Line #0 YMMV/Planescape


1	* BrokenBase:
2	** The Factions as a whole earn this, with many fierce wars about whether this faction or that is well-written or not. In general, fans tend to either love the Factions as a whole or hate them, and this gets more heated when you look at the factions individually.
3	** The Blood War is regarded by many fans as being an incredible, epic piece of background lore and iconic to the setting... and a significant number instead hate it, generally citing its PlotTumor nature. 4th edition ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' actually got rid of the Blood War as it used to be, downgrading its importance on the cosmological scale and changing it from a traditional ForeverWar to instead going through eons-long "hot" and "cold" phases of active conflict vs. rebuilding and resupplying for the next round, ''because'' the designers felt it was overdone, over-hyped, and tended to overshadow everything else about Sigil and the planes.
4	** The Faction War is a deeply controversial aspect of the setting, resulting in deep divides between those who loved the original factions and those who hated them. What makes this more contentious is that both 3rd and 4th edition used the post-Faction War version of Sigil as the default in their cosmologies. An ''immediate'' question among the fanbase when the [=5th=] Edition version of ''Planescape'' was announced was how, exactly, the new boxed set would follow up on all this.
5	** Whether the Lady of Pain is a good concept, forcing limits on the setting by just existing, or is a ridiculous excuse for screwing players. This is ''not'' helped by the degree to which individual [=GMs=] can "get" the Lady. Making this even more complicated in 2022 was the reveal in a [[https://www.expositionbreak.com/a-walk-through-the-planes-an-interview-with-monte-cook-ray-vallese-and-colin-mccomb/ retrospective interview]] with Monte Cook, Ray Vallese, and and Colin [=McComb=] that the Lady of Pain was an allegory for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Williams Lorraine Williams]] and Sigil was one for working at [[Creator/{{TSR}} TSR]] in general at the time. This raises questions about whether the Lady is simply ''dated'' conceptually, since by the time the [=5e=] ''Planescape'' set was scheduled to come out, Williams hadn't been involved with ''[=D&D=]'' in any capacity for a quarter-century.
6	* CompleteMonster: See [[Monster/DungeonsAndDragons here]].
7	* EnsembleDarkhorse: Shemeshka the Marauder is an arcanoloth of AmbiguousGender and one of the biggest influencers in Sigil. On top of [[CardCarryingVillain reveling in her]] Neutral Evil-dom, her popularity is presumably one of the reasons why the arcanoloths became their own race (the Ravaasta) in 4e's World Axis cosmology -- and it's certainly why Shemeshka was basically established as having obtained her desire of becoming ''the'' most powerful and influential woman in Sigil's 4e version.
8	* FanonDiscontinuity: You would be very hardpressed to find a self-described Planescape fan who likes 4th edition's "planar material", with the biggest sticking points being the replacing of the Great Wheel cosmology with the smaller, more compact and explicitly non-alignment-based World Axis, and the insistence on using a post-Faction War version of Sigil. While fans of the 4e-era cosmology do exist, they tend to be rather uninterested in ''Planescape.''
9	* HilariousInHindsight:
10	** The name of members of the Society of Sensation, "Sensates", after the release of ''Series/Sense8''. The Sensates' signature gadgets, the sensory stones, are even designed to be a (limited, low-bandwidth) way of "sharing sensation" the way the main characters of ''[=Sense8=]'' do.
11	** And for an earlier and more famous work by Creator/TheWachowskis, the fact that the Signer faction is searching for an {{omnipotent}} RealityWarper known as [[Film/TheMatrix the One]].
12	* MoralEventHorizon: Rowan Darkwood. His plans to instigate the Faction War involved taking control over the Mercykillers. He couldn't do that without seducing Alishon Nilesia, who while being a KnightTemplar, was a 19-year old girl. After winning her heart, he persuaded her to marry him and involve him in her faction's chain of command. Then he sold her into slavery to the fiends.
13	* NightmareFuel: All of the Lower Planes. NightmareFuel can appear in other places throughout the setting as well.
14	** Special mention goes to the Inner Planes. The four Elemental Planes can be scary enough (you fall until you die of dehydration, drown, get crushed or burned alive) and the Paraelemental Planes (the four planes between the Planes of Air, Water, Earth and Fire) can put one in the dead-book real fast by either freezing, corrosion, melting or suffocation. But it's the Quasi-Elemental Planes that get real scary. Here a berk can get roasted by lightning, fossilized, blinded and incinerated, boiled alive, burned by cinders, disintegrated, have all the water sucked out of your body or just die from exposure to a vacuum. [[SarcasmMode Things get extra fun]] when you land in the area where a Quasi-Elemental Plane borders another or one of the Para-Elemental Planes. And that's nothing to say about what the Positive and Negative Energy Planes can do to a body...
15	*** To put things in proper perspective, one part of the Elemental Planes is ''an infinite desert of radioactive dust''. And ''there's no known cure for radiation poisoning in Sigil''.
16	* ParanoiaFuel: Portals. They can be anywhere. Any opening can be a portal, from a door to a rat hole to the opening in a barrel to an arch over a street. It's impossible to be certain where one may pop up until someone stumbles by with that portal's key, which can be anything from a priceless artifact to a stray thought or memory. And they can lead anywhere, from Mount Celestia to Toril to any of the Nine Hells. It's an accepted risk to living in Sigil that one can trip right into a portal without knowing it and end up on another plane altogether. Just walking into your front house can lead you to the Ash Wastes. Even worse is the Hive, where ''any random puddle'' could be a one-way and permanently active portal to the Paraelemental Plane of Ooze.
17	* RetroactiveRecognition: One of the key writers for the campaign was Tony [=DiTerlizzi=], who would later go on to write Literature/TheSpiderwickChronicles (along with Creator/HollyBlack) and the Literature/{{WondLa}} series, both of which later became favorites of children's literature.
18	* ViewerPronunciationConfusion:
19	** Just how does one pronounce baatezu, tanar'ri, or Xaositect anyways? ''A Player's Primer to the Outlands'' and ''VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment'' helped a bit, but not enough to stop endless arguments at the game table.
20	** Creator/{{TSR}} briefly ''did'' have a recorded pronunciation guide on their website. Not that this had any effect except to intensify arguments over whether they were "right."

Context YMMV / Planescape