Planar Problems

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Over 40 years, I watched the planes go from something inhospitable, the realm of souls, unreachable and too alien to conceptualize...

...to a theme-park default setting.

The planes ruined the 4E setting, and we felt betrayed once the expansions came out, assuming "planar adventures" at level 10 (out of 30 levels). The fantastic campaign world stopped at level 10 like some MMO starting zone (Elwynn Forest in World of Warcraft). The planes as a campaign setting began in 4E in earnest, and the established campaign settings (Forgotten Realms, etc.) felt like afterthoughts. We have never recovered from this state of affairs, and none of the great settings have ever been revisited.

This assumption never stopped, and it is the current state of affairs with Wizards. All of their fantastic IP in campaign settings are withering on the vine, with zero support in 5E, no gazetteers or atlases, nothing introducing players to the world, and they seem to focus more on the planes than the settings their novels (once NYT best sellers) reside in. This is like the Lord of the Rings franchise abandoning their world for some nebulous "multiverse" and "planar setting" just because the writers want to have the freedom to do sci-fi or something but still have that Lord of the Rings name attached to the project.

Lord of the Rings: Planetfall, the Rise of the Star Empire.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Okay, shut it down; the IP is obviously dead. Either that or the studio can't hire writers who can do the work. This is what happens when "everything is a sequel" - people need to shoehorn in things that would have been "new ideas" into "old properties," and both are ruined.

But that above picture? This works in Numenera perfectly since the game is built around a core of anything possible. Still, Numenera is just one world without needing planes of anything watering the setting down. Numenera is not a theme park; it is a blank sheet of paper used to imagine anything.

The planes are the ultimate theme park game world replacement. Need a gothic vampire area? Need a beast-lands? Need a Norse place? Need a Greek place? Need a floating whatever with some whatever on them? An infinite city? A ringworld? A water/fire/earth/air place? A shadow dimension? A place with lots of (non-religious affiliated) demons and devils?

We got a plane for that!

Old campaign worlds? They are there too! The planes answer every question. The beauty of the planes is if the parent company gets sick of supporting a planar setting or just wants to do a one-shot, it is easy - a plane is disposable and ultimately meaningless. Sure, we have room for you old-timers, too; just put the campaign worlds we don't support in there!

And planar settings feel lazy. There is no history to write for a planar setting. Cartography feels unimportant. You do not have to fit the place into a campaign world and culture. It feels like a lazy way to "skip the work" and deliver a setting without making it work with anything else. The price for unlimited creativity - is nothing being compelling, related, or holding meaning.

The planes, as they exist in the default mindset of 2023, are overdone and tired. They are not the "home of the gods" anymore. None of them seem alien or strange, and it is just a disconnected theme park of ideas used in a hundred campaign worlds before.

I would take a decent theme-park world over a planar setting any day.

They aren't even "planes" anymore.

It is an overused and nebulous junk drawer that does everything poorly without form, history, connection, or function.

Infinite and meaningless.