Planescape is a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. It primarily concerns Sigil, the City of Doors, a city at the "center of the multiverse," with portals leading anywhere and everywhere. Although the setting encompasses the entire D&D multiverse, the city's location in the middle of the Outer Planes means that the realms of belief where the gods reside play center stage.
Those beliefs are important: Sigil plays home to 15 factions, "philosophers with clubs" who each have different core beliefs about the multiverse, and the collective power of their belief makes them true. They vie for the hearts and minds of Sigil's residents in the hope that whoever "wins" will win control of the multiverse.
In a city with factions warring for supremacy, where angels and demons can clash, the peace is kept by the enigmatic Lady of Pain, who controls all the city's portals, and bars gods from entry.
Production History[]
AD&D 2nd Edition[]
Initially pitched by Slade Henson, he, Dori Hein, and Jeff Grubb (author of the original Manual of the Planes) developed a proposal for a new game line called Planescape. The final line bore little resemblance to the first proposal, but Slade nailed the name out of the gate.
The idea was shelved for year, before it was assigned to David "Zeb" Cook to design Planescape, working with editor David Wise to find Planescape's "voice," most obviously through use of the cant. Artist Dana Knutson was assigned to draw whatever they wanted. His initial sketches defined the look of Planescape, and sold TSR brass on the setting. His doodles became the Lady of Pain and the various faction symbols. Artist Robh Ruppel was also brought in for brainstorming sessions.
It's been suggested that Planescape was partly devised as a way to keep D&D players from moving to the popular World of Darkness, which had debuted a few years earlier in 1991, with Planescape's factions being a D&D take on the WoD's own vampire clans, werewolf tribes, and mage traditions.[1]
Robh's wife Cindy Jackson and mapper Dennis Kauth created the three-dimensional Lady of Pain that became the centerpiece of the game's logo, with Cindy sculpting the face and Dennis creating the halo of blades.
Impressed by his art on 1993's Monstrous Manual, TSR brought in Tony DiTerlizzi to handle the bulk of interior illustrations, while mapping was given to Rob "Lazz" Lazzaretti, formerly of GDW.
The original box set, the Planescape: Planescape Campaign Setting 
, released in April 1994.[2]
Publication continued through TSR's woes and sale to Wizards of the Coast in 1997, before being cancelled at the end of 1998. The line ended with a cliffhanger, of sorts: the penultimate Planescape: Faction War resulted in the banning of the 15 factions from Sigil, with several either disbanding, splitting, or merging. A note in the epilogue promised concerned readers that an upcoming supplement would see a way for the factions to return. That supplement never arrived.
Planar-based products were folded back into the main D&D line for the next few years, before AD&D 2nd Edition came to an end in 2000.
The final product was D&D: Die Vecna Die! , an adventure where the lich Vecna once again attempted to attain godhood. The adventure took characters from Vecna's original home world of Oerth (the setting of Greyhawk), to his domain in Ravenloft, to Sigil, where he would wrest control of Sigil from the Lady of Pain and remake the multiverse in his own image.
Planescape: Torment[]
- See also: Planescape: Torment
1999 would see the release of Planescape: Torment, a CRPG from Interplay's Black Isle Studios. The game used BioWare's Infinity Engine, previously used in Baldur's Gate. Due to the vagaries of development, it was released a year after the game it was based on had been cancelled.
Curiously, Colin McComb, who had been working on Planescape since nearly the beginning, had left TSR to join Black Isle years earlier, unaware that he'd soon be working on a Planescape project again.
The Interim Years[]
Once Planescape was cancelled, WotC started a fan site policy: Communities could run their own sites, but each community had to develop their own logo to use. This was the winning design for Planescape's "official" unofficial logo, by Jeremiah Golden.
2nd Edition famously had a glut of different campaign settings available; most of these were cancelled by the arrival of 3rd Edition in 2000, and Planescape was no exception. Planar content was still occasionally visited in the main D&D line, most notably with the new 2001 D&D: Manual of the Planes and 2004's D&D: Planar Handbook for 3.5e.
The new Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting was published in 2001, and included Planescape's tieflings and eladrin as playable character races.
Ravenloft was resurrected via a third-party license, published via White Wolf's Sword & Sorcery imprint. This lead to some speculation that they might also resurrect Planescape, due to the similarity with WW's World of Darkness, but this never manifested.
Supplementary material such as Dragon Magazine had a little more freedom from the full books, and it played host to a number of articles specifically referencing Planescape, typically looking at and updating factions to the current rules, and examining the aftereffects of the Faction War.
4th Edition arrived in 2008 and saw both more and less planar content: tieflings and eladrin, originally from Planescape, were moved from Forgotten Realms into the core rules. 2009's D&D: Dungeon Master's Guide 2 included Sigil as a paragon-level campaign setting and provided a Sigil-focused adventure.
On the other hand, the decline and cancellation of Dragon Magazine meant there were only two notable Planescape-related articles, one covering the Mercykillers, and one featuring a behind-the-scenes look into writing Sigil for the DMG2.
5th Edition[]
In July 2013, a Wizards blog post about the upcoming 5th Edition indicated that when "it comes to the outer planes, we're treating Planescape as our default assumption. It's a much-beloved setting and one that's fairly easy (by design) to integrate into existing campaigns. That means the return of the Great Wheel, the Blood War, and other classic elements of the D&D cosmos."[3] This led many to hope that Planescape would return for 5th Edition, but no further news manifested.
Once the Player's Handbook released in 2014, tieflings were once again a core race, although eladrin were not.
Guildmaster Rhys made a surprise appearance in an illustration for October 2020's Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, surrounded by Transcendent Order symbols.
Finally, 25 years after the last official supplement in 2nd Edition, and nearly 30 years since the first boxed set, D&D 5th Edition released Planescape: Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse in October 2023, an official return to the Planescape setting. The project was spearheaded by Justice Ramin Arman and F. Wesley Schneider. Tony DiTerlizzi returned to do art and design for the covers and DM Screen of the deluxe edition.
Unlike its original run, Planescape doesn't appear to have a lot of time on the ground: Like Die Vecna Die! before it, an epic adventure starring the Lich-God is planned for May 2024 as a last hurrah for the edition, called Vecna: Eve of Ruin[4]. This adventure has Vecna in search of the fabled Rod of Seven Parts in order to destroy the multiverse. The adventure is even more of a grand tour of the multiverse, having PCs travel through the Forgotten Realms, Spelljammer, Ravenloft, Planescape, Dragonlance, Eberron, and Greyhawk.
Revised D&D rulebooks will be released for the end of 2024.