When I returned home to Albuquerque after more than a decade living elsewhere, it was in the midst of the still-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.[su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” shadow=”yes” size=”2″ content=”As I write this, we’re still there, and it’s dumb in more ways than I have time to enumerate, but you already know that so let’s not spend more breath on it than we need to.”]¹[/su_tooltip]  This coincided with a series of equally unforeseeable yet also natural-feeling events, and soon I needed to move everything I owned out of my parents’ house in a hurry, including the shelves of old roleplaying game books still laying above the desk at the back of my room. I’d already given many of these books away, sold dozens of others, and in plenty of cases simply lost them as they ended up with friends I’d never see again[su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” shadow=”yes” size=”2″ content=”Or alternately, friends I still see and speak with frequently but have a habit of disappearing anything left in their possession….”]²[/su_tooltip]; our roleplaying groups have always been pretty communal with materials, which is something I’ve long appreciated about them. But there was one set of books I still hoarded up there careful to retain, protective as one of those titular dragons whose name is inscribed on the cover of so many of these old tomes: the ones detailing the Planescape campaign setting. It wasn’t because they were valuable (though, weirdly, some of them have become so due to their age, rarity, and cult audience), it’s that these were books I appreciated even if I never got to use them for actual adventures. There was always something special about Planescape‘s better works that transcended the generally looked-down-upon genre[su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” shadow=”yes” size=”2″ content=”As far as literary genres go, the way RPG books are looked down upon makes comic books seem like the collected works of Billy Shakespeare.”]³[/su_tooltip] of roleplaying game source materials, even if it was difficult for me to figure out what exactly that was when I was younger.

As soon as I moved these into my new house, I poured into them with glee, the ideas and stories contained within returning to life to life for me once again, their images and concepts just as evocative as when I’d previously read them as a 15-year-old, an 18-year-old, a 25-year-old,  and now as a 35-year-old. They held up in a way that few games or books or really anything from our childhood ever does, their pages more filled with unique characters and thoughtful ideas than most novels or movies, let alone games. When, soon afterward, I decided to run a campaign for friends online[su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” shadow=”yes” size=”2″ content=”I quit running DnD campaigns at roughly the same period of time I went to graduate school and my first book got an agent. At this time, I assumed I’d never run another one, as it seemed like writing fiction and fancy-pants essays and all of that was a better use of my time. Turns out, even someone as much of a hermit as me gets driven nutso by Covid-isolation, and this seemed a better way of spending time with friends online than awkwardly getting drinks and asking each other what we’ve been up to lately, the answer inevitably being, ‘Same as last week/month/year.’”]⁴[/su_tooltip], it’s not surprising that these were the books I returned to, fully aware that in all likelihood we would only dip our toes into what they described. And that’s fine. Unlike so many other guides detailing the intricacies of game mechanics, I like reading the Planescape books just for themselves, will happily lay down to read one of them the way I would a good novel, and recommend that anyone with even passing interest take a look at them regardless of  whether you’re likely to run a campaign in the setting. They are, for the most part, simply good works of literature, and that they’re also filled with rules and scenarios for a game seems at times almost incidental to what makes them worthwhile.

Before I get too far into things, I should introduce at least a little bit of what Planescape is. It’s a “campaign setting” (place to run your roleplaying games) first published for Dungeons & Dragons in 1994, its chief overarching concept being that all worlds are connected with each other, it’s just that the magic to get from one place to the next is tricky to harness. There are plenty of other details about it we’ll get to in time, from Sigil to the Blood War, but this is the most fundamental concept to the setting, the one that distinguishes it most from not just other D&D settings but also fantasy universes of any genre. In Planescape, if you’re holding the right key (which could be an object like a crystal or even a literal key, but also something more complex such as wearing a fragrance or humming the right song or even something as abstract as telling a joke or being in a pleasant mood) and walk through the right doorway, you can end up anywhere. Or perhaps I should write that as  “Anywhere,” with a capital A, because at least theoretically there is no limit to what might lay on the other side of that doorway. Planescape is all campaign settings, assuming your DM has the imaginatory chops to make that happen.

This may not sound too different from any other fantasy world, but it is divorced from most Tolkien-inflected stories, or tales told in worlds influenced by the latter day disciples of George R.R. Martin. These are all set in concrete places, and while they might have magic, their rules are largely the same as our own, just with more orcs and elves hanging around the place. But Tolkien and his brand of fantasy is only one possibility, and in many ways it’s much less interesting, or at least has a far smaller possibility-space, than the one we tend to leave behind after childhood. Fantasy in children’s books is often about ordinary kids leaving the world behind to enter into strange, new worlds where the rules as they exist on Earth no longer apply. You can fill in your own favorites here, but I’ll fill in some examples of my own favorites: Oz, with its maddening kingdoms that Dorothy seemed to stumble into at random, a sinister world filled with death and horror but also more wonder than ever existed in the world of dustbowl era, depression-stricken America. There’s Alice’s wonderland, with its rules and games and illogical logic puzzles that have an elegance to them my autistic brain never glimpsed in the dreary lessons of the public school system. And best of all there is Narnia, the country on the other side of the wardrobe where children might become royalty and live out their hearts’ desires under the watchful eye of a loving lion deity.  I read these books over and over again, and while I loved Middle Earth and its ilk as well, the idea of a parallel world, of stepping through a portal into a place where the rules and customs weren’t just foreign, they were magical and perhaps beyond our comprehension, has grown far more attractive to me over the years. The Lord of the Rings may be much better-written than most fantasy stories using this trope, but at the same time it doesn’t feature ideas gushing out at us the way an Oz book does, which is both overwhelming and completely liberating in a way that little besides fantasy can give us. 

Of course, I’m not alone in this fascination with stepping from this world into other realms. We’ve always had these stories, from those about mortals ending up in the faerie realm ruled by Titania or Hades’ underworld to interloping ifrits coming to visit from the City of Brass, so it’s only natural that this idea drifted into the world of Dungeons and Dragons before too long, as that venerable game eventually become a clearinghouse for pretty much any fantastical idea its creators might come across. This leads to the second thing that initially drew me to this setting: that Planescape contains all of these mythical worlds as well. Within it, you can jump from that faerie kingdom to the City of Brass, then visit the drow’s underdark on your way to Middle Earth. Any God or storybook beast from any mythology is waiting out there for you to find, if only you know where to look. There is a capaciousness to this cosmology that’s enchanting, and this way of blending theology and mythology into something you can play around leads to the type of stories where characters can thwart Lucifer’s plots on the way to visiting the Chinese celestial bureaucracy and then take a shortcut through Yggdrasil on your way to drinks with Raistlin Majere. 

So with all of that out of the way, let’s take a journey down the River Styx and see what we might find. I’ll be starting off by writing about the creation of the very concept of the Planes in D&D and then, after some strange false starts by the games’ creators, we’ll finally get to the setting itself, where I’ll be going through each actual Planescape release in detail. Following this, I’ll  eventually move past that to, well, roughly where we’re at with all of this nonsense today.  Don’t expect this series to move too quickly, as some of the books required for research are quite long, but at the same time since  this is a solo project it’s also a lot easier to complete than something like our always in-progress Codec Logs. Alright now, berk, let’s gets started.

Footnotes:

1. As I write this, we’re still there, and it’s dumb in more ways than I have time to enumerate, but you already know that so let’s not spend more breath on it than we need to.

2. Or alternately, friends I still see and speak with frequently but have a habit of disappearing anything left in their possession….

3. As far as literary genres go, the way RPG books are looked down upon makes comic books seem like the collected works of Billy Shakespeare. 

4. I quit running DnD campaigns at roughly the same period of time I went to graduate school and my first book got an agent. At this time, I assumed I’d never run another one, as it seemed like writing fiction and fancy-pants essays and all of that was a better use of my time. Turns out, even someone as much of a hermit as me gets driven nutso by Covid-isolation, and this seemed a better way of spending time with friends online than awkwardly getting drinks and asking each other what we’ve been up to lately, the answer inevitably being, “Same as last week/month/year.”