My interactions on MeWe this month have reminded me how important it is for RPG fans to contribute blog posts to inspire each other. Rather than considering a few people to be top tier thinkers and passively follow their blogs, we should all take time to hammer our thoughts into something presentable and add life to the online RPG community. Our community will shrink to a paltry thing if we don’t each do our part.
Many D&D fans keep fond memories of the many published settings during the game’s 2nd edition. At that time my friends and I played in a home brew setting so I took little notice of them. The only one that commanded my attention was Planescape. When I first heard about it I was fascinated. A magical city that occupied a space between the game’s Outer Planes. Opportunities to travel between different fantasy worlds on a regular basis – not just to one dimension that a dungeon master wanted to feature. I was sorely disappointed when I met someone who had the books. I thumbed through them and questioned him enough to get an overview. Although the advertisements attracted me the final product repelled me. I loved the concept but hated the execution.
My chief criticisms were:
- The denizens of Planescape were late 20th century Americans in a pre-industrial fantasy world
- It upset Gygax’s intended order for D&D by offering the planes, designed to challenge high level characters, to low level characters who shouldn’t be able to survive them
- It made wondrous things seem commonplace
- Planes Cant was meant to give the city of Sigil its own culture but sounded so silly it turned me away
- The illustrations looked like they came out of children’s books
The last 2 items I could overlook but the first 3 were deal breakers. The do it yourself ethic of the OSR community encourages each of us to take the things we don’t like about published fantasy games and rework them into something attractive for our own games. This notion made me take up the challenge of fashioning my own version of Planescape. I’d like to see if I can modify the material from the initial box set into something I can use in my own games. Because I have no intention of publishing anything, I don’t have to invent new names and re-label everything.
This project will satisfy a desire I’ve had for some time. Most D&D fans use published settings as-is or create their own. I haven’t spoken to many people who have started with an official setting but bent it to their own purposes. The 1st Edition era had many books that gave light setting information and encouraged individual dungeon masters to expand on it and make changes. In my youth I thought it was an admission of weakness to do anything less than create your own setting from the ground up. Now that I’ve mellowed with age and become short on time, hammering Planescape into a shape more pleasing to my tastes could be fun. I intend to document my project on this blog to show my contacts on MeWe that I can do more than read other people’s posts.
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