JCC Amph Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies - The Tabletop RPG Discussion Thread

Just popping in to tell @JoinTheSchwarz how awesome he is. Love this series you're doing.

 

Strictly speaking, the final 3E "Adventure Path" allowed the players to kill Demogorgon... but they earned it.

I think Ravenloft and Planescape just codified what should've always been true: deities aren't going to agree to fight you one-on-one, if you encounter one away from their hme plane it's just an avatar, they are supreme in their own realm and can either avoid you forever or instantly kill you, and only another 'power' can kill a deity.
(Not that I think that any munchkin character ever 'legit' killed a god, even in 1E)

 

The Incomplete History of D&D Settings
Part VII: Dark Sun



The setting that succeeded Ravenloft was a very different one. Well, different from Ravenloft and to all the settings that TSR had previously published. If, when we talked about Greyhawk, we had problems explaining how it was different from the regular Dungeons & Dragons, with this new setting, the challenge becomes finding any common ground with standard D&D.

As was apparently the case every two years, in 1991 the TSR bosses were convinced that Dragonlance's days were numbered and that a substitute needed to be found before the sky fell on their heads and they stopped selling magician Raistlin figurines. Forgotten Realms sold well but had been a disappointment (it wouldn't become the monster it is nowadays until the following decade), and Ravenloft was seen as more of a minority setting. The new world had to be a "high-level" world, in the sense that it would be aimed at veteran Dungeon Masters looking for new challenges and had to avoid competing with the most accessible Forgotten Realms. Also, a new edition of a wargame system called Battlesystem was about to be released, and the bosses felt that it was imperative to have a new setting that could be the scene of constant pitched battles: the Brits behind Games Workshop and their very successful Warhammer wargame were hot on the heels of TSR, who had spent ten years trying to make Battlesystem happen and still couldn't figure out how. Therefore, a group was soon assembled to design the company's next hit, which received the original code-name "War World."


Wait. What's this? Where are my knights in shining armor? Legolas, where are you?!

This time, the chosen ones were Tim Brown and Troy Denning; well, they actually volunteered, since the more veteran designers had no intention of getting into the mess of designing another big setting. Their choice already indicated how different this new world was going to be. Although they had both been working for TSR for a while, their career had started in other companies creating very different role-playing games. They were new blood, so to speak.

From the very beginning, they decided that their new world needed to be very different from everything that TSR had done before: although their orders were to create a new primary setting that coexisted with Forgotten Realms, Brown thought that creating yet another Tolkienian fantasy world was not going to convince that "advanced" audience that they were trying to court, D&D veterans who would be tired of cookie-cutter fantasy. At their first meeting, which was attended by about twelve people, editor Steve Winter suggested that the world be a post-apocalyptic desert covered in ruins, influenced by the work of Clark Ashton Smith and the comic books of Richard Corben, an idea that everyone liked. Another decision completely changed not only the fate of this setting but the way TSR created settings: the group, having seen the high quality of Ravenloft's design, decided to add a professional illustrator as a third full-time creator, someone who was involved from the beginning and would give the line its own style. The chosen one was Brom, who was recruited after they saw an illustration that was hanging on his cubicle's wall.


This illustration of the gladiator Neeva got Brom the job. It's more metal than an ax-storm.

The group got down to work. The budget allocated to the project was very high since TSR wanted this new world to be the background for new novels, toys, and video games. For weeks, Brown and Denning were giving Brom ideas to illustrate and, at the same time, getting new ideas from Brom's original illustrations. Once again, D&D had turned its back on Tolkien and was looking for something rougher and more primal, more sword-and-sorcery than epic fantasy. The world's first influences were, of course, Conan and his barbarian buddies as depicted by Robert E. Howard, but the stories of John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Jack Vance's Dying Earth books carried the same weight (interestingly, three of Gygax's main influences when he created D&D!). Their original concept of the world was completely radical: none of the existing D&D species or monsters existed in it. The new setting would be built entirely from scratch. Of course, the marketing department threw their hands in the air, screamed, and asked them to please reconsider. Grumbling about the marketers' lack of creativity, Brown and Denning altered their approach: they were going to reimagine all the details familiar to D&D, but would look at them through a dark and twisted prism. Elves were going to become desert nomads with a cutthroat reputation, wizards were going to use life energy to empower their spells, and halflings... well, Frodo and Sam were turned into savage cannibals inspired by the Picts from Conan. Brown has ended up thanking the marketing department and thinks that the choice ended up being the right one: the new setting became somewhat more accessible, practically what happened after a typical world like Dragonlance went to hell. To highlight this idea, the designers elevated old monsters like the thri-kreen to playable species: after the extinction of orcs and gnomes, they had evolved to take their place. Alongside this, the setting refused to follow many of the genre's conventions: heavy armor was non-existent (partly to conform to the style of Brom's illustrations), the common weapons were made of obsidian and bone instead of steel, and heroes would ride around on giant beetles instead of horses.


Honestly, maybe I should have just posted nothing but Brom art. You'd get a better idea.

The desire for the world to be compatible with Battlesystem ended up giving the setting its physical form: the campaign took place in the devastated world of Athas, in the tiny Tyr Region, where several city-states ruled by the terrifyingly powerful and tyrannical "sorcerer-kings" were in constant conflict with each other. Another book that was about to come out, The Complete Psionics Handbook, forced them to make psionic powers (which had always been an awkward addition to any D&D campaign) a central part of the world: the authors decided that everyone in Athas had at least one mental power. Today Denning regrets having gone so far with psionics, as this ended up making the combat extremely complicated: the original rules of psionics in AD&D were a real mess and having to use them for each encounter made combat interminable.

Dark Sun finally came out in 1991. It was quite a bombshell and was greeted with enthusiasm, eventually becoming one of TSR's biggest hits throughout the decade. Its dark tone, its relevant history of ecological collapse, and its brutality convinced that "advanced audience" they hoped to attract. Dark Sun even became a reason for many remaining First Edition adepts to jump into the Second Edition. Battlesystem came and went without much glory, so TSR finally gave up, and the following supplements discreetly removed any reference to it. The style of the Dark Sun manuals was entirely original for TSR: for the first time, even rulebooks contained snippets of fiction to help DMs achieve the desired atmosphere, and published adventure modules had player sections with maps and illustrations.


The setting actually codifies that yes, Athasian humans often look extremely weird, because Brom drew them like that.

The world was so different that it even changed the system itself drastically. Ravenloft had already modified the basic AD&D rules, but Dark Sun went a step further in adjusting system to setting. It included new rules for players to handle multiple characters simultaneously, it added new species and modified all existing species, it removed some classic classes like the paladin and replaced them with new more suitable classes like the always-popular gladiator or the evil templar, it detailed a sinister magic system in which casting spells destroyed the vegetation that surrounded the caster, and it altered the characters so that they automatically started at higher levels and with higher than standard ability scores. The rules, the background, and the incredible graphic design collaborated with each other to create a solid setting full of possibilities.

And then the famous 90s meta-plot blew the setting up before it had a chance.

It may sound a bit of an exaggeration, but just a year after the original box went on sale, Troy Denning himself wrote the first Dark Sun novels, a pentalogy called Pentad Prism. In this series, half the sorcerer-kings were annihilated, and all the great secrets of the world were revealed one after another. The changes were drastic and ultimately caused a revised edition of the setting to be released in 1995, a version that most veterans will tell you that "it was just not the same." In addition to incorporating the changes caused by the novels, this new edition expanded the game world beyond the Tyr Region and gave us a world timeline for the first time, removing much of the original aura of mystery. The general impression was that the changes to the setting had been entirely out of the players' hands since unlike Ravenloft they were not dictated by adventures but by novels and that as a final insult all these changes were robbing Athas of his unique character and making it a more typical world: at least the amendments to Ravenloft had been made to improve the setting, but these? These changes felt utterly arbitrary.


Yes, they also replaced the original badass logo with... wait, is that Papyrus?! Close enough. Guillotine!

Despite these last obstacles during its original journey, Dark Sun has persisted and has become a fundamental part of Dungeons & Dragons. Dragon Magazine briefly updated it for Third Edition, but it was in Fourth Edition when Athas triumphantly returned and became one of the three official campaign settings thanks to an excellent conversion at the hand of Rich Baker that, among many other things, ignored most of the changes caused by Pentad Prism and went back to the original concept of Athas, changing just some things that had never worked too well. It's perhaps one of the few Fourth Edition things that almost all veterans appreciate! Although a Fifth Edition version hasn't been announced, the design team has mentioned that one of their own office campaigns is set in Athas, so it might be just a matter of time.


The new art is not nearly as amazing as Brom's, but it could be way, way worse. At least they got the right color pallette.

Dark Sun's originality made the world of Athas one that thousands of gamers still remember with affection... although the following year, TSR would release another setting, one that would try to go even further...

 

The desert and the clothes almost gives me Mad Max vibes

 

Ah, the younger, headier days of my youth, when I could hear the phrase "Dark Sun" and only think "Bomb-ass psychic gladiator death pits on a dead planet" rather than "What, like the Nazi thing?"

Anyway, since you mentioned Dragon: for whatever reason presumably related to editorial desires, it always seemed like they were pushing out-of-print 2E settings really hard during 3E, to the extent that that was a lot of my exposure to older campaign settings prior to the fun-if-hagiographic 30th anniversary coffee book (and I'm probably not the only one). It's kind of weird in retrospect - "Hey kids, you want new rules for updating the most important part of Spelljammer: the random ****ing giff NPCs?! ... No...?" - but it did give you a little taste of just how wild and woolly things used to get. I think it's what inspired my group to just blow up all of Toril one day and set our next campaign on sky islands cobbled together from the wreckage. No hippos, though. We weren't savages.

 

The "Classic Campaigns" issues were pretty cool, especially #315. I honestly wish WotC released something similar in spirit, updating the mechanics behind their old settings. I'd love to play a genuine Dark Sun game in 5E, for example.

 

I loved Dark Sun so much. I even really dug the early PC games, where you killed a tarrasque...

 

Same. It's my second favorite D&D setting, although I ignore all the late lifeshaping stuff that Monte Cook brought into the setting.

 

Yeah, I literally don't know any of the storyline Troy wrote -- basically main box only, etc.

 

That's the best iteration. The Wanderer's Journal is what Dark Sun is.

Okay, I actually like what Baker did in 4E: he only took into account the events of Denning's first novel and of Zeb Cook's first module, Freedom, having the sorcerer-king of Tyr be killed by a slave revolt and turning the city into the Free City of Tyr. The setting needed a relatively-safe campaign center.

 

A sort of hope spot. A point of light if you will.

... I’ll show myself out.

 

I insist "points of light" is a solid concept!

 

So I have a weird question for the DMs, just for me to understand better how the game works.
You create your beautiful scenario, and I guess it requires spending a considerable amount of time on it. But then, if I get it right, the players will have freedom in what to do inside the scenario you created. So, how do you do in case the players take a path that is far from what you had in mind for your story. Do you have to just quickly invent new situations during the game? Example: the players are supposed to cross a dangerous bridge but they just decide that they'll rather walk along the precipice and hope to find a safer way to cross not too far away.
Doing the DM seems to be super difficult.

Edit: or an even more obvious example: you create a crucial character for the story and the players simply kill them as soon as they meet them without exchanging a single word.

 

You prepare in advance as much as you can, and then you eventually learn how to roll with their punches.

But it also depends on how you structure your adventures. This varies from DM to DM.

In your first example, I would have (very briefly) prepared beforehand the three likelier ways to cross the precipice. You might think the bridge would make for an exciting scene, but some players feel more satisfied if they avoid the danger. You accommodate them all. You actually encourage creative solutions because everyone loves feeling smart.

In your second example, it depends. Why is that NPC important?

Information? You always prepare at least two redundant ways of obtaining any important info.

Or is the NPC important for your plot? Well, that’s the problem: preparing a plot. An RPG is not a novel! You prepare situations, not plotlines. I love to add convoluted lore, don’t get me wrong, but it’s never a linear story: my adventures look like flow diagrams.

Is the NPC important to your world? Tough luck: your game is more important than any worldbuilding you’ve prepared beforehand.

And yes, it’s not easy, but it can be learned. Experience help. Preparedness helps too.

 

Four things from a long-time DM:
1) Improvisation is key. Players are always, always, going to go off the rails. Do it right, and players will think that you had it all planned out.
2) Players hate being 'railroaded'; they refer to it derisively as 'following the plot wagon'. So, a good DM convinces the players to follow the story but make them think it was their idea.
3) Resources. I usually keep a library of various adventures, locations, characters, monsters, etc. to draw from if the story goes off the rails. Sometimes you go off in a completely different direction. That's okay!
4) Sometimes - rarely, under certain circumstances - you have to fudge things a little bit. That's kind of the 'nuclear option', as in 'the entire adventure is going to end within the first 15 minutes'. Every time that I've done this (not often, really) is because the entire party would've died due to a bad roll of the dice.
If the players find a way to kill your big bad in an inventive way before your story is done, though, let them. They've earned it. My last Call of Cthulhu adventure, one that I wrote myself, ended one session early because one of the players managed to kill the zombie sorcerer with well-placed rock to the head before he could finish his incantation. It was a one-in-a-million shot, and he made it. It was pretty epic!

Edit: (I said "two things" and then wrote four )

 

My wife has started running her first campaign ever, having never run even one single adventure, and I’ve been advising her and helping with campaign and adventure design. I told her my three main pillars of DMing:

1. to prepare thoroughly but lightly; enough that you can improvise quickly and naturally, but not so much that you start limiting player choice;
2. to make sure she understands the underlying structure of her adventures; if it’s location-based, you need to really work on the location; if it’s a whodunit, you need to make sure the mystery is solvable;
3. to understand and visualize the flow of information through her campaign; that way she can make sure that her players know what they need to know and that they get more from the campaign that they would get from random adventure modules.

And she’s doing wonderfully!

(I hate tooting my own horn, but a few years ago I wrote a small piece on running your first campaign; it’s about the SWRPG but I tried to make the advice as universal as possible)

 

Relevant:

 

The Incomplete History of D&D Settings
Part VIII: Planescape



The fifth AD&D campaign setting was released in 1994 and was created directly with a mission: replacing Spelljammer. From the very beginning, its objective was to recover one of the most attractive traits of Spelljammer: traveling from world to world, living adventures in fantastic lands. This next setting spawned from an idea by designer Slade Henson: why not build a world based on the complex cosmology that Jeff Grubb, Spelljammer's dad, had conceived for his Manual of the Planes years ago? That book was wildly original, was still one of the game's most popular sourcebooks, and had never been converted to the Second Edition. Henson and Grubb co-wrote a proposal, and-- yes, yes, I know, Jeff Grubb was in every single setting in one way or another. He is ultimately the hero in the shadows of this series.

Henson's idea ended up forgotten for months, until someone decided to pick it up do something with it: it was none other than David "Zeb" Cook, a legendary designer that had been one of the authors of the Second Edition, that had taken over its reins after Gary Gygax himself and that, surprisingly, had managed to finish a pretty good product in record time. Even before the Second Edition odyssey, Cook was already considered a true legend in the company: not only had he been one of the first designers that Gygax had hired for TSR, but he had written Oriental Adventures a few years before and in just a couple of months, inheriting the project when the original author had not been able to finish it on time and pretty much rewriting it on his own: the spectacular sales of that book had saved TSR from a more than likely bankruptcy and had also changed the game entirely (AD&D did not have a skill system before Oriental Adventures!).

Cook, who, after penning the first adventure module, had preferred to stay away from Dark Sun, accepted the new challenge. And he took the bull by the horns as, aside from the idea of an interdimensional campaign, the rest of Henson's proposal did not have much to do with what the setting ended up being: Colin McComb, one of the original members of the development team, says that if we are curious to know what that original proposal was like, we should close our eyes imagine elves surfing on the Astral Plane. Brrrrr. In fact, other veterans say that virtually the only thing left of the original proposal was its attractive title: Planescape.


The first time a Monstruous Compendium entry made me feel tingly.

The mission that Cook was entrusted with had the following terms: he had to create a complete extraplanar campaign world, accessible to characters of all levels, compatible with the standard cosmology of the Manual of the Planes, that conveyed a feeling of immensity but without overwhelming the DM, different from the rest of TSR settings, that could be explained to TSR executives in less than twenty-five words, oh, and that didn't use the words demon, devil or hell because the news had been insisting that roleplaying was totally satanic, and TSR received (literally) hundreds of letters from enraged parents. That was it! A simple task!

The Planescape project ended up in the hands of a team that, from the very beginning, was going to adopt a style that definitely was not the house style. In addition to Cook and McComb, editor David Wise and conceptual artist Dana Knutson joined the team. They would soon add illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi as a fifth member, just like Brom had done with Dark Sun. McComb recalls that our heroic Jeff Grubb was immersed in the design of a new beginner-level game and that he had all the directors of the company continually looking over his shoulder, leaving the Planescape designers to do basically what they wanted.

So they did something bizarre.


No, no D&D product has ever had art this good. I'm sorry. We peaked here.

McComb also fondly remembers the design process: the group often ended up laughing so hard that their editors had to come in and tell them to shut up now and start working at once. And it is a good thing that they took it with humor because Zeb Cook was, plain and simply, burned up. Up to his very beholders, if you will. All those years working in heroic fantasy had made him hate it, so he found refuge in strange movies and experimental literature. This creative crisis ended up giving the setting a unique approach, turning Planescape into something that, as it wasn't primarily based on sword-and-sorcery and high fantasy, did not look much like any other existing fantasy world. Instead of Tolkien or Howard, Cook's references were Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Going far beyond what Ravenloft and Dark Sun had already accomplished, Planescape was soon going to redefine what could be done in a fantasy RPG: no one actually knew how to define precisely what was coming out of that development team, and Colin McComb would end up calling the genre they had assumed as their own "avant-garde fantasy."

Planescape had also something important, especially in the nineties: attitude. The sourcebooks were written in a cynical and arrogant tone using a unique slang that Cook had created based on Elizabethan English. DiTerlizzi and Knutson gave it a quirky organic and rusty graphic style, a midpoint between children's illustrations and cyberpunk art. A piece by Knutson, a woman with a crown of swords surrounding her face, ended up becoming the central figure in the setting: the Lady of Pain. The group became so fascinated by the Lady of Pain that it became the Planescape logo, as you can see at the beginning of this post.


"Shee seems nice to me!" (Note: the Lady of Pain is an unkillable entity that even gods fear and that violently shreds mortals for reasons not fully understood. She's not nice.)

When it was time to start detailing the setting, Cook knew he had to fix one of Spelljammer's fundamental problems, so he decided to add a center to his campaign: after briefly contemplating that said center could simply be some kind of magical object or vehicle that helped characters travel between worlds (something like the TARDIS from Doctor Who) he ended up creating a literal geographical center of the multiverse called Sigil, the City of the Doors of the mysterious Lady of Pain, floating in the center of the Outer Planes and containing portals to every imaginable place in the multiverse. Another designer, Jim Ward, told them that the different vampire clans in Vampire: The Masquerade were very popular and that adopting a similar concept could serve to give some cohesion to groups so diverse that players could theoretically build in an interdimensional campaign. That brilliant idea ended up evolving into the Factions, philosophical groups that competed for the dominance of Sigil and that were born from the amusement that Zeb Cook found to diverse marginal philosophical schools; These organizations, which Cook informally called "philosophers with clubs," had different ideas about the true nature of the multiverse and were willing to kill for them.


Introducing the favorite choice of emo and goth D&D kids for decades to come!

The playable species were also different from the usual. Although the timidest players still play as humans and elves, old extraplanar monsters like the githzerai or the bariaur suddenly became playable. But without a doubt, the most popular new species in the setting was a creation by Zeb Cook who, wanting players to be able to create demonic characters and without being able to use the word demon, decided to create a race of humans with traces of demonic blood and a cynical and tormented personality. Another TSR designer, Wolfgang Baur, gave him a name for the species derived from the German word tief, "deep," as a nod to their origin in the Lower Planes: the tiefling had been born, a species that in the Fourth and Fifth Editions would accomplish the feat of becoming one of the standard species of Dungeons & Dragons on the same level as elves or dwarves.


In case you thought fellas from Dark Sun looked too boring.

Although the end result was "a bizarre thing," the Planescape team had managed to meet all of the management requests. The setting, despite taking place in the AD&D equivalents of heaven and hell, was logical: knowing how humans are and considering that in Dungeons & Dragons there are magic spells that allow us to physically travel to the afterlife(s), is it not credible that we would have finished colonizing them and setting up our little businesses and schemes up there? Despite the extreme nature of the concept, Cook and company managed to make it not that different from a regular campaign: in a Planescape (extraplanar) adventure, players begin their enterprise in a tavern (manned by fire elementals) in the (extraplanar) city of Sigil, they go on adventures (through portals), they travel through the unexplored lands (of the Astral Plane), fight through a dungeon (inside the gigantic corpse of a dead god) and return home with their treasure (where various Factions try to split the treasure and also said treasure would turn out to be the crystallized souls of five-dimensional entities and... ok, not everything was just like standard D&D: Planescape brazenly tended towards the wildest fantasy.) The prohibition against using controversial names ended up giving extra personality to the environment, which renamed demons as tanar'ri and devils as baatezu, eliminating any relationship with real mythologies and incidentally giving friends in the legal department new names that they could happily register.


We are not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Lorraine Williams and company were apparently a bit flabbergasted when "the bizarre thing" turned out to be another absolute bestseller and, probably with resignation, decided that the group that had been formed to continue writing the later supplements (made up of McComb and other recent recruits like Monte Cook, who despite the surname had nothing to do with Zeb Cook) was to be left to do whatever they wanted: if the recipe works, better not get your hands on it. The game saw several expansions exploring different planes and also adventure modules, especially many adventure modules, a return to a classic style that was already almost forgotten: apparently, Planescape was determined to do the opposite of what everyone was doing.

Although like the rest of the campaign settings, Planescape was canceled when Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, it still had a last surprise on it: in 1999, videogame Planescape: Torment, written by the legendary Chris Avellone and by Colin McComb himself, came out. Torment is considered one of the best RPG games in history even twenty years after its release, so Planescape certainly said goodbye in style. What about the roleplaying game? Although Planescape never officially returned, tieflings, Sigil, and the Lady of Pain became a fundamental part of the cosmology, having survived in the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Edition. It could be said that Planescape has been absorbed by Dungeons & Dragons. It is not a bad legacy, honestly.


If you haven't played this, it's still not too late.

In the mid-1990s, the Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Planescape trinity convinced the public that TSR had matured: their new campaign settings were adult, creative, and tremendously original. Although these more narrative settings have now been abandoned in favor of a return to a more informal style of play, their heritage is incalculable. But Second Edition still had one last setting to give us...

 

... and there we have it - one of the most beautiful, wonderful, original campaign settings that - simultaneously - reached back to the very beginning, a chart in the original Player's Handbook.
For those not familiar, the "Great Wheel" of D&D fame is (in effect) a Map of the Afterlife, a Chart of the Gods' Realms, based upon the two alignment axises - Good-Evil/Law-Chaos, with Neutral as the zero point. Each 'realm' was assigned a particular alignment, with an additional space in between (Lawful Good to Lawful/Neutral Good to Neutral Good to Neutral/Chaos Good, for example), the hub being "Concordant Opposition" - a fancy way of say "Pure Neutral". The original names of the realms were all pulled from our own religions and mythologies - Heaven/Hell/Abyss/Limbo/Gehenna/Pandemonium/Paradise from Christianity, Hades/Olympus/Tarterus/Arcadia/Elysium/Acheron from Greek/Roman mythology, Nirvana from Buddhism, the Happy Hunting Grounds from Native American beliefs, Gladsheim from Norse mythology. The first volume to describe the planes in detail, The Manual of the Planes, made it clear that for the most part, the depiction of the realms did not match much with the source material - Nirvana as the realm of Pure Law consisted of titanic interlocking gears, whereas Limbo was a formless soup of constantly changing matter. There were other planes too - the "Inner Planes" had the classic Greek elements forming planes surrounding our dimension, along with the realms of positive and negative energy.
From the earliest adventures, players traveled to the planes (specifically, "Queen of the Demonweb Pits", the final adventure of seven where the PCs travel to the Abyss to fight a demoness in her own lair), but in general they were inhospitable places where only the most well-equipped adventurers could venture, temporarily. Planescape changed all that.
I cannot emphasize enough how wonderful Sigil is - in fact, whereas Planescape as an official setting never technically survived 2nd edition, Sigil has made an appearance in every edition except the 1st. Sigil has its own slang, its own flavor, and is the ultimate neutral ground because the gods themselves can't visit. (The Lady of Pain is never truly explained, but the strongest of hints indicate that she is one of the ultimate 'powers' beyond the normal deities, who maintains Sigil as the fulcrum of reality itself) Plus, the setting has the awesome in-universe narrative rules that govern the universe: The Rule of Three (things happen in three), The Unity of Rings (things tend to be circular, coming back to where they started), and the Center of All (there is a center for everything and everything is a center).
I think that it did a better job of being a 'meta-setting' than Spelljammer because it, well, was more meta. I mean, technically even Spelljammer is inside Planescape! The various published adventures had side treks to the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, for instance (Dark Sun and Dragonlance were special cases as the inhabitants generally didn't get to do planar travel, but you still had characters from those settings show up in Sigil and elsewhere).
They also made an important point - you don't have to be powerful to be important. Somehow the lessons of the Lord of the Rings were missed in Dungeons & Dragons... I mean, Frodo wasn't exactly a 25th level dual-class Mage/Assassin with a Wand of Infinite Spellcasting, and yet he managed to go on a quest that radically changed his world. Similarly, in Planescape, you are maneuvering among the realms of the gods, demon lords, the Lady of Pain, none of whom you are ever going to be able to battle directly. And yet, you had some of the most epic adventures published for the game - where an unknown entity was killing gods, or a terrible plague swept over the planes, or a massive march of powerful beings threatened to ruin the realms. Plus, the concept of factions grew in 3rd edition to be something in all campaign settings, and notably is an important part of Paizo's D&D variation, Pathfinder.
Okay, yeah, I love Planescape.

 

I feel like I should go back to my post-moderating life avatar for a while...

 

I approved of the Cat Lord change.

 

Yes, Planescape is my favorite official campaign setting ever, not just in D&D but in every RPG I've played (and believe me, the list is long.) @blackmyron explained why very well. There was nothing like it. It was brimming with character and potential. Sigil had a cosmopolitan tone that no other setting has ever achieved: the city where you can trade with a demon and five minutes later get mugged by an angelic being. "Boo hoo evil races don't exist anymore." Planescape encouraged it, something that we wouldn't see again until 3E and Eberron.

It made you want to play immediately. And guess what? They let you make any character from any campaign setting you owned. Do you want a Knight of Solamnia from Dragonlance? An elven bladesinger from the Realms? A grugach barbarian from Greyhawk? Feel free! Don't be surprised if everyone looks at you like you are a redneck from some backwards town, though, because that's what you are.

(Aside: blackmyron's mention of Dark Sun being usually no planar-travel-friendly made me think of Black Spine, a DS module centered on a githyanki army attempting to invade Athas that culminated in a raid into their fortress in their Astral Plane, essentially combining my two favorite settings... and that I absolutely despised. Maybe this is the reason Hickman hated inter-settings crossovers.)

 

By the way, the series stops here for now! I’m working on the second half, that will include the last AD&D setting (Birthright), the Forgotten Realms subsettings (Kara-Tur, Al-Qadim, Maztica), some obscure settings (Jakandor, Council of Wyrms), and finally Eberron.

 

Council of Wyrms was weird, man...