Society of Sensation (Planescape)

Faction Philosophy

According to these folks, the multiverse is known by its senses - the only proofs of existence. Without experience, without sensation, a thing isn’t. If a sod can’t taste the soup, then it ain’t soup. The only way to know anything for sure is to use the senses.

Look, it ain’t that hard to understand. Which is real, a description of a rose or the rose itself? Only a barmy’d choose the description, which ain’t real. It’s got no smell, no thorns, no color. PIcking a rose, that’s real, and the way a body knows is by experiencing it. The senses are the only way to know the universe.

So some berk’ll ask, “What’s this got to do with the universal Truth, the meaning of the multiverse?” Well, the chant is no one’s going to know the big dark until they’ve experienced everything - all the flavors, colors, scents, and textures of all the worlds. Only when a body’s experienced the whole universe does the great dark of it all finally get revealed. It may seem like an impossible task, but there just might be a way to bob the problem - cheat the multiverse, as it were. It just might be that the multiverse doesn’t exist beyond what a body can sense. The answer to what’s over the next hill just might be “nothing”.

Given that, the multiverse has limits, and a body can try to experience it all. All being’s got to savor the intensity, explore the complexity. Don’t just guzzle the wine - find all the flavors within it. Before a sod’s all done, he’ll learn the difference between Arvorean and Ysgardian wine, know them by vintage, and even by the hand of the vintner. Only then do the secrets of the multiverse start to make themselves clear.

Factol Erin Darkflame Montgomery

Erin Darkflame Montgomery

At 33 years of age, Erin Montgomery's seen and done more than planars three times her senior. While growing up in the tiny village of Grim's Head, out on the Outlands in Tir na Og, her family discovered her mind-talent for healing others. At the tender age of 10, she became a novitiate to Diancecht, the Celtic goddess of healing. By 13 she was a full fledged priestess, committed to the impartial healing of all injured, friend or foe. And when a Blood War raid ran rampant through Tir na Og a few years later, Montgomery gave her all to help heal the wounded. Unfortunately, she had nothing left to give when the tanar’ri captain Za’rafas and a few of his fellows collapsed before her. Most of the fiends died, but a few made it back to the Abyss to report their woe. As it turned out, Za’rafas was a favorite of a powerful Abyssal Lord, and the fiend blamed Montgomery for the captain’s death. He began to send assassins after her: how she’s eluded them thus far, none will say.

At 17, Montgomery left Tir na Og, hoping to spare her family and friends from any more tanar’ri trouble. For the next decade she wandered almost exclusively from world to world on the Prime Material Plane. She was still young enough to want to lead a boisterous life - something she’d never been able to do as a priestess back in Tir na Og. So she joined a decadent group called the Pax Imperica, mesmerized by its spectacle, by the ease with which they conducted pleasure and life. She developed an appreciation for fine wines and foods and fostered a growing desire for ever more prurient entertainment.

Cuatha Da’nanin was a slave in the royal court, of which Montgomery was a favored - and frequent - guest. Her jaded eyes liked what she saw: a tall, finely muscled body combining the best features of elf and human parentage. His eyes, which first caught her attention, were a startling green - so much like her own that she thought she saw herself every time she looked at Da’nanin. But the image those eyes reflected back was an ugly one: proud. sadistic, self-serving, and arrogant.

Montgomery still had the grace to feel shame each time she looked at Da'nanin, and for a while she avoided him. Then one dayhis name was called for the nightly entertainment known as the Spit, a circus of atrocity that the half-elf wasn't likely to survive.

Though she’d witnessed - and even participated in the horrors of the Spit many times before, Montgomery had no such desire that night. She secretly freed Da’nanin and used a gate key to jump to Sigil; they’ve been a pair ever since. ‘Course, Montgomery’s need for sensation couldn't entirely be quelled, only channeled, and she joined the Sensates a year after entering the Cage. She knows that hedonism’s destroyed more than one faction member and, as factol, she’s tried to steer the Sensates toward more cerebral pursuits, rather than immediate gratification at whatever cost.

Da’nanin joined the faction, too, as Montgomery’s consort; he helped her rapid rise to power and now acts as her right-hand blood. The half-elf‘s interested in all manner of visitors, especially adventurers and travelers from strange lands - even the Clueless are likely to receive a reception from him that’s quite warm by Cager standards.