Interplannar adventures

Warning, Spoilers for Monte Cook’s Ptolus d20 setting. Safe for my players to read.

I’ve been wishing to do a multiplanar campaign for a long time. A D&D 2nds edition was the period I had left that game for the crunchiness and detail of Gurps. So I missed out on Planescape, having touched it only in a A D & D demo at my FLGS and while playing Torment on my PCs (awesome game, but I hated real time RPGs back then).

My last campaign had a taste of plane hopping where we had this one session, quite like ‘The Truman Show’* , where the players were taken out of their world to actually see that it was a prison. My player’s reaction was so awesome that I was profoundly marked by that… and the idea has been bouncing in my head for a whole year.

However, by that time, we chose to move the game to Ptolus (we had purchased it). Of course, being the stickler for rules that I am, I chose to apply the setting as is, a prison plane where plane shifting is strictly prohibited. So I had to squelch my desire to have my players go plane hopping. (I since then integrated Ptolus in my Homebrewed world and did away with all that annoyed me in it: The Chaos Cults and the whole prison world thing).

But still when I started openly stating that I felt like we could move on to a new campaign, all my players chimed in that a Plane Hopping theme was way up there in their preference for a game. Side note: DMs (if any eventually read this stuff), you usually don’t get that kind of open feedback that easily with players. When you do get it, JUMP on it! 🙂

But being the somewhat inflexible thinker that I can be. I had always envision the planes as being something incredibly hostile and deadly. I mean the Nine Hells of Baator are full of devils and fire. The Abyss has countless billions of demons in it. How can a 5th level PC play in this? The only multiplanar adventures I had DMed were the 1st editions Queen of the Demonweb Pits (14th level adventure IIRC) and Throne of Bloodstone (25-100th level adventure) which strongly reinforced the idea. So up to recently, I imagined that a low-mid level PC showing up on the shores of the Styx would just be picked up by a Soul Collecting Fiend and the game would end there.

Now having spent the last few months reading on it all with a broader perspective, I finally understand that game-world consistency and Power-level economics are secondary in multi-planar games. Plane hopping can be the Cyberpunk of fantasy gaming** in that it’s all about the attitude and the flavor, not believability. It calls to the explorer-type players and the story-tellers that can recall invading Limbo and recovering a shard of the Chaos Stone to power the Staff of Freedom against the hordes of Rakalat’hon, the devil general currently rampaging through the Kingdoms in your homeworld. Powerful stuff if you ask me.

So game on friends, we’re going on a tour of the Cosmic Wheel!

*Thank you Mr. K. Dick, those drugs gave you wicked ideas.
** Well arguably, Steampunk is the equivalent, but in 1989, Planscape was TSR’s answer to Vampire the Maskarade that was all about attitude!