Fiction of Planescape: “The Plane Truth”
[For an introduction to this series of posts, see here.]
We begin our voyage into Planescape fiction with a short but suggestive story by David “Zeb” Cook. Cook was the main designer behind Planescape, and the influences on him at the time are going to be relevant here. Cook has been quoted as saying:
By the time I started on Planescape I had pretty much given up on reading fantasy (too many years spent working in it). For a long time I had been reading obscure history, but right around that time I picked up a batch of experimental fiction. Books like [Italo Calvino’s] Invisible Cities, [Alan Lightman’s] Einstein’s Dreams, [Jorge Luis Borges’s] Dreamtigers, and [Milorad Pavić’s] Dictionary of the Khazars had an effect. (qtd. in 30 Years of Adventure, p. 142)
Besides these texts, and various movies and music, he’s also mentioned 17th-century Japanese writer Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (see Cook, “Mutating the Planes,” p. 38).
Most of the literary influences mentioned by Cook — but especially Dictionary of the Khazars — are reflected in his short piece “The Plane Truth.” This story was published in three parts in Dragon Magazine in 1994 (issues 203–205). The three parts are subtitled “Codifying Sigil,” “A Journey to the Outlands,” and “The Transformation.”
“The Plane Truth,” of course, plays on the phrase “the plain truth.” Cook seems to be signaling that we’re going to be introduced to some facts about the planes. And the story is a good introduction to Planescape; Cook does give us some basic information about the planes. But more importantly it introduces the tone and style of Planescape: there’s an air of mystery and dreaminess and vague dread; there are metafictional techniques and a Möbius-strip-like looping of reality.
The plot of “The Plane Truth” revolves around a book called The Codex of Infinite Planes which takes control of people through their dreams in order to manifest itself in reality.
The first part of the story is subtitled “Codifying Sigil.” “Codifying Sigil” is framed as a found document. In other words, the text of this part is supposed to be a document existing within the world of the story — within the Planescape multiverse. Specifically, it is some pages from a notebook of Fallendor the Mage, and is presented to us by someone named Magistrate Lach-Verger.
The notebook entry describes Fallendor the Mage’s dreams of a book called the Codex of Infinite Planes. The Codex, Fallendor thinks, exists only in dreams and reveals itself one page at a time to dreamers. Each morning Fallendor writes down a dream page. He believes that when all the transcriptions of the pages of the dream book are collected, then the book will exist in the real world — will move from dream to reality.
The Codex of Infinite Planes appears to function as a portal. Fallendor says, “As the dreamer reads the entries in the book, he creates the destination where the Codex will send him. When the image is complete, the traveler arrives” (74).
I should mention here that the Codex of the Infinite Planes is a long-running artifact in Dungeons & Dragons. It was perhaps first described in print by Gary Gygax and Brian Blume in the D&D supplement Eldritch Wizardry from 1976. Zeb Cook himself had included a description of the Codex in his second edition AD&D supplement Book of Artifacts (1993). I believe it was first described as being a portal in Gygax’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Masters Guide of 1979. There Gygax wrote, “Any person reading its 99 damned pages is 99% certain to meet a terrible fate …. The Codex’s other pages have the keys to instant physical transference to any one of the other planes and alternates of any world or universe” (p. 156). Cook gives a similar description in the 1993 Book of Artifacts: “The Codex can open a portal to any plane, demiplane, or prime material world at any location” (p. 27). The Codex would reappear in materials for subsequent D&D editions as well as in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game under various descriptions.
Up to 1994 the Codex of the Infinite Planes was portrayed as a very large, very powerful, but very dangerous artifact that could only be used by a high-level character. Zeb Cook’s “The Plane Truth” and “The Analects of Sigil” (which I’ll discuss in the next post) are the only overt references to the artifact in fiction as far as I know. “The Plane Truth” would also seem to be the only text in which the Codex exists in the world of dream.
Now back to the story.
Fallendor the Mage hopes to dream of Sigil, and so he “review[s] the entries relating to Sigil.” The rest of this first part of the story is an alphabetized list of entries on Sigil. These entries include “The Aleax of Sigil,” a mysterious formless creature that takes on properties from the city around it before driving itself to oblivion at the end of the day; “The Dictionaries of Pain,” which are pretty much what they sounds like; “The Doomguard,” the faction within Sigil that seeks the end of all things; “Factions” itself, which discusses the various groups within Sigil that are defined by what they believe; “Geography of Sigil,” which gives the basics of how Planescape’s geography works; “PLANESCAPE Campaign Setting,” which talks about Sigil’s existence “in another reality,” i.e., in human reality; “Portals,” which describes inter-planar travel; and “The Lady of Pain,” about the mysterious guardian of Sigil. (These entries are variations on descriptions given in Cook’s Planescape campaign setting books.)
A few things to note so far:
This first part of the story is very much in the spirit of Invisible Cities and Dictionary of the Khazars. In both novels dreams play a major role in constituting reality. And Dictionary of the Khazars, as the title would suggest, is also an alphabetical set of entries that gradually reveals a fictional history.
A couple of ideas here possibly influenced later Planescape literature. The idea of a book that transports you to different places will reappear in J. Robert King’s Blood Wars Trilogy. And Troy Denning’s Planescape novel Pages of Pain is organized around four types of pain, recalling “The Dictionaries of Pain” which classify “all the shadings of anguish.”
Finally, note the postmodernist metafictional element: Fallendor recognizes that his reality is a fiction in another universe. And he writes:
The easy question would be, of course, who dreams who? Is this world the creation of those who imagine it in play, or are they mere fictions of this realm? But the hard question is this. Of the two worlds, one is truthful, while the other one lies, so who created the honest world?
The first part of “The Plane Truth” ends with another entanglement of dreaming and non-dreaming realities: “At last he [Fallendor] dreams the magistrate standing in an empty house, reading the papers Fallendor has left behind.” The magistrate, in other words, is presenting a document which presents his own finding of the document.
So much for the first part of the story. The second part of “The Plane Truth,” “A Journey to the Outlands,” shifts to the writings of a different character, “Ambran the Seeker, half-elven paladin of Oghma’s temple at the court of Azoun IV; king of Cormyr.” Ambran’s narrative is eventually going to intersect with Fallendor’s. Oghma, incidentally, was the God of Knowledge in D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting at this time; Cormyr was one of the major countries within the setting.
The paladin Ambran has apparently been tasked “to explore the realms beyond the barriers of Toril” — Toril being the planet on which Cormyr exists, basically a fantasy version of Earth. Ambran’s journals record his visit to Sigil and his journey into the outlying regions. After some time in Sigil, Ambran hires a bariaur (“goat-centaur”) named Glin to guide him in the Outlands. The Outlands are the lands around Sigil that lead to all the various planes of existence.
Whereas the first part of the story owed much to Dictionary of the Khazars, the second part seems to borrow more from imaginative travelogs like Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, or perhaps Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams. It’s a quick survey of a few Outland regions and gate towns. Ambran’s journey outside Sigil takes him to Ribcage, the gate town to Baator (aka, Hell); the Vale of the Spine (a mountain range around Ribcage); and Automata, the gate town to Mechanus.
There are references here to a couple of ideas important to the Planescape setting: the Blood War, an eternal war between demons and devils (tanar’ri and baatezu); and the Modron Procession, a periodic march of mechanical beings called modrons along the Great Road which connects (at least conceptually) the gate towns of the Outlands.
The second part ends with a brief conversation between Ambran and a member of the entropy-loving Doomguard, who had come to watch the modron march. The Doomguard, recall, are one of the factions of Sigil (factions being groups whose members are united by similar beliefs). We get some insight here into Doomguard philosophy, which is about maintaining the decay of the multiverse. It’s notable that this Doomguard warrior is “from one of the Doomguard citadels on the Inner Planes.” This anticipates Cook’s second Planescape story, “The Analects of Sigil.”
The third part of “The Plane Truth,” subtitled “The Transformation,” begins in Chronepsis’s Mausoleum. Chronepsis is the dragon-god of fate, death, and judgment, whose realm is somewhere underneath the Outlands. After emerging from the Mausoleum, Ambran finds he has lost track of the days.
Ambran and his bariaur-guide Glin continue wandering the Outlands, passing over Ilsensine’s underground realm, the Caverns of Thought. Ilsensine is the Lord of the Illithids, also called mind flayers — creatures that are able to manipulate the minds of others. At this point Glin begins asking Ambran about his dreams. And, presently, Ambran begins to sense the occurrence within himself of thoughts that are not his own. He begins to have dreams which “become stronger and more insistent.”
Ambran’s dreams, it turns out, are the dreams of Fallendor the Mage, whom we met in part 1 of the story. Fallendor feels he has become the slave of the Codex of Infinite Planes. While Ambran sleeps, Fallendor, through his dreams, tattoos words from the Codex of Infinite Planes on Ambran’s body. In this way Fallendor hopes to release himself from the grip of the Codex. As he transcribes the Codex onto Ambran, Ambran feels himself becoming “less of [himself] and more of someone else.”
Finally, in Bedlam, gate town to Pandemonium (the plane of madness), Ambran finds someone who can explain his predicament. A fiend-leader tells him:
To exist and to grow, the book becomes the dreams of a prime [=someone from the Prime Material Plane]. The slave writes what he dreams and goes where the pages take him, until eventually the slave is a useless husk. When he finally writes his own page in the dead book, the book waits for another and continues its pages.
But sometimes the slave realizes he can escape his burden by sending his dreams to another (Ambran’s passage over the Illithid Lord’s realm seems to have enabled this).
Ambran is drawn inexorably into Pandemonium. The story ends with Ambran switching places with Fallendor in a cave in Pandemonium. Or rather, Fallendor’s spirit or soul enters into Ambran’s body, and presumably Ambran’s soul is trapped in Fallendor’s body. Fallendor is able to leave Pandemonium in Ambran’s body, yet he still finds himself enslaved by words:
I thought I was free of the Codex, but even now I realize this too was a lie. I no longer see it in my dreams, but its words still bind me. These notes, for one. I cannot resist the urge to write my experiences, even though I always burn them later. My passions are printed on this face; these hands describe the childhood of another body. All the things that Fallendor was are written for everyone to see — his hopes and his final treachery. People see this tattooed face and shun me. Words still enslave me.
The influence of books like Dreamtigers, Invisible Cities, and Dictionary of the Khazars seems to weigh heavily on this final part of the story. All of these works are pervaded with slippages of identities and of dreams, poetry, and reality. Consider, for example, Borges’s brief story in Dreamtigers “Borges and I,” in which a gap opens up between the private and public Borges, with the private Borges ceding more of himself to the public Borges, Borges the writer, the good parts of which belong “to the Spanish language or to tradition.” The private Borges is devoured by the public Borges, and the public Borges is devoured by the language. Or consider “Parable of the Palace,” another story in Dreamtigers, in which a poet’s poem verbally captures and thus dissolves a palace. Or consider Invisible Cities, in which reality is remade to correspond to a dream or in which dreams correspond to realities one has never seen (e.g., pp. 45–46, 55, 73–74).
But perhaps more than anywhere else, the reality of dreaming pervades Dictionary of the Khazars, which is in part a dictionary of dream hunting. The dictionary includes such phenomena as people who live only in dreams, moving from dreamer to dreamer, who are tracked by dream hunters.
One of the entries describes the ultimate dream figure, “Adam Ruhani”:
If all human dreams could be assembled together, they would form a huge man, a human being the size of a continent. This would not be just any man, it would be Adam Ruhani, the heavenly Adam, man’s angel ancestor, of whom the imams speak. … [D]ream hunters plunge into other people’s dreams and sleep and from them extract little pieces of Adam-the-precursor’s being, composing them into a whole, into so-called Khazar dictionaries, with the aim of having all these assembled books incarnate on earth the enormous body of Adam Ruhani. (pp. 165–66)
Additionally, Dictionary of the Khazars also describes a Khazar envoy who has “the history and topography” of the Khazars tattooed on his body. “The Plane Truth” makes use of this idea of tattooed topography; and a similar idea will appear later in the video game Planescape: Torment, in which tattoos can provide clues to identity as well as special powers.
I should mention that the idea of dreams having their own metaphysical reality or providing portals into other realities is also present in the fantasy literature that influenced earlier D&D, such as the stories and novels of H. P. Lovecraft and L. Sprague de Camp. There are interesting parallels between 20th-century speculative fiction and magical-realist/avant-garde/postmodern fiction — though it seems these developments rarely influenced each other.
Zeb Cook would continue exploring these themes in his story “The Analects of Sigil,” which I’ll look at next time.