The multiverse is everything known and everything beyond. Encompassing worlds planes, life, and death, the multiverse’s infinite infinities brim with wonder, terror, secrets, and—above all—possibility. Every D&D adventure takes place in the multiverse. Beyond the lone worlds of the Material Plane are countless other realities and the paths and portals that connect every edge of eternity. Those who seek the wonders of the planes take their first step into the endless possibilities of a Planescape campaign.

What Is Planescape?

Planescape is the D&D multiverse and so much more. Beyond the Great Wheel cosmology (detailed in the Dungeon Master’s Guide), Planescape focuses on reality-bending adventures and aesthetics unbound from those of mortal worlds. Just as other D&D settings highlight certain concepts but can host any genre of adventure or style of play, the same is true of Planescape. Adventures in Planescape campaigns often focus on the following themes:

Backstage of Reality. Planescape adventures provide glimpses of the daily lives of unfathomable beings—like gods, angels, and demons—and how they act (and interact) when mortals aren’t their primary concern. The mysteries of life and the afterlife are widely known to these creatures.

Everywhere at Once. Planescape adventures span worlds, planes, and possibilities. Travel between incredible realms is common, especially via portal-rich locales like Sigil and the Outlands. Adventurers are likely to see multiple impossible sights every day.

Multiversal Scale. In Planescape adventures, dangers might threaten countless worlds, or the fate of the multiverse might hang in the balance. By the same token, wonders are commonplace, and true marvels are often wild in the extreme.

No Single Truth. The multiverse makes room for everything, and beliefs manifest as fantastic creatures. Planescape adventures often pit philosophies against one another and highlight subjective views. Situations might encourage characters to reexamine their beliefs in the face of plane-spanning philosophies, conflicts, and revelations.

Power and Possibility. The planes are home to beings of phenomenal power, yet the smallest things make a difference. Although adventurers might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of the multiverse, their choices hold the power to change reality.

Stage of Contradictions. In Planescape adventures, Celestials might be evil, Fiends might be apathetic, and yetis might sell snow cones. What you do defines you, not what others assume about you.

Everything D&D. Anything from any D&D setting and anything you can imagine might appear in Planescape adventures. Characters might encounter D&D’s greatest characters and monsters in situations where they’re not pitted against one another.

Sigil is the crossroads of the multiverse, a city at the center of the Great Wheel. Connected to every plane of existence and the infinite worlds among them, the City of Doors brims with commerce, travel, schemes, and adventure. Sigil is commonly referred to as the Cage because the only way into or out of the city is through one of its countless portals—pathways controlled by the enigmatic Lady of Pain. 

Where Is Sigil?

Sigil simultaneously exists at the center of the Great Wheel and nowhere. In the middle of the Outlands, an impossibly tall needle of a mountain, the Spire, rises into the sky. Sigil floats above the apex of the Spire, barely visible from the ground, constructed on the inside of a massive stone torus. Attempts to ascend to the city by climbing or flight are futile, as are efforts to reach the top of the Spire.

Sigil at a Glance

Once inside the city, a visitor is greeted by a vast urban tangle of bladed buildings in a wild array of architectural styles. Built within a great ring, the city curves before and behind observers, as if they stood in a bowl or valley, stretching upward and disappearing into an industrial haze. On a clear day, a creature that looks upward sees the other side of the city, curving far overhead. Visitors can find this reality unsettling. There are no suns, moons, stars, or other celestial bodies in the sky above Sigil, though city lights twinkle above in the darkest hours.

Sigil is built to the edges of the ring, forming a wall of structures along its border. Anyone who climbs atop this outer wall of buildings can look out over the edge into an empty sky. Few who cross the edge are ever heard from again. Those who pass over the edge don’t end up in the Outlands; rather, they are flung to random corners of the planes.

Life in Sigil

Creatures from every corner of the planes live and toil in the City of Doors, bringing fragments of their cultures to the multiversal hub. Over eons, these cultural tenets have blended and evolved into a unique way of life made possible by the myriad portals that exist at the Lady of Pain’s sufferance.

Inhabitants

Sigil is the backstage of the multiverse. Celestials and Fiends share drinks in genie-owned taverns, agents of evil gods trot through the streets astride nightmares, and hags stable faerie steeds alongside pegasi and beasts of living stone. As a result of this mingling, fundamentally incompatible parts of the multiverse come into direct contact. They don’t always clash, but when they do, authorities maintain order and stifle cosmic peril. Only when these eruptions threaten the city on a grand scale does the Lady of Pain intervene.

Humans are the earliest known inhabitants of the City of Doors. Some sages track the existence and spread of humans back to Sigil itself, rather than to a deity or its creations.

Various factions handle the day-to-day governance of Sigil, enforcement of laws, and maintenance of civic infrastructure. These groups each follow a philosophy inspired by a cosmic aspect of the multiverse, and they actively recruit visitors and citizens into their ranks.

Gods and godlike figures—including archdevils and demon lords—can’t enter Sigil by any means. However, their schemes and influence still find their way into the city through their agents.

Currency and Trade

Neither port nor proximity dictates trade in the City of Doors, granting its merchants and artisans access to the planes and their wondrous offerings. Woodcarvers whittle toys from golden trees toppled in Arborea, blacksmiths forge weapons from infernal ingots, and tavern chefs cook halfling recipes passed down on worlds of the Material Plane. With enough time, connections, and coin, one can find anything in Sigil’s markets.

A dizzying array of coinage flows through Sigil. It doesn’t matter where a coin was minted—if it’s made of precious metal and the weight is right, the money is usually good. However, some traders are particular about the currencies they accept. An efreeti merchant selling instruments from the City of Brass might accept only rainbow sapphires from the Elemental Plane of Earth. Perhaps a night hag hawking rare spell components refuses all currency but fresh larvae from Hades, while a bone devil might siphon years off the buyer’s life as payment for a diabolical blade.

The Outlands are a plane of concordant opposition—a disk-shaped plane of perfect neutrality at the center of the Outer Planes. Anything and everything can flourish on the impartial and balanced canvas of the Outlands: a broad region whose boundless terrain blends to match the extreme forces that shape it. Arid, flame-scarred plains give way to heroic mountain ranges sculpted in the likenesses of gods, moldy caverns ruled by sapient fungi, bottomless seas, and anything else that makes for great adventures.

Cosmic Realignment

Save for the domains of gods, realms in the Outlands are subject to a planar phenomenon known as cosmic realignment. When a location embodies the nature of one of the Outer Planes too closely, that plane absorbs the location and its inhabitants, restoring balance to the Outlands and expanding that plane. Some creatures combat cosmic realignment by acting in direct opposition to the linked plane’s temperament, while others gladly welcome this fate or pursue it outright.

Currency and Trade

Bartering is common in the vast and varied realms of the Outlands. When money exchanges hands, it often takes the form of a lodestar—a weakly magnetic, cobalt coin stamped on both sides with a five-point star. Minted in the gate-town of Tradegate (detailed later in this chapter), a lodestar is valued at 1 gp elsewhere.

Language

Like Sigil, the Outlands are home to speakers of every language, but creatures generally speak Common. Still, certain locations attract those who favor a particular tongue. For example, residents of towns with high concentrations of devils tend to also speak Infernal, while those in locales frequented by angels prefer to trumpet their holy praise in Celestial.

Religion and the Gods

Creatures in the Outlands revere gods as folk do anywhere else. At the center of the Great Wheel, faiths are as diverse as their worshipers, who hail from neighboring planes and distant Material Plane worlds. The Outlands contain the domains of several gods, such as the hidden tower of Annam the All-Father, creator of giants, and the gaseous realm of the beholder god Gzemnid. Devout worshipers, whether alive or dead, gravitate to their gods and carry out their will.

Time and Directions

Though the plane has no apparent suns, moons, or stars, the Outlands experience day and night cycles, sometimes referred to as peak and antipeak, respectively. In the morning, the sky gradually brightens, darkening to night 12 hours later. In the absence of clearly visible celestial bodies, travelers orient themselves based on the direction of the Spire, known as spireward. The opposite of spireward is brinkward.

This is a campaign of self-discovery. The characters all begin with amnesia, and they will be questing to partly discover who you were. You could have been a conquering warlord, a peaceful prince, a simple peasant, or a scholar with a dizzying intellect. You could have been anything, good or evil!

As such, your character backstory is up to your imagination. You could have been anything before  you ended up in Sigil with no memories. Try to put some effort into your character concept, but I will warn you, character death is quite common in this setting. Fortunately, through reasons that will be revealed later, characters coming back to life is very easy and simple. 

As you create your backstory, please answer the following as well:

What was the greatest decision or turning point in your character’s life? If your character made a different decision, how might their life be different? How would they be different if they made choices based on others’ expectations?

What is something your character wishes they could change about themselves? How would the best version of themselves be different?

What is your character’s signature possession or physical trait? What makes you certain that your character would retain this no matter what could have happened in their life?

I expect at least one post a day from the players. You can expect one from me as well. However, I understand if life gets busy and you can't post for a bit. When this happens, please let us know in advance or as soon as possible. I am currently a college student who is working two jobs, so there may be periods when I post every other day. I will let you know when this happens.

I will be running this campaign on Discord. I have found that Discord does a very good job at keeping things organized. While I may not be the best at Avrae yet, I like it better than how DnDBeyond runs things. 

I'm looking for 4-6 players that love telling and crafting stories. If you're in this just for combat, this isn't the campaign for you. This campaign has heavy exploration and social aspects.