After a comment on @monkeyking's post about D&D writin', I mentioned #DarkSun and #Planescape, and this seems as good a time as any to ruminate a bit on some thoughts for making interesting Planescape adventures.
A thread of... who knows what!
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Planescape's D&D with a side dish of philosophy. The core game drives you into conflicts via the Factions, each of which has some Thoughts about the nature of reality, the cosmos, and our relation to it.
This is important enough to affect your character!
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Since you pick a Faction affiliation—or you don't, and that, too, has consequences—and it gives you a mechanical alteration to your character, the game tells ya right up front that this is supposed to be central to the kinds of things that you do in play.
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So one of the ways that you can make an interesting Planescape adventure is by looking for a parallel between the esoteric and the exoteric in your story: Some way that the action reflects some element of a Faction's philosophy.
For instance...
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Rumors might tell of someone who claims to have memories of a life before this one, something that would suggest that the Dusters are correct in their belief that everyone's actually already dead, having died in some higher level of existence. But...
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... various Factions would want such a person silenced, of course. And how can you validate their claims? If it's all lies, it could be bad for the Dusters; what if one of the Dusters decides that eliminating this loose end is the better idea?
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Or, perhaps the PCs are approached by an apprentice psion, who explains that his mentor experienced some kind of mental break that has shattered her personality. He needs to send someone in telepathically to mend her mind, but it will take all his strength to make the link.
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He hires the PCs to enter the mindscape of a damaged mind, with fragments of personalities hidden throughout dreamlike (or nightmarish) landscapes. The PCs must slowly bring the personalities back together and merge them.
"We must go deeper!"
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Upon reassembling the psion, though, the mind shifts itself back into a fused whole, and the PCs find their personalities all fused into one form! Worse still, the psion becomes convinced that she can absorb them, too. How do they escape? Split her up again? Overcome her?
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Of course, this idea matches with the philosophy of the Signers: The psion is solipsistically building her own universe and asserting that other people are just figments of it. This ties in with the idea of the problem of other minds:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_o…
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So you can take one of the Factions and loop back to a big philosophical conundrum and then present it in adventure form. What if the psion's mind fragments again and pieces of her personality wind up trapped in each of the PCs? Whose mind is real? Which reality is real?
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Or a McGuffin story: The Guvners hear of a magical tabulator that can predict the outcomes of various actions with perfect accuracy. Possession of such an object could change the nature of their Faction!
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The Fraternity of Order would change its agenda from working on universal laws and loopholes to discovering the right questions to ask so that they can predetermine desired outcomes. Or just using the tabulator to home in on questions that would tell them about cosmic laws!
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Not everyone would love this. The Xaositects might think that it needs to be destroyed. (Or they might not care. Or different Xaositects might think different things.) And how accurate is the tabulator? On its home in Mechanus it could be perfectly accurate...
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... but perhaps in Limbo or the Abyss, where "universal laws" break down, it too loses its function? And where did it come from? Perhaps it was a tool of Primus, the One and the Prime, that was stolen by Tenebrous during Orcus' reign of terror? Without it...
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... Mechanus could become increasingly error-prone, so the PCs must decide whether to bring it to the Guvners or return it to the Modrons. But what questions do they ask it along the way?
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Another trick to making an interesting PS adventure is to just pick two of the Factions at random and pit their philosophies against each other for the adventure hook. For instance, the (rolls dice) Bleak Cabal and the (rolls) Athar. Ok, we create meaning vs. gods are fake.
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A new arrival turns out to be a demigod, child of one of the gods. The Athar believe that this person could be proof of their philosophy: The divine powers of the person show that you don't have to worship gods; gods—and, by extension, divinely-powered mortals—have power...
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... by their nature, not because gods are somehow deserving of worship and engaged in giving people powers in exchange. The Bleak Cabal, on the other hand, feels that this demigod's existence is a great chance to show that your life is your own to shape, that we are not...
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... predestined because of our roots, because there is no cosmic meaning to our origins and thus we make our own stories. Both sides want to recruit this demigod. But the twist? The god's divine parent has divinatory foreknowledge of this conflict, and is meddling by proxy.
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The PCs wind up being "guided" into this struggle as the demigod, a potentially valuable ally, is steered first this way and then that.
Or if you wanna get really over the top, reveal that the PCs are all demigods and it's part of a big divine experiment!
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Anyway, that's the thought for this morning. Planescape games run a philosophical idea in parallel to the adventure's action. Center the adventure around that idea, or relate it to the things that the PCs do, to make 'em resonate.
Until next time, sword-ringer!
~Fin~
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