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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Planescape Look

My Johnny-come-lately exploration of 2e Planescape has gone gangbusters this week. Thanks to hot tips from you fine, but enabling folks, little brown packages from the mail order gods have been rolling in each day.

Contact has left me appreciating much of that old line with only a few tugs of dislike (nothing about that today I am in “jaunty cap” mood). One of the things that really caught me is the conscious attempt to put together a real, unified aesthetic to the products—a shocker for me really since the vast majority of D&D art became so exponentially awful and commercial year after year following the early 80s.

My interest piqued, I went out looking for why TSR had put out such a markedly different feeling and looking line at the time. Fortunately White Wolf magazine (a painfully pretentious and vapid publication that I feel dirty for having bought legally) had some interesting skinny on its development in issue 43.

Of particular interest was an article by the designer himself, Dave “Zeb” Cook, called “Mutating the Planes”. In the piece he talks about the inspiration that went into the month of figuring out what he wanted to do with the new:
“I put on my headphones and cued up Pere Ubu, Philip Glass and Alexander Nevsky. For inspiration, I read books: The Dictionary of the Khazars, Einstein’s Dreams and The Narrow Road to the Deep North. For fun, there was always...Naked Lunch to Wolf Devil Woman [on] the VCR. For some reason, all this started affecting my brain.”
How could that go wrong? Reading that I can't help but think about all my peers (and really myself too) lists of strange disparate influences in Zak's GM questionnaire meme. A right-brained approach to worldbuilding that I can really appreciate.

Now back to the actual look Cook envisioned:
“I could think and write about these things, but the setting needed a look. I already had some images in mind--the gloomy prisons of Piranesi’s Le Carceri etchings, Brian Froud’s illustrations and surrealist art. Foolishly, people believed in me, and Dana Knutson was assigned to draw anything I wanted. I babbled, and he drew--buildings, streets, characters and landscapes. Before any of us knew it, he drew the Lady of Pain.”
Aha, that's what makes it click.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi's 18th-century flights of fantasy (and note how Carceri becomes a prison plane in the setting) has been a longtime favorite from his multilevel crampedness of the prison sketches to the gloomy ruins of Rome to the grand, weird cityscapes. Look at these fine examples and you can see the inspiration points for the work above.

Brian Froud provoked the same reaction, the “Dark Crystal dude”. Just take a gander at some of the concept art for that dark muppetish fantasy flick.

Great stuff.

I like the idea of thinking hard about all your points of internal visualization and pulling them together into a more coherent whole. It beats the pants off thinking about the art as a secondary thing, at best a pretty bow-tied package to wrap up the real meat of the prose.

It seems remarkable to me given the "published setting as schlock factory” that was the bread and butter of 2e-era TSR—a departure I have only really encountered again (successfully at least) in the DIY sections of our hobby in the last few years. Bully for that. 

13 comments:

  1. Great article. I was in my early twenties when Planescape was released. It was the only TSR product from that era that I was excited about. Check out the random 'Tiefling tables' from the 'Planeswalker's Handbook.' I still use those to this day in my S&W game. The three 'Monstrous Compendiums' are very useful as well.

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    1. I will definitely have to check those out especially if I can find them at bargain bin prices (I know a tough bar, but good things come to those that wait. I hear.)

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  2. Though I never played Planescape (I was a hardcore spelljammer in my last years of AD&D gaming), I've always admired the aesthetics of the setting. I also became an admirer of Tony DiTerlizzi's work after seeing it in the PS-supplements and the MM.

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    1. I didn't put it together that he was the big-time children's book author and artist until I googled him this morning. Figures, he obviously has economy-sized buckets of talent.

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  3. Planescape is good stuff. While I wouldn't do everything exactly the way they did it, the fact that it gets the creative juices flowing to tweak it is suggestive of its evocative power.

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    1. "While I wouldn't do everything exactly the way they did it..."

      Me either but I am saving that grousing for a slow day.

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  4. 1st Ed of Dark Sun was incredible too. It actually managed to evoke Sword and Sandals sensibilities.

    The 2nd editon of that milieu rather sucked, though a lot of that had to do with ongoing meta-plot issues that TSR was full of at that time.

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    1. I remember a year or two after it came out, picking up and thumbing through a copy of the Dark Sun boxed set at a date's house. I teased her at the time, but I remember thinking "I should start playing D&D again." (And she was a nice Jewish girl too.)

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  5. Like many commenters, I have fond memories of the Planescape setting though I didn't actually play it outside Torment and the odd influence on our Greyhawk campaign. The art and the concept are both very cool.

    Kill the friggin' factions! I found them irritating and unusable - like alignments on steroids or something. YMMV

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    1. A lot of people seem to dislike the factions. To me they're an important part of the feel of the setting. I think the idea of making PCs join a faction as part of character creation was a bad one; strip that away and you're left with a bunch of powerful, amoral, idealogical organisations engaging in constant Cold War style skullduggery and presumably always willing to hire conveniently deniable adventurers to do their dirty work.

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  6. Back when Planescape and Dark Sun came out one member of our group bought PS and another bought DS. They, of course, brought them to our games and everybody spent a long time checking them out. They left them there for everybody to read, so we all became fairly familiar. Oddly, we never played PS and we only eventually played DS for maybe 6-7 sessions.

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  7. I should add.. my favourite thing about the planescape materials' look was the font. Although I did (and do) love DiTerlizzi's work, I thought it needed more 'weight' and a 'heavier' feel to really be right for PS.

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  8. Is it odd that all the zaniest, most memorable, most gameable stuff that TSR did in the early 90s (PS, the Known World) was stuff that the people at the top kept away from?

    I recall a Zeb Cook article in Dragon that said this was one of the reasons that Planescape kept so much of its distinctive character: no one was trying to enforce TSR house style on the game (you know, the style that made 2E Dragonlance and FR books such boring, wordy slogs).

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