Is Sigil a safe place to live?How would one gain citizenship.
>>93925010>Is Sigil a safe place to live?So long as you aren't stupid, you should be fine>How would one gain citizenship.Yeah you can just show up and that's enough
>>93925010Compared to most D&D settings, it's among the more stable ones. All those high level figures in one place leads to a kind of equilibrium out of fear of escalation.
>>93925010>Is Sigil a safe place to live?Probably about as safe as St Louis.>How would one gain citizenship.Doesn't exist. You just show up and live there however you can.
There isn't a state power expect for the authority of the LoP and she doesn't give a shit about anything, average schmucks sign up with devil mafias, extraplanar orgs, or one of the 15 relatively static factions. So you become a "citizen" by either being powerful enough that no one fucks with you, or you go find a gang whose badge you like and ask em if they're recruiting.
>>93925010I don't know jack shit about Sigil but what is the deal with the Lady of Pain?
>>93925635Setting device so that Sigil doesn't gangraped and torn apart. No purpose other than that.
>>93925010It's the single most culturally and ethnically diverse place in the multiverse (although Forgotten Realm have been catching up lately). Of course it's safe.
>>93925754I mean, you bring up a good point. Everywhere is culturally and ethnically diverse or getting there, Sigil isn't special. God modern fantasy is so fucking boring.
>>93925776>Things being varied and colourful with a multitude of options and stories is actually boring>Only a homogenous grey paste where everyone looks the same, thinks the same, worships the same god, speaks a single language and has only three class options excites me>Now excuse me while I eat this boiled, unseasoned chicken breast with mayonnaise
>>93925010If you're immortal, yeah.
>>93925010>Sigil>safeit's giant floating Lankhmar with portals to a billion worlds, so no
>>93925815I didn't say that, I don't even hate it. But if everyone does it everywhere it is boring and gets old. Ready for you to call me a black Nazi now.
>>93925848>Jumps right to white genocide nonsense.Fuckin' Nazis just cannot help but out themselves.
>>93925860Why tf you defending soulless grey subhuman paste?That's not culture that's fucking sickness. It's the opposite of interesting and drains the beauty out of everything. The less of it around the better.
>>93925877I'd rather have the grey society. Rainbow cultures are gay as fuck and will never last long term. I'm glad that faggots are getting thrown off buildings.
>>93925877Nta but it's kinda funny to complain about grey paste and then champion living in a grey concrete hellhole.To answer OP's question no, fuck no Sigil isn't safe. You're bumping shoulders with Baatezu and Tanar'ri, every wrong turn is filled with berks who will shank you to sell your shell to the Dustmen, one wrong step puts you through a portal to an empty room with no exit or to the middle of fucking Carceri, and the Lady will flense you into quivering cubes of beef jerky if you're unlucky to get yourself noticed.
>>93925635She's a bunch of giant squirrels working together under those robes.
>>93925635She bans the gods from residing in Sigil and mazes anyone who tries to worship her.
>>93925860Why would I call you a black Nazi? More truthfully, you're just a boring bastard.>>93925886Do you fantasize about people throwing queers off buildings because you're too weak and spineless to do it yourself, or is it just because you're a self loathing closet case?>>93925890>"...black pepper is the limit of the midwest spice rack." -- Tim WalzHerp derp Tim Walz is black nao...Jesus Christ this place is such a fucking short bus.
>>93925635>t. berk
>>93925877>why are you defendingOh it's one of you retards. >soulless grey subhuman paste>rest of that postMask off I see.
>>93926436Look at it talking shit on the internet then crying about everyone here disagreeing by the third post. Love to see it.
Is Mechanus a safe place to live?How would one gain citizenship.
I like what I've heard about old sigil but the 2e manual has the worst font over colored background. Is there a good primer of the philosophical factions and plot hooks?>>93926935I had a wizard who'd be interestedhe also wanted to replace Mystra with an algorithm that standarized magic for everyone. He was a smart dude but not too rational.
>>93926935Mechanus feels like it'd a pretty lonely place to exist in. Huge, expansive cogworlds whose known span stretches out to the lengths of the solar system with less than a billion beings. Why are the Formians even fighting the Modrons when there are Earth-sized gears left untouched by man, beast, or Modron?
>>93926833>having sympathy for the colonizerbro you damagedwake up to reality
>>93925635The Doyalist explanation is that she is a tool to explain why Sigil can be connected to everywhere in the multiverse and not be the single greatest battlefield in all of creation. Its extremely high value to control, so everyone wants it. The Lady of Pain prevents that from happening, both by telling gods to fuck off and to be unambiguously able to win any fight against any number of opponents no matter the circumstances. The Watsonian explanation is that no one knows exactly WHAT she is, only what she does. She only seems to exist within Sigil, and many claim that she is trapped there. She has absolute control of all access in and out of Sigil, no being no matter how powerful can enter or leave the city except by one of the Lady's portals, and she can turn them all off if she wants. This is a disaster if it ever happens, because Sigil depends on portal access for food, water, and AIR. The Lady never speaks to anyone herself, her servants the Dabus make proclamations on her behalf. In fact the Lady of Pain never appears except to enforce the rules of her domain, which typically means showing up out of nowhere, killing someone and anyone else unfortunate enough to be near them when it happens, and then vanishing. Its unclear whether the lady of pain even EXISTS when she isn't 'active'.Her signature method of attack is that her shadow moves of its own accord, and anything that falls under her shadow is ripped apart as if being sliced by hundreds of blades. This has never, ever failed to kill someone. And that includes archdemons, super-wizards, demigods, and people who were explicitly immortal or invulnerable. Worse yet, anyone flayed by the Lady appears to have their soul destroyed entirely, they do not go on to any afterlife and there is nothing left to resurrect.For more minor offenses, The Lady will sometimes take a pocket of Sigil around the person and break it off into an extradimensional maze with them trapped inside.
>>93927317The Lady of Pain outright prevents gods from entering Sigil, and kills or mazes anyone who worships her. With the way that power of belief works in planescape, belief might be one of the few things that she is afraid of. But trying to take advantage of that is how you get Aoskar, the only time that the Lady has ever extended her power beyond Sigil. Basically, Aoskar was the god of portals. Portals are a bit part of the mutliverse, so he got a lot of worship and was pretty strong. Eventually he tried to muscle in on the lady's portal into and out of Sigil and worhsippers were attributing them to him. The Lady doesn't seem to have cared enough to do anything about that.Until a Dabus, one of her own servants, started worshipping Aoskar. THAT pissed her right the hell off and triggered the single largest flaying event ever. Every single priest and faithful worshipper of Aoskar, no matter where they were in the multiverse, was shredded by invisible knives at the same time with zero warning. The only exception was the traitor Dabus himself, who is still alive to this day but everyone avoids like the plague because no one wants to be near him. Aoskar the god or portals is very, very dead. No one even knew that this was something that the Lady of Pain was even capable of, murdering a god like that.
>>93927374It's notable that one second Aoskar was sitting in his temple, in the heart of his domain and power. The next his corpse was in the Astral, stabbed full of blades, and he was deader than dead and straight up fucking GONE.
>>93927614I've always assumed that she killed Aoskar directly someone, and all of his worshippers dying was a sort of splash damage. They were connected to their god by their faith, so when the Lady flayed him that death was so thorough that it extended downstream to the sources of his power (his worshippers) and killed them too. Its possible that this was only doable because of special circumstances, like the Dabus being one of his faithful giving her an 'in' to Aoskar. But no one knows for sure, and the idea that she can delete gods like that REALLY incentivizes them all to leave her and Sigil the fuck alone. They already are prevented from entering Sigil, but now there is good reason not to try and circumvent that.
>>93925010Didn't Vecna burn like half of it? I know LoP punished him but Vecna still burned a part of city and its citizens got effected right?
>>93928076Nothing is gained by admitting 'Die Vecna, Die!' happened. You only lose a part of yourself.But in all seriousness, that modules breaks the established canon of Ravenloft AND Planescape based entirely on introducing some vague bullshit that it never explains and clearly never will. To call the events of Die Vecna, Die! fanfiction would be an insult to people who actually put effort into their fanfiction.
>>93927374that sounds neathow viable is a campaign in Sigil? I skimmed the new one and it was mostly outside of it, and for what I read they took out a huge chunnk of lore and factions.
>>93928651Sigil is LE RANDOM XD in city form. It's fantasy New York "where anything can happen." If that's what you're into, go for it
>>93928808I assumed there were factions clashing or some sort of unstable power balance to exploit. But I'm used to older settings being barren of playable content.
>>93928825There's established factions but the balance of power is maintained by the Lady of Pain so it's the "Nothing ever happens" meme
>>93928651DnD 5e Planescape splat? No idea, never touched it.2e Planescape lore? A campaign NOT centered in Sigil would be the weird outlier. There are whole books of Lore specifically about Sigil and the Faction War going on there. Not a hyperbole, there was even a book called Faces of Sigil that was just a compilation of detailed character writeups for prominent NPCs in the city and what their deal was. Like Akin the Friendly Fiend, a 'risen' Yugoloth (NE extraplanar monster) what was extremely friendly to everyone and ran a magic item shop that sells at big discounts, but no one is actually sure whether he can be trusted or not. Angels can fall, so a fiend rising isn't *impossible*... but this could all also be some kind of extremely long con. The book supports both interpretations and its up to the GM to decide which version their game considers the truth. Sigil has two advantages for basing a game there. The first is Sigil-specific stuff involving the Faction War. You know how the Lady of Pain stops anyone from fighting over control of Sigil? That only applies to actual mass violence or invasions, as long as you keep a lid on it she doesn't care. So there are 12 factions fighting for control of Sigil, each defined by their own warped philosophy, vying for control of the city. The Dustmen believe that the outer planes are nothing more than a waiting room for the True Death that lies beyond. The Athar believe that the gods are not worthy of worship and should be opposed. The Fraternity of Order are convinced that the multiverse runs on rules and laws that can be learned and exploited with complicated legalese. And so on. Every single faction, due to the power of belief, has unique powers and abilities that exist only within that Faction, like the Transcendent Order whose entire deal is that they harmonize with the natural cadence of the turning of the wheel and eschew thought to act on instinct, which basically lets them Dirk Gently their way through life.
>>93929176The second advantage is that Sigil has portals to *everywhere*. Any plane of existence, any location no matter how remote. A portal to it exists *somewhere* in Sigil, its just a question of whether anyone knows where that portal as and the key to open it. So being based in Sigil gives you free reign to pop out and have an adventure anywhere, and then come back to Sigil. Raid a dungeon on a generic fantasy world, Guard a Caravan through the Outlands. Steal a soul back from Hell today and smuggle it into the Heavens tomorrow. Take the wrong portal and end up trapped in in the screaming caverns of Pandemonium, now try and find your way back out before you are driven insane. All of it is within reach of your shitty Apartment in the Lower Ward, so long as you have a Planeswalker that knows the way.
>>93929176>>93929199what books should I check?is there like a primer or guide to keep track of all that stuff? 12 active factions sounds really cool until I have to remember who they are and what they're doing all the time.
>>93929212Back in the 3.5 era, there was an active community called Planewalker.com that archived and managed the lore and did conversations of modules and shit from 2e to 3.5. I very much doubt it is still alive now. You can probably find PDFs of the planescape books somewhere. Start with the Campaign Setting book and work out from there, Planescale has a lot of material to read up on if you want to.
It's always weird to me whenever there's a Sigil thread and everyone keeps talking about how important the factions were. My only experience with Sigil was DMing a 3rd edition module, I wanna say Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, where the faction wars got too out of hand and factions were banned. On one hand, I have no experience with older editions, and something about the factions rubs me the wrong way, so in a sense I'm glad they're gone. But, they seem to have been replaced with "fuck all" and that just feels boring and lazy.
>>93929337Planescape got caught up in the storm of TSR being bought by WotC. Faction War was a rush job that was supposedly going to be part 1 of a three-part series that would lead to a new set of factions, but without parts 2 and 3, it just ends factions outright.Warriors of Heaven seems like it should be under the Planescape banner, but it was released as a generic supplement and the index is missing all the page numbers (they literally all say "page XX" instead of numbers) and the last few entries for the planar horses are straight-up missing.
>>93927218Yeah how dare that dude appreciate the guys who brought crazy inventions like the wheel to Africa
>>93929922Nice digits. Terrible take, but nice digits. For the record, using wheels for transport generally requires roads, which the climate of large parts of Africa make difficult to build and maintain. It's just easier to use donkeys and camels as pack animals. Heck, using the wheel for transport even fell out of usage in Europe for quite some time after the Roman empire fell and its roads stopped getting maintained.
>>93930032IIRC, for most of history, rivers have been the main highways of both commerce and travel. Roads are useful to be sure, but a river is.... there. And costs negative money
>>93927636Didn't she get punked by Vecna tho?
>>93929337Faction play is something nice as a base line, but if you want to make a module about faction play it's gonna be extremely niche on both the player and DM side. So whenever someone shoots for the moon people tend to remember it.>>93929922Egyptians knew of wheels and used them as tools, the thing they didn't have was chariots because those are useless in the sand.
>>93930032>>93930044>UH ACKSHUALLYstfu nigger lover lmaoWay to belabor a point unimportant and irrelevant to the actual argument
>>93930084yeah, they suck. Maybe next time don't be retarded so we don't get fact checkers.
>>93930095I'm not even the previous guy. This is why all boards need ids
>>93930077Vecna did some bullshit enabled by a primordial being even above Ao that has never been mentioned before or since that allowed him to teleport out of Ravenloft (which isn't possible) and into Sigil (which isn't possible), and then once he was there the Lady of Pain wasn't allowed to do anything about it (despite having proven in the past that she can obliterate a god without much trouble) just so that the adventure has need for 3-5 PCs of the appropriate level to go and involve themselves in the affair and be the heroes. And for some reason, Vecna being in Sigil for any length of time had ripple effects throughout all of reality such that "Anything that changed between 2e and 3e was caused by this. If you race or class changed its Vecna's fault. If we stopped supporting your campaign setting, its Vecna's fault." and do on. Because its edition changeover lore, the adventure is written in such a way that its not actually possible for your party to do anything that would change how events play out, if you fail to stop the bad guys at any step they win, if you successfully stop the bad guys at any step they also win because they planned for that. Its an astoundingly shit module.
>>93930139>Die Vecna Die!>Vecna is already an undead>You don't get to permanently kill VecnaI sure hope someone was fired for that blunder
>>93930139>Vecna did some bullshit enabled by a primordial being even above Ao that has never been mentioned before or since that allowed him to teleport out of Ravenloft (which isn't possible) and into Sigil (which isn't possible)It's a level 7 spell in 5eIn 3.5 it just means going through the far realmIn spelljammer you can just do it
>>93930164It's German for The Vecna The!
>>93930203oh, that makes sense. If it's german it can't be that bad.
>>93930202You can't do it into Sigil, it's negated by a god killer. Same way you couldn't do it into Dark Sun because magic was wonky there.Settings used to have differences.
>>93930234>You can't do it into Sigil, it's negated by a god killer.Complete bullshit.Planar Metropoli in 3.0/3.5 are interdimensional and straight up just connected to each other:>The Planar Gate visits with other planar metropolises, most of which cannot be found on the Material Plane. For instance, cities such as Sigil, Tu’narath, the City of Brass, and even the mind flayer city llkkool Rrem (thralls act as representatives of the mind flayers-nary an illithid is seen) show up on the circuit. Other cities of lesser status found on various Outer and Inner Planes are also visited.Infinite staircase goes everywhere. No exceptions.You can just walk into Sigil. It's right there. It's canon. LoP doesn't stop you.Sigil is just a place in 3e. You were long since able to just go wherever you want in AD&D when you were powerful enough, 3e is no different in that regard.>Settings used to have differences.Settings didn't exist, and then they were all the same setting, just separated by barriers that were trivial to cross for high level mages. High level magic users have become more commonplace, but people going to Sigil from anywhere (or indeed, Ravenloft from anywhere) has always been a thing.Tell me again what realm Lord Soth is from?And if you can get past past Bolothamogg directly instead of going around him you're way overprepared for curbstomping LoP.
>>93930372nta and your post is pretty seething but Soth being from Krynn doesn't support your argument, since Ravenloft is usually one-way only.
>>93930372It's amazing how everything you said is wrong.
>>93930460Cry more
>>93930372>in 3.0yes, as said before the switch to 3e took away a lot of the charm of Sigil, a step before the current Rick & Morth central.>You can just walk into Sigil.yes, you couldn't dimension hop into it. You had to play by its rules. Same way you couldn't enter Dark Sun by any official means because the gods closed all doors.>Settings didn't exist, and then they were all the same settingNo, WotC meshed them together to make a more solid and marketable IP.They were stand alone games running the same engine, so you'd play Birthright if you wanted to have all noble PCs or Dark Sun if you wanted sand survival with little resources or Dragonlance if you wanted a railroad. You're right that 3e changed that to make it more of a slop, but even then you can see the intended use.
>>93930491not the words of someone sure that they are rightBut adding "in 3e" to a discussion of pre 3e stuff should had been a clue that you were wrong.
>>93928076She allegedly couldn't immediately kill him because the splash damage would take out the rest of Sigil in the process. After he was gone she fixed up Sigil like normal and moved on.
>>93925010God the 5e splotchy vague watercolor art is so bad. Can barely see the city it is supposed to depict.
>>93930032So how the Europeans were able to build roads and bridges in Africa? I'm sure the reason why those bridges and roads don't work anymore is purely due to the fact that the climate got the better of them
>>93931781>barely see the cityyou can't, that picture is underneath it
>>93925815That only works if things are actually varied. In practice every setting just becomes more generic and similar to the last one as every aspect of uniqueness is stripped away.>Now excuse me while I eat this boiled, unseasoned chicken breast with mayonnaiseTry sticking all of your favorite foods into a blender and then see how colourful the results are.
>>93931884>Africans had the wheel and didn't use it for transport much because building and maintaining roads in Africa is very hard to do>But, post industrial colonists also have failed in building and maintaining roads and bridges in Africa>Therefore Africans should be grateful to their colonizersNot quite following your logic
>>93925010>Is Sigil a safe place to live?hahaahhahah no>citizenshipWhatnow? I've heard of sailing ships and voidships, but city-scene-ship? Are you looking for the ecstatic parade?
>>93925408>There isn't a state powerThe factions are effectively guilds that exert state power.
>>93925010>Is Sigil a safe place to live?No>How would one gain citizenship.It's a gang controlled interdimensioal city with extremely powerful warriors, demons, angels, and other monsters walking around regularly. The Lady of Pain is a meme as you have to out of your way to get fucked by her. So, there's virtually nothing protecting you aside from one of the "factions," meaning either tribe up or die.
>>93932843>you can't, that picture is underneath itThe rectangular shapes around the inside of the ring are supposed to be the buildings of Sigil.
>>93933434>Africans had the wheel and didn't use it for transport much because building and maintaining roads in Africa is very hard to do>But, European colonists in the 1600s built and maintained roads and bridges in Africa>these roads and bridges lasted until the Europeans left, at which time the roads and bridges immediately failedThe logic is easier to follow if you don't revise the historical record.
>>93926981There's a 2e splatbook called the Factol's Manifesto that is literally an in-depth writeup of all the factions; history, membership, notable figures, and benefits of joining, like unique spells and facilities.
