is your oyster. Let's see where you end up!

I'd like a party of 6, so get in quickly. I'll choose people mostly on a first come first served basis, although obviously if I know you (via the blogosphere or wherever) it'll be a help. For the time being, just send me an email saying "I want to play!" or words to that effect, and we'll go from there.

Defiance in D&D

When it came to Planescape, it often seemed that everybody's favourite faction was the Society of Sensation - a group whose philosophy was loosely based on Epicureanism, and whose factol was not incidentally a hot, nubile young woman. It thus appealed directly to the two main urges of teenage boys: sex, and, er, sex. (I think that after the Society of Sensation the most popular were the Doomguard, whose factol was also, not incidentally, a hot nubile young woman.)

My favourites, though, were always the Athar.

The Athar, for those who aren't familiar with the Planescape setting, are a faction who effectively reject the gods (who they call 'powers') as the holders of truth, justice, and power in the multiverse. They aren't Atheists, note. Many of them believe that true gods may exist, or believe that true gods do exist but are unknowable. They just reject the current set of powers as objects of worship, and look on them as essentially just big uber-powerful bullies.

What I like best about that philosophy is that it spits in the face of the current order, and does so in spite of the fact that the 'powers' could quite easily squish the Athar like so many house flies if they wanted to. It takes a special kind of bloody mindedness to refuse to believe in somebody who, god or not, is certainly as powerful as a god - and moreover, certainly exists. It seems like a particularly perverse way of living your life, and much more appealing than the boring old hedonism of the Sensates.

Get Back in Your Pit, You Fiend!

I've already harped on about Tony DiTerlizzi's Planescape retrospective, but I think this deserves a special mention:


It's only a black and white sketch, but it is hands down my favourite ever picture of a Pit Fiend. The way he's clinging to the mountain like that, and the baleful look in his eyes - he's the picture of malevolent, twisted cruelty.

DiTerlizzi has, in a previous entry, already said that he wishes he had had more maturity as an artist when drawing for Planescape, so he could have made an even better job of the Baatezu and Tanar'ri. He now looks to Bosch for inspiration, as the above picture shows. I especially like his comment that:

The most obvious flaw in the PS illus. is that they are all perfect specimens. After eons of fighting off adventurers, good guys from Mt. Celestia, and each other - well, they would show the effects of such a battered existence, and I think these wounds would add greatly to their grotesqueness.

He then illustrates what he means.



I'm sure I'm not the only one out there looking at those pictures and thinking, "I need to make demons and devils more like that in my games."

Caterpillar List

You know how you sometimes have a few caterpillars of ideas crawling around the empty space inside your head, but none of them has yet matured into the butterfly of a proper blog entry? Today is one of those days. So, I bring you, A Short List of Things That Have Caught My Attention:

• Max has picked up his own idea and run much further with it than I did when I ripped him off a few entries ago. Borges and D&D are clearly more a match made in heaven than anybody has previously realised.
• There is a new blog out there called The RPG Corner, which judging by its first few entries is going to be good reading. The blogger is tentatively working his way through the 4e books from the perspective of, I think it's fair to say, a relative skeptic.
  
• Tony DiTerlizzi, who together with John Howe and Donato Giancola is top of the list for me when it comes to fantasy art, is running a Planescape retrospective at his blog. Planescape is my favourite setting ever, so I'm paging through the one or two Planescape books I have here with me in Japan and getting all bleary-eyed and nostalgic about it.
  
• I'm going to see if I can get a group together to run real-life, tabletop Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Risus, and/or the Burning Wheel. And 2nd edition AD&D Planescape!
  

A proper entry tomorrow, perhaps.

Worlds Within Cities and Finding Paths

The new Pathfinder RPG doesn't sound like anything I'd be interested in playing (trying to sell me a new improved version of 3.5 edition D&D is like trying to sell me a new improved version of horse manure) but I'm intrigued in an academic sense to see how well the thing can compete against the big boys. These days most of the RPG industry, as a rule, tries to avoid tackling D&D head-on; you occasionally get the odd Fantasy Heartbreaker cropping up, but a non-D&D fantasy RPG in 2008 generally means something that is trying to do something radically different, like Exalted or REIGN. The era when Role Master or Runequest were valid contenders are over: WotC won that particular war pretty handily. (Although an honourable mention must go to ICE's HARP, which is still fighting its corner and generally knocks the socks off the latest versions of D&D.)

So far, the guys at Paizo really seem to be making a decent fist of it, what with the coup of getting Monte Cook on board, the pretty fantastic-looking production values, and the good idea of releasing "alpha" and "beta" editions for play testing so as to avoid going head-to-head with the release of D&D 4e. The problem for me, apart from the rules, is the setting itself, which has been outlined in a recent blog entry linked to by trollsmyth:

One piece unique to our RPG organized play system is factions. Every faction has its own unique history, culture, style and specialty. Each has its own modus operandi in the ongoing struggle for control of Absalom, and each offers the Pathfinders in their service different boons. Choosing your faction is as important as choosing your character class or race. It helps define your character in the campaign and ties your Pathfinder to one particular nation's destiny.

You see, the idea of factions isn't unique to Paizo's "RPG organized play system". The above paragraph could, with one or two changes of nomenclature, be describing the concept of factions exactly as they exist in the Planescape campaign setting - complete with ongoing struggles for the control of Absalom Sigil and different boons benefits and hindrances. The main difference is that Planescape had a heck of a lot more than five factions, and they were much more interesting and believable, being based broadly on actual philosophies from the real world - from the Epicurean Sensates to the Acosmic Dustmen to the Solipsistic Sign of One. (This is not to mention the other many World Within a City settings which exist throughout the RPG and sci-fi/fantasy canon; Necromunda leaps instantly to mind.)

Even fishier is the fact that Paizo's very acting-guru Monte Cook has his own World Within A City Campaign Setting, Ptolus. This makes Absalom seem not only derivative, but worryingly "influenced" - in the same way that books by inferior authors have tag lines like "in the tradition of Stephen King" - and I don't think it bodes well for the future of Pathfinder.

That said, I'm willing to wait and see what they come up with over the next few days in the way of elaboration.

Planescape Borges and the Library of Babel

I'm taking a break from discussing my new campaign, because I want to jot down some words on Jorge Luis Borges. I haven't read enough of his work to call myself a fan, but everything I've read I've loved; like China Mieville he's a writer who you can enjoy reading even if you disagree with the politics, and also like Mieville he has an irresistible affection for the weird that comes across in all his work (although of course Mieville has nothing on Borges).

I recently put a thread up on rpg.net in which I speculated on using Borges' Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition as the basis for a campaign setting; I intend to one day write the idea up for a system like FATE or a heavily doctored SOTC. Recently, though, I've also been thinking about The Library of Babel as something to use in a Planescape campaign. (The story is out of copyright, and a translation is available here, if you're interested. It's a highly recommended short sharp shock, of Argentinian-Magic-Realist weirdness crossed with a Socratic philosophical thought experiment; perhaps that's as much your bag as it is mine.)

The Library of Babel is a Universe of books. In it are exactly 25^1312000 volumes. Each book contains exactly 410 pages, and each page contains exactly 40 lines of 80 characters. No book is the same - their contents are made up of random letters, spaces and punctuation marks.

Now, most of the volumes are of course gibberish - just garbled text. However, it is also the case that the library contains some books of coherent text, by virtue of the fact that it contains every conceivable combination of letters, characters and spaces. Indeed, it contains not only every novel ever written, but some novels that have not yet been written; it also contains all variations on those novels - so that not only is a complete copy of, say, The Catcher in the Rye hidden somewhere in the middle of one of its volumes, but there is also somewhere a Catcher in the Rye with one different letter somewhere in the text, one with two different letters, one with three... And of course another one with one other different letter somewhere in the text, and one with two other different letters... And the same for every novel ever written. Every non-fiction book too, of course. And, more interestingly for our purposes - every spellbook.

You can probably see where I'm going with that.

The point of the Library of Babel, however, is that there is no catalogue. The books not only contain random text; they are also organized randomly. Whole sects of people live in the library, trying to make sense of it and quantify it, but the task is too great. They disagree not only on the system they should use, but also on the very philosophies underpinning the system; some go so far as to believe that even the random volumes - which make up the overwhelming majority of the Library's books - contain hidden meanings which, once deciphered, will unlock the key to a new reality.

This is perfect for a Planescape campaign, in which the characters are sent to recover a single mighty spell book from the Library. How do they find it amidst the effectively almost infinite shelves? How do they make sure the copy they have is perfectly correct, and not one of the multitude of volumes which contain one or two crucial mistaken characters somewhere in their midst? How do they deal with the mysterious denizens of the Library's honeycomb hallways and archives: the different sects and cults and philosophers, and the monsters who prey on them? How do they find their way around its labyrinthine shelves? What arguments occur between the Bleaker who revels in the apparent meaninglessness of the place, the Godsman who believes it will reveal the path to Godhood, and the Sensate who wants to read every one of its volumes?

It is the stuff dream Planescape dreams are made of, and the kind of thing that makes me wish that the thing was still supported. I guess it was always just too different.

(Incidentally, for those who've never read or played a Planescape product, and for those who tried it but didn't like it, check out last month's Godzilla Gaming Podcast [April 22, 2008]. In it there is a lengthy retro-review of the setting from two self-declared fans, and also a half-hour chat with the famous Monte Cook, who with Zeb Cook and Tony DiTerlizzi came up with most of Planescape.)