tl:dr; talking Planescape, the 800lb gorilla of planar settings on the eve of its re-issue. Factions are pitched hard but there is so much more in here.

Planescape is coming back this October and I wanted to take a look at what we got before to refresh our memories before that. So credentials - I was known as a Planescape GM for most of my 2e/3e time. This box set was bought on holiday in Italy, I saw it in a shop after having read about it in Dragon and persuaded my parents to get it for me. I was riveted from that point on.

What actually lives in my Planescape box after ~ 25 years

The books themselves are gorgeous, filled with DiTerlizzi art in its slightly fiercer whimsical incarnation. I think a major part of the setting appeal was the world portrayed through the art.

I picked up most of the major Planescape releases bar the adventures and as you can see the bestiaries from all the sets together with the Guide to the Outlands migrated into the main box over time. All the maps ended up in the Outlands box - I am sure I had good reasons at the time. That box has moved ~ eight cities., five countries, two continents. The saddle stitching used has gotten a bit ragged in places but mostly has held - I think only one sheet has come off in all this time.

Cards on the table, I got a ton of use out of this. I was known for most of the 90's/00's as a Planescape DM. I had a home game, then I got this box and it became a Planescape game. I ran Planescape in college, I ran a play-by-text campaign shortly afterward. I got a *lot* of use from the setting. Let us come back to this after a cold eyes review of what was *actually* in the box.

What kind of desperate, ruthless mercenaries sign on for the Blood War?

It is known throughout the lower planes that the yugoloths make up the lions share of mercenaries - effectively a third equivalent group to the demons and the devils that are for hire. The question is who are all the mortal mercenaries that join in? What could they possibly seek and what use can they serve in such a cataclysmic conflict?

I like Blood War mercenaries as an on-ramp to the Blood War itself. In their mockery of your plans, their casual pity as you say you plan to venture into the Gray Waste, the raucous offer to pay you back double after you both survive the battle - all these things can throw the scale and horror of the Blood War into relief before the players get there. The particular spin these mercenaries will have on the horrors of course depends on their own motivations for being there.

Assume there are some who are no more than fodder - tricked into serving, expected to survive no more than their first battle, their lives spent cheaply by their fiendish generals. This is not about them, their story ends after the first conflict. The ones I am interested in are the long haul veterans. The survivors - those who could be called blood war veterans. What role do they serve and what keeps them in the fight?

Generated with Wombo.art

I saw a retrospective on a persons gaming (Failing Better on Against the Wicked City) and decided to tot up all the gaming I have been involved in over the years. The big thing I noticed here was there was quite a lot of gaps between games that actually gets accounted for by flare-outs, campaigns that never got off the grounds even after eating quite a lot of time in some cases. I will dig into the flare-outs and what went wrong in another post, but first - the great victories, the glorious campaigns run.

I guesstimated the hours spent running for the different campaigns to get an idea of how long all the campaigns ended up being at the table. This was surprising to me, I had felt some of them to be a lot longer than others but that may just have been prep time I sank into them vs how much actual play time happened.

For upcoming Gehenna hex-crawl piece, I am snapping off this mercenary band generator.

In particular I had in mind the volcanic slopes of Khalas, known as 'the Gentle Land', where the front lines of the Blood War surge back and forth but the broken landscape means there is no static, fortified line and lots of room for wandering around without being seen - or without seeing and thus avoiding some other band of ne'er-do-wells abroad beneath the Furnaces. I like about Gehenna is the cragginess of the place - the terrain is so difficult to deal with that again, it makes sense that even though the Blood War rolls over this place, you can move around unseen and avoid the clashes of mighty armies.

Khalas was where I set one of my longer running campaigns and I think it is a great part of the lower planes for many reasons. Least horrible of the lower planes you could pitch into Gehenna and while it is dangerous, it is plausible that you could survive there long enough to think you way out. Pitch up on Avernus or into the Gray Wastes and the clock is ticking for you. All of the 'off-cardinal' lower planes are generally more survivable because they do not have a native power of the lower planes - no devils, no demons, in theory the yugoloths live here but they hold the place with a lighter grasp if so. The noted local powers of Gehenna are the Barghests - described as the 'only true natives' of Gehenna. Taking this as true, then Gehenna is sufficiently easy to slip about in that CR4 blue goblin lycanthropes can hold dominion where the rulers in the planes on either side are CR13 Ultroloths and CR20 Pit fiends.

Altogether, I read that as a canon license for cunning lower level adventurers to slither about in the shadows without that being against the spirit of the place. Below you will find some tables for setting the scene for the local Blood War and the mercenary bands players could run into.