What is Sigil and Planescape to you?

[*witchinghour]

Lady's Grace Berks and Bashers.

I've got a simple but potentially complex question for both people who are and are not familiar with Planescape.

What is Sigil and Planescape to you? What aesthetic, theme, and feeling you get from the setting? 

I'd love to hear some great answers from you folk! As I'm planning a few fun things this summer and would like to show you more, or something different but the same.

[*Gadwin]

I have only gotten into DnD as a whole via NWN1 a year ago. The planescape setting was, until recently, wholly unfamiliar to me. From what i've seen so far, planescape is kind of a theme park of sorts- go through this portal to get to the fire place, go through this one to get to the ice place. There isn't any extended travelling, and transitions between planes are usually very brief and chaotic. I enjoy this.

To my knowledge, Sigil is a very shitty place to live. But amidst the gloom, doom, foul smells and sludge rain, small pockets of happiness can be found wherever two berks come together to adventure or hang out.

[*Sinlinara]

Planescape is hard to wrap your head around and even harder to describe.  And that's sort of the charm - exploring things that should be impossible, yet aren't.  Things which are alien, and yet also commonplace in their own realms.  Whether you're using it as a temporary backdrop in a campaign otherwise on the Prime Material or making it a proper focus of the campaign, the sheer scale and amount of unknowns is something that is really appealing.

I think my first exposure to the concept of the planes was in the NWN2 OC (which I've gone through far too many times to count) where you have a fairly normal fantasy story suddenly complicated by numerous extraplanar creatures all with their own agendas, whether that be the Githyanki, Demons and Devils, Githzerai, or the more fantastical creatures in the Mask of the Betrayer expansion.  There was always something fascinating about how uncaring these creatures were towards the world as a whole and yet you as the PC had something which they were single-mindedly in pursuit of.  That impression has stuck with me and I'm always happy whenever I can catch the glimmers of that multi-faceted struggle in SCoD.

[*frozen_heart_of_cania]

I vaguely remember reading this anecdote where supposedly the father of the planescape/Sigil setting was reacting to somebody making a statement about - I think - rational interpretation of factions' phillosophies. He said something like "if you're thinking the setting is supposed to make sense, you got it all wrong in the first place" ;) 

I think the thing that drawn me most when I came across the setting first was this whole new "dimension" of story, centered more around spiritual side of things. In literal terms - it often deals with character's most intimate, deepest self - soul - allowing motivation, stories and relating to the characters in ways far exceeding usual adventures in other settings - no matter how magical. Still getting this shiver whenever I remember an NPC doctor going like " I cannot help you. Yours is a disease of the soul ".

But also in broader terms, where you get this entirely new uni- wait, multi! -verse, with complicated. exotic, rich metaphysics. Not just hacking around the usual limits characters deal with typically, but opening a multitude of both fascinating and in many ways unsettling story arcs. Perils to be faced within far exceed those of usual adventures: they are an uncomprehensible mystery, overwhelming and creepy on entirely new levels. And wondrous on entirely new levels also.

However, once you've made a little sense out of it and got used to some ideas... you can dig a bit further and discover the richness of lore is just as wide and deep as the planes. Plenty of sources offer a great many exciting and fresh ideas and stories. Even the 'physics' of the usual planes you're used to by then are so detailed and complicated you can always discover something new to enhance your experience. Peculiar places of interest mentioned in few sources have fascinating background stories. Planes have separate and often wild rules each for simple usual interaction: movement, fight, magic - that alone freshens the adventures they host. Planar encounters also bring a whole new dimension in their behaviour, motivations, characteristics, ecologies, histories (and of course dangers).

Last great bit is the "fluidity" in the setting. Lore for example is often imprecise, various sources treating things way differently and often contradictorily. Here it's fine because this dubiousness only enhances the mysterious climax, where everything is uncertain and just about anything possible. Or how characters from different backgrounds - like, primes that you'd never envision mixing otherwise; mythologies and cultural references, other fantasy works even - and virtually limitless potential for own creations - in planescape just they just magically manage to come together in harmony that simply makes sense.

tldr; - dark mystery climax, "spiritual dimension", rich lore, exotic places ;)