Dungeons & Dragons is a game powered by the imagination, which explains why the creators of D&D have spent decades producing stories, adventures and entire worlds so the Dungeon Master always has something to work with. One of D&D’s oldest settings and most imagination-powered worlds involves characters exploring other planes of reality, back in 1987 with The Manual of Planes and again in 1994 with Planescape. It also inspired the 1999 video game Planescape: Torment, which is still considered a classic.
The idea is that your elves, dwarves, and gnomes find themselves wandering into lands made of air and whimsy or variants of heaven, hell, and everything in between. Planescape is a weird, pan-dimensional setting filled with conspiracy, belief and subtle horror. It’s also been long overdue an overhaul, as the previous books are decades old and pretty dense.
The new book, Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse, updates the old setting, streamlining a whole range of books into three slim volumes that fit into a nice slipcase. (It even comes with a DM’s screen, specific to the setting.) The first slim book, Sigil and the Outlands details the mysterious city of Sigil (pronounced with a hard G). It’s a cosmic metropolis filled with fantasy beings from across reality. Ruled by the god-like Lady of Pain, it is a place with no sun and a land that loops across itself, so the sky is just more city. Sigil is a place filled with various political factions, as in the world of Planescape, where one’s personal beliefs can magically alter the world around you. It’s a good overview of the setting and introduces some new factions to the shifting landscape that is Sigil. Alas, the book just does the broad strokes. This is a great introduction to the setting, and it’s beautifully presented, but if you want something deeper, you’ll have to seek out the older source material (the PDFs are available via Wizards of the Coast, however.)
More detail can be found in the second book, Morte’s Planar Parade, a monster manual of sorts that fleshes out the world of Planescape by talking about the various weird beings you can meet. As the name implies, we get running commentary from Morte, a talking skull that those familiar with the old Torment video game might recognise. This is well-presented, easy to read and filled with fun ideas.
The jewel of the collection is the third book, however. Turn of Fortune’s Wheel is a cross-planar campaign that is utterly unforgiving; it’s deliberately designed to remind the players how deadly jaunting across realities can be. To keep things fun, though, it has a clever rule in which the characters return as variant timeline versions of themselves. The adventure itself is loose in format; the idea is for Dungeon Masters to plug in other adventures if they wish, making this perfect for a long-running campaign requiring minimal preparation. It’s a strong mix of old and new school vibes, filled with some fun shout-outs to the history of D&D.
The hardcover copy we received was robust, and there is a map in the back that’s relatively easy to remove if you need a closer look at it.
Overall, Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse does a solid job of tying various settings together whilst being its own thing. Though on the surface, it looks like it’s doing a similar job to the Spelljammer and Radiant Citadel books, Planescape’s thing is its strangeness. There is a distinct lack of character options in this set, which is a pity as the setting is very much its own thing, but a savvy DM can easily fix that with all the character creation options available in the game right now. Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse is a worthy update of one of the all-time great D&D settings.
