Planescape (Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition)
Locations
Characters
- Drummer a mysterious masked bard
- Aldier Covingstar a devoted cleric of Sune
- Hizzkizz a dragonborn ranger seeking new horizons
- Valeria a paladin of Torm seeking redemption for Carissa
- Stormy Mountainpeak a cat torn between impulses and dicipline
- Garumgar a half-orc cavalier far from her horse
- Orsik Dankil a dwarf far from home
- Riadon 'Gold-teeth' Hanali a pirate you might have heard of
- Larhs Saithroses a half-elf who played dice in Hell
- Gundal 'Ratspawn' a thief on the road to redemption
- Leaves in the river a cat who found something familiar so far from home
- Holg 'Inchice' man with strange interest in sewers
Adventure log
- To baator and back; Or how to lose a small child in hell
- The March begins; Or how to return a talking book to Automate because a cat asked nicely
- Planewalkers; Or never skip leg day
Known portals
| From | To | Key |
|---|---|---|
| Avernus | Sigil | Brick from the road to Hell |
| Sigil | Automata | Page torn in half with letter E written on each part |
| Sigil | Gates of the Moon | Ounce of silver |
| Gates of the Moon | Infinite Staircase | Full moon |
| Infinite Staircase | Sigil (Civic festhall) | None |
Magic on the Planes
"Only a clueless prime or a leatherheaded wizard would ever believe his magic is always going to work the same on every plane. It just ain't so, berk — not when the multiverse has got planes whose very essences are living fire, absolute perfection, howling despair, complete decay, or things even worse. Some of it should be obvious — using a holy word against a pit fiend on its home plane just won't work, as many a sodding basher has learned too late. Some of it ain't so clear, either, like can a cutter summon a djinni to Ysgard?"
Most abjurations protect against creatures from another plane, and a few (like holy word) can drive a creature back to its home plane. In either case, an abjuration can't affect a creature on its home plane. For example, some primes might try to use protection from evil to protect themselves from efreet while they're in the City of Brass. They figure the spell works at home, so it should work on the plane of Fire, too, but it doesn't. The City of Brass is on the efreet's home plane, so the genies aren't an extraplanar there and the protection spell won't work. If anybody was summoned, it was the fool prime .
The home plane has the reverse effect on summoning spells. Specifically, unless it's a spell that summons creatures from another plane (such as conjure elemental or gate), a summoning's got to draw on something close at hand. A monster summoning I can only summon up monsters from the same plane. For instance, casting a monster summoning won't cause a succubus to appear on Ysgard; it's not the fiend's home plane, and not even a plane where it can normally be found.
Spell keys
With all these alterations and restrictions, a spellcaster's life on the planes could be nigh impossible. Imagine some poor sod of an elementalist wizard out there on Gehenna, cut off from the Ethereal and unable to cast the most powerful of his spells. Kind of makes a wizard just want to stay home, eh?
Good thing, then, that there's a way around it: For each plane, there are secret spell keys that attune a wizard to the magical vibrations of that plane. Once the spellcaster's in harmony with the plane's essence, some or all of his spells may behave normally again. It's really not much of a dark, since most planar mages know the keys exist, even if they don't know the keys for every plane. It's the spellcasters from the Prime Material who tend to be most clueless about such things, much to the general amusement of their planar counterparts.
