Planar Problems

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.

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.

Traditional Fantasy Worlds

One thing the Cypher experiment with Road War (my homebrew Mad Max-style game) has taught me, which should be obvious, is how great my imagination is. If I turn my attention to fantasy worlds, I look back and see how horrible most of them are, especially the theme park worlds.

I know people love the convenience of these, as you can "play in the same world" with the same system and have your characters experience a lot of different themes. But I get the "brash American tourist" vibe with these worlds, like these cultures are in these worlds to "entertain us" and never really be taken seriously.

Do you want to show them respect and take them seriously? Give them their own worlds. The players must immerse themselves in the culture and be a part of it instead of being planar outsiders "just here to visit and solve the local problems the people here can't."

The outsider-savior complex is high in these theme park worlds.

It is funny since I used to like theme-park worlds, but now I see them as a lower-quality buffet or fast food. They end up being like mall food courts, with an Egyptian-like area here, a Ravenloft area, a Norse area up there, and so on. They exist together because theme park magic keeps them culturally isolated or something. I see this in both Mystara and Golarion, and there are parallels in the Greyhawk, Eberron, and the Forgotten Realms worlds.

And what the designers are in danger of saying is the "adventurer class" outsiders are superior to the locals. In my Road War game, everyone starts with a job in the world - they are the locals. I am not doing any "lone wanderer" or "strange outsider" backgrounds since I feel they are done to death, and they are this strange "default character background assumption" in a lot of modern fantasy games. I liked Level Up 5E because they placed characters in a world and raised the stakes.

Ironically, Dark Sun was one of the better thematically unified game worlds that TSR put out. Still, toy companies can't put out anything remotely challenging to our psyches, so it is dead, along with all other TSR settings. I am not reminiscing over them anymore or revisiting them. Keeping the original spirits of these settings alive is a waste of time and energy better spent on making my own, and I found that out with Road War. For the longest time, I felt I had to do a Mad Max concept like this in the Car Wars world, and that setting held me back far more than it enabled my creativity.

It failed every time I tried to reboot Car Wars with another rues system. I had great ideas for a Mad Max-style game, but the Car Wars tropes kept getting in the way every time I tried. The vehicle designs, auto duel culture, or the game's history and structure kept popping up, telling me "my ideas sucked" and "use these instead."

The problem wasn't my ideas; it was the ones I was trying to fit them into.

Easy solution, dump that world and make my own.

I love Car Wars, but I don't want to play that game, and it doesn't fit the idea of what the world I am imagining should be like.

If I want a "Norse world," I will just create a Norse world and play in that. Why do I want 99 other things I won't use? Or worse, serve to break immersion and remove characters from involving themselves in factions and storylines? I'm an android! In the Norse world? Says I can be one in the rules! If I want an Egypt-style world, I will make my own and use a few history books to seed my ideas.

This is what Cypher is teaching me. Throw out the settings and games you try to "convert in" and do your own thing. But I need Car Wars to do a mad Max-style game! Turns out, I didn't. The Cypher rules handled vehicle combat just fine and better in a narrative-cinematic format. I am actually liking the Cypher vehicle combat better than Car Wars, even though they are incredibly simplified.

But I need the Forgotten Realms or Golarion to do a fantasy world! I will likely find out shortly that I don't, and by forcing myself to use them, I am setting myself up to fail again. This isn't to say they are bad settings, but they aren't the ones that inspire me to tell the stories in my head.

If I spend most of my time searching through a setting to find a spot for my excellent idea, that wastes a lot of time and forces compromise that weakens my creation.

If I were to create a world or even a mini-sandbox to start? One based on my idea?

No time is wasted, and I have exactly what I want with zero distractions or competing ideas.

Books for Games, The Renaissance

Okay, most of this is dark stuff. A book about colonialism and the brutality of conquering native populations, and the start of the slave trade. An art book showing architecture, clothing, and the feeling of a Renaissance setting. The Great Plague. A book about the decline of magic and witch trials. If you put any of this on your typical "roleplaying PDF store," you would get an adult content warning. Yes, even for the art book because it has artistic nudity.

No warnings on Amazon, where the grown-ups shop.

Bleh, we are way too protected from ourselves and our dark pasts. What game are we considering these for? Why can there only be one...

Yes, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and this is the signature game of fantasy horror where you know you are screwed from character creation. You are all guilty by default of being a part of the wealthy, exploitative, decadent, callously cruel, wasteful, environment destroying, slave-taking, rich, and colonial power that just messed with something they should not have, and all fall like cast members of a Friday the 13th movie.

I can't play dark horror in D&D. In Pathfinder 2e, some of these concepts are banned.

This is fantasy horror at its best.

And I love shopping for this game because I am diving through some of the most twisted and horrible history books ever written. I don't have to buy game books or adventure modules; I got tons of content just for this concept alone, reading history. Want more books?

Forcing native cultures to learn a language and to change their beliefs at the point of a sword? Taking them for slaves? Needless wars to make the rich richer? Stealing wealth from primitive cultures to enrich the wealthy back home? Books on the nature of Hell and how it changed as a tool of societal control? A history of death? Climate change? Oh, we have it all here. I might as well have "works with LotFP roleplaying game" stickers made and stick them all over these books.

I seriously think some of the history books from this era are better than the printed adventures for the game. In fact, many of them are worse and could never be published as "adventures."

And it all happened for real.

If you ever wanted to know why Renaissance society was one of the evilest and heartless this planet has ever seen, just open a book. And yet we romanticize this era with modern high fantasy and rewrite it to be more inclusive. This is like taking some of the worse genocides of the 20th Century and rewriting them to be more inclusive and family-friendly and putting them in roleplaying games.

I know, I know.

We need our escape; this world is horrible enough today to be constantly reminded of how awful it was in the past.

But to "get" LotFP, the way I play it, you need to know why the characters in that game deserve all the terrible things that happen to them. Great horror has that puritanical notion of punishment for sins, like the original Friday the 13th. And great horror has a deeper meaning to the events of the time it was created. The paranoia and mistrust of John Carpenter's The Thing can be seen as an AIDS metaphor of the early 80s. We shy away from these things because they make us uncomfortable.

But when we can experience them in a safe environment, we learn more about ourselves and our fears. And we may know why these things done at this time were so horrible.

And maybe we reflect a little and try to make up for all the awful things back then.

Or we could keep forgetting.

Hundreds of years after our rose-colored Renaissance, the default setting of all of our popular fantasy games, we are still living with the disastrous effects of that time. And yet we continue to put the time on a pedestal and rewrite it instead of facing what that moment in Earth's history did to us.

We will never make it right by ignoring it or painting it over with varied and colorful hues.

Or by banning them in stores because they upset a few people. If I were a part of a culture that was wiped off the planet by colonialism, I think I would want people to be a little upset.

When you consider this, LotFP goes from being "that silly B/X game that uses shock value to sell books" to an actual top-tier roleplaying game. There are times I see LotFP adventures doing what Dungeon Crawl Classics does better, and I feel those are a bit misguided. This is more like Mork Borg to me, but with a sense of impending doom and punishment for all characters in the game for "what they did."

Very few games inspire me to go out and educate myself like this.

And yes, I know about the referee's guide's advice about "not using the real world" as a setting. A lot had changed between when that was first written and now, and there are great B/X and OSR options that did not exist back then. But all of them are in the high fantasy genre, and where LotFP shines is in that unhinged Renaissance horror in a slightly realistic and non-fantastical world. 

I choose a semi-realistic version of the natural world, slightly fantastic with the presence of magic but still rooted in reality. I am not using elves, halflings, or dwarves since they put too much Tolkien in the setting and break the unspoken rule of the familiar that horror requires. I play overseas and the New World not-on-Earth canon, as trips to these places should be fraught with strange, unexplained, and supernatural. A coast or island could appear in the middle of a charted ocean, and the ship is off in some nether-realm nobody knew about.

And the reasons for inflicting horror on the classic colonial powers and their seven-sins wrought followers are way too tempting to resist. I do feel, at least for me, that the shock value of LotFP has worn off and it does not sell me on the game anymore. What does sell me on the game is the message of unholy retribution on the sinful colonial powers that brought so much conflict, war, and injustice to the world and the same issues we still deal with today.

And dealing with these quite modern themes is the key to a great horror story.

A massive part of it is using that "shock value" to set you up for the things you learn - which actually happened - that will be even more shocking. A genital with teeth is one thing, but wiping out an entire civilization for their gold and land is entirely different. Popes who do all sorts of horrible things when put in a position of trust are part and parcel of this era.

And all of this is much more horrible.

Books for Games, The Middle Ages

One of the great things about playing roleplaying games with a strong historical context is you get to buy books outside the hobby to support your creativity. I got the above three books to support the Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS), and they are wonderful reference guides on how the era is supposed to look, feel, and act. While I am not playing in Middle Ages Europe for my game, the conflicts, people, and struggles of the time directly translate into in-game inspiration and background. I could flip to any page of these books and instantly have an adventure seed.

There are also conflicts baked into these books, like the Magic in the Middle Ages book discussing the history of magic, the church, and the early laws against witchcraft. If you have a civilization where the power lies solely with the church and not the state, this stuff is important. A monastery is established in a remote region, and the church moves settlers in. A town grows in the area, and the land begins to be tamed. And then mages move in, or magical artifacts are found.

If this were D&D, oh, that is another character class, someone hire an arcane caster, please? Character classes don't have reasons to mistrust each other! What is this? Somebody remind everyone of party unity please and play nice with each other. That "modern fantasy" feeling hits and people start behaving as the rules tell them to.

In a more grounded and historical game, the church may keep a close eye on mages and limit the practice of magic. They may ban it, or even hunt practitioners, depending on the faith. Of course, as characters get higher levels and begin to start their own kingdoms, they can set any rules they want. My reading of this book gives me ideas for the game outside the game's library of sources.

And of course, you get the novels and game worlds of the official game, and if you tried to bring in ideas from history into "a fantasy world" you may be called out for breaking what one book said, changing the lore of the world, or stepping on someone's expectations. You can't make druids distrusted! I play a druid! That would never happen in the Forgotten Realms! There are too many powerful mages in this world for that to happen!

The fact a lot of "in-game lore" and the rules themselves contradict history and have to be argued for is a very strange thing. It is as if somehow we worship this idolatry of a "generic fantasy world" so strongly that actual things that happened in history are somehow invalid ideas.

And this "generic fantasy world" becomes a Wonderland of silly rules and contradictions, things that can and cannot happen, words that can and cannot be said, codes of conduct and manners of dress, and concepts and injustices being brushed away and everyone being told to forget about them because they didn't happen.

Back in the Middle Ages, peasants and serfs were practically owned by the lord of the land and needed to be given permission to travel. There was no modern cosmopolitan society, no colleges, few organized guilds, no merchant class, no wealthy class, no intellectuals, no suburban life, and governments were weak compared to the almighty church. Families gave children to the church for blessings and benefits. This is the starting point, if players want to change this they are free to do so.

If I started with D&D, C&C, B/X, or any other game that feels more "modern fantasy" I am not getting these concepts. The books feel strange. A lot of what is in these books is out of place in the D&D cosmology or Pathfinder world, and parts of them are banned outright in the lore.

And I like collecting books. I do not have to rely on a game company's release schedule to find inspiration on my favorite topic or style of the game world. I have all of Amazon at my fingertips. I am not limited to one source, company, view, content guideline, or pigeonholed into the "fantasy world" box when I am shopping for my library. I am also not tied to web portals or having my library taken away by policy changes, business closings, or license invalidation.

The company can stop printing the game and I will still have near-infinite sources of content. This is one of the strengths of B/X and the OSR as well, none of my B/X purchases are invalidated by a new version of the game, switching from Labyrinth Lord to OSE, playing ACKS or C&C, doing LotFP or AD&D (or ADD&D), S&W or any other B/X game.

I have the freedom to choose.

Tunnels and Trolls: Trollworld

Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls includes an amazing atlas of the Trollworld campaign setting. This was (and still is) the home-setting of the game's creators, and it seems all legendary campaign settings in pen-and-paper gaming begin this way. After reading the nearly 100,000 years of history in the atlas and pouring over the maps and details about the cities and other places, I come away feeling I have really misunderstood and underestimated T&T's setting over the years.

I thought mostly T&T's home setting, Trollworld, as referenced in the solo adventures and other sources,was more of a humorous and rather silly place like something pulled out of a Monty Python skit. There were funny-named spells, all sorts of black humor in the traps, and a tendency to wink-wink-nod-nod about the humor in town-names and other NPCs. Even the continents are shaped like fantasy creatures, so how can one take this place seriously? I mean, this place is no Greyhawk or Faerun, right?

I am feeling really humbled right now after reading and understanding what the designers were shooting for here. I really had misunderstood how the dark humor plays into the setting, it is like a world shaped by powerful, malevolent and uncaring beings of pure malice and a lack of caring - the "dragon shaped" main continent was made that way as a "self portrait" of a powerful dragon. While it was still populated.

Imagine that, some dragon comes alone and starts reshaping a continent the size of North America, dragging out a head from the states of Washington and Oregon, dragging a huge swath of California out into the ocean to form claws, pulling Mexico off the bottom border, tucking up the stomach of the Gulf Coast, twisting Florida into a back claw, and dragging all of New England up into a long, twisting tail.

The people and cities? Well, I hope you all take cover while I finish my handiwork. Never mind the earthquakes and ripping off the land apart around you, would you? I might be done the job in a couple hundred years, I am sure you won't mind the short little interruption while I finish my masterpiece.

There, perfect! Now that wasn't so bad, was it? Hello? Hrm, I wonder where they went and why every surviving civilization is so mad at me? No worries, I am a dragon after all.

Trollworld is Black Humor

Black humor permeates this setting from top to bottom, and once you understand this one fact about Trollworld you get everything else. A wizard so powerful he creates a dungeon which is essentially  his personal "MMO" where real people unknowingly enter to fight and die for his amusement? A wizard war with armies, sides, and years of bloodshed caused by the misunderstanding about fork placement at a magic wizard's birthday party centuries ago? Monsters terrorizing towns created by the careless dumping of magical toxic waste from a wizard's alchemy lab? Take any abuse of power from the headlines today, replace "the abuse of power" with "careless and who cares about the little guy" magic, and you are all set to create adventures.

And the little guy, the average person knows nothing about the capricious and deadly causes of the world they live in. The lands are dangerous because they always have been, not because everybody knows about the magical toxic waste dumping. When you find out about these "dark secrets" during your adventures and begin to piece together the insane and sadistic reasons why the world is the way it is, you begin to fear a world that is more chaotic and full of random death than even a Lovecraftian setting.

Little People Don't Matter, and Don't Know Better

This is worse. The powerful beings in control of this world don't care about the little people. And yet they still try and live their lives, build cities which routinely get burned to the ground, and survive in a world full of madness wracked by forces no one really understands or can control. In a way, it is a world out of a Monty Python skit, but here there is no laugh-track or studio audience. You are literally living in a world being torn apart by forces out of control with no care for those who live in it.

No other setting does this as well, and in fact, the humor plays into the "we are all seriously doomed" sort of feeling here. There are funny things, silly-named spells, and all sorts of intentionally humorous places and people here. Some could be created as a joke by a wizard and then set free upon the world, like a pair of trolls, one short, smart and weak; the other dumb, large, and strong like something out of a Steinbeck novel and out looking for a lost pet rabbit. Once the joke was over, the wizard forgot about them and went on to other pranks and more interesting things. And these two trolls wander the world until their demise, fate, or they find a place of their own.

Or until the adventurers meet them and either help them find the rabbit, or get smashed to a pulp by Lennie the troll. "I'm sorry George."

The Abuse of Power is Funny, and Great Fun Too!

It's funny and pop-culture-tastic, but in another way, it's a sad reflection on the abuse of magical power in this world and what the average person has to deal with. You are constantly a victim of some careless mage's plans, in-jokes, plots, power-mad schemes, or manipulations of the world. Perhaps the White Rabbit from one wizard's version of Wonderland wanders the world as a lone knight, the rest of his version of Wonderland's inhabitants long gone, and he is out to clean the world of all other magically summoned versions of Wonderland that other wizards create for their amusement.

It is madness and I love it. The best part about this whole setup is T&T will actually let your character be one of those mages or powerful forces. It is intentionally overpowered and super-deadly, all the way up the level chart, and the spells at the higher levels can be created by the players. Want a spell that summons an insane version of Wonderland yourself? Spend some time and write it. If your character survives, they too can join the fun.

Now, this is my take on the setting as I read it - other people may play this differently. But from what I see, that humor and wild abuse of magical power makes this world unique, and the humor softens the blow a little bit and plays into the fun. It reminds me a little of the original humor in the Warcraft universe (before the game got all serious and multiplayer), and it has that insane and madcap charm to me.

And all the while, the box of broken toys, insane deathtraps, and crazy schemes keeps living on. Once you understand it, nothing else comes close to the insanity and power-mad nature of this place. A misunderstood, richly detailed, unique, and true classic of a setting indeed.

Pathfinder World Design: Realms of Proteus

Check this out:

http://realmsofproteus.blogspot.com/

I am doing an interesting world design this summer in another blog for Pathfinder, a sort of Hunger Games meets Matrix style dystopic future where players of the "fantasy game" are trapped in a virtual world/fantasy game until they can reach level 20 and escape - with perma-death and no logging out. Think of this as a world gone mad that is using a virtual reality game to select the world's leaders and you are close to what I envision it to be.

I am doing a post every other day describing the world, and it is a cool design which breaks apart all of Pathfinder's books and expansions and gives each one a place in the world. You can play with as little books or as many of your collection as you want, everything has a place, and there are some strange goings on inside the world as well that open up possibilities for intrigue and dark conflicts.

It is really a game? I love the "sinister forces" angle to this project where the players of a virtual fantasy MMO can't get out and have to deal with demons and other sinister forces that are possibly real.

I am enjoying writing this, and I am doing the entire blog as if I were a survivor of the game giving new players hints on what to expect, so there is a fun fiction angle to the blog as well that I love doing. You have to read it from the start though, since it is a complete story, so make sure you catch up on the posts if you are interested.

Enjoy!