The Rule of Threes

A Planescape Website

What's New
(2005-August-18)

1. What's Planescape?
2. What's this site?
3. Who did this site, and why?

1. What's Planescape?

Planescape is a campaign setting for roleplaying games which was published by TSR (and then WOTC) from 1994 until about 1998 or 1999, back in the days of 2nd edition AD&D. It uses as its base the "known planes of existence," familiar (in broad outline, anyway) to anybody who has played AD&D since the first edition and remembers the appendix from the Player's Handbook. Only, here, they've been fleshed out, and the setting has been given a character all it's own, making the planes more than the "supporting cast" for the main, Prime Material setting of a game. (Indeed, the perspective is quite the opposite: in Planescape, characters from the Prime are considered provincial and clueless.) In so doing, the city of Sigil was introduced, a huge city where a basher can find anything he might want to find, including portals to all of the other known planes of existence. In Planescape, on the outer planes philosophy becomes tangible. The war of ideas becomes just as, if not more, important than wars for territory.

On the Books section of this site there is more information about the books which were published as a part of the Planescape line. It also details what I consider to be the "Planescape Canon"... towards the end of the line, some products got published that made it clear that WotC was trying to move away from the character and uniqueness of the Planescape line while still claiming to support the setting. And, of course, some might say that the various, more generic and broader planer toolkits that come with D&D/3e should be considered Planescape, though I would probably not be inclined to agree. Of course, anything you happen find useful or inspiriational for your campaign is the right thing to use, so there you go!

2. What's this site?

This site is Omar's collection of Planescape related stuff that he felt inspired to put on the web. Beyond this home page (and it's associated pages such as What's New), there are three main sections to this site:

1. Books: all about the Planescape books which were published by TSR, some of my thoughts on those books, and a few additional books which may be interesting for somebody running a Planescape game.

2. Index: an ambitious project which is just getting started. I mean to start building a master index of the names, places, and things which are referred to in the Planescape products, so that I can quickly find the dark about various cutters in my huge stack of Planescape books.

3. Chant: other chant created specifically for this site, including information about the Planescape campaigns I've run, some of my rantings, some rules conversions for using the Planescape setting under systems other than D&D, including GURPS Planescape, and other fluff

For technical information about this website, including the web standards and optional fonts used, see About the Rule of Threes.

3. Who did this site, and why?

This site was created by Omar, a sometime gamer (who uses an alias partly because of being in the closet due to the "nerd stigma" of gaming). Once upon a time an AD&D gamer, Omar has primarily been playing (and GMing) other systems in the last several years, primarily GURPS and Fudge, which is why he uses GURPS when playing Planesape.

Why is this here? Scratch your brain-box: why does anybody put a hobby website online? Some terrible combination of narcissim, exhibitionism, and procrastination (of what one really ought to be doing) is probably what usually leads to these sorts of things.