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"What can change the nature of a man?"

You wake up in a massive mortuary. You are the Nameless One, and you have no memory of who you are or how you got to the mortuary, with only a heavily scarred body and a few tattoos to give you a clue of your past. Aided by a sarcastic talking skull Morte, you escape from the building into Sigil, the City of Doors, a place linked to countless planar portals, located at the center of the multiverse. Here, regaining your past becomes an increasingly complex proposition.

Released in 1999 by Black Isle Studios and set in the Dungeons & Dragons setting Planescape in the Outer Planes, the Role-Playing Game Planescape: Torment was applauded for its storyline and script. What starts off looking like a stereotypical amnesia tale drops you and your hero into a very strange world with interlocking plotlines about your past, complete with a series of helpers who may or may not know more than they're letting on. It's like Memento in computer game form (although it predates it, so it's more like Memento is a movie version of Planescape: Torment).

It's also well-known for being heavy on the personal interactions and puzzles, while relatively light on the combat, so much so that it's more a highly interactive novel than a game. In many situations, your allies are more useful for the advice they can bring and the clues they can decipher than any capacity as "another warm body to throw at the enemy" (although some of them are pretty hot indeed). For a complete gaming experience, creating a character with high intelligence, charisma, and wisdom gives the best dialogue options. Which isn't to say that the game is lacking in enemy encounters and dungeon crawling for players more interested in monster slaying.

The game makes an effort to subvert or avoid as many RPG tropes and cliches as possible. Instead of Saving the World, the player character is interested only in discovering the truth about himself. Instead of a Cool Sword, you have "equippable" tattoos, earrings and even eyes. Your statistics matter a great deal, and the game plays dramatically differently depending on what you decide to emphasize.

The main character's Healing Factor allows you, among other things, to wield your own arm as a club and wear your own intestines as an armlet. You can bite your fingers off and pluck your eyeballs out in order to replace them with something better. Death is usually just a minor annoyance that can be often turned to your advantage.

Bottom line: this game is strange. It did not sell well but was very highly acclaimed, remaining a Cult Classic to this day.

The game has two novelizations. The first, released in 1999, went the way of the Baldur's Gate novelizations and was ripe with Canon Discontinuity. The second, released online in 2000, was a fan novelization of the game's script based on one particular play through. It can be found here.

Thanks to Kickstarter, Planescape: Torment has two Spiritual Successors: Pillars of Eternity by Obsidian Entertainment released in March 2015, and Torment: Tides of Numenera by inXile Entertainment released in February 2017. The latter takes place in the Science Fantasy far future Earth setting of Numenera. (inXile couldn't obtain the rights to the Planescape setting.) Disco Elysium has also been pointed to as a spiritual successor, not only because of its clear inspiration from Torment, but also because of its willingness to go further in its subversion of and innovation upon RPG tropes.

An Enhanced Edition of the game, similar to the ones done for Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, was released on April 11, 2017, firstly on PCs and mobile devices, and then two years later on consoles.


This game provides examples of:

  • 11th-Hour Ranger: By the time Vhailor, a strong combat-oriented companion, can be recruited into your party, it is possible to speed your way to the end credits in 2-3 hours, especially on a combat-oriented playthrough.
  • 11th-Hour Superpower:
    • Finding out the use for the Bronze Sphere will grant you an insane amount of power right before facing the Big Bad.
    • The Symbol of Torment is also learned at the last minute, giving an infinite-use unavoidable attack inflicting 30-100 damage.
    • Vhailor and Dak'kon both get 2 million EXP and instant boosts to their stats right before the Final Boss if you resurrect them and choose to engage the Transcendent One in combat.
  • Absurdly High Level Cap:
    • While AD&D normally has a level cap of 20, this game brings the cap up to 127. Reaching this level cap under normal circumstances is at the very least highly time-consuming. Depending on the player's choices, the party's levels at the end of the game can vary wildly, not only from player to player, but from character to character as well. There's a ginormous totally ludicrous experience bonus for the Nameless One you can get right at the end of the game that's the main reason the level cap makes any sense. It gives you 2 million XP and several levels in one single reward. You can get your main character near level 40 following all quests and combat options (although the average lies more in the 20-30 range), and you can keep going if you grind.
    • Vhailor can also get a massive XP bonus near the end which gives him several levels in one go if requirements are met. Not quite the same as the Nameless one but still quite an insane amount. Dak'kon can get a similarly massive XP bonus by meeting a different requirement, though as he's a spellcaster and there's no means of resting before the final fight at that point, he doesn't get quite as much benefit from it.
  • Acrophobic Bird:
    • Fall-From-Grace's wings are never used, nor do any of the abishai fly.
    • In an amusing inversion, Trias, the angel with the destroyed wings, shouldn't be able to fly but does. Of course, he's a spellcaster and Fly spells are low level.
  • Affectionate Parody: The entire Modron Maze is one long parody of ultra-cliché dungeon crawls. At least until you meet the "Evil Wizard Construct".
  • Alas, Poor Villain: Ravel Puzzlewell is a horrible being, practically an incarnation of evil. The stories of her cruelties are legendary, and people are still afraid to talk about her, centuries after she disappeared for good. And yet... three times she tried to do an act of kindness, and each time it backfired terribly on her. Then there's the fragments of herself that she's left around, like poor old Mebbeth, a kind healer who helps you a great deal, should you ask for it. After Ravel's death, Mebbeth slowly fades away, filled with regret. Ravel's incarnations in the Icewind Dale games are also a far cry from the bogeyman described in this game, being instead very human—if eccentric—characters.
  • All for Nothing: In addition to getting the helpful tattoos put on your back, the Practical Incarnation writes an extensive journal that keeps tracks of everything he learned in his journey to find your true identity. When the Paranoid Incarnation emerges, one of the first things he does is to destroy the journal.
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys:
    • Deionarra fell deeply in love with one of The Nameless One's previous incarnations. Too bad for her that it was the Practical Incarnation.
    • Also true if the player chooses to play The Nameless One as a bad guy and puts sufficient points into his Charisma.
  • All There in the Manual:
    • In this case the official strategy guide; the reason why the Nameless One can't become a priest (he can become every other class) is because every god had forsaken him long ago.
    • In Carceri and Baator your spells get screwed up. For example a strength spell will actually diminish your strength instead of boosting it. Due to the flaky nature of this (not all spells are affected) it was assumed by many people to be a bug, but it's completely intentional since magic works differently on other planes. It's very unlikely a player would know this, though, since it's only mentioned in the Planescape campaign setting booklets.
  • Always Someone Better: Mebbeth will cite this trope if you tell her you want to learn magic chiefly to gain power. It's a vain and foolish motivation, as there will always be someone stronger, and you'll attract their ire if your ambition overreaches.
  • Amnesia Danger: As the Nameless One levels up, he actually remembers old skills rather than learns new ones. Without his amnesia, the Nameless One would pretty much be a Physical God.
  • Amnesiacs are Innocent: The Nameless One, to begin with, at least. His previous incarnations have done a lot of damage, however, and it is common for him to encounter the consequences of his past incarnations' misdeeds, which might cause memories to resurface. Given that his entire personality can shift dramatically after dying, swapping randomly from whichever side of the Balance Between Good and Evil he's on, one could possibly argue that he actually is innocent of the sins of his past selves.
  • And I Must Scream: Ignus. When the gate spell failed (the one a previous Incarnation forced him to use), his body became a living portal to the Plane of Fire. When this happened, a large portion of Sigil was burned down. Several wizards pooled their talents to contain him. You find him trapped, unable to speak and in terrible agony until you can free him. Oh, and he is the local bar's main attraction, so people come from all over just to see him.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You can only have six members of your party. There is no in-game explanation for why this is so. If you wish to recruit someone else, you will have to leave one of the people you brought with you behind. Infamously, the two secret characters are both in very inconvenient spots, and veteran players will either use a mod to remedy this or plan around it.
  • Arc Symbol: The Mark of Torment. It is the physical and metaphysical scar of your Torment, you spread torment where you go and draw tormented individuals to you in return, and a blade that can kill you is shaped like it. The Golden Ending has the Mark of Torment flapping in the field, signifying that you're free from torment forevermore.
  • Arc Words: "What can change the nature of a man?"
  • Arc Number: The Rule of Three, a staple of the Planescape setting. Used subtly for the most part, however. An early discussion about this makes the point that the rule is self-reinforcing for cosmological reasons and that obsessing about it just means seeing it where it's not relevant, real or not.
  • Armor Is Useless: The game features only a dozen suits and each of them can only be worn by a specific character. Morte, Nordom and Ignus can't wear any armor at all. The Nameless One, Annah and Fall-From-Grace can only wear clothes; the only clothes the Nameless One can wear are a disguise which becomes useless outside the Morgue. Dak'kon and Vhailor start out equipped in nonmagical armor (ceremonial zerth armor for the former, the equivalent of chainmail, and field plate mail for the latter) which they cannot change and which doesn't give them any bonus beyond the standard benefit to Armor Class (base AC 5 and 2 respectively, lower being better under AD&D rules). Instead the vast majority of AC bonuses come from enchanted rings, bracers, earrings, and tattoos.
  • Armor-Piercing Question: When The Nameless One once asked Ravel the Arc Words question, it drove her insane (well, moreso than baseline for a night hag) trying to puzzle it out.
  • The Atoner: One of the game's major themes is regret. As such, there are several examples of characters who are motivated by a need to atone:
    • One speaker at the Civic Festhall once fought in the Blood War. He uses his lectures to teach other people not to follow in his footprints, because the things he did during his stint has condemned his soul to the Lower Planes (and thus to keep fighting in it post-mortem, forever).
    • Amongst your party members, Morte has attached himself to The Nameless One to atone for a misdeed he's not even sure he did in the first place — lying to the original incarnation in such a way that it got the original killed.
    • The First Incarnation initially sought out Ravel Puzzlewell to grant him immortality so that he might atone for the sins he had committed during his lifetime and avoid an afterlife in the Blood War. Unfortunately, he realised too late that the weight of his sins would never be something he could balance, and that turning himself immortal was in itself an act that could never be atoned for; ever since, the remnants of his psyche have been trying to steer all the incarnations that came after away from evil.
  • Back from the Dead: The Nameless One is exceedingly difficult to kill off permanently, as he will regenerate his wounds and come back to life within a few hours of dying. The primary motivation of the story is finding out why this is happening, and what to do about it. It is also an important part of the gameplay, as it means the player doesn't have to be as careful as usual in a video game, and puzzles can be designed with this power in mind. An insistent player can limit the number of deaths to about half a dozen on-screen deaths, however, with three or so coming from the same puzzle and the rest coming from sidequest cutscenes.
  • Badass Boast: There are numerous entities in this game that have godlike power levels, so it's only to be expected that this trope shows up frequently:
    • When Fall-From-Grace is confronted by The Transcendent One near the end of the game, he tells her, "I can forge planes with my power. I can unmake you."
    • If the Nameless One asks Coaxmetal the Iron Golem about what he's doing, he responds with "I forge the weapons by which the universe will be unmade."
  • Balancing Death's Books: Every time the Nameless One resurrects, someone else dies in his place. Their ghosts become the shades that periodically attack the party. When the final dungeon is reached, the number of Greater Shadows encountered is based on how many times The Nameless One died throughout the game.
  • Barbie Doll Anatomy: There is a giant statue of a naked woman with smooth skin where genitalia and nipples should be. Since it's in the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts, this can be understandable.
  • Beast and Beauty: Zig-Zagged via the Nameless One's romantic possibilities, Annah-of-the-Shadows and Fall-From-Grace, who are, respectively, a tiefling (demon-blooded mortal) and a succubus. Both of them are far more attractive looking than the heavily scarred Nameless One, but at the same time, they can be seen as the "beasts" due to their demonic nature — Grace, in particular, was once a soul-stealing heartless killer before her metaphysical redemption.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: Invoked by Morte, who at one point tells the "that was your first wish" joke as a serious story. A memory crystal in the sensorium indicates that this actually happened, and that it happened to The Nameless One.
  • Betty and Veronica: The Nameless One's romantic interests are a fiery-tempered redhead and an even-tempered blond. Chris Avellone even said in an interview with GameSpot that Archie Comics was an inspiration for the characters.
  • Bilingual Backfire: This trope can be inverted towards the end of the game. The main character encounters his previous incarnations, including the Paranoid Incarnation, who learned the language of the Uyo, killed every other speaker, then wrote his diary in Uyo, ensuring no-one would be able to decipher it. If you've found the journal and remembered the language, you can speak to him in Uyo and immediately win his trust.
  • Bilingual Bonus:
    • When Fall-From-Grace asks Morte what he is, he replies, "Me? I'm le petite Morte." "The little death" is a French euphemism for an orgasm.
    • Fall-From-Grace's spellcasting chants are Japanese words enunciated in slow English.
    • The Tattoo of the Lost Incarnation uses the Chinese character for rat/mouse.
    • The Tattoo of the Redeemer uses a Bonji (Sanskrit characters used as Buddhist holy symbols) representing Manjusri, bodhisattva of wisdom.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The Nameless One regains his mortality and uses his new found unlimited power to bring all his companions back to life. However, as he is now mortal, he is dragged into the Lower Planes as his long-overdue death finally claims him. Although he was finally caught by what he was trying to escape all along, an eternity in hell, he is at last at peace with himself, and accepts that he wrought his own fate. It's also implied that although he will be repenting for his cumulative sins for an eternity, he will find salvation some day.
  • Black-and-Grey Morality: The Dead Nations sequence is full of this. The Nameless One trespasses in a functioning undead society and is told he will stay their prisoner until death releases him, at which point he'll be raised as undead and become a free citizen of the Silent King's little kingdom of undeath. Despite that rather cold welcome, speaking to its inhabitants shows them to be a mostly friendly group of varied undead, simply trying to make the best of their situation and protect the crypts from the rampant looting and graverobbing. The high priest who condemned you can even be reasoned with to let you leave, after providing a few services for the community and/or learning the truth about the Silent King. While a prisoner, you run into Acaste, the ghoul matriarch, a completely evil creature who resents the nations' reactionary laws (they're forbidden to kill or feast on the living without provocation) and hungers to just kill and eat everything. The nations are opposed by Many-as-One, an unholy collective of cranium rats who's at least half on board with Acaste - it wants to scour the crypts of the undead and extend its own kingdom of filth far beyond its current confines.
  • Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Only three of the main characters have hair on their scalps: The Nameless One has black hair, Annah is a Fiery Redhead and Fall-From-Grace is blonde.
  • Body Horror: Poor, poor Ignus. All he wanted was power, and what he got was the fun of being turned into a living portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire. He eternally burns because a previous Incarnation was trying to find a way to Ravel.
  • Bonus Dungeon: Undersigil, the Rubikon Dungeon Construct and the Player's Maze are all dungeons that lie outside the beaten path and have little immediate connection to the story otherwise.
  • Broken Bridge: It is impossible to leave The Hive until the Bronze Orb has been found. When asked about it, Hive dwellers mutter something about "the streets being rearranged again."
  • Buffy Speak: You can have someone perform a little exploratory surgery on you to see if she can find any "thingees".
  • Bullying a Dragon: "You have tested your immortality against the wrong creature and have been destroyed.", this is the Game Over quote if you decide to piss off the Lady of Pain or Lothar, so don't try to annoy them.
  • Can't Bathe Without a Weapon: The description for the "Punch Daggers of Zar'Anun" mentions the eponymous thief was never without his daggers, keeping them with him even while he bathed.
  • Cessation of Existence: In two of the endings, The Nameless One kills himself with the Blade of the Immortal or wills himself out of existence. The end video only shows The Transcendent One disintegrating and then nothing, as The Nameless One has removed himself from existence altogether. Considering that the alternative is going to Hell, this may qualify as the best choice... assuming you're okay with your party being callously left behind with no hope at all for rescue (unless you didn't bring anyone with you) and avoiding the consequences for your past monstrosities.
  • Character Alignment: Invoked, the game being based on Dungeons & Dragons and all. You start as Neutral and your actions and decisions will slowly change your alignment.
    • There is a number of seemingly unimportant actions that can easily shift your alignment in unexpected ways, such as talking to (non-responsive) zombies making you more chaotic. Some of the items require having a specific alignment, too.
    • Apart from the obvious Selflessness=Good and Selfishness=Evil choices and alike, telling the truth and keeping your word will make you more lawful while lying, stealing and breaking promises or vows will make you more chaotic. As the zombie example above, doing nonsensical things very repeatedly after knowing there is no reason to do so again will earn you chaotic points.
    • Goes without saying but attacking any NPC who is not hostile for no reason will earn you Evil AND chaotic points. (It's bad and there is no reason to do so.)
    • It is actually hard as balls to stay Lawful and even more to stay Lawful Good. The game gives many MANY more ways to gain chaotic points and to be lawful you have to be honest and avoid lying altogether throughout most of the game since the very beginning. It pays off immensely though: the Infinity +1 Sword, Celestial Fire a "Holy Avenger sword" (straight out of the Tabletop Game) requires you to be Lawful Good. These normally +5 and beyond swords are insanely powerful while having defensive magic too but are restricted to Lawful Good with only paladins capable of using the magic abilities and aura they have.
    • Because your party members need to be able to stay with you regardless of what alignment you choose, all of them are varying shades of neutral (except for Morte). None of them are True Neutral either, which leads to some awkward categorization, such as labeling someone who delivers a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to a Lawful Neutral Knight Templar as Lawful Neutral herself. However, it's also an example of showing how even people with the same alignments can be very different people.
  • Character Class System: Of the variant that allows the main character to switch classes during the game.
  • Chekhov's Armoury: If you are prompted, either in dialogue or in narration, to pick up an item, do not lose that item. No, not even the prybar you were prompted to get to pull out the bolts on the skeleton. You will need it later. There will be a test. Above all, for the love of all that is good and holy, do NOT just leave the bronze sphere lying with Pharod's corpse. It is not as useless as it seems. Go back, pick it up and keep it until the bitter end.
  • Chivalrous Pervert: Morte is a floating skull. He suggests hitting on female zombies, flirts with every female character around, and buying him some time with a prostitute buffs his taunt skill. He's also the only party member who is actually Good aligned. He also spends time with a prostitute employed at a brothel of "Slaking Intellectual Lusts", and is able to buff his taunt skill because she has a particular talent for profanity and constructing curse phrases that impresses even the foul-mouthed Morte. Needless to say, he finds her even more attractive for it.
    Nordom: Attention; Morte. I have a question. Do you have a destiny? A purpose?
    Morte: Is Annah still wearing clothes?
    Nordom: Affirmatory.
    Morte: Then the answer is yes.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: This is how the gate town of Curst operates, virtually everyone in the town is out to figuratively or literally backstab everyone else over even the most trivial things.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The fundamental law of reality in the Planes. In-game examples include:
    • If you tell enough people that your name is "Adahn," a real person named Adahn will be brought into existence. He will be very confused about just where he came from (although he *knows* the Nameless One has been looking for him), and if told how he was created, he'll wink back out of existence. (If you have a high wisdom, you can also ask him to give you "some items you were holding for me.")
    • In a memory of the Nameless One, a previous incarnation successfully argues that someone does not exist, and that someone immediately ceases to do so. The audience watching your debate bursts into applause. Hilariously, the person you're arguing with is a member of the Sign Of One, a faction who routinely try disbelieve their enemies out of existence. In other words, you beat him at his own game.
    • One of the ways in which you talk the Big Bad to death is to believe so hard that the two of you don't exist that it happens.
    • The aptly named Mourns-For-Trees wants you to care for the suffering trees growing in the Hive area - not actually do anything to them, just have a general but genuine concern for their well-being and want them to thrive. If you agree to do so, and can get at least three of your companions to do the same, it will actually happen.
    • At one point, the gate-town of Curst (usually located on the True Neutral Plane of Concordant Opposition) slides into the Plane of Carceri when the residents are incited to riot, because the overall alignment goes too far into Chaotic Evil. By convincing the residents to get a grip on themselves and restore some semblance of order, the town will be able to return to where it belongs. Note that this is a very real game mechanic from the original setting.
  • Class Change Level Reset: The hero could become a warrior, wizard or thief. He starts as a warrior, and when he changes classes, he resets. Progression in the other classes are frozen until he changes back to them, though.
  • Climax Boss: Two, Ravel and Trias. They are two of a handful of fights you can't talk your way out of or run away from.
  • Cool Gate:
    • Sigil is called "the City of Doors" for a reason: every single arch or similarly limited passageway may be a portal to somewhere—provided you hold the proper key. A key in turn can be anything a person might be carrying or doing while passing through an arch, such as hum a melody. Even a stray thought is enough to activate a portal.
    • Deconstructed with one NPC, Ingress. She is deathly afraid of this, and with good reason. She's been desperately searching for the portal back home for decades, but the portals she found led to dangerous places, and she suffered dearly for it. Now she refuses to walk through anything that could be a portal, for fear she'll activate it and be sent to some horrible place, leading to her essentially living in the middle of a street.For thirty years. You can have a planeswalker guide her home.
  • Couldn't Find a Pen: Or parchment to write it on, for that matter. In the Player's Maze, you find a journal made out of human bones and skin. It is the Nameless One's own bones and skin from a previous incarnation when he was trapped in there for an untold amount of time.
  • Cursed Item: Many of the "cursed" items in the game had no negative effects other than requiring a Remove Curse spell to take them off. There were a few others that had effects that were legitimately detrimental, like Nordom's Beer Goggles, which gave a huge penalty to his attack and made him permanently drunk while he was wearing them.
  • Cute Monster Girl: Annah-of-the-Shadows is a very pretty woman, even despite the rat-like tail.
  • Cutscene Incompetence: How Morte gets captured in the Lower Ward.
  • Damsel in Distress: Outside Sigil, you have to rescue Jasilya from slavers and thugs respectively, but both quests are optionals. On the second rescue, she gives you a kiss if you allow her.
  • Dark and Troubled Past: All of the party members. Suffice to say that Annah, an orphaned tiefling who was forced to become a petty thief to survive, has the least troubled background. Did we mention she's a petty thief in a slum where devils and sapient, psychic rats walk the streets, and she earns her living by finding corpses to sell to a death cult? In several cases you are directly responsible for the dark and troubled pasts of your allies.
  • Deader than Dead: The Nameless One's eventual goal is to achieve this state.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Morte, from beginning to end.
  • Death as Game Mechanic: Your character can die and, when he does, he remembers more of his past and recovers abilities. You can also use your death for puzzle solving.
  • Death Faked for You: (At least) one undertaker has a deal with the Nameless One to sneak him into the Mortuary whenever he wants, getting extra money for the extra "corpse".
  • Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Dialogue is in many cases intentionally more dangerous than combat in this game. If you die during combat, you'll just wake up again and regenerate, but some dialogues can lead to Nonstandard Game Over.
  • Death Is Not Permanent: Resurrection spells aside, the game is about The Nameless One trying to figure out why he can't stay dead when he dies.
  • Death Is the Only Option: The Nameless One has quite a few chances to use his death to his advantage, being immortal. One example is allowing himself to be "killed" by some thugs so he can hear their plans.
  • Deal with the Devil:
  • Deconstructor Fleet: Many RPG tropes are turned on their head:
    • The Planescape setting itself is a deconstruction of roleplaying game worlds, specifically Dungeons & Dragons, specifically AD&D 2nd Edition. It takes certain aspects of the edition, such as the somewhat skewed take on the struggle between order and chaos in Moorcock's Elric novels, follows them to their natural conclusions, and thereby constructs a remarkably interesting world that provides superb backdrop for stories like that of Torment.
    • Also a deconstruction of CRPG death — mostly Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. In so many games, you die, you come back. Here, the entire game is an investigation into that mechanic.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The game's three bosses are a nigh-omnipotent demon witch, an angel, and a creature that, through thousands of years of accumulated experience, has basically become a Physical God. By the end of the game, you will have defeated at least one of them in combat, and will have the option of talking the other two into submission.
  • Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: The Nameless One is unusually difficult for many powerful beings to predict or control — Immune to Fate, his destiny is unwritten and his future cannot be seen; as an Amnesiac Hero, he often lacks memories for telepaths to read; and because of his long life and many disparate incarnations, he thwarts Living Lie Detectors because even if the current Nameless One is lying, it may still be true of a previous incarnation... From a Certain Point of View. Among others, this allows you to tell bald-faced lies to the likes of angels, devils, a psionic collective of sewer rats, and Vhailor, practically a walking avatar of justice whose absolute belief normally allows him to discern guilt — the weight of an entity's sins — on sight alone.
  • Disc-One Nuke: For Fighters proficient in hammers, it is fairly easy to get Mazed quite early in the game and find a Brimstone Hammer, which will last you until mid-game or later.
  • Do Not Taunt Cthulhu:
    • Annoy The Lady of Pain by mocking her and it will end very, very badly for you. Note that "annoy" means "worship, adore or otherwise allow her to take notice of you". She does not need nor want mortal worshippers.
    • Telling Morte to use his Litany of Curses against certain extremely powerful enemies will result in him saying "No way. I am not taunting that!" in place of his normal insult, though the effect still functions.
    • Invoked by the character in the in-universe story, "The Lady's Suitor", who's infatuated with The Lady and seeks to get her attention. So he starts worshipping her, which gets her attention alright... But he goes out with a smile, as he still sees it as his win.
  • Doppelmerger:
    • During the finale, the main protagonist's personality is shattered and he has to convince the duplicates to merge back with him so that he can continue his quest. One is particularly persistent about making the protagonist merge with him.
    • The Paranoid Incarnation, who sounds just like what you'd expect, came to the conclusion that future incarnations (who were merely new personalities assumed through Amnesiac Dissonance) were actually evil spirits looking to steal his body. He therefore spent an inordinate amount of time laying traps for people who matched his physical description, which he would know to avoid but the future incarnations wouldn't. This in turn is a plot-point and also helps convince him to merge by speaking in a language only he and the player speak (if the correct quest for this is done) thus showing him the player is someone to trust because he and TPI are the same person.
  • Double Meaning: Ravel drops a particular bit of foreshadowing about Trias when asked where to find him, but you are almost assured to overlook it in a first playthrough given how indistinguishable it is from the rest of her idiosyncratic speech patterns.
    Ravel Puzzlewell: He lies, lies beyond my keeping, in another cage (...) note 
  • Downer Ending: All the endings, to some degree. If you fail against the Big Bad, there's no special game over, but the implicit ending is bad enough that perhaps it should be included: The Transcendent One kills all your friends, and points out he has already killed everyone who can help you to find your way back to him. You are left trapped in the cycle of death and resurrection, never remembering who you are, explicitly becoming less and less of a man with every death, but unable to stop existing, forever.
  • The Dreaded: The Lady of Pain, the god-like ruler of Sigil, is spoken of only in hushed whispers, as drawing her attention is equivalent to having angered her. The player may draw her attention exactly once and survive — the second time, she kills The Nameless One out of hand, causing one of the game's few game overs.
  • Dressing as the Enemy:
    • One of the methods of escaping the Mortuary is to disguise The Nameless One as a zombie — with the downside of reducing movement to one-quarter speed. If the player takes this option, settle in for long stretches of watching The Nameless One sloooowly lurch across the screen.
    • The player can dress up The Nameless One in Dustman robes to get around the third floor undetected, but only if he has a high enough Dexterity stat to kill the Dustman they belonged to without setting off the alarm.
  • Driving Question: The search for the identity and history of the Nameless One drives most of the story.
  • Dump Stat: While highly physical "action runs" are possible, it is generally not considered to be the ideal way of playing the game. As a result, any of the three physical stats, namely Strength, Dexterity and Constitution, are likely to be neglected due to their marginal utility in dialogue. The exact dump stat varies depending on the player's preferred character class, but Strength and Dexterity are, respectively, generally only of interest to Fighters and Thieves (and uninteresting to Mages), while Constitution is usually kept either at the lowest level where regeneration can occur, or at the lowest level where the game's handful of Constitution checks can be passed.
  • Dying Moment of Awesome: Fall-From-Grace manages to hurt The Transcendent One before being killed. Your other party members are no slouches, either.
    Dak'kon: I may fall in battle, but I shall never be defeated.
  • Dysfunction Junction: Every character you can recruit has psychological issues, be they serious or no. Whether it is cause or effect, your character wears a magic symbol on his body that attracts tormented people. And often, you helped make them that way.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending:
    • The sidequest character Ingress has spent thirty years trapped in Sigil after accidentally wandering through a portal, and all she wants is to go home. If you help her out, her long torment finally ends in freedom.
    • Getting the best ending is not easy, but is oh so worth it. After struggling your way through the planes and several unbelievably powerful enemies, you finally reunite with or destroy the sentient manifestation of your own mortality and can finally die permanently.
  • Eat the Dog: According to the merchant who sells you one, Lim-Lims make pretty good eating in a pinch.
  • Eldritch Location: Sigil. There's a quest where you have to act as midwife to a pregnant street in order to proceed!
  • Empathic Weapon:
    • Dak'kon's karach blade, which is tied to his mental state (and ceases to exist if he lets go of it).
    • Ingress' Teeth, an equippable weapon for Morte. Although the implication is there to begin with, the content making it explicit was unused for Gameplay and Story Segregation reasons. The restored version most commonly used was expanded by the modder to about double its original length, and has Morte apologizing to the Teeth for insulting them.
    • Nordom's gear spirits.
  • Entertainment Below Their Age: It's possible to purchase a small, articulated figurine of a Modron at one of the stores in the game. While it's actually used to access the Bonus Dungeon, you can also choose to have The Nameless One play with it like a small kid with an action figure. Not only will they express joy at vanquishing imaginary foes with it, Morte will become jealous if he sees you playing with it and ask for a turn.
  • Epiphanic Prison: The Nameless One's inability to die, which leaves him unable to end the never-ending cycle of forgetting himself over and over again.
  • Equipment Spoiler:
    • You can find oculars "usable by Modrons" in Vrishka's shop and the Modron Maze, which hints at the existence of Nordom. The item "Nordom's Ocular," also found as an occasional drop in the Modron Maze, is more explicit about it.
    • Somewhat less spoilery is the fact that numerous weapons you can find in the Hive will say "not usable by priests", hinting that you can find and recruit Fall-From-Grace.
  • Eternal Equinox: Justified, in that Sigil has no sun, moon, or stars, and night becomes day and back again literally by magic.
  • Eternal Love: the Nameless One's ghost girlfriend Deionarra, for him. Completely not mutual, though—in fact, the trope is pretty viciously deconstructed by the extent to which the Nameless One's previous incarnations exploited Deionarra's love to manipulate her.
  • Everything's Deader with Zombies: Most zombies are non-hostile and some are even communicative.
  • Evil Sounds Deep: The main villain of the game, The Transcendent One, has a very deep voice, and is absolutely ruthless in pursuing his goals.
  • Evil Sounds Raspy: Ravel Puzzlewell's voice is described as if it's "trying to force itself through a thick layer of dust". She is known for her exceptional cruelty, and is one of the most feared characters of the Planes.
  • Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Fortress of Regrets, the hideout of the Big Bad that is located in the Negative Material Plane.
  • Expressive Skull: Morte is pretty good at conveying facial expressions despite being a talking, floating skull that can only move his jaw and eyeballs.
  • Eye Scream: The Nameless One has an "Eye" equipment slot; replacing the eye with another one causes him to take damage, and the swap is accompanied by a squishing sound. Certain events also involve him hurting one of his eyes in some way.
  • False Reassurance: Ah, dialogue options. The game is famous for letting you pick your intention when choosing a lot of them. The same line might be repeated two or three times, one of them sincere, the others marked with [Lie] or [Bluff] or other modifiers. This generally does not affect the dialogue, but it affects your alignment.
  • Fetch Quest: Optional and... otherwise. Being a '90s CRPG, this is ubiquitous, and often involves a lot of backtracking.
  • Fighter, Mage, Thief: These are the three character classes the Nameless One can become. He starts as a Fighter, however, and needs to find teachers for the other two classes from there.
  • Final Boss Preview: After leaving Ravel's Maze, a cutscene is shown where The Transcendent One kills Ravel.
  • Fire and Ice Love Triangle: Possible if the player takes along the "fiery" Annah and the "cold" Fall-From-Grace. Somewhat subverted by Grace being chaste and the relationship between her and The Nameless One always staying purely platonic. That doesn't stop Annah from becoming incredibly jealous of her though.
    • Annah's jealousy of Grace can even go so far that she may literally try to murder The Nameless One depending on which dialogue options the player chooses.
  • Flechette Storm: The Blade Storm spell. Pick a spot and it will cause a series of rings of razor-sharp blades to erupt from the ground. Notable in that it requires an attack roll rather than a saving throw (and if you miss it will inflict no damage at all, unlike most similar spells that will inflict half damage), and it's one of the few area affecting spells you can cast in the game that will cause friendly fire.
  • Flying Face: Companion Morte is a snarky floating skull — a mimir, a kind of planar encyclopedia except he's not really a mimir. The Weeping Stone Catacombs, meanwhile, are infested with vargouilles, vicious flocks of bat-winged severed heads which reproduce by causing the heads of those they kill to sprout wings and pull themselves off their corpses.
  • Food Porn: Go ahead, try reading through the description of the food merchant's specialities or the Smoldering Corpse's drinks without feeling at least peckish.
  • Foreign Queasine: Ratsies, cranium rats on a stick. Comes in several varieties, and if you eat one, the experience is described in detail and some are described as tasting surprisingly good.
  • Foreshadowing: All over the place. The opening cinematic goes into surprising detail about some of the game's secrets, for instance. The creation of Adahn also foreshadows one of the possible endings, and then of course there's the location of the door to the Fortress of Regrets.
  • A Friend in Need: In the Fortress of Regrets, the party is scattered upon arrival, forcing The Nameless One to go on alone. As the player progresses, cutscenes are periodically shown that depict a lone party member encountering The Transcendent One and choosing to fight him out of loyalty, dying in the process. Morte, Vhailor and Ignus do not get such a scene, however: Morte is later shown to be playing dead, so you have someone to tell you your backstory again in case you don't win. Then either Ignus or Vhailor will be talked into siding against The Nameless One if he's good or evil, respectively. In the event that he is not, they are implied to have died out of loyalty as well.
    • Vhailor will betray at you at the end if your alignment is evil. He can also turn hostile if you reveal your past to him in many conversations possible or while talking to certain Non Player Characters about this while he is in your party.
    • Ignus will betray you if your alignment at the end is lawful or good.
  • Future Slang: Though most of the slang isn't fictional so much as obscurely and obscenely British.
    • "Berk," which in-game is a synonym for fool, is short for "Berkshire Hunt," which is rhyming slang for... Cats.
    • More specifically, the vernacular used is heavily based on Canting, a mid-18th Century slang used amongst beggars, thieves and low class in general. The words that aren't directly lifted from Canting are designed to fit feel of the dialect in the Planescape universe. It's even referred to in-universe as "the Cant".
  • Gameplay and Story Integration: The Healing Factor of The Nameless One comes into play a lot in dialogue and is a very important part of the story. Physical stats often have uses in dialogue as well, instead of just contributing to combat, although not to the same degree as mental stats.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Fall-From-Grace claims that she can't use any metal weapons because she can't stand the touch of cold steel. In practice, however, she's not allowed to use any weapons at all, even ones that aren't made of metal.
  • Gateless Ghetto: You are not allowed to visit any portion of Sigil other than the Hive at first.
  • Genius Loci: Several. The Alley of Lingering Sighs is the most obvious place—it is a sentient, pregnant alleyway that communicates by manipulating the materials (wood creaking, metal spikes scraping, cobbles grinding, and so on) in the area to mimic spoken sounds.
  • Give Me Back My Wallet: There are a number of pickpockets scattered around Sigil. It is possible to increase your own skill by observing them while they steal from you, and with a high enough Dexterity you can steal from them instead. Calling them out is optional.
  • Global Currency: Commons are accepted across multiple planes of existence.
  • Gods Need Prayer Badly: It's mentioned that gods have been killed simply by people forgetting about them.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: The Nameless One originally sought immortality in order to atone for an atrocity so terrible one normal lifespan wouldn't be enough. Unfortunately he lost his memories upon his first death, including those of said atrocity, so he never atoned... and the subsequent damage caused by his unnatural presence since is threatening to break the universe.
  • Good Thing You Can Heal: Many, many instances. At one point, you can even have someone dig out your internal organs and cut them open to look for hidden thingies.
  • Good Wings, Evil Wings: Most fiends have the standard bat wings fare. In Trias' case it's subverted, as he is, well, an angel. His charred, skeletal wings are explained as mutilation done by the prison guards ...and then it turns out to be a Double Subversion and he really is a Fallen Angel.
  • Gorn: Text only (mercifully enough), but what else do you call dialogue options that explain, in loving detail, the act of pulling your own eyeball out of your head and surviving?
  • Go-to Alias: The Nameless One has the option of using the moniker Adahn when talking to people. Use it enough times and a very confused Adahn will eventually be found in one of the bars.
  • G-Rated Sex: Harlots refer to sex with euphemisms, and the most romantic thing that can be done with a Love Interest is kissing. It is also possible to buy prostitutes for Morte, which leads to some rather creative solutions from their side, considering he is a floating skull.
  • Grievous Harm with a Body:
    • You get two clubs that are preserved severed arms, one of which used to belong to you.
    • If you anger the Paranoid Incarnation rather than talking him down, he will tear off his own arm and beat you with it. From the way he is described, this is how he usually fights, too.
  • Guide Dang It!: The degree to which your statistics affect your dialogue options, even early on in the game.
  • Healing Factor: The characteristic power of the protagonist. Go high enough and you will almost regenerate faster than you can be hurt. Your party members can get in on this too, if you raise their constitution beyond 18.
  • Heel Realization: Happens over and over again... Your past lives were a mixed bag of morality, but it's clear that the malevolent incarnations left a more noticeable impression on the Planes than your benevolent ones.
  • Hell Invades Heaven: Trias the Betrayer was planning to organize an army of fiends to do this to get the gods to wake up and deal with the Blood War, which led to his incarceration under Curst.
  • Hell Is War: Sinners are sent to fight in the Blood War, the eternal war between devils and demons taking place on the Lower Planes, when they die.
  • The Hero Dies: The game ends with The Nameless One ending his immortality in some way or other. He can unmake himself and his mortality, destroy his mortality, or fuse with it. The last two cause him to become mortal briefly and then be transported to the Blood War, the setting's version of hell, to pay for his sins.
  • Heroes Prefer Swords: One of the tropes to be silently defied. A total number of three swords appear in the game, and only one can be used by the protagonist as such. One is exclusive to supporting character Dak'kon, the second must be transformed into a different kind of weapon before the main character can wield it, and the third — Celestial Fire — is one of the most powerful weapons in the game, although the requirements for obtaining and wielding it are very specific. The Nameless One must make do with knuckledusters, daggers, clubs, axes and very big warhammers for most of the game even if he can wield Celestial Fire.
  • Heroic BSoD: The Nameless One, regardless of alignment, upon recalling how the Practical Incarnation caused Deionarra's death.
  • Hidden Villain: There are about three different characters who might qualify as antagonists in Torment, with one receiving a passing mention once or twice early in the game from minor NPCs, and none of them being painted as villains of your quest until past the halfway point of the game.
  • High-Class Call Girl: Getting a prostitute in Clerk's Ward is probably one of the most expensive fades to black in an RPG.
  • Hijacked by Jesus: Played with. While there are several equivalents of Heaven and Hell in the setting, the various religions and mythologies mostly concentrate in their own planes of existence and none have overarching dominance.
  • Hitchhiker Heroes: Justified; all party members are bound to the Nameless One in some way, even if it's just by the fact that the Symbol of Torment tattoo attracts people who are "tormented".
  • Hive Mind: Cranium rats are normal rats with abnormally big brains; they can communicate telepathically with others of their kind, and they grow smarter the more of them are around, as they form a hive mind. Individuals are no smarter than normal rats, but their threat level scales with group size, as they grow more coordinated and attain sentience and the ability to cast spells at high concentrations. Many-as-One is a colony of cranium rats that has achieved incredible intelligence and powers due to the sheer number of rats collected at one point.
  • Homage: According to the developer credits, the way some of the higher tier spells were animated are meant as homages to the Final Fantasy franchise, most notably the 7th and 8th entry.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal:
    • Just how exactly is Morte able to carry anything at all?
    • Ignus can carry around scrolls and other flammable items despite being constantly enveloped in searing flames.
  • Hypocritical Humor: There's a female NPC in one of the upper class areas who considers the Nameless One's outfit (or lack of one) indecent; she shows as much skin as he does, and one of the dialogue options allows you to call her out on it.
  • I Cannot Self-Terminate: A gith in the lower ward who is suffering requests to be put out of her misery. Party member Dak'kon can be allowed to euthanize her (it's essentially his role among his people). If you're feeling like a real bastard, though, you can use the life debt he owes you to force him to torture her to death.
  • Idiosyncratic Menu Labels: The New Game, Load Game and Exit Game options in the main menu are respectively retitled as "New Life", "Resume Life", "The Abyss".
  • I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: The Fortress of Regrets. In keeping with the setting, the name is literal: the place is actually built from the regrets of all the Nameless One's past incarnations.
  • I Know Your True Name: Reekwind claims that his current... smelly state is due to a curse laid upon him by a mage he carelessly told his true name to, and now refuses to tell his true name to anyone. He tells the Nameless One that he is fortunate not to known his own name.
  • I Lied: Several dialogue options, prefaced by [Lie] or [Bluff], but are otherwise identical to lines marked [Truth] or [Vow]. These may be treated differently in later conversations, including being allowed to admit you were lying all along, or to break your word thus making it a lie retroactively, etc. They have a bigger impact on your alignment, as lying too often will shift you away from Lawful and Good and into Chaotic and Evil territories.
  • Identity Amnesia: The Nameless One. It's the driving force behind the story — and not just your story, but the story of every single Nameless One incarnation who ever existed.
  • Immortal Breaker: Coaxmetal can be persuaded to make the Blade of the Immortal. Even though it's only a simple dagger, it is the only weapon in the setting that can kill the Nameless One permanently.
  • Immortality: A toss up between From a Single Cell and Resurrective Immortality — you sort of "fall into darkness," but then get better.
  • Immortality Immorality: The eventual reveal of how the Nameless One is immortal proves to be this. When the Nameless One is resurrected, he's a sudden, violent Life Drinker from someone elsewhere in The Multiverse. The shadows that are hunting the Nameless One are the tormented, undead vestiges of those whose lives were consumed to restore the Nameless One — in a nice bit of Gameplay and Story Integration, the more times you have died during the game, the more Greater Shadows you will encounter during the final dungeon. It's even mentioned in said dungeon that, since it exists in a closed-off bubble of the Negative Energy Plane, and there are no other living beings in the place, death here will be permanent for the Nameless One, as he won't be able to absorb life from anywhere to restore himself.
  • Immortal Life Is Cheap: You can have the Nameless One kill himself to win an argument, to sneak past guards, to escape from traps, to make money from a bored noble looking to experience a murder, or even as a combat tactic. Getting sufficient deaths will cause more shadows in the Fortress of Regrets, which are rather dangerous opponents when you are alone. Also counts as a subversion due to that fact that while immortality is cheap for The Nameless One, every time he cheats death someone else in the multiverse takes the bullet for him. This leads to the poor unfortunate who died in place of The Nameless One getting their soul ensnared by the Transcendent Incarnation in the Fortress of Regrets as the aforementioned shadows, doomed to be robbed of the afterlife of their god or where their alignment would've taken them.
  • Immortality Seeker: The Nameless One's First Incarnation had a good reason for not wanting to die: he had committed an atrocity so horrible that a single mortal lifespan would not be enough to atone for it, and so he sought immortality to be capable of trying to make amends for his sin and avoid being cast into the Blood War.
  • Immune to Fate: In the Hive Marketplace, the local gambler refuses to play dice with your character after the first go, because you "have no fortune." Later, in the Clerk's Ward, if the player pays a fortune teller to tell his future, she will tell him that he is one of those rare individuals who have no predetermined fates, and can do as they will. She then gives him a refund.
  • Impossibly Delicious Food: A sensory stone tells of a wine that people would do literally anything for.
  • Improbable Weapon User:
    • You can equip yourself with such improbable weapons as a fingernail, a sharpened set of antlers, or a severed arm. Your own severed arm!
    • Fall-from-Grace's mere touch can inflict scratch damage while her kiss does a little better.
    • Nordom has two spirits that have conveniently taken up the shape of crossbows.
    • Morte can not only masticate foes to death, but also summon mobs of skulls to bulldoze them later in the game. You can find magical teeth for Morte, too. Living magical teeth that can evolve and, if the scene is restored with a mod, be talked to.
    • Dak'kon's spirit weapon, the Zerth blade, changes appearance and damage effects as his alignment changes. Lawful and good shifts make the blade bright and shiny, while chaotic and evil actions make the blade black and spiky. As the blade is made from his mind, the appearance correctly reflects his mood.
  • Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Pharod's men did a really lousy job looting the Weeping Stone Catacombs, although admittedly a lot of them were running for their lives from cranium rats and vargouilles at the time. For that matter, there seem to be an awful lot of treasure chests scattered around the Dead Nations and the Warrens of Thought, where no one has any use for them.
  • Infinity +1 Sword: Invoked: Celestial Fire for Lawful Good characters, and the shapeshifting Entropic Blade for everyone else, are acknowledged to be exceptionally powerful artifacts, above and beyond the other weapons you find.
  • Informal Eulogy: Party members give these when another party member dies.
  • Informed Equipment: Putting a new outfit on Annah or Fall-from-Grace will not change their appearances. Also, it seems that using your intestines as an arm band is completely unnoticeable.
  • In-Game Novel: The Circle of Zerthimon, a cleverly designed mechanical stone ring which tells a different story depending on how the rings are aligned. It contains the holy teachings of the Githzerai, and a Player Character with sufficient intelligence can read all of it.
  • In-Game TV: The Sensory Stones, in-universe. They store a single sensation which can be re-experienced at a later point by anyone who knows what they're holding. This can be anything from a momentary sense of joy to a complex memory that evokes a particular mix of emotions.
  • Insult to Rocks: If you have Fall-From-Grace in your party when you meet the baatezu Fhjull Fork-Tongue, he'll make a crack about how the random scars on the Nameless One's body remind him of the crude manner of tanar'ri violence. Grace will ask him with amusement if he's implying that tanar'ri are a crude race, which he'll respond by calling it an insult to crudity.
  • Interface Spoiler:
    • Potential party members that aren't immediately obvious as recruitable (specifically Annah and Ignus) will still show up in the PC section of the journal.
    • Nordom's existence as a party member is given away due to finding equipment that is usable only by Modrons available for sale in several merchant shops long before he himself can be found.
  • Irrelevant Sidequest: Played With. Many sidequests touch tangentially on your condition as memories are triggered or people recognize you. Even if it truly is an irrelevant sidequest, it still helps you define your identity.
  • It's All My Fault: invoked Although it's actually up to the player how upset the Nameless One is over it, the torment of every party member except Fall-From-Grace and Nordom was caused by him, and a Lawful Good Nameless One will often want to make things right.
  • It Was with You All Along: In several ways. For example:
    • You find at the end of the game that the portal to the final area is located in the place that you woke up in at the start of the game, and that you had the means to get there from the start, just not the knowledge.
    • The bronze sphere you find for Pharod is a container of the memories of your first life.
  • Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Infamously, the plot of Planescape: Torment revolves around trying to find all the pieces of the Nameless One's history and piece them together in order to figure out who he is, where he came, and how he came to be.
  • Joke Item: The drones in the Modron Maze often drop junk (Bag of Coins, Stone Rod etc.) that have no value or direct use whatsoever. You could use them as markers in the Maze, however.
  • Karma Meter: Your alignment changes depending on your actions. It uses the Dungeons & Dragons system of a two-dimensional grid with law, neutral and chaotic on one axis, and good, neutral and evil on the other one.
  • Keystone Army: There's a necromancer in a crypt in the hive with a swarm of skeletons backing him up. Once he dies, all of his remaining skeletons also die, since it was his magic that was animating them in the first place.
  • Kick the Dog:
    • A favorite hobby of the Practical Incarnation, who is responsible for most of the awful things in the parts of your backstory dedicated to solving the mystery of your curse.
    • An evil-aligned Nameless One can do things so awful many players can't stand to play him that way.
  • Kiss of Death: Fall-from-Grace can do this, literally. However, for moral reasons, she only does so in an emergency. (However, as this is one of her attack options as a playable character, it seems that the player decides what defines "an emergency".)
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: Just as you'd expect, the Nameless One's quest of identity is an excellent opportunity to collect all sorts of things. Several quests involve simply having the right thing in your inventory to solve.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: Basically, the Nameless One "starts a new game" with the player - forgetting everything about personal identity, but thankfully has a tattoo on the back as a means to prevent a complete loss (except for the missing journal).
  • Leitmotif:
    • All the important characters and several of the locations have their own themes. Though with the exception of Deionarra's, Annah's, and Fall-from-Grace's, you probably won't even notice most of them because they either don't play in many circumstances, don't get played for long enough when they are played until they get overridden by something else, or don't even appear outside the game's soundtrack. Restoration mods make the theme songs more prominent, though this causes some problems of its own when, say, the player is in the Smoldering Corpse bar and Ignus's theme suddenly overrides the area music, which is bound to be at least somewhat confusing the first time.
    • The Transcendent One's theme is a Dark Reprise of The Nameless One's.
  • Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Kissing Annah gives her some minor fire resistance.
  • Light Is Not Good: invoked If a hugely powerful Lawful Good character is found trapped underground outside the gate town of a prison plane, there may be a good reason why they were put there.
  • Linked List Clue Methodology: The quest for Morridor's Box has a solution where you go backwards through a list of previous owners in an attempt to find out how to break its curse.
  • Literal Metaphor: Comes hand-in-hand with the setting, as even beliefs and emotions have their Anthropomorphic Personification in the outer planes.
  • Living Legend: The Nameless One has earned and deserved every reputation available. Then there's the Gray Sisters, Queen of Blades, the fallen angel...
  • Living Shadow: You're stalked by them through the entire game. They turn out to be the spirits of people who died in your place.
  • Loads and Loads of Sidequests: The game, if played thoroughly, is mostly sidequests. Considering the point of the game is finding out who you are and where you came from (instead of, say, defeating an Evil Overlord), it's justified, since the sidequests all develop the Player Character in some way.
  • Logic Bomb: If your charisma is high enough, you can convince Vhailor to finally pass on with one of these. It's also one of the many ways you can defeat the Transcendent One.
  • Lord British Postulate: Defied. You can't kill the Lady of Pain because A) she has no stats and B) she never appears outside of FMV cutscenes (this follows with the tabletop game's attempts to avert this trope when it comes to her.)
  • Loss of Identity: Up until the point where the player takes over, The Nameless One loses his identity every time he dies. Trying to recover just who it is you 'are' through the multitudes of former yous who have existed across time is a cornerstone of the entire game.
  • Love Martyr: Deionarra, who keeps defying death just because of her unfaltering love for you. Also, in the end, Annah-of-the-Shadows and Fall-from-Grace.
  • Luck Stat: There is one, but it's hidden from the player. You'd have to get the strategy guide to know that you have one, let alone how it works.
  • MacGuffin: The bronze sphere seems like this. According to Pharod, it will save him from an afterlife in the lower planes, though the "how" is unclear. After retrieving it, make sure you get it back as soon as you can and hold onto it, as its significance is explained in the end-game.
  • Mad Oracle: In the Hive, you meet a babbling lunatic who is the local representative of the Xaositects, a faction dedicated to utter chaos. If you question him, all of his answers will be (mostly) nonsense, unless you ask him about your journal. He will then have some sort of a fit and tell that you have multiple journals, and give you accurate descriptions of where they are.
  • Made from Real Girl Scouts: Baby oil — made from real babies! — is sold in the Curiosity Shop in the Lower Ward. The shop mainly specializes in Lower Plane curiosities, so the baby oil is not a surprising item.
  • Magikarp Power: The Missile of Patience is a puny first level spell that deals minimal damage to a single enemy. Then, as your mage reaches level 11, it summons a Glowing Repeating Ballista of Doom. The Blade of the Immortal also works in a similar, but plot-related manner.
  • Manual Leader, A.I. Party: The game gives the player the option of letting their party be controlled by AI (although micromanaging them is a better option during boss fights).
  • Mass Resurrection: In the end, the Nameless One can manage to resurrect his entire party who have all suffered a Plotline Death in the final dungeon if certain pre-conditions are met.
  • Match Maker Quest: The Nameless One can help a Harmonium guard get together with a girl he has big crush on.
  • The Maze: Three of them, although two are Bonus Dungeons. They are: Ravel's Maze (the mandatory-for-the-plot-to-proceed one), the Rubikon Dungeon Construct (which can only be accessed by purchasing the Modron Cube Toy from the Curiosity Shoppe and unlocking it), and the Player's Maze (to which the Nameless One will be sentenced if he pisses off the Lady of Pain once too often).
  • Meaningful Name: Almost every character (especially NPCs) in the game. Many characters either have names that allude to their most prominent characteristic (e.g., Morte [who's undead] and Ignus [who's on fire]) or have names that are more like their job descriptions (e.g. Mourns-for-Trees and Death-of-Names).
    • Mort in Thieve's cant means "woman", fitting his womanizing nature.
    • You can actually discuss the meaningful nature of Fall-From-Grace's name with her if your wisdom score is high enough.
  • Mobile Maze: According to the sourcebooks, Sigil is one of these. In the game you get treated to just one, prominent manifestation of it in the form of Modron's Cube. The Player's Maze is a lesser, but more straightforward example.
  • Mickey Mousing: During Vhailor's pre-boss battle video, his footsteps match the music.
  • Moment Killer: Flirt with Annah and Morte will chime in that he's not going to do anything to spoil the moment once she starts flirting back. But there really isn't a moment to kill since she was just trying to Troll you. Only she really is attracted to you but doesn't want to admit it.
  • Memento MacGuffin: Deionarra's Wedding Ring, which she left for you.
  • Money for Nothing: Not to the extent of the other games on the Infinity Engine, but you will be able to end up with more money than you need fairly quickly. Unless you really want to buy all the expensive high-level spells (and note that you're unlikely to ever become high level enough to actually cast them). There's one quest that if completed in a certain way will cause a merchant to give you such a huge discount at his shop that you can sell items to him for more money than he charges to sell them back to you, allowing you to get as much money as you'd like in a matter of minutes.
  • Monster Town: The Dead Nations, which is populated by... well, take a guess. Everywhere else, too, to a lesser extent.
  • The Mole: The Anarchists infiltrate pretty much every organization with more than three members. Whether anything comes of this is entirely up to the player.
  • Monster Compendium: One function of the journal is to provide descriptions of encountered monsters.
  • Moral Event Horizon: The game actually has an in-universe example that's mentioned explicitly: Whatever it was the first Incarnation did, it damned him so terribly that The Multiverse itself basically went "This Is Unforgivable!" and condemned him to the Lower Planes upon death no matter what else he did. He tried to become immortal just to give himself enough time to atone for it (mull on that for a moment), which only ended up making things worse. The current Nameless One, although completely non-complicit in his crimes, still has to pay for it in the end.
  • Mortality Ensues: One of your implied goals, as you are an immortal being who has lived well past the point where the property is fun or useful any longer.
  • Motor Mouth: If you ask Hamrys, the coffin maker, to provide you with a coffin pillow, he will assume that you want to buy a whole coffin and will go off on a tangent about all the things necessary to make one. All throughout, the Nameless One will not be able to interrupt him and remind him that all he wants is the pillow, at least until he threatens Hamrys that he will smack his head if he doesn't stop talking for a second.
  • Multiple Endings: None of them are happy, but the finality the "best" ending gives you is very satisfying.
  • Murder by Cremation: According to Morte this is what the Dustmen would do to the protagonist if they found out about his immortality, which is sacrilegious to them.
  • Murder by Suicide: There's a tale in the game about a murderer named Kossacs, who was blessed so that no one could strike him with intent to harm, or else feel the pain themselves. When he was judged to death, he laughed, since no one could kill him without suffering his fate themselves. The Mercykillers took him to a prison cell without light, a bed or food, and gave him a chalice of poison, telling him to drink it. Obviously, he refused, and shattered the chalice, only then realizing he was completely alone in a dark cell. When the Mercykillers returned 33 days later, he was dead.
  • My Brain Is Big: The aptly named "Cranium Rats" have large brains partly sticking out of their skulls. They also form psychic networks when near each other. One of the sort-of Big Bads of the game is a colony of THOUSANDS of these rats, aptly named "Many as One".
  • The Nameless: You play as The Nameless One, and although you can lie and say your name's Adahn, it's not your True Name.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Lady of Pain, the godlike being who is not actually a god that rules over Sigil.
  • Nay-Theist: The Lady of Pain, who regularly deals with Physical Gods and is more powerful than them by far, bans worship of herself, on pain of mazing or death. The Lady allows temples to the gods and their servants, but the gods themselves are banned from the city.
  • Neck Snap: In the mortuary, one option in the dialog tree attempts snapping the necks of dustmen that challenge the player, thus killing them. Soego can also have his neck snapped, but he's not killed. In all cases, it's easier to bluff the guards using other dialog options.
  • The Necrocracy: The Dead Nations, which is populated by skeletons, zombies and ghouls.
  • The Needless: The Nameless One and his crew never need to eat, drink, go to the bathroom, or (as long as the healing charms hold out) sleep. Your allies do complain about getting tired, though.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
    • All those people who were slaughtered when Curst slid into Carceri? Your fault. Say, maybe you should have asked yourself why the angel with his wings burned off was magically imprisoned beneath a town populated entirely by traitors.
    • When you had Ravel turn you immortal in order to gain time to atone for your previous crimes, and it turns out that (1) you will lose your memories every time you die, (2) somebody else dies for you every time you die, and (3) your mortality takes on a malevolent sentience. Most of the game is spent trying to fix this. Now, consider how you abused this ability during the game.
  • No Fair Cheating: Parodied—though you aren't punished in any way by using the Tome o' Cheats (except through a significant drop in maximum HP when it's purchased), its description and dialogue will mock you relentlessly.
    The Tome hums with the power of...well...of cheating. Blatant cheating.
  • No Mercy for Murderers: Vhailor is the restless spirit of a particularly fanatical Mercykiller, Sigil's jailers and executioners, possessing his armor to continue his single-minded pursuit of justice after death. If he joins the Nameless One's party there are a couple of glaring examples of his merciless justice:
    • After defeating a Fallen Angel a Good-aligned Nameless One has the opportunity to offer the angel a chance at redemption. But if Vhailor is in the party he refuses to let that happen and executes the angel on the spot.
    • Over the course of the campaign the Nameless One discovers that one of his prior incarnations was a serial killer that Vhailor hunted before his past incarnation locked Vhailor up in the Mercykillers' prison. This may lead to the Nameless One fighting Vhailor in the final stage. In the "good" ending the Nameless One is condemned to the Lower Planes for the various crimes he barely remembers, and Vhailor swears to hunt him down if he tries to escape this punishment.
  • Non-Combat EXP: The game became a cult classic largely because of this trope. Whereas most CRPGs at the time were heavily into hack'n'slash, Torment gave the best rewards (including experience) for dialog-based solutions to problems.
  • Non-Human Sidekick: None of them is fully human, except Ignus—and considering his current state, he possibly doesn't count.
    • Morte is a mimir, a sentient lexicon. He's lying: Technically he's a petitioner of the Nine Hells, and what he was while alive is anyone's guess.
    • Annah is a tiefling, a human with fiend blood in the family tree.
    • Nordom is a rogue Modron.
    • Dak'kon is a Githzerai.
    • Fall-From-Grace is a succubus, ultimately a Tanar'ri.
    • Vhailor is a restless spirit inhabiting his old suit of armour.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
    • Were you a good guy? Sorry, but you still have to burn in hell for all eternity. Thanks, First Incarnation!
    • This happens to Ravel, as well, and is lampshaded by her. A hag's kindness leaves things worse than her cruelty.
  • No Man of Woman Born: The subject of one of Yves' tales.
  • Nonstandard Game Over: Since you're immortal and can't get a "standard" game over, there are only a few ways to screw up:
    • Become permanently bound to one place.
    • Piss off someone very powerful: "You've tested your immortality against the wrong creature."
    • Die in a place where your resurrection doesn't work. There's only one such place in the game and it's instantly recognizable.
    • Have one of the few necessary Non Player Characters die before they can tell you crucial information.
  • Noob Cave: The Mortuary. Averted in that, if you work at it, you can get out without killing anyone (at least, anyone who isn't already dead). And, all that business with portals and keys aside, you can walk straight out the front door just by speaking civilly to a few people.
  • Noodle Incident: The first incarnation's crime. It's never revealed what it is, but a lifetime of saintly penance wouldn't make up for it. That's why he sought immortality so he could have several lifetimes of penance. The problem is that this made him lose his memory, so he didn't spend his immortal life in penance - far from it.
  • Nominal Importance: You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of characters with a name who have no impact on either the main plot or any side quests.
  • Not Afraid of Hell: The plot is caused by one man's attempt to deflect death because he knows he's Beyond Redemption and what awaits him won't be pretty. (In this setting, Hell is an actual physical location, and people know for certain that it exists.) His Character Development concerns him getting over his cowardice to become the trope. It helps that he's a Physical God by this point and Planescape's hell is a giant battlefield filled with Asshole Victims. The demons never know what hits them.
  • Note to Self: In the format of a tattoo, an elaborate journal made of your own skin and bone, an even more elaborate dodecahedron-shaped puzzle filled with deadly traps that unfolds into a journal written in a secret language, an entire tomb full of writings by previous incarnations, memories that float to the surface under certain conditions, and instructions scrawled on various surfaces in the Fortress of Regrets.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: Whatever the first incarnation did was bad enough to forever condemn him to hell, with not even a thousand lifetimes of atonement being enough to make up for it. We never figure out what he did.
  • One-Letter Name: O. As a member of the Divine Alphabet, his name is actually quite important. Through dialogue, The Nameless One can see his true face, gaining a permanent bonus to Wisdom.
  • One Stat to Rule Them All: Assuming the player wishes to experience as much of the story as possible, the single most important stat in the game is Wisdom, a stat that, in any other AD&D context where the player could choose to be one of a Fighter, Thief or Mage, would have been a Dump Stat. Keeping it high gives a bonus to experience points earned, allows access to more story in the form of flashbacks, and gives additional experience for getting the flashbacks.
  • Optional Party Member: All of them are technically optional, but Ignus, Vhailor, and Nordom are the most standard examples of this.
  • Organ Drops: During the course of the game, the Nameless One can "produce" two full sets of intestines and several eyes.
    Marta: Gotta pulls the stitchies out, the teethies, yes. And the thingies inside...
  • Only the Leads Get a Downer Ending: In the best ending, the Nameless One convinces his mortality, the Transcendent One, to rejoin with him. This means that he's no longer immortal and now all the crimes his past incarnations have committed have come due, and they're going to be punished with an eternity in the Lower Planes. However, he resurrects all the companions that accompanied them to the Fortress of Regrets, Morte has been able to let go of his guilt, Dak'kon has been freed from his servitude, and all of them are free to go off and live their own lives. And Fall From Grace promises the Nameless One that she'll search the Lower Planes until she finds him.
  • Overly Long Fighting Animation: Some of the spell animations take more than a minute to finish.
  • Pacifist Run: There are exactly two characters in the game that you have to kill, and each playthrough requires you to fight at least four times, with three of those enemies being constant and the last being one of two, depending on your alignment. And in each one of those circumstances, the enemy either fakes their death, runs away before dying, or was already dead to begin with. To wit:
    • The zombie with the key in the Mortuary room that the Nameless One wakes up in has to be fought and killed.
    • Ravel has to be fought, but she was only pretending to be dead. At least to start with.
    • Trias has to be fought, and you can choose whether to release him, kill him, or both. Thanks, Vhailor.
    • Depending on your alignment, you need to fight either Ignus or Vhailor in the final dungeon, and kill them.
  • Party Scattering: This happens to your party once you enter the Fortress of Regrets. Unlike other examples of this trope, in this case your companions inevitably die one by one while you're looking for them (except for one, who betrays and attacks you). You get a chance to resurrect them all after getting to the end, though.
  • Path of Inspiration: Dak'kon suspects that the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon is this. While his crisis of faith predates it, he's Right for the Wrong Reasons — the true nature of Zerthimon's teachings may very well be valid, but his 'holy book', The Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon, was made by the Practical Incarnation to strengthen his resolve.
  • Permanently Missable Content:
    • Every area after and including Ravel's maze cannot be revisited, so any quests you don't complete or items you don't pick up (including an Infinity +1 Sword) are gone forever.
    • Before leaving an area, make absolutely sure you didn't leave anything important in an item pile, because item piles permanently disappear once you do. One of the biggest problems with this is that when party members die, they drop every item that isn't strictly vital to progressing in the plot. This includes the many seemingly-unimportant Chekhov's Guns and any unique equipment they may have been wearing.
  • Platonic Prostitution: Used in Fall-from-Grace's brothel, the Brothel of Slating Intellectual Lusts in the Clerk's Ward, where no sex is offered under any circumstances. Only intellectual stimulation allowed on the premises, please — storytelling, debate, Volleying Insults, chess and other games, a good listener, and even non-penetrative BDSM, but nothing more.
  • Point-and-Click Map: The map of the game world becomes available fairly late, at which point it is shown each time you move across zone boundaries — it appears to be made up of pieces of stitched-together parchment or vellum. However, only the locations in Sigil remain open; other locations are added to the map, but serve no purpose and are unselectable as they are only used during linear portions of the game.
  • Point of No Continues: The player can revive over and over again, where Out of Continues theoretically applies if everyone else is dead. The final fortress is isolated from the rest of the planes, cutting you off from the supply of extra lives, and when all your party members are dead, you will not be able to revive any more.
  • Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Nameless One is immortal because every time he dies and returns to life, someone else dies instead and becomes an undead shadow.
  • Power Equals Rarity: All of the most powerful weapons in the game are unique, and many are made specially for your character.
  • The Power of Love: The Practical Incarnation deliberately invoked this when he let Deionarra die, *knowing* that her love for him would bind her as a ghost and allow him to use her as a spy on the Negative Material Plane.
  • Power Tattoo: Armor is for sissies. Real men protect themselves with ink.
  • Powering Villain Realization: The Nameless One meets the Transcendent One — a godlike being that has been haunting him for the entire game, because TTO is actually TNO's own mortality, which he had cast off millennia ago and which has been growing more intelligent and powerful each time he has cheated death ever since. One way to defeat TTO is for TNO to reintegrate it into himself, becoming mortal again and negating the source of its power.
  • Practical Taunt: Morte's "Litany of Curses." If it works, it enrages the opponent into chasing down Morte and trying to melee him, even if the opponent in question is a mage. Unusually for this trope, Morte levels it by example; angering various characters causes them to launch into swearing tirades, which Morte files away for future reference.
  • Pre-Mortem One-Liner:
    • If you deal with the Practical Incarnation by mentally overpowering him, you get to say one:
      The Nameless One: This is the last time we shall ever speak. Return to death, where you belong.
    • The Big Bad gives multiple examples.
      The Transcendent One: I can forge planes with my power. I can unmake you.
  • Puff of Logic: A flashback reveals The Nameless One once debated a Signer out of existence by proving he didn't exist. With a high enough WIS score, The Nameless One can do this to himself inside the Fortress of Regrets.
  • Press X to Die: Fall-From-Grace warns you if you kiss her you'll die. You can choose to kiss her anyway (yes, you die. Fortunately you're immortal so it's not permanent)
  • Psychic Block Defense: Mind readers have a tough time reading the Nameless One, particularly if you choose to block them out or deceive them. The cranium rat Hive Mind Many-As-One, for instance, will be completely fooled if TNO chooses to lie like a rug to it, while it's actively scanning his thoughts. The game never confirms why this is, but among the in-game theories: the Nameless One is somehow insulated by the Repressed Memories he cannot consciously access himself (making it a form of Psychic Static); alternatively, the scars which cover his body, by no means only skin deep, may have also remapped his brain; maybe it's just an unconscious reflex, some form of training TNO picked up in a former life and has since forgotten; or perhaps it is simply another side-effect of losing his mortality.
  • Punctuation Shaker: Githzerai and githyanki names tend to contain at least one apostrophe, sometimes more, often at unusual points such as between a string of consonants with no vowels. See party member Dak'kon and the lost city he once called home, Shr'akt'lor, as well as the gith townies you can meet in the Hive and Lower Ward, such as An'azi, Yi'minn, and Kii'na.
  • Quest for Identity: You wake up in a mortuary, with no memory of who you are and why you are immortal, and from that point onward you spend the rest of the game trying to find out answers to these questions.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Your party. You can potentially recruit, in addition to the amnesiac immortal you start with: a floating snarky skull who doubles as Mr. Exposition, an old githzerai zerth with a sword shaped by thought, a brash tiefling thief, an agnostic celibate succubus cleric, a fire sorcerer whose body is a gateway to the Elemental Plane of Fire, a cubic robot gone rogue, and a suit of armor possessed by the restless spirit of a dead Knight Templar.
  • Random Drop: Two of the most powerful rings in the game are only dropped rarely by the strongest non-boss enemy in the game, which only appears in one instance at a time in Under-Sigil, once in a blue moon. It also only appears during the endgame, right before you enter The Very Definitely Final Dungeon (though you can use a mod to change this).
  • Randomly Generated Levels: The Modron maze is notably the only example of a randomly generated dungeon in an Infinity Engine game. The dungeon is generated by having a number of square rooms connect via different exits at random.
  • Real-Time with Pause: The game's combat, as an Infinity Engine game. Much less strict than Baldur's Gate, however, since many of the game's spells and magical items freeze time when they're cast, more like a JRPG than a western game. It does add to the sense that the Nameless One is a very large fish even in the already large pond of Sigil.
  • Reality Warper: Nemelle and Aelwyn are two minor NPCs in the Clerk Ward who speak by "narrating" their lives. Whatever they narrate comes true; if The Nameless One bothers them enough, they will simply say that he no longer wishes to speak with them, and he will find that this is indeed the case. Attempting to attack them produces similar results.
  • Recurring Riff: Several of the game's songs use the same basic melody.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: Annah and Fall-From-Grace, played straight all the way to the colors.
  • Redemption Equals Death: By the end of the game, the Nameless One. Possibly, that is. You don't have to redeem anything...
  • Relationship Upgrade: If the player chooses to pursue that particular path, Annah-of-the-Shadows and The Nameless One eventually become lovers, although the plotline doesn't go further than them kissing.
  • Relationship Values: Everyone in The Nameless One's party has an adjustable opinion of him. For some characters, it doesn't have much effect on the gameplay, whereas for others, it makes or breaks them; for example, Dak'kon's blade changes forms as he levels, and the form it takes is based on his opinion of The Nameless One, with a either a very good or very bad opinion being best.
  • Resourceful Rodent: A single cranium rat doesn't do much, but when many of them band together, they get stronger and gain magical abilities, going so far as to develop a united collective consciousness in their domain. So this is exactly what they do, use seemingly harmless lone rats to lure you into an ambush. On top of that, their allied wererats are used as double agents in order to spy on and destroy the neighbouring enclaves.
  • Resurrection Sickness: Although dying in the game usually means simply being moved to the nearest safe area with no other direct consequences, prior to the story beginning, The Nameless One dying usually meant having his memory wiped and his personality reset. The exact mechanics are unclear, and it is uncertain why the current incarnation can die without having his memory wiped — the closest thing to an explanation is a flashback where The Nameless One visits a seer who tells him that after dying three more times he will stop losing his memory.
  • Ring Menu: The various menus used throughout the game, from the start menu to the option menus and even the right-click context action menu, are arranged in a circular fashion.
  • Robot Wizard: Exactly What It Says on the Tin with the Evil Wizard Construct in the Modron Maze — specifically the evil wizard at the end of a mock dungeon full of lampshaded RPG cliches. In the tabletop setting, the modrons who created the maze are also living constructs capable of wielding great magic, though we don't see any of the higher-level ones in-game.
  • Romance Sidequest: It's not really a sidequest; any female party member who sticks with the Nameless One will fall in love with him by the end. Not that they'll really act on it.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: The Brothel of Slating Intellectual Lusts is a purely non-physical bordello in the Upper Ward. It was meant to say Slaking (quenching, satisfying), as "slating" can mean various things (e.g. covering with slates, as with a roof, or pre-scheduling or setting an appointment), but none of them makes much sense in context. Per Beamdog's FAQ for the Enhanced Edition, they decided to let it stand, per Chris Avellone's request, as it had become part of the game's personality for him after so long. "He asks for your apologies [sic], he knows it’s a mistake, but it’s burned in his brain."
  • RPGs Equal Combat: For a game with so much emphasis on dialogue, some areas are filled with trash mobs. The Nameless One has one advantage many of them don't, however — you and your companions can and will run.
  • Rule of Three: There are three principles that are commonly held to be fundamental to existence throughout the Planes: the Unity of Rings, which states that everything is circular, coming back to where it started; the Center of All, which states that there is a center of everything, or rather, that wherever a person happens to be is the center of the Multiverse; and the Rule-of-Three, which states that everything tends to come in threes — much like these three principles. Since belief is equivalent to reality on the Planes once enough people believe it, the principles, especially the Rule-of-Three, tend to reinforce themselves (as long as someone notices a pattern, be it accidental or not).
  • Saved to Enslave: Githzerai live in a world of chaos shaped purely by their thoughts, a world in which self-doubt can be deadly. The Practical Incarnation entrapped a githzerai named Dak'kon in this way, saving him psychologically by giving him the scripture of Zerthimon. The githzerai swore obedience until the Practical Incarnation's death...but what he didn't know was that the Practical Incarnation was immortal.
  • Scars are Forever: Even the Nameless One's regeneration can't keep up with the sheer number of wounds he's accumulated in a long, long life of constant peril, and he's literally covered in scars by the start of the game. None of the skin you can see is actual skin, hence his corpse-like greyish pallor.
  • Schmuck Bait:
    • A box found in the Hive which everyone is trying to get rid of. There are three options once you get it: open it while in the Hive which pits you against a fairly weak demon, exit the Hive without completing the quest which will cause a boss to appear much later in the game, or to simply complete the quest by talking to a bunch of people, earning some experience and a modest amount of money.
    • The throne of the Silent King. Whoever sits on the throne is bound to serve as the Silent King for the rest of their (un)life; the subjects would prefer it if the Silent King were undead, but if you play your cards right, you will get offered the job. Considering you're immortal, this is really not a good idea.
    • An aversion of Talk to Everyone serves as this. You can see devils walking about the streets of Sigil. Clever players can control and farm them for XP. Dumb players might try to have a nice chat with them only for the beast to snarl with rage and attack. Really dumb players will try to have a chat with them while Grace, a member of their hated enemies, is in the party.
    • Actually doing the things that attract the Lady of Pain's attention, in spite of multiple characters' explicit warnings. All of Sigil is terrified of her for good reason. Doing this once ends you in a Maze; doing it twice kills you. Pissing off the Lady of Pain is possible by becoming a believer of Aoskar, the dead god of portals, slaughtering large numbers of townsfolk, murdering Dabus, the servants of the Lady, or worshipping and/or making fun of the Lady dozens of times.
    • The Monster Jug, which is an item that can be purchased in the Curiosity Shoppe in the Clerk's Ward. Buy it, turn it upside down and shake it to see if anything comes out? The monster pops out and attacks you.
  • Schrödinger's Gun: The Nameless One's entire personality. Justified, in that he suffers from Laser-Guided Amnesia, and literally has no personality until you give him one.
  • The Scottish Trope: Few people are willing to mention the Lady of Pain.
  • Secret Character: There are three characters which the player is not completely likely to recruit throughout the game. Two of them, Nordom and Vhailor, are hard to find. Ignus is easy to find but relatively hard to get.
  • Shaming the Mob: The best way to handle the situation in Carceri, at least assuming you want the town to flip back to the Outlands, is to convince the mob that the Cycle of Revenge is exactly the reason the whole town was Dragged Off to Hell in the first place, and that they need to learn to forgive and let go of their hatred if they ever want to escape.
  • Shaped Like Itself: In the character menu, one of the items listed at the top of the screen is the race of the given companion. Nameless One and Ignus are humans, Dak'kon is a githzerai, Fall-From-Grace is a succubus, Annah is a tiefling, Nordom is a rogue modron, Vhailor is a restless spirit... but Morte? Morte is just Morte.
  • Shop Fodder: Many early game enemies drop various pieces of jewelry that have no actual benefit, but can be sold off for a decent amount of coin.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Silliness Switch: Easter Egg Morte and Leprechaun Annah.
  • Skippable Boss: Most of them, including the final boss. Ah, dialogue options...
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Fairly cynical (for fantasy, at least), with a few idealistic streaks here and there. Where on the sliding scale this game falls is strongly dependent on how you act; it's possible to play as a Messianic Archetype, and do very well, in game terms; it's also possible to be a Villain Protagonist, and do just as well.
  • Snowball Lie: Keep referring to yourself or otherwise bringing up the name Adahn, and eventually the eponymous Adahn becomes a real being.
  • Solo-Character Run: It can be done, though it deprives the game of many of its best parts.
  • Speaking Like Totally Teen: A group of thugs in Clerk's Ward can be called out on their poor grasp of Sigil's slang. Annah, a born and raised street urchin, finds them especially amusing. Ironically, the game regularly uses "pike off" to tell people to go away and stop bothering her, whereas at least according to the 2nd Edition Planewalker's Handbook it means "to annoy" (as in "to be piked off"). (Though the Planescape Boxed Set, at least, did list "pike/piking" as being an all-purpose rude word.)
  • Statistically Speaking: The game does a fairly impressive job of integrating your stats into dialogue and dialogue-based ability checks, and cases where you run into this tend to be more the exception than the rule. Although there's still nothing you can do against the occasional stubbornly impassable door or Broken Bridge, not even blow the locks off with by opening up a portal and firing the Mechanus Cannon at it.
  • Stealth Run: It's possible, though the Thief Character Class is typically the least played as it lacks the equipment options of the fighter (there are no ranged weapons other than Nordom and Ignus's Stuck Items) and access to the game's many spells, as well as being based on Dexterity, which generally unlocks the fewest dialogue options.
  • Stealth-Based Mission: Enforced to some extent in the Mortuary — Morte suggests you keep a low profile once you leave the first room, and even if you chose your Nameless One's starting stats to suit a mage or thief, you still start off as a fighter, just not poorly built one. Until you escape the Dustmen will accost you if they spot you wandering the upper floors, and if you can't explain yourself, they'll summon the guards and attack. Of course, they're rather weak on their own, their vision range is poor, and they move extremely slowly, allowing you to skirt their vision or run if spotted. If you get made anyway, you can also snap their necks in dialogue if your Dexterity is high enough, or, if you don't want to kill them, bluff them into simply giving you directions to the exit with sufficient Charisma... but if you do kill one, they drop their robes, which you can use to walk around freely as long as you don't talk directly to any of the Dustmen.
  • Step One: Escape: The game starts with you waking up in a locked room inside the Mortuary. Your first task is getting out of the room, then you have to get out of the Mortuary as well.
  • Stock Lateral Thinking Puzzle: The "three words ending in -gry" one. How you can answer depends on the Nameless One's stats.
  • Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: This is actually a real, legitimate way to win the game. Taking the right options will let you acquire a sword that can kill an immortal (like the Nameless One) under the right conditions. Those right conditions happen to be met by the Fortress of Regrets. You can then threaten to permanently kill yourself when you confront the Transcendent One, forcing it to agree to your demands as this would also destroy him.
  • Stop Poking Me!:
    Morte: You know, if I could click you, you wouldn't know a moment's peace.
    Dak'kon: Your reasons for your incessant clicking are not known to me.
    Fall from Grace Simple minds, simple pleasures.
  • Stripperiffic:
    • Annah's outfit. Weakly justified as her infernal heritage giving her increased body heat. If The Nameless One is a good enough thief, you can even suggest she use it to distract potential marks.
    • Annah looks downright Puritan compared to the clothing worn by female Upper-Class Townspeople. Oh, and the Lower-Class ones too.
    • Trias is a male example, wearing only a loincloth.
    • With the exception of an optional disguise in the Mortuary, the Nameless One goes the entire game wearing nothing above his waist besides tattoos and some magic jewelry.
  • Strong as They Need to Be: The Final Boss has multiple versions based on how many levels the Nameless One has in the active class. The lowest tier has 320 hit points, equivalent to about 5-6 casts of the Rune of Torment. Bringing the class level up to the cap gives 999 hit points.
  • Succubi and Incubi: Fall-from-Grace is an inversion of this trope. She is a succubus who wears a chastity bodice and runs a sex-free brothel. Normal succubi are mentioned here and there, however.
  • Superboss:
  • Take a Third Option: When facing Trias in Carceri, you are presented with two options upon defeating him: either spare him and receive a scroll of Celestial Host from him in gratitude, or kill him and take his Infinity +1 Sword. Alternatively, you can just have Annah steal both of the items from him before the battle.
  • Take Our Word for It:
  • Talking the Monster to Death: Several of the major bosses can be talked into surrendering or committing suicide.
    • Getting the best ending requires that the player persuades The Transcendent One to merge with The Nameless One; fighting him gives a slightly worse ending.
    • Inverted with "Adahn," who is talked into existence by lying about The Nameless One's name enough times.
    • In a bit of Black Humor, the coffin maker in the Lower Ward annoyed the rest of the ward so much with his inane chatterbox tendencies that they hired a wizard to create a zombie to be his friend. The zombie is so sick of listening to him that it's become suicidal and asks you to put it out of its misery.
  • Talk to Everyone: Lampshaded by numerous characters; by the time you get to the other wards of Sigil, most people *know* that you're going around asking everyone questions, and are exasperated when you start asking them.
  • Thanatos Gambit: The Practical Incarnation specifically designed the empty tomb so that only an immortal could get through it. How? Several of the rooms can only be exited by getting struck by lightning and dying.
  • Theme-and-Variations Soundtrack: Every track in the game follows the same melody, but with differences in instruments and beat.
  • Third-Person Person:
    • Ignus will always refer to himself in the third person, and tends to draw out the 'S' at the end in a way that suggests he is not quite there.
    • Nemelle speaks as if she's narrating her life, and according to her sister (who can actually do the same thing, but has trained herself to speak normally), she can warp reality based on what she says — both of them Cannot Tell a Lie, so anything they say is, by its very nature, true.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Most high-level spells:
    • Instead of pretty lights, those spells use long and impressive cutscenes which explain where the meteor storm or a giant ray of fiery death comes from and why it should completely obliterate your enemy.
    • The Celestial Host spell takes almost a minute and a half to resolve, and invokes the help of an angel in heaven, a phoenix, a Solar and a golden dragon.
    • The Symbol of Torment spell is incredibly badass.
  • Title Drop: The word "torment" appears pretty frequently, and ultimately refers to the mental anguish suffered by the Nameless One, your companions, and those others unfortunate enough to have stumbled into your previous incarnations' wake.
  • Token Evil Teammate: Officially, an evil Nameless One is the only evil member of the party. Ignus functionally fulfills this role in the sense that he really only cares for burning the crap out of everything and you really need to reign him in, even if it doesn't say he's evil in his stat description. He'll be a designated boss fight for a future Good Nameless One, if that's any indication.
  • Totem Pole Trench: The bestiary entry on the Lady of Pain includes a rumor that she is actually six giant squirrels with a headdress, a robe and a ring of levitation.
  • Trauma Inn: Zig-Zagged; The Nameless One will be able to restore most or all of his health while resting with enough Constitution, but other characters are only healed a certain amount based on the quality of the resting place.
  • Treasure Chest Cavity: The Nameless One can ask one character to dig around in his body for valuables that previous incarnations might have hidden there. There is also a reanimated skeleton that was altered by an earlier incarnation to include a small pocket dimension in its chest cavity for some emergency supplies.
  • True Neutral: You start as this and it makes sense In-Universe; as a blank slate, your character starts off this way and will have this adjusted based on player actions. Thankfully in this case the concept of alignment-change penalties was ignored. Certain items are only usable by certain alignments, of course.
  • Trust Password: The dead language of Uyo functions as a way for The Nameless One to obfuscate his notes. It lets the player decipher a journal written by a particularly paranoid incarnation. When you meet the Paranoid Incarnation later you can speak to him in this language to convince him to trust you, as only the two of you could possibly understand what is being said.
  • Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: The Nameless One and Deionarra. The former is a walking mass of scar tissue who has been described as zombie-like; the latter is a beautiful young woman.
  • Unique Enemy: There are three types of Shadows. The first and the most frequently encountered one is the feminine-looking Lesser Shadow, which can randomly spawn at night and appears a number of times in cutscenes and at least once in a story-related fight. The third is the very powerful and menacing True Shadow, which infests The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and pops up during cutscenes in that place. However, the second type of Shadow, Greater Shadow, falls squarely into this trope, as the only time they appear in the game is when you are escaping from Ravel's Maze. They appear in that place with little fanfare and in small numbers, and don't even pose much of a threat. And after you leave the place, you never stumble upon them again. With how little reason you have to stay in there by the time they appear, and with how few of them are there, their overall screentime totals at about 3 minutes tops. Even Trigits, the living trees unique to the location, get more screentime and presence than Greater Shadows.
  • The Un-Reveal: If the player brings a certain object to the final dungeon and picks the right conversation options, The Nameless One will be able to recover the memory of his own name with the help of the Good Incarnation. The player, meanwhile, is never told what it is.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Fortress of Regrets is literally built from unknown aeons of regret, manifested as jet black stone and haunted by the Shadows born of those who died in the Nameless One's place. That said, the path to this place is surprisingly humble: a portal in the morgue room the Nameless One woke up in.
  • Victory Pose: Striking one with the cheat item "Sword of Wh'ynn" actually causes victory, advancing you to the end of the game.
  • Videogame Caring Potential: Mourns-For-Trees wants you to care about his trees. Not do anything with them, just be generally interested in their well-being. Persuade enough of your party to go along with it, and the trees will flourish. You get no reward besides some XP and a warm fuzzy feeling.
  • Videogame Cruelty Potential: One of the most epic examples in gaming. No random violence played for laughs here, this game will let you be cruel, Elaborately-Torture-The-Dog style. Some of the genuinely horrible things you can do to people just through dialogue are guaranteed to make you hate yourself. Unless you're just as Evil, of course. Special mention goes to the ability to squeeze every last drop of soul-crushing goodness out of a situation set up long before the game even started: The Practical Incarnation engineered a sequence of events that ultimately led to a githzerai swearing a life debt to him - only to have the gith find out later that The Nameless One is immortal, and he's pretty much signed himself into slavery of his own free will (essentially a living hell for a githzerai). You're free to remind him of this every chance you get.
  • Violence is the Only Option: Downplayed; you are forced to resort to force of arms exactly four times over the course of the game. They are the zombie with the key at the very beginning of the game, Ravel, Trias, and Ignus/Vhailor.
  • Waking Up at the Morgue: One of the locations that The Nameless One can wake up in after dying is the Mortuary, the Sigil morgue.
  • Warrior Therapist: A Nameless One with sufficiently high stats in Wisdom and Intelligence. If you concentrate on leveling up those two stats, by the game's midpoint, you can teach Dak'kon a thing or two about the religious relic he's been studying for decades. Keep leveling, and by the end of the game, you can Breaking Speech the Big Bad into giving up without a fight.
  • Wave-Motion Gun: The Mechanus Cannon. There truly is no kill like overkill, particularly when it involves a giant laser in a parallel dimension opening a portal into yours and annihilating the enemy.
  • Wax On, Wax Off: The training required to become a mage. Lampshaded: your mentor is bemused when part of your aptitude from previous lives returns, as she was looking forward to having someone to do menial tasks for her for months.
  • We Are Everywhere: The Anarchists, as in the tabletop game, have a unique, borderline supernatural ability to convince others that they're part of the same organization, allowing them to infiltrate all the factions of Sigil in their ongoing campaign to burn them all to the ground and start anew.
  • We Buy Anything: Mostly played straight. There are certain merchants who only buy and sell one sort of thing (for example, spices, fish, or dishware). They are, of course, important to various sidequests.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Some of the anarchists in the Lower Ward. Also Ravel, in her own twisted way: she wanted to free the Lady of Pain by unlocking her Cage which is the city of Sigil.
  • Wham Line:
    • "Don't trust the skull." Morte understandably didn't read that part out loud. And subverted when it proves to be one of the few things the Practical Incarnation could be said to have gotten wrong. For all the grief the Nameless One has given him, Morte really does just want to help you, if that's even possible.
    • The Big Bad's identity, revealed at the very end although there are different versions of it.
      TNO: Well if I cannot die, then you can't exist. You're my *mortality*.
  • Where It All Began: One of the three universal rules of Planescape is the Unity of Rings — the principle that everything tends to be circular, be it literally or figuratively. Usually, this means that when an event draws to a close, it will almost invariably focus back on where it began. The entrance to the final dungeon is found in the very room The Nameless One wakes up in at the beginning of the game. This can be Lampshaded by the player by having The Nameless One complain about how all the running around the Planes was ultimately pointless, and both Morte and Dak'kon can be chewed out for not telling him about the entrance to his goal.
  • Wisdom from the Gutter: Most of the game takes place in slums or working class areas of cities, and as such, most of the wisdom The Nameless One hears comes from rather unlikely sources. Notable teachers include Mebbeth, a midwife who dabbles in the Art (magic); Dhall, the cataloguer in charge of keeping track of the bodies brought to the Mortuary; Stale Mary, a motherly, caring zombie; Morte, the wisecracking skull following The Nameless One around and who has seen quite a bit of the Planes; and Annah, a young Tiefling raised in the Hive — the slums of Sigil — and another companion of The Nameless One.
  • Words Can Break My Bones: You can un-petrify a wizard whose stone-form is kept in a museum at the Festhall District. Doing so allows him to finally unleash a torrent of curses so profane they kill the Nameless One instantly. This is one way of amping up Morte's special Litany of Curses ability — and while he's encountered a lot of foul and inventive mouths in the game, this one is bad enough even he is startled:
    Morte: By the Lady's bladed teats!
  • World of Buxom:
    • Sigil, City of Doors and Giant, Shapely, Voluptuous Breasts. All of the female character models are impossibly proportioned, although this is only really obvious in the codex part of the journal, where pre-rendered images of most inhabitants of the world are shown.
    • Averted with Fall-from-Grace, who "only" appears to have a C-cup, compared to most other ladies sporting E-cups. Notable since she is literally a sex demon.
  • Wretched Hive:
    • Curst, so wretched that the whole city gets dragged into Carceri, a hellish Prison Dimension, designated afterlife of traitors. You then have the chance to make things a little better, possibly enough to tilt the balance and return the town to the Outlands.
    • The Hive, the part of Sigil where you start. While not as bad as Curst, it's still pretty wretched.
  • You Are Worth Hell: The Nameless One goes to Hell even if you get the best ending, but in that case, there is one small upside: Fall-From-Grace promises to search the Lower Planes until she finds him. (Of course, she is a demon, so she probably doesn't find it as bad.)
  • You Didn't Ask: If the player asks Morte or Dak'kon why they never told the player character where the entrance to the Fortress of Regrets was, they'll reply that he didn't ask, and that they didn't know the significance of the place.

 
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Mechanus' Cannon

The 8th level arcane spell "Mechanus' Cannon" opens a portal to a BFG on Primus, the first layer of Mechanus.

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