WMG / Planescape: Torment

The Nameless One's crime was...

Inventing the Hawaiian pizza

The Nameless One's true name is Calvin

and his crime wasn't a Noodle Incident, it was THE noodle incident.

The Nameless One is a facet of the Eternal Champion.

The Planescape setting already features a massive conflict between Law and Chaos (The Blood War), and The Nameless One happens to be a tragic, extremely powerful individual condemned to fight that war for eternity (Or at least, until the Planes die off). The Dungeons & Dragons multiverse could very well be a part of the Multiverse.

The secret to the Nameless One's memory was the invocation of the player.

The incarnation that discovered a means by which the Nameless One's memory could be preserved between deaths hit on the critical importance of the player in determining the outcome of tabletop and video games. He arranged it so that Planescape: Torment would be created in our world, but by the time it was released he had died a few more times, leaving us with the playable incarnation. The reason the memory endures is because the player is there to share the memory. However, the incarnation wasn't the only smart character wandering around; anyone capable of outright killing the Nameless One has, through madness or transcendancy, mastered the blackest art: that of the Game Over.

The Nameless One's name wasn't Adahn.

It was Adam.

• That... makes a terrible amount of sense.
• This may be my favourite theory I've ever read on WMG. To expand on the points in favour: if one assumes the Christian parallels fit, this slots neatly into the First Incarnation's story, as he commits a sin so grave the planes have been dying ever since. As mentioned, the Nameless One always lies that his name is Adahn, and when discovering his name realises that it's a simple thing, and not what he expected - the name Adam being deceptively simple. Further, this puts a new spin on the game's central question: "What can change the nature of a man?" Adam means, essentially, 'man'.
  • And from a bit of a meta perspective, the answer the game essentially gives you (the player) is "your choice." From certain theological perspectives, Adam and Eve chose to exercise their wills and disobey God. This one DOES make a scary and remarkably awesome amount of sense.
  • It makes me wonder what happened to Eve, though.
  • Adding on to this theory, Adam's first wife, Lilith, became the "Queen of Air and Darkness" after being cast out of Eden, and mother of the demons known as the lilin, who came to people in their sleep and gave them nightmares — the Middle Eastern version of the Western idea of the "night hag". Hello, Ravel.
  • It also means that the Nameless One simultaneously fulfills the role of Christ, at the end.
    • Christian doctrine describes Christ, after all, as the "New Adam", a new father of all mankind who goes right where the original went wrong.
  • Also, mind-bendingly enough, the Gordian Knot is an item you can find in Curst, described as being from "a distant Prime Material world." This means our world (or at least, a mythic version) is definitely somewhere in the universe of Torment.
• Trouble is, and I speak as both the son of a preacher and a lifetime D&D nerd when I say this, the cosmologies and metaphysics of D&D and the Bible are incompatible. Even aside from the obvious issues such as the respective quantities of deities and afterlives, there are such issues as: 1)The Bible runs purely on Black-and-White Morality, whereas in D&D Order vs. Chaos is just as important. 2)Evil is a corruption and deviation on the norm that is Good in the Bible, whereas in D&D Evil and Good have independent existence and have equal metaphysical "validity." 3)Angels, devils, and demons are all distinct beings in D&D, whereas in the Bible they're all the same "species" (for lack of a better term), the difference between them being the same as the difference between a good human and an evil one. 4)In the Bible, angels and demons are immortal, incorporeal spirits and The Needless. In D&D, they are as physical, killable, and in need of sustenance as a human. 5)In D&D, the gods and outsiders are sexed beings just as mortals are (Depending on the Writer, admittedly), whereas Yahweh, angels, and demons are not, due to predating such aspects of mortal biology as much as rocks and rivers do. 6)In D&D, the gods are finite in power, finite in knowledge, need prayer badly, temporal beings with a distinct past, present, and future, and can be killed. None of this is true of Yahweh.
  • I must point out, that Planescape: Torment simultaneously takes borrows ideas from a more biblical mythos and ignores some aspects of the Planescape setting. The most obvious of those the idea of the Lower Planes being a punishment for Nameless One's crimes, him not being reborn as any of the lower planes bottom feeders, etc. Not fully conforming to Planescape canon doesn't make it worse story and being barely compatible with Christian canon doesn't make these thematic references, comparisons invalid, because the game devs live in our world, and 90s video games see a lot post Satanic panic counter-culture demonic aesthetic choices and self-reflection on their own Christian youth. You are right to take the "Adam" theory above with a grain of salt, but just because it isn't literally true and canonically incompatible it can still be thematically relevant and a meaningful reading of Planescape: Torment.

The Nameless One's name is Torment.

Less brilliant, but like a certain other nameless, centuries-old living myth, the Nameless One might be the origin of the word Torment, it having come to mean what it does only through association with his actions.

The Nameless One is Prometheus

The nameless one cannot die, and loses part of himself periodically that grows back, like Prometheus loses his liver but always regenerates. He committed a crime so evil that once he becomes mortal, Hell can just take him alive and no god will intervene. Almost like his crime against the gods is still happening and can't ever be stopped, such as giving fire to man. This troper would go further and propose he personally created a D&D staple: Sorcerers. Specifically Divine Soul Sorcerers (Invokers) who can function as gods unto themselves. If this was the case, who knows how much of Sigil's weirdness is TNO's own doing. Vhailor and Ignus' immortality from pure belief? Deionarra's undeath? Devils actively trying to breed Tieflings?

The Nameless One's original crime was the instigation of the Blood War.

A crime so massive and downright evil that the planes seem to be slowly dying of it? The Blood War fits the bill well enough. Far back in a time before even surviving myth, the original incarnation instigated the Blood War for fun, profit or an ideal, and ended up causing a tumult that would endure for millenia, killing thousands by the hour. Therefore his ultimate fate: to fight as a soldier in a war of his own making.

• The problem is that the Blood War has never had much in the way of collateral damage. It's always been contained to the lower planes, and is viewed by most everyone as a positive thing. It keeps the demons and devils occupied so they don't conquer the multiverse.
  • Yeah, the Blood War is a good thing. It keeps the demons and devils fighting each other instead of overrunning the rest of the cosmos.
  • According to canon source material, the Baatezu and Tanar'ri first met millennia before they discovered man, which means the Blood War probably predates mortals.
• Alternately, he is the reason the Blood War is necessary in the first place. He is the reason why fiends outnumber celestial by so much, why Good Outsiders, naturally-occurring and independent from deities in terms of both creation and growth (like lillends), are so much rarer than similarly natured Evil Outsiders. Somehow, the Nameless One fundamentally and permanently shifted the Balance Between Good and Evil towards the side of evil. What else could condemn a man to hell, no matter how much he changed as a person or did to make up for it?
  • See the above WMG — the only mortal whose choice changed the very nature of the universe that much would be Adam (or his wife).
    • What about Cain?
• Why is everyone saying that the planes are slowly dying because of his original crime? I understood that his original crime simply damned him to fighting in the blood wars for eternity regardless of his actions afterwards. The planes are not dying because of his original crime, they're being slowly, very slowly, drained of lives by his immortality forcing death to take other people instead of him.

Branches of the Ravel tree include...

Chris Avellone has said that Ravel's existence spreads through the planes like the branches of a tree. The other incarnations that appear in Planescape echo her existence in small or large ways. Due to the nature of belief on the planes, these incarnations may not start out resembling Ravel, but they come to resemble her in their lifetimes. The examples present in Planescape include Old Mebbeth, Ei-Vene, and Marta the Seamstress. Here are some from other planes:

• Icewind Dale: The blind seer and the cat lady of Targos (confirmed by Chris Avellone himself)
• Dragon Age: Origins: Flemeth, an old hermit crone with intense magical powers and extraordinary longevity
• Fable: Theresa, blind seeress possessed of incredible longevity and arcane magical knowledge
• Knights of the Old Republic: Kreia, twisted blind seeress possessed of arcane magical knowledge. For bonus points, written by Chris Avellone and imbued with some elements that didn't make it into Ravel's character.
• Final Fantasy: Old and insane blind seer, Matoya
• The Dark Tower: Rhea of the Cöos
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: Pisha the Nagaraja, a flesh eating vampire living underneath an abandoned hospital, with a vast knowledge of magic and the future.
• Silent Hill: Dahlia Gillespie, evil, demonic witch extraordinaire. Dahlia is probably only just becoming one of Ravel's avatars, and the first hint is her looking ancient while really being only 40.
• Dishonored: Granny Rags, the blind old witch who lives in her apartment, with magic powers and control over the plague rats.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: The Ladies of the Wood and She-Who-Knows. Four powerful old crones, three of whom are figuratively blind (deformed eyes and covered faces), the fourth being trapped in a tree.
  • Blood And Wine: The Witch of Lynx Crag. A jilted lover with a vengeful streak, found in a very tree-themed quest.
• Pillars of Eternity: Caldara de Berranzi, an old crone with arcane magical knowledge who is something of a Ms. Exposition and is first found dead in a tree, and Lady Webb, an old recluse and cipher who takes over in exposition where Caldara leaves off. For bonus points, Chris Avellone also worked on this game.
  • Also Grieving Mother, for her resemblence to Old Mebbeth, the magical midwife and branch of Ravel that the Nameless One meets early on. Aaaand there's Chris Avellone again.
• Torment: Tides of Numenera: Mother Tomaz, again for her resemblance to Old Mebbeth. It is a Torment game, after all.

For about five minutes of the Good Ending, the Nameless One was the most powerful being in the multiverse.

The Nameless One's last acts before he accepted his ultimate fate were to revive his companions, speak with them one last time, and open portals to send them back to Sigil. For those who might not know what this means, the Nameless One created portals to the city where no portals are created without the permission of the Lady of Pain herself. For the brief span of time between joining with the Transcendent One and his descent into the Blood War, the Nameless One could casually ignore Her Serenity and create changes in her city against her will. If he could do that, it's possible he had the power to undo his own punishment... and chose not to.

• You can cast Gate to go to Sigil any time you like. In fact, you can cast Gate to get out too. It just so happens that most people can't cast ninth-level spells.
  • If PST follows the rules of PlaneScape, Gate cannot penetrate the Lady of Pain's defense. Nothing can. If twenty gods teamed up to batter down her barrier, it would result in twenty very frustrated gods.
    • More like twenty very dead ones. Her Serenity doesn't take deities messing with what's hers well. Remember Aoskar.
    • Maybe his spell included polite ask for permission for his party? Since he himself stayed outside, and his party has not angered her before, she could simply shrug and think: "Sure, why not?"
    • Or he just gated them to the nearest available portal to Sigil and elided that fact in his explanation.

The Nameless One is the father of Cyric.

How else could a mere human kill a demigod (Bhaal) unless he had the blood of an immortal coursing through his veins? Yeah, Godsbane helped, but only so much. Considering that several of TNO's incarnations had had a way with the ladies, it's not hard to imagine TNO from getting one (or several) pregnant.

• Godsbane...the avatar of the god Mask? Helped only so much?

In life, Morte looked exactly like Joe Pantoliano.

Not just because the guy usually plays archetypal traitors and liars, but because of his role in Memento, which, without going into spoilery detail, is broadly similar to Morte's in Planescape. On top of that, they even act and sound similar, with the same outward Deadpan Snarker front.

• Morte's Fate Worse than Death is very appropriate for someone whose crime in life was along the lines of Cypher in The Matrix

The Nameless One's sin was creating Coaxmetal

Because I can't think of any worse crime than creating a entity that desires to destroy all universes, and succeeding in many of its attempts. Of course, it has probably forgotten its maker, and now attributes entropy as its creator and commander.

• After more study of the Planescape setting, I shall elaborate. The Nameless One was formerly a fanatical Doomguard, and created Coaxmetal as the ultimate tool of entropy. However, he abandoned the Doomguard after realising what he had done.
• Or he was creating a mighty weapon for an even mightier foe, and it had Gone Horribly Right, as the weapon took the idea to its logical conclusion. And that's the threat what would weaken the Planes themselves, by the way.

Fell was supposed to be able to join your party

Because it just makes so much sense. All the other party members have their own contradictions (a chaste Succubus, an enslaved Gith, and so on,) and so the idea of a Dabus who has fallen out of favour with the Lady of Pain fits so well. In addition, there seems to be something missing from Fell's Tattoo parlor. He's a guy who knows you, tattoos play a massive part in the game, he's relevant to your back story. Plus he's interesting. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just get this incredible feeling that, at least in one stage of development, they had Fell down as a potential party member.

• Hell, I'd rather have him as the healer than Fall-From-Grace. I'm totally going to mod him in as a party member.
• Fell was a canon NPC in the source material, so that might explain why he's so well developed.
  • Specifically, Fell was the first (and so far only) Dabus to worship a god. He chose to become a worshipper of Aoskar. The Lady didn't take that well. At all. That is why Annah is so afraid of him.

The Nameless One's incarnation name for the player character, should the events in the Negative Plane be told from the perspective of the other incarnations, will be The Inquisitive Incarnation

In fact, this aspect of his nature is what allowed him to get so much further than any other incarnation. His power to make people who are about to kill him stop and answer any questions he might have. This is most obviously demonstrated by the demon that accosts you in Curst's underground. He wants to eat you, but he feels compelled to stop and answer your questions first.

• It also makes sense as far as the fact that he's the only one who can retain his memories goes. His mind has been broken so often that there is nothing left to break, leaving him with an empty mind, brimming with questions and longing to have them answered to fill that empty void that is now his existance.

The Nameless One is Tharizdun.

He isn't chained, he's forgotten who he even is. Explains a lot.

• Alternatively, going by 4e Nentir Vale story, The Nameless One is the person who originally made contact with the Obryith lords; he was a follower of Tharizdun and established a link between his god and the original demons, which lead to the shard of evil being forced into the universe, lead to Tharizdun going mad, lead to the creation of the Abyss itself, the primeval war between law and chaos, and eventually the Blood War and now the Abyssal Plague.

Vhailor is an homage to the Tin Woodsman.

He's heartless, he used to be human, and he carries an axe.

The ending is the beginning of the end for the Planes.

Think about it: petitioners retain no memories of their former lives, and petitioners sent to fight in the blood war are incarnated as grotesque creatures like Lemures (see the original campaign setting material if you don't believe me.) When the Nameless One wakes up in the Grey Wastes, he's still in his human body, and his remembrance of Ravel's words suggests he still has his memories. This is a Very Bad Thing since the Nameless One now has the memories and abilities of over a thousand lifetimes. Either side of the war he joins will have a serious advantage, and this may even lead to the end of the Blood War. The campaign setting material makes it very clear that the Blood War is the only thing keeping the Demons and Devil's from attacking other plains. Therefore the Nameless One's reclamation of his mortality ended up dooming all of reality!

• Ao is really an idiot.
• Except, depending on your ending, he's not guaranteed to join either side. In the best ending, I expect him to keep being good.
• Jossed. The Blood War ends in Fourth Edition, and the Planes are just fine.
• For a more optimistic twist on this, if we assume the Nameless One's original sin was starting the Blood War, maybe his redemption would be ending it by himself
• By that point he can qualify as a side of his own. And then take on both other sides at once.
  • Also, one of the warlock's patron options in 5e is a powerful being that cheated death somehow, and also in this ed warlocks are frequently made to aid their in the War or infernal politics/intrigues in some way. Would be a marvellous plot hook - he's roflstomping both Hell and Abyss just to meet his friends again, and you're helping.

the punishment at the end is entirely voluntary on The Nameless One's part.

OK, this may not seem like much, but upon arriving in the hellish Planes, he picks up a weapon, nods and goes into battle. Sure, it could be a "yeah, that's a neat weapon" nod, or a "OK, let's go kick some ass" nod, but in a story where many little details seem to have real significance, this little gesture suggests that he's making a decision. So he has a choice. Then, just perhaps, The Nameless One has kept his incredible power but, after remembering his past lives, accepts that he has to redeem himself. Note that - as mentioned above - he keeps his human body, that there is a "what can change the nature of man?" voiceover, and that he didn't seem to die before undergoing his belated punishment - it looks like he was pulled bodily into another plane. Hence he probably didn't forget things. And knowledge, like belief, seems to be a very important thing in the Planes. And lastly, but very importantly - why would the Nameless One lose his incredible power? There is nothing that indicates he did.

• It certainly makes sense to me. After all, how does The Nameless One gain the memory in the bronze sphere? By feeling regret. How can he take full advantage of it? By accepting the regret, accepting all the evil, all the sins, all the pain his existence has caused to the point where he can weaponize it. Honestly, if you went through all that, the only logical conclusion is that he would, upon feeling full and complete regret for all his incarnations' actions, willingly take the punishment upon himself.

Planescape: Torment is a sequel of Baldur's Gate

The Nameless One is the Child of Bhaal if he were a Human male, followed the evil path and chose to remain a mere mortal being. After some times, he began to regret his deeds, and found a way to become immortal, so he would have the time to fix his numerous mistakes. It went horribly wrong...

• This doesn't add up, when you speak to Aphril in Spellhold, she tells the player that she sees TNO standing in front of the Pillar of Skulls. This either the scene where he meets Morte for the first time or the scene experienced in PS:T by the player (more likely the latter imo). Eitherway, the timeline doesn't add up.
  "I see... a walking corpse... he speaks... to a pillar of skulls? See, it is madness!"

The Nameless One is the Doctor

Read the full story here.

The Nameless One is Perrine, founder of the Godsmen

Because it would be just like this game if the founder of the Godsmen started that faction based on nothing more than the desperate hope that even someone like him could escape damnation and attain divinity.

Alternatively, The Nameless One founded every faction, or at least every faction he can join during the game

When he saw how the conflict between his factions, each of which was founded with the best intentions, was tearing the planes apart, the Good Incarnation repented of what he had done, and realized that he might need several lifetimes to make up for it. This would also explain why he feels no disconnect in joining any or all of them in a single playthrough.

The Nameless One's great sin was pride.

The belief that your sin is so horrible that it, alone of all sins, is unforgivable, is itself the sin of pride. He probably did something genuinely very bad, but was too proud to seek forgiveness. That's what led him to Ravel....

• But then there would be others like him.

Morte is Bob from The Dresden Files.

A perverted skull with only a tenuous grip of common morality?

The Nameless One's real name is Gith.

Lemme get the first big problem out of the way. When the Nameless One learns his name, he muses that it's "a simple thing, not at all what he expected," and remarks to the Good Incarnation "That was my name all along? But if I was-" As if he knew the name, had heard it before a number of times, but had thought it impossible to be his. Because it belonged to someone supposedly of the opposite gender, for example. History got mixed up a little somehow.

Gith created and led a race of xenocidal, slaving sociopaths - more than enough to condemn someone to the Blood War. The last thing Gith did before dropping off the radar forever was descending into the lower planes - officially to gather allies, but actually to seek Ravel's aid in attaining immortality. Why would he tell the truth to a race her regretted creating? And every Githyanki in all the planes knows instinctively that, somehow, Gith lives, but is lost to them.

• Debunked: Gith was a female, this is why the Githyanki society is a matriarchy, it's mentioned often in the Gith tribes lore. Githzerai aren't because while they respected her as the hero who freed both tribes (which were one at the time) they chose to follow Zerthimon's (Gith's right hand man in the uprising) path of neutrality over Gith's plan of "Let's be a dick to everyone now because we were slaves".

Yemeth was the Nameless One's first incarnation, or at least a very early incarnation.

Although the content was dummied out for the most part in the released game, Yemeth was canonically an incredibly powerful wizard who created a pendant that supposedly made the wearer immortal by consuming souls. Now, does this sound at all like how the Nameless One's present form of immortality functions?Furthermore, the name is brought up in relation to the Nameless One twice; once in the Tomb of Death that the Paranoid Incarnation created, a second time when speaking to the Pillar of Skulls. In both occasions, the name is brought as the last of a list of appellations or titles referring to the Nameless One's past. This suggests that Yemeth was, if not the very first incarnation of the Nameless One, than one of the first.

• Chris Avellone has stated that Yemeth is not the Nameless One's original name, though he did acknowledge that Yemeth could have been a past incarnation of him.

The Nameless One is the admiral responsible for the destruction of an entire world recorded in the Sensate Stones.

Think about it. First, the First Incarnation is said to have felt a tremendous amount of regret, which led him to seek immortality. Now, the stone that shows this memory is described as the one the Sensates use to feel regret. Next, we are talking about a crime (the destruction of a world) that seems more adapted to a sci-fi setting than to the Planescape one. It makes sense, however, if you imagine that the destruction of an entire world in a Multiverse where real, material worlds are ... well, now there is only one, would definitely upset the balance between Good and Evil, causing the decay of the Planes that the First Incarnation feel responsible first. That theory also explains how the Nameless One could recognize his name when he finally finds it (although it doesn't explain the rest about how it is a simple thing, I admit). Anyway, it's only a theory.

The First Incarnation was responsible for the death of the first Despair

Despair's killer was described as taking the rest of eternity to die, and this seems to be The Nameless One's fate until he's able to break it, the end result of which is being condemned to the Blood War regardless. Killing an aspect of one of the Endless would likely be a monumental enough crime to fit the one described in the game. In terms of world-building, tone and theme, the universes of Planescape and The Sandman would mesh well.

The First Incarnation did nothing exceedingly horrendous at all

But since the Planescape universe runs on Clap Your Hands If You Believe he basically convinced himself that his deed was so vile that eternal torment that no amount of good deeds will make up for is the appropriate punishment.

• THAT is utterly brilliant.
• Alternatively, he committed a grave sin but his regret magnified the severity of the sin to the point where he convinced himself that even an eternity of servitude in the Blood War wouldn't be enough to absolve him.

The First Incarnation was Rajaat, and the unforgivable crime he commited was, of course, the dooming of an entire Crystal Sphere to a slow and painful Class 5 Apocalypse How.

Alternatively, he may be somehow responsible for the existence of the Dark Powers and/or the Demiplane of Dread.

TLO's previous incarnations can sometimes resurface after dying

This explains any inconsistencies in the timeline (i.e. the Paranoid Incarnation came after the Practical one, but Practical's lover Deionarra's father is alive and not senile, and Paranoid's time was over 50 years ago, when he killed the Linguist's father). This pushed the Paranoid Incarnation even further off the edge; he suspected that the other incarnations are body snatchers, which is a more reasonable conclusion if he woke up several times with no memory of what he just did, instead of just waking up once.

TLO's name really is Adahn

As said above, TLO remarks that his name is both simple and unexpected. He can use it as much as he wants, but it doesn't take effect unless he knows it's his name. It's simple because it means that he knew it all along, deep down, but unexpected because he's been using it without effect.

The Nameless One ends up becoming a very important god.

That is, Jergal.By merging with The Transcendent One, The Nameless One becomes so stupidly powerful that they can cast True Resurrection for free. That sounds very familiar. And then you realize who The Nameless One would look like if their head was shaved.It would also be a fitting cameo in Baldur's Gate III, comparable to a decades-long veteran player overshadowing a strange noob; your mentor is a wizened grandmaster of The Game, who has grown tired of overcoming everything and seen it all, and started following you around because they were bored - and then you manage to show them how wacky you are, and so many brand-new ways to troll the hell out of everyone, that they get interested enough to dip their toes back into the game and share their overpowered, DM-infuriating powerset with you.

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