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Planescape is perhaps the closestDungeons & Dragonsgets to a Grand Unified Cosmology: The various settings and even versions of the game are tied together narratively through Planescape, for a broader multiverse setting that stitches the smaller worlds together, while letting them keep their own forms of magic.
Transitioning a campaign from a small pond to the wider ocean can present challenges, both due to the sometimes convoluted way the setting is constructed, and the narrative complexities of expanding your game from the smaller world you have created together with the other members of your game. You can expect some teething difficulties as you make the switch.
Use Your Current Campaign To Set Up The Next
Whether you’re running a module or have written your own campaign, there are ways you can lead naturally into the next campaign featuring Planescape. Some modules have hooks and scenarios that can easily be adapted to lead into other adventures.A good example is Rime Of The Frostmaiden featuring a crashed spelljammer in Icewind Dale.
The way your players interact with the ship and its crew can set up easy passage into other spheres or simply remind the players of the existence of a broader world beyond the Forgotten Realms. Having the crew of the spelljammer make dialogue about other planes can prompt the players to ask for more details.
You may also want your players to carry out in-character preparations before touring the wider planes. For instance,clerics may need to make arrangements with either their own deity to ensure they still have their abilities in a new world, or align with the local gods of the planes they intend to travel to.
This may be as simple as making them perform a special rite in a temple of their deity, or may have them go on an entire sidequest.
Some Planescape mechanics and features will provide additional issues when following on from an existing campaign.Turn Of Fortune’s Wheel has the cast start with amnesia, and incorporates the mechanic of replacing dead PCs with reflected versions of themselves from parallel worlds: Some groups would prefer the catharsis of their character having a proper send off when dead instead of being replaced by a mind-wiped clone with a penciled on mustache.
Don’t Drop All The Exposition At Once
Planescale and the modules set within it feature a lot of terms that are specific to the setting. Players entering from another setting won’t know what it means to be glitching (or how it differs from the Glitchlings), why the Modron March is so dangerous, or who the Harmonium are.
Introducing these concepts one at a time can ease players in without disrupting the pace of your session:
Another way of spreading this information, while also giving the players free-reign to do their own research and claim it as an in-character study is to provide them easy access to a source of knowledge they can come back to.
In other settings this would be a more complex process of giving them an entire guide NPC or access to a library,but the Outlands has Mimirs: Magical items that act as talking encyclopedias (they normally are depicted as floating skulls, but can take any shape).
These itemsonly work in the Outer Planes, so giving one for free is unlikely to break the magic item economy of your setting. The party might also purchase one: both the city of Sigil andthe surrounding gate towns are liable to sell these magical trinkets, either for gold or by bartering equivalent magic items the players aren’t using.
If you’re feeling retro, you can take a tip from the Planescape Primer released in D&D’s Second Edition and have a physical prop to represent the Mimir, alongside a tape recorder and some pre-recorded lines.
Mimirs are also able to record specific information rather than cramming a dictionary into one.This gives additional storytelling options if the Mimir comes from a biased source, and they have to choose what information to trust.
Focus On The Worlds You And The Players Know Well
Stories that focus on multiple planes canencounter issues with scope:When the stakes are infinite, it becomes rather difficult to make things feel meaningfulto individual characters.
Your players might struggle to comprehend what it means for a faction war to take place across a thousand worlds with billions of combatants, but they’ll be able to digest it more easily if these grand world spanning conflicts bleed over into their narrative hometowns.
Turn Of Fortune’s Wheel does this well as a standalone module: The plot spans the fate of thousands of modrons, multiversal irregularities across the infinite expanse of the outlands, and the intervention of multiple of Sigil’s factions, but is still tightly focused on the core cast of player characters, and therefore makes them always relevant to what is happening.
If your campaign so far is centred on a setting like the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, then that world shouldn’t cease to exist once the players stumble through their first gate to Sigil. This can mean creating quests that lead back to places the PCs are familiar with or maintaining contact with key NPCs using Sending spells.Perhaps have a city or a town that the players return to,that can serve as the anchor.
The Bastion mechanics from Unearthed Arcana can be a useful way oftying the characters into a location both mechanically and narratively, giving them a plot of land to developand allowing them to hire NPCs they encounter to staff facilities in their base. It is recommended that Bastions are introduced to the characters once they reach fifth level, but work can be done ahead of this in preparation.
Use Gate Towns To Divide Up The World
The 16 gate towns circled across the outlands act as a useful way of gating off content and signaling what the players are able to handle. The towns serve multiple important functions to traversing the Planescape multiverse:
