I have finished reading the new Planescape box-set and I have thoughts.
It comes in three parts, Sigil and the Outlands which is a gazetteer with some player options, Morte's Planar Parade that is a monster book and Turn of Fortune's Wheel which is a campaign-adventure.
I thought the gazetteer was OK, not brilliant but much better than the Spelljammer book that had hardly any setting information at all. It is slim compared to the Eberron or Ravenloft books but if I want to go deeper there is a lot of 2e stuff to go back to and the new book gives me a framework to understand it through. When I was reading the 2e material I spent a lot of time thinking that it was good stuff but I didn't know what to do with it, now I think I have a better idea what to do with it.
It has a reasonable description of Sigil and it's different districts, two pages each on the gate-towns in the outlands and descriptions of each of the factions and and their leaders. There's enough here to do something with Sigil I think, unlike the scant few pages we got on the Rock of Braal.
I was disappointed there wasn't more on the planes at first but given the space constraints I think focussing on Sigil and the Outlands was the right choice. I have other sources like The DMG, old Planescape material, Monte Cook's Planebreaker and Sly Flourish's City of Arches to add more things that might be on the other side of portals.
The player options are a little thin, two backgrounds and associated feats, but I'm pretty much over player options by this point so I 'm fine with that.
The monster book suffers a little from the recent excess of 5e monster books and we could have managed without but I generally like it, some interesting creatures and a nice array of planar NPCs in a decent range of CR. The high CR creatures suffer from the usual WotC curse of not hitting anything like hard enough to be a threat to players of a suitable level to face them, but it is hard to call this book out for it specifically when all the others are the same.
The adventure though. I was going to write a fairly generic spoiler-free review but I'm not sure I can. I'll put the high points here then leave a gap before more spoilery stuff.
The start is great, I don't know what to make of the middle and I don't think I'm enough of a DM to turn the end into a satisfying conclusion. I think it would have been a better adventure without the gimmicks.
TL;DR Better than Spelljammer, but still not a top tier product.
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SPOILERS FOLLOW
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This might not be the strangest adventure I've read (there were some wacky Spelljammer things) but it is the strangest that I've considered running.
It consists of Part 1, the introduction which takes place in Sigil. Part 2, which takes place in the outlands, and Part 3, which is a return to Sigil where they discover what has happened to them and fix it then the conclusion proper.
I love the start, you wake up in Sigil's morgue with amnesia and have to escape. There is some danger of waking up in the Morgue becoming the "meet in a tavern" (or given more recent adventures meet at a festival) of Planescape but I was genuinely excited to run chapter 1.
I didn't feel like it got to that high point again.
There is a pretty good chance the PCs will die during this chapter, there are several deadly traps and encounters and this is where you are likely to encounter the "glitch" mechanic. The PCs are part of some cosmic glitch that means then they die they are quickly replaced by another version of themselves. This other version can be very similar to them or wildly different but they all have some "Nexus feature", such as a notable scar or particular hairstyle which every variant shares, and they all have amnesia about who they are and what they are doing here. This is an interesting idea but it causes issues I'll discuss later.
The rest of part 1 is fine, the link to get you to The Fortune's Wheel casino and start the adventure proper is a bit tenuous and random sewer cakes are ??? but I guess it is some light relief after the morgue.
You meet Shemeshka, an Arcanaloth spy-master and information broker. She sends the PCs on a quest to find a missing Modron who may have the key to fixing their glitched status. Her motives are seemingly to get them out of the way on a wild goose chase that will take them out of the city but her motives are not really clear here. She is the one that has caused the characters to be glitched as a way of getting them out of her hair after she has been fighting them for years. But if she has been fighting them for years why doesn't she send them on a proper wild goose chase? "Only the diamond from the crown of Orcus will restore you" type stuff, instead she sends them to do the actual thing that will allow them to repair the glitch.
Part 2 starts well, they find a fiend-infested walking fortress and take possession of it which allows them to travel around the outlands in style. They also find a broken Mimir, a sentient recording device in the form of a skull. When repaired this Mimir can tell them where to find the missing Modron if they take it on a tour of the various towns in the outlands and have it gather data at the gates located there. Not the biggest issue but they need an arcana check to fix the Mimir. Are we really gating the whole adventure behind that? What happens if they fail and just throw it away? I'm sure a competent DM can work around it but come on WotC, that seems like a rookie mistake.
The gate towns are a mixed bag, some of them I like a lot some not so much but the variety is good and it is a good highlight tour of the outlands.
I have issues with the structure here though.
After a few adventures (Witchlight and Netherdeep) that I have struggled to bring in player backgrounds because they get whisked away to another plane/continent this is a really great opportunity to explore the setting with few limitations or restrictions. There is so much potential here for side-quests and backstory, you could spin this out into a years-long campaign. But everyone is an amnesiac glitch who likely isn't even from this reality, maybe you can throw in a few NPCs who recognise them from their past life but how many times can you get away with that? and if they die, it isn't even the same past life any more as the glitches are all from different realities.
Also, the glitch mechanic removes all threat. The adventure talks about how you don't come back in the same combat encounter and how you will only have the same spell-slots you had when you "died" but it reduces death to the status of minor inconvenience at worst. I love it in the Mortuary where there are hard fights and deadly traps and you can turn up back on the slab being mocked by Mort, but it seems like a lot less fun here. Without backstory you are left with working out your character through play, and I'm cool with that, but then that character you developed through play? you died and became a different guy with the same colour eyes.
They seem to overestimate how often players will die too, I usually get an average of 1 death a campaign. I have the excuse to turn the dials to full deadly here but that seems hard on the players and will seem very DM vs player.
My other issue is that if you just have them skip from town to town the quests are all essentially "do a sidequest get a plot coupon" and after a couple the players will be asking "where's the guy that needs a favour so we can get the gate done?" and if you fill it in with a lot of side adventures there's a danger of "why are we here and what are we doing?" syndrome.
This whole part, which is the bulk of the adventure, is just a giant missed opportunity in my eyes.
Part 3 has lots of cool ideas that I'm not sure I have the DM chops to pull off.
Having restored all the Mimir's memories he will direct you to the Spire where you can find the missing Modron.
The spire is fine but they get betrayed by an NPC. I don't like betrayer NPC's, especially as right after this one we will run into Shemeska and discover she has betrayed them too.
Nevertheless they find the Modron and he directs them back to the Platinum Rooms, an exclusive back area at The Fortune's Wheel, the casino we visited at the start. Here the PCs need to win several of the mini-games in order to get the attention of security who will take them to a back room to enquire about why they are so lucky and they can meet Shemeshka again.
This is kind of OK, but as far as I can work out they start with 1 platinum chip that they need to operate the gate to leave and have to turn that into wins in 3 games, each of which costs 1 platinum chip to play. They can buy more chips with secrets, but will they? And they only have so many secrets to trade, this all seems very luck dependent. Assuming they make it to Shemeska- oh no! betrayal! they fight and then she stops the fight to negotiate. Hmm, that might not go well, but at least you can get the exposition via searching the office.
Then if they do the thing they need to do their different glitches are reunified and they skip right from 10th to 17th level. They have their memories back now and finally know who they are. But we have played these characters for most of the campaign now and might have developed some personality and things for them. Now might just make a new one with a new story?
We can get used to these characters by playing unused parts of the adventure apparently (though any unused parts will be very easy now they skipped 7 levels) or something from an anthology. Which is, well there isn't an anthology that WotC publishes that has level 17 content. I guess 3rd party folks making lair books etc. will appreciate the business.
That aside, on to the wacky final dungeon. It looks fun but I'm a little unsure how it will work, presumably the footprints on the map represent the path of the modrons but the maps look empty considering they are supposed to be crowded and yet are cramped because most of it is taken up with invisible (on the map) Modrons. Still, there's a final boss then the conclusion.
This is all thinner than I would like.
The idea is that Shemeska has been manipulating some Modrons left after the last unscheduled Modron march and will involve the Modrons in the Blood War and profit from the arms sales is all kind of good, but that outcome is by no means guaranteed and I'm not sure whether I'm enough of a DM to make this a satisfying ending.
Someone really loved the Great Modron March adventure I think since they have been marching every 289 years like clockwork for millenia, except the last march was off schedule, we have traced the path of the march in this adventure, some of the Modrons have been captured and are still marching and then if Shemeshka's plan comes off they will have another unscheduled march. I'm sure it is fine, but I wish they had read The Blood War instead because I love the idea of Sigil as neutral ground where we could have played out a cold war inspired spy thriller as the demonic and devilish factions vied for advantage without attracting the ire of the Lady of Pain. But I guess we can't all be the same.
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