Fiction of Planescape: Introduction
It’s hard to know how much background to give in introducing this series of posts. I’m going to be talking about fiction set in Dungeons & Dragons’ Planescape campaign setting. If you know what all of those words mean you can skip the first part of this introduction. For everyone else, let me just say that Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game. In brief, players create characters and then work together to solve some problem in a fantasy narrative and world provided by the Dungeon Master, who is him-/herself drawing on rules and other materials provided in D&D game books.
Sessions of D&D take place in settings. Several different official settings have been developed over the years, beginning with Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor and Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk. Since 1984, novels and short stories which take place in these settings have commonly been published alongside the guidebooks and adventure modules. Since the late 1980s the “default” setting for D&D has been a world called the Forgotten Realms, and hundreds of novels in this setting have been published. Another important setting is Dragonlance, for which many dozens of novels have been published.
This series is going to be about Planescape. In a nutshell, the Planescape setting was a way to combine all possible settings in such a way that you could get from one to the other. The hub of Planescape is the city of Sigil, a donut- or wheel-shaped metropolis hovering above an infinite spire. Sigil is also called the City of Doors because it contains portals to all the other planes of existence.
The concept of multiple planes had been part of D&D for a long time. The planes seem to have been first explicitly discussed in 1977 by Gary Gygax, one of D&D’s originators, though they seem to have been assumed even earlier (see Sean Gandert’s article on this). Possibly Gygax was inspired by the alternate dimensions explored in writings like H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dream Cycle” (1918–1932), L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s “Harold Shea” series (1940–) and The Carnelian Cube (1948), de Camp’s The Fallible Fiend, Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” novels (1950–1984), Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber (1970) — among others. The concept of alternate worlds was indeed common in 20th-century fantasy and science fiction. The innovation of Gygax and of the later D&D game designers who contributed to Planescape was to systematize these alternate dimensions and provide a hub for traveling between them.
Planescape was and is a highly-regarded setting, but it’s not one that seems to have been very popular for actual tabletop gaming. It came out in 1994, during TSR’s final years (TSR being the company that originally made D&D). This was after TSR had already produced many other settings in a misguided attempt to draw new customers. This abundance of settings with different features perhaps drew in some new customers. If you were into dragons, maybe you’d go for Dragonlance materials; if you were into Frank Herbert’s Dune, maybe you’d buy into Dark Sun; if you were into vampires, maybe you’d pick up Ravenloft; etc. But this strategy also subdivided some of D&D’s existing audience into niches, while other players probably just ignored the new settings. In any case, TSR was already in grave financial difficulty by the time of Planescape and was taken over a few years later by Wizards of the Coast. For an excellent history of TSR in the ’80s and ’90s, check out Ben Riggs’s book Slaying the Dragon.
As I said before, novels and short stories had been, since 1984, a popular way for TSR to market and develop its gaming materials. D&D fiction allowed players to experience D&D settings in another medium. It also gave them new ideas for their D&D sessions. Before TSR was acquired by Wizards of the Coast, they managed to produce four official Planescape novels. Add to this a major fan-made novel that was rejected by TSR but circulated on the internet, and a novelization of the videogame Planescape: Torment which was published by Wizards of the Coast in 1999, and the grand total of Planescape novels comes up to six. We should add to this at least two pieces of short fiction by Planescape designer David “Zeb” Cook. We’ll also make some reference to fan-made transpositions of Planescape: Torment’s in-game text into quasi-novel form. All in all, a not-insurmountable amount of material. While I seriously doubt whether anyone has read all of the Forgotten Realms novels, making your way through the six Planescape novels and a few additional items is not a Sisyphean burden.
Pretty much all of this is now rather obscure. Some would say this is for the best. But, while the official Planescape novels have been generally disliked, Planescape fiction is really no worse than other D&D fiction (a low bar, some would say). In fact, I’d say that on average a Planescape novel is more inventive than your average Forgotten Realms entry. Why? Well, one of the special aspects of Planescape relative to other D&D settings is its overt postmodernism. Planescape is a world of bricolage, multiple perspectives, carnivalesque subversion. Where much of D&D is vaguely medieval in style — Conan the Barbarian meets Lord of the Rings with a dash of H. P. Lovecraft — Planescape mixes the medieval with the ancient and the Elizabethan and Victorian. You get Greek gods but also steampunky science fiction. You get sword-and-sorcery but also urban horror. All while your characters trade wisecracks in Elizabethan slang (“cant”).
This postmodern mixing and matching is no accident: the original Planescape designer, David “Zeb” Cook, was influenced by, among other things, postmodernist fiction. I’ll say more about this when I discuss Cook’s short fiction.
In this series of posts, I’m going to proceed roughly chronologically through Planescape fiction. Though it has to be said that, since much of this was written during the same few years of 1994–1996, it’s not possible to be absolutely precise about chronology. In any event, over the course of the series we’re going to pay special attention to the following aspects of Planescape fiction:
- Common themes, imagery, symbols
- Connections with other literature and with Planescape games
- Relative strengths (and weaknesses) of particular writers
The planned content of this series is as follows:
- “The Plane Truth” by David “Zeb” Cook
- “The Analects of Sigil” by David “Zeb” Cook
- Fire and Dust by James Alan Gardner
- The Blood Wars Trilogy by J. Robert King
- Pages of Pain by Troy Denning
- Torment by Ray and Valerie Vallese, as well as other Planescape: Torment novelizations
- A few other later works that utilize aspects of the Planescape setting