Let's Build a Planescape Campaign

[Joshua Goudreau]

I busted out Planescape: Torment a couple weeks back and played it through for the first time in a long time and holy crap I forgot how great that game is. It got me thinking however, and now I'm toying with the idea of putting together a good ol' Planescape campaign.

I loved the setting back in the day and bought all the books and boxes I could get my hands on. I stupidly made the mistake of getting rid of my books a few years ago but about a year back I repurchased all of them from the guy I gave them to, along with a few books he had. Pawing through those books brought back many a fond memory of being both a player and a DM.

So I took to my keyboard and started assembling something and this is where you guys come in. Also, yes I made an account on the forums here so I could mine your collective brains for input. lol

I have the following materials:
Campaign Setting Box
Planes of Chaos Box
Planes of Law Box
Planes of Conflict Box
Hellbound the Blood War Box
--
The Planewalker's Handbook
A Guide to the Astral Plane
A Guide to the Etheral Plane
The Inner Planes
In the Cage, a Guide to Sigil
Faces of Evil, the Fiends
--
The Eternal Boundary
Doors to the Unknown
Tales from the Infinite Staircase
The Well of Worlds
Harbinger House
The Great Modron March
Faction War
Dead Gods

So I know that's a lot of material and I'm trying to sort it together into a campaign. I don't necessarily want to run every scrap of everything because that's a lot but I do want to weave together a campaign made primarily from the anthology adventures so the plotlines kind of flow around each other. Now, I haven't played or run all of the adventures but I have run the bulk of the mini adventures in the Planes of... boxed sets and Hellbound more than once as well as a smattering of the Infinite Staircase adventures. I have run and played in The Eternal Boundary as well as played Doors and Well. I never got the chance to run Harbinger House. Modron March, Dead Gods, and Faction War are my new acquisitions. Tangentially related, I ran Expedition to the Demonweb Pits as part of a 3.5 campaign much to the enjoyment of myself and my players. Dead Gods looks every bit as great as it has been hyped over the years and I REALLY want to run it.

So in this campaign I'm toying with I am thinking of weaving together mostly the anthologies, so Doors to the Unknown, Tales from the Infinite Staircase, The Well of Worlds, The Great Modron March, Faction War, and Dead Gods. I know that Modron March and Dead Gods are supposed to be related with the return of Orcus and such and I gather they both flow into Faction War. That being said, I don't want to run just one adventure and then another, I want to weave the chapters of these products together to form a bigger campaign.

I looked at the suggested level ranges of the adventures and tried to place them together that way but I couldn't fit Dead Gods and Faction War in there smoothly. I'm thinking of mostly scrapping those suggestions for the sake of story since I can scale the difficulty up or down as needed. The big game changer adventures seem to fit better in the endgame, so events like those in Squaring the Circle and the war in Sigil seem like great third act material and the climactic return of Orcus seems like a great ending.

How would you guys weave those together? Or should I pull in some other stuff I have on hand?

tl;dr Let's mash us up some Planescape!

[Joshua Goudreau]

I discussed this a little over on the RPGNet forums but I wanted to bring the conversation over here as well. I gather the Orcus storyline isn't super linear so it's not detrimental to mix up the chapters some. Perhaps you have a different opinion on that. Perhaps you think some of the small adventures in the Planes of... box should get mingled in there.

Thoughts? let's converse. :)

[Braininthejar2]

I wanted to do the modrons + orcus storyline myself.

(never got off the ground because my player turned up sick, and slightly high on painkillers, causing her chaotic neutral sorcerer to cause a level-inapropriate encounter with inapropriate comments)

The campaign would require some tweaking, because it was never written with new editions' power levels in mind.

Also, whenever I read about it, I find myself wanting to homebrew re-write the modrons.

[Joshua Goudreau]

I've been building this in 5e and I think the Orcus/Tenebros storyline would work just fine, though I'm scaling the levels diffrently than the intended 2E range. Converting straight to 5e isn't that difficult and I've done it with other modules since the encounter design is pretty close but it's worth checking the xp budget occasionally. The conversion from 1e/2e to 3E/3.5/4E/PF is a tad wonky though (especially 4E), I agree with you there.

The campaign I've been putting together from these products is shaping up to look pretty neat. i don't know if I'll get to run it, but it's been fun to build.

[Braininthejar2]

So what kind of ideas do you need?

[Joshua Goudreau]

Originally I was looking for some input from folks who knew the adventures much better than myself. Then I was just curious how folks would arrange the material to make a fun and coherent campaign.

I'm one of those folks who enjoys building campaigns. I've built WAY more campaigns in a bunch of different systems than I will ever be able to actually run. lol

[Joshua Goudreau]

Out of curiosity, how would you homebrew the modrons? I was thinking they might be neat as a kind of warforged.

[Braininthejar2]

My attempts so far have hit a problem of making them too complicated. I might attempt it again in the future though.

I'm considering making the hierarchs psionic rather than wizardz/clerics, as the power point system feels better than casting. Also homebrewed some weapons for them at some point.

Mostly, I've been messing around with their appearance - I could post some fanart of you like :)


As for your questions, I'm all 3.5 How much different is 5?

[Joshua Goudreau]

Hm, I like the idea of making them psionic. It does feel more modron than vancian casting.

I love 5e. For me it gives the depth of 3.5/Pathfinder without getting bogged down in the minutia of rules. I was all about 3.5 but I started to tire of it when my houserules to tweak bits here and there began to get a little heavy. I didn't care for 4E. Pathfinder gave me a game like 3.5 but with those little tweaks that I had done to 3.5, but then I started to get bogged down and had characters that seemed like they were going to collapse under the weight of their own rules.

5e strips away the bulky rules and brings it to a much more streamlined system that is fast and easy to play. However, it gives the customization inherent to 3.5 which was an aspect I loved.

I recommend it. It really ticks all the boxes of what I'm looking for in a game of D&D.

[Braininthejar2]

So, now you need some sort of overarching plot to get the characters to spend years moving around the great circle, as the Modron March moves, and then tied them meaningfully to the Tenebrous finale?

[Honest Tiefling]

...never got off the ground because my player turned up sick, and slightly high on painkillers, causing her chaotic neutral sorcerer to cause a level-inapropriate encounter with inapropriate comments...

Hi. I know nothing of Planescape, but please tell me more about this story.

[Braininthejar2]

Hi. I know nothing of Planescape, but please tell me more about this story.

As a tiefling, you should know Planescape - it's basically D&D campaigns played mostly in the outer planes.

In this case, the player and her party of NPCs crossed a portal that turned out to be one-way, landing them in the swamps of Carceri. There they found a huge log house and found that it was inhabited by a glabrezu.

The glabrezu was Sinmaker, an npc who makes a living by concocting high DC poisons for wealthy customers. He is chaotic evil, but not stupid - generally doesn't hurt potential customers, though at the moment they met him, he was in the process of decorating his home with the guts of a still living would-be thief. (it's surprising what you can live through when you're already a damned soul)

He was meant as an introduction to how the planescape adventures generally work - you meet a lot of fantastic creatures, experience wonders, and have to exercise some respect and cunning, because mortals are generally small fry in the planes. He would infodump them on where they are, and possibly send them to the abyss, just to be an ass, if he could trick them into wishing to get out of carceri.

But the player being a childlish, "young elf" chaotic neutral, (as well as the player not being herself that day) started asking the 20 foot demon silly questions. He kept his composure for several minutes, initially thinking her a xaocite ( a member of a philosophical sect that seeks enlightment by embracing the 'chaotic stupid' aspect of chaotic neutral)

But when she looked at his huge rabid hound head and asked if he likes being scratched behind the ears, he decided that leaving them alive would be actively harmful to his reputation.

[Joshua Goudreau]

My 5e Landscape game has been underway for a few months now and it has been running smoothly. My table has six players but they are not all always present so it ends up being at least four consistently.

Everyone is having a really good time. I set them up as a kind of noir detective group operating out of a dusty former bookstore in the Lower Ward. The campaign is a series of small adventures usually presented as cases they were hired to complete. I brought them to Sigil by way of the introductory adventure in Well of Worlds and gave them the shop with the first part of The Great Modron March. They have since gotten involved with the faction struggles, the Blood War, and an assortment of other planar shenanigans.

The adventures have converted very smoothly so far. Converting monsters that don't appear has been a matter of simple replacement though I have seldom had to do this with a couple great third party books, namely Frog God's Fifth Edition Foes and Kobold's Tome of Beasts.

The only major change I've made is a modification of the experience system that is based on the Pathfinder Society system. Each chapter, which is usually each adventure, the characters get 1xp. They need 1xp to advance to 2nd level, 2xp to advance to 3rd, and then 3xp to advance every level after that. It's all worked quite well so far with all of the characters at least 3rd level currently.

If there is interest, I will gladly share the order in which I organized the chapters.

[Corsair14]

Do a quick google search for Codex of infinite Planes. I have it linked at home but cant access planeswalkers website from work. It has pretty decent bones for a fairly elaborate campaign and a 5e Planescape campaign guide for characters and factions. Really good stuff.