The idea for the Planescape Campaign Setting came from a man named Slade Henson. At the time, TSR had ended the Spelljammer setting and was looking to replace it. Slade picked up a copy of the First Edition Manual of the Planes and came up with the idea of creating a planar setting. TSR enlisted the help of David "Zeb" Cook in 1994, just five years after he had designed the Spelljammer Campaign Setting. Zeb would become the lead designer on Planescape and the rest is history. Planescape would later receive critical acclaim and be stated to be "The best game world ever produced for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons"

After its initial release, the Planescape Campaign Setting was followed up by 5 additional box sets, 14 accessory publications, 12 adventures, 3 novels, a collectible card game and a wildly popular video game titled Planescape: Torment. Planescape: Torment could receive an article of its own but in general, the game follows the protaganist, The Nameless One, through his adventures of the world of Planescape (including Sigil, The Outlands, Baator, Carceri, and The Negative Energy Plane).

Upon the release of 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, Planescape was discontinued, along with most other settings from 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons. 3rd Edition did contain its own Manual of the Planes and included references to the setting, including Sigil, but it didn't quite scratch that itch that players had for the setting. As a result, fan sites such as planewalker.com and theplanardm.com began to pop up, proving that the fandom for this setting was strong.

So what does Planescape offer besides just an adventure on different planes?

Well, I would be remiss to not talk about Sigil: the City of Doors. Sigil is the gateway to everything and everywhere that matters. Step through one door and enter the halls of Ysgard, or turn down a particular alley and discover the Abyss. There are more gateways in Sigil than can be imagined; with all those doors Sigil's a very useful place. Want to share a drink with a fiend, or maybe discuss philosophy with a deva? Here it can happen in the same day, the same afternoon, even at the same table - nothing's too unlikely for Sigil. Strange folks abound here, and any one of them may prove ally or foe. Planescape originally introduced the tiefling, githzerai, and to some degree the aasimar and genasi races to Dungeons and Dragons. It was truly groundbreaking. Only in Sigil could you find an adventuring company comprised of humans, elves, dwarves, githzerai and tieflings. Of course, such a sight is commonplace in many campaigns now as the races have expanded and become more common.

Beyond Sigil, the Planescape Campaign setting offers so much more and introduces aspects of Dungeons and Dragons lore that persist to this day. It introduced the Lady of Pain, gave guides and rules to many of the planes and fleshed out the Great Wheel Cosmology which is now taken as the standard cosmology of most Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, regardless of setting. Some of the things described within are taken for granted by many Dungeons and Dragons players and DMs now, but at the time it was really innovative stuff. The beauty of the setting is not lost just because those rules are commonplace now.

For all the love it gets, the setting is not absent of criticism. Everything in this hobby comes under fire at some point and Planescape is no exception. Many critics will describe how poorly written the source material is. With one look at any of the core books, you can understand where they're coming from. The text is wrapped around images in a way that breaks it into jagged chunks, with almost every line ending with a broken word that continues on the next line. If this doesn't make it hard enough to read, the entirety of the Campaign Setting and several other Planescape books is written in Cant, a kind of slang that gives the books a feeling that they're being written by a tour guide from Sigil itself, rather than by a company describing a setting. It's not quite on par with A Clockwork Orange but it can be off-putting for some.

But that's all just criticism for the sake of criticism. People will pick apart anything. If you're truly interested in the Planescape setting, you'll probably find those things endearing rather than loathsome. Well how do you know if you are interested in the setting or not? We'd like to save you the time of combing through 30 books, a card game and a video game and break down some of the basic defining characteristics of the setting.