[OSSR]Factol's Manifesto

[CapnTthePirateG]

Doesn't the Lady murder you if you worship her?

[Ancient History]

Yeppers.

[Foxwarrior]

I have an impossible writing challenge for you, Ancient History: Rewrite "A Christmas Carol" using Bleakers and Fated such that Fated seem like the good guys.

[Ancient History]

<sigh> Remind me again in a month. I can do it, but I'm a little swamped by current projects.

[Foxwarrior]

Mmm, looks like Hyzmarca could be persuaded instead...

[Koumei]

Given a bunch of their slang is just Cockney, it makes sense that Sigil is actually London. I bet there are Corgi Archons roaming about.

Anyway, this makes me really hope we get to deal with the Fated in the current Planescape game I'm in. And by deal with, I mean put them through a table. I'd happily join the Sodkillers for that.

And then we could roam about laying beatdowns and being hired bodyguards/thugs (see: adventurers).

[Guyr Adamantine]

Given the Fraternity of Order's role as the "lawful" faction in a balls-out chaotic city shouldn't they be a bit more...

[Ted the Flayer]

That's the Mercykillers.

Fun fact: the first time my players entered Sigil, one of the Mercykillers tried to arrest one of the players for screaming "GIANT FROG" in public. It didn't take, and when the players were done killing them, everyone went back to their drinks and didn't care.

I was also very upset when I ran Shemeska the Marauder as a foppish obvious transvestite with an obnoxious elitist attitude... and found out a year later that I was playing him correct to canon. I think that's the first time I made an NPC to make fun of someone I didn't like on the message boards and somehow got it right...

[Orion]

Would it be fair to say that this book basically casts Law and Chaos as Kantianism and Existenialism? It doesn't matter whether your actions strengthen or destabilize society, only why you do them. Feeding the poor is Lawful if you do it out of a sense of moral duty, but Chaotic if you do it because you want to.

[Username17]

I apologize for not communicating more clearly. I understand that Frank was primarily drawing comparisons to other published D&D settings, particularly the implied setting of the PHB.

No. You stupid piece of shit. I am comparing this game to itself. We are talking 2nd edition AD&D with a planar emphasis and access to high level locations, abilities, monsters, and effects. Sigil isn't the campaign setting, it's a location in the campaign setting. In the campaign setting, you can become count, king, emperor, and god. Usually in that order. You can create and destroy whole worlds.

Sigil is just a location in that campaign setting where they suggest you go if you want to "play politics" and then give you a bunch of characters and political factions for you to interact with if that's what you want to do. So far, so good. Then the Lady of Pain enters the picture in order to disable the "Head of State" achievement, the "major political reforms" achievement, the "control city maintenance" achievement, and even the "seriously alter the architectural styles" achievement. Because apparently what everyone wants when they "play politics" is to have an unkillable NPC disable most of the high end political achievements.

And it doesn't even serve the purpose of making the setting eternal or some similar (if silly) goal. In canon, it's only 2 game years after the Factol's Manifesto that the official timeline has all the factions booted from the city and scraps even the meager political sandbox that Sigil allowed.

Would it be fair to say that this book basically casts Law and Chaos as Kantianism and Existenialism? It doesn't matter whether your actions strengthen or destabilize society, only why you do them. Feeding the poor is Lawful if you do it out of a sense of moral duty, but Chaotic if you do it because you want to.

No. The Takers are Chaotic and deontological. The Athar are existential and Lawful. There is no consistency to be had anywhere at all. Each piece of justification for any alignment is completely inconsistent with each other justification for any other alignment given in the book.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

A hyperdimensional merchant hub is almost essential to a setting like Planescape. Having that city be "Neutral Ground" where Archons and Demons can barter in something approaching good faith would be cool, and in that kind of situation, and a very powerful character like the LoP being around to keep the peace and run the city would be good in that situation, to explain why the place doesn't burn down and fall over within a week. It'd also be a big flag that "Politics isn't welcome here."

On the other hand, making Sigil a political hotbed boiling over with intrigue is good too, except as mentioned, in that situation the political hierarchy needs to be made up of more-or-less regular people who can be interacted with and possibly replaced, particularly with PCs.

Both have their perks and hooks, but they're mutually exclusive. Trying to make Sigil both simultaneously is just fucking dumb.

[Ted the Flayer]

Why set a "the players can never be powerful enough to do XX or YY" level when I have found that player boredom and DM fatigue tends to limit PC power on its own?

[Ancient History]

Free League
Who prize the Individual above All.

AncientH:

Take careful note of the scar on that buttock, that is the mark of the Free League:

Arguably, the Free League are not a faction. They look like a faction and smell like a faction, but they don’t have even the bare minimum organization of a faction so they don’t get a real say in things, and their general philosophy is…I don’t want to say Randian or Libertarian, but definitely Small Government, I-go-my-own-way kinda thing. The text likes to make it out that they’re all about freedom to do what they want and neutrality between opposing philosophies and whatnot, but it’s a weird, mercenary kind of neutrality where they’ll happily work for anybody if the price is right…and people hate them for it.

FrankT:

Going through the Planescape factions, you will often find yourself wondering “Wait? Why are these guys a faction?”, and the Indeps are here to push all those concerns to the back burner because the actual people in the faction don't believe that they should count as a faction. Really.

Most of the opening fiction is about how the Harmonium hates the Indeps and attacks them for no reason. Part of this is because Planescape was stuck trying to justify how Chaotic Good warred with Lawful Good as much as it warred with Chaotic Evil, because that's how the Great Wheel was supposed to work, even though that's stupid beyond belief. But a really big part of it was just to give the Harmonium some “unlikeable” traits so that the Lawful Good City Protectors wouldn't automatically be considered “the good guys” that all the players felt obligated to support.

Really, the Free League is about showing how fucking terrible the alignment system is in AD&D. These guys are too disorganized and individualistic to have a leader, and that makes them Chaotic Neutral. Because True Neutral is about opposing Law and Chaos for having too many rules, which is totally different from the way Chaos opposes things that have too many rules. Fuck!

AncientH:

Bridgette Gunnarsmoon, the Frost Giant archivist for the Fated, gives the low down on the Indeps because they’re too disorganized to give a good accounting of their own faction history. Initially it was formed during the Great Upheaval, when the Lady of Pain said that there would be only 15 factions in Sigil and told them to organize themselves appropriately. In the Faction Musical Chairs that followed, the Free League was basically the catch-all for everybody who hadn’t found a place anywhere else, and wound up with a million members. Sketchy history said that the vast majority of those died in a sudden anomalous, mysterious calamity though, so at this time of writing they’re down to about 20,000.

FrankT:

There isn't much to say about the Free League, because their entire existence is just supposed to make you care about True Neutral (which no one does anyway), and their entire philosophy is just “You're not the boss of me!” So to pad space out, this chapter has a lot of dialog. People discuss past events in interview format because that fills a page, while writing a couple of sentences as narrated by Morgan Freeman would only use up a couple of lines.

The big mystery they want you to contemplate is how the Free League dropped from a million members to twenty thousand members in about 50 years. This doesn't seem like much of a mystery, because the Free League only swelled up to a million members in the middle of the Great Upheaval, when people were told explicitly that at least 34 factions were getting culled and the Lady of Pain was going to maze or stab you if you were in the wrong one at the end of the month. For some reason, that bullshit caused a lot of people to change their voter registration to “independent”. Then, with the entire “join us because then you definitely won't be killed by an arbitrarily powerful NPC whose has declared her intention to go on a completely pointless murder rampage against 2/3s of the people who aren't signed up with us” motivation went away, so too did most of the members.

But this really shitty mystery is supposed to be the big thing to talk about in this section. It's like asking why just thirty years after its peak, there's very few people in the KISS Army. They suggest that something sinister may have happened with 98% of the Free League members dying off over a 50 year period. This does not sound like a sinister event at all, since the “great disease” that struck them down over fifty fucking years could have been “old age” rather than any particular sinister curse.

AncientH:

I’m going to reiterate that the approach and attitude for the Free League in the text is absolutely confused. To look at them, they’re just a (very) loose affiliation of people who wear the same gang colors and are otherwise fiercely independent and hold self-sufficiency as a high ideal. Honestly, they’d do well to have some sort of democratic voting system in place where they get together and vote on major issues, but I guess that’s giving up too much freedom. The other Factions mostly treat them as lawless brigands who believe in nothing, which is super bizarre because you don’t hear that about the Doomguard (actual set-your-shit-on-fire-to-watch-it-burn types) or the Dustmen (actual nihilistas), so why the Harmonium & co. have such a hard-on for them is not quite comprehensible, except insofar as all of AD&D hates “True Neutral.”

FrankT:

Apparently, the Free League are getting their asses kicked in Sigil, but they are big in Japan the Outlands. The Outlands is another name for Concordant Opposition, which is the plane in the middle of the Great Wheel that is all around Sigil. No one fucking cares about the Outlands, because the only interesting features it has are gate-towns grown up around gates to other dimensions you might actually give a shit about.

AncientH:

Anyway, while the Indeps don’t have a true leader they have a couple people that they sometimes listen to—a silversmith-turned-bard named Bria Tomay and a pair of wemic twins. Wemics are a kind of centaur-lion kinda thing: head of a lion, humanoid upper torso, lion lower torso. Try not to google those too much, I have a feeling there’s a lot of furry porn with that configuration.

Now, given that they’re a loose affiliation of people that basically don’t like to be told what to do, instead of an HQ the Free League tends to gather around the Grand Bizarre, which they act as unofficial market wardens of. The aforementioned “leaders” like to hang out at the Red Lion Inn, which caters to “hybrid” beings like centaurs, dracotaurs, wemics, etc. That means no chairs and tables at knee-level or waist-level.

FrankT:

I don't even understand what the hell the authors think that freedom means. Apparently True Neutrals are libertarians, because:

But the Bazaar does offer one thing of genuine value: freedom. The Indeps see to that. A merchant‘s free to ply his trade and get an honest wage for it; he doesn’t need to gild the hand of some high-up of the other wards.

But how they expect to get an honest market going without any rules I do not know. They even mention that the Grand Bazaar is full of pickpockets and con artists, and the fact that this completely undermines the idea that they have a free market appears to be totally lost on the authors.

AncientH:

It’s hard to be an Indep. Truly independent Free Leaguers have no preconceptions, attitudes, or viewpoints that might cloud the truth of a matter. It’s not easy playing a character who has no biases, no prejudices, no leanings one way or another. An Indep might be suspicious, but not judgmental. He doesn’t believe that any one philosophy is the be-all and end-all of the multiverse. To embrace one ideology denies independent thought, evaluation, and existence. Most Indeps, tolerant and open-minded, know how to get along with other factions.

“Wait, you’re not an intolerant, judgmental asshole that hates all that I hate? Then you are my enemy and I must destroy you!”

There is a strange book y’all might have read called The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison, and it contains one of the strangest characters in fantasy fiction, Lord Gro. The thing is that Lord Gro is a tactical genius, but he is such a tactical genius that he always empathizes with the disadvantaged party in a conflict, and has a tendency to switch sides. This comes to a head during the final battle, where he starts killing people from both sides just to prove he’s being fair. It doesn’t go well for him. The Indeps remind me a lot of Lord Gro—so dedicated to some idea that even if it’s in their best interests to work together, it’ll never ever happen.

FrankT:

The Indeps' three virtues of “acceptance, balance, and individuality” sound a lot better to new players than to established players. Once you realize that “balance” refers to “cosmic balance between Good and Evil” rather than nutritional or emotional balance, the bloom really come off that rose. When they start going off about how Indeps aren't supposed to have preconceptions or viewpoints, it becomes even harder to take.

’Course, when a group contains both an Indep and a Hardhead, blows may result, but that makes for exciting role-playing.

Yeah, nothing says “exciting role-playing” like having the players degenerate into violent PVP because one of the characters was too moderate to be able to get along with the guy playing a Paladin. Fucking 90s.

AncientH:

On the plus side, the faction is open to any alignment, sex, race, and class. So you could actually have a party of Free Leaguers where everyone is of different alignments et al. and they might not kill each other because they’re bros. Granted, they have a slight preference toward neutrality and “hybrids” (my Ghost, a place where ha’ponies are accepted!)

FrankT:

Game mechanically, being a Free Leaguer gives you +2 to your Will Saves. Note that this was 2nd edition, and “Will Saves” was not actually a thing, so the description of this ability is very long and convoluted and involves a lot of DM adjudication as to whether something is “like” something that affects the character's mind. Also, when you get up in level you get nepotistic discounts in the bazaar, because the authors do not know what a Free Market is.

AncientH:

So, to sum up: the pros to the Free League are that anyone can join up, no one can tell you to do shit, and you get a couple little bonuses and discounts at the Grand Bizarre. On the cons side, everyone wants to kill or convert you. Just because. Even the Lady of Pain gets in on the action, and I have no idea why.

See, in Ankh-Morpork the Patrician needs to play the different guilds off each other because if they actually got their shit together they’d be a challenge to his rule. The Lady of Pain is supposed to be doing the same thing with the Factions, but I don’t know why; she can literally just kill them all and start over again. Why she has a specific spiked-strapon picked out for the Indeps is another unexplained wrinkle. The Free League, even when it had a million members, was formed specifically to not get their shit together, because none of them like to take orders. So it’s all terribly strange and confusing.

FrankT:

The big reveal here is that the Lady of Pain is a total bitch who has been secretly murdering Free Leaguers just because large numbers of ambivalent moderates somehow unnerves her or something. Also, she designed an STD to murder Neutral people because she thinks it is funny that some people thought there have been one that killed off a bunch of Neutrals six hundred years ago. Ha ha! It's funny because your character has a 2% chance of contracting a deadly disease! Isn't the Lady of Pain fun! Fucking fuck.

[fectin]

All of the things you describe as not being part of a free market are completely orthogonal to whether a market is 'free' or not. You can have a free market with or without strong law enforcement, and nepotism is totally something that happens in free markets.

Were you thinking of an ideal market, maybe?

[Username17]

All of the things you describe as not being part of a free market are completely orthogonal to whether a market is 'free' or not. You can have a free market with or without strong law enforcement, and nepotism is totally something that happens in free markets.

Were you thinking of an ideal market, maybe?

The market is described as "fair". That is laughable in the face of the kickbacks that the Indeps personally receive and the massive amount of fraud and crime described as occurring in it.

Apparently the authors just really think they have a fundamental right to commit fraud and feel that even contract enforcement on the part of the government is the jack boot of tyranny stamping out freedom. They are way crazier in their libertarianism than even the Ron Paul Revolution.

-Username17

[Orion]

Okay, I think it's time for me to stop threadshitting this largely excellent review and join in the revelry.

Freedom. The Indeps see to that. A merchant‘s free to ply his trade and get an honest wage for it; he doesn’t need to gild the hand of some high-up of the other wards.
Also, when you get up in level you get nepotistic discounts in the bazaar, because the authors do not know what a Free Market is.

So widespread kickbacks and favoritism are nothing at all like bribery? Intriguing. I guess we add arithmetic sign to the list of things these writers do not understand.

the Great Upheaval, when the Lady of Pain said that there would be only 15 factions in Sigil and told them to organize themselves appropriately.
The big reveal here is that the Lady of Pain is a total bitch who has been secretly murdering Free Leaguers just because large numbers of ambivalent moderates somehow unnerves her or something

Fuck. Just... fuck. I woke up this morning intending to start a new thread to debate the viability of a surreal cityscape maintained by irresistible forces as an adventure setting. I still might, but my god. You could make a frighteningly strong case that arbitrarium NPCs are one of those powers like censorship that humans are constitutionally incapable of using responsibly.

[Ancient History]

The Harmonium
Who enforce Peace through Might.

AncientH:

…members of the Harmonium believe in peace so much, we’re willing to fight for it.

The Harmonium basically see themselves living in an 80s action movie, and they are all Robocop or John McClane. They don’t want to bust your head…well, no, they totally do…but they’re only busting your head because you don’t go with the flow. These are the kind of cops that make otherwise decent, upstanding and law-abiding citizens scream obscenities and make oinking noises.

As a quasi-paramilitary force zealously pursuing an ideal, the opening indoctrination is framed along the lines of boot camp by somebody that has never quite gone to boot camp. That is to say, a lot of the right elements are there but in the wrong proportions and without the understanding of the underlying dynamics they pretend to have. This is bootcamp as understood by somebody that’s seen Full Metal Jacket and thinks that it takes eager young berks and spits out bloods able to kick hoop and enforce peace.

FrankT:

The Harmonium's “big paradox” is that they are willing to use military force to enforce peace. This viewpoint is actually not particularly controversial in the modern age. It's one of the primary justifications for pretty much every modern nation state, it's in the United Nations Charter, and it's used as a propaganda point to back up virtually every war ever. It is a position supported by the Mahabharata and Saint Thomas Aquinas. It is a position that is so non-controversial that people who don't agree with it are relegated to the perplexing fringe (Quakers) or cast as history's villains.

The Harmonium is thus subject to a different problem than most of the other factions. Since the central tenet of the Hard Heads is something so universally accepted that almost everyone who has been born within the last thousand years would agree with it if formally stated, the Harmonium has to be loaded down with weird baggage to make them less popular. If they just left it with the core belief, all the players would feel compelled to join because their core belief is self evidently true to almost everyone on Earth regardless of religious affiliation or philosophical bent. Peace is good, but Might must be used to defend peace lest it be overthrown by war. Almost everyone believes that.

AncientH:

The Harmonium started out as a band of adventurers out to kick ass and defeat the forces of chaos. Surprisingly, this actually worked, until they managed to become the police force for their entire frickin’ plane, so that even beholders didn’t start any shit but punched their time cards like everybody else (this apparently also required the extermination of elves and pixies, who were not mourned). Still, occasionally some badness would erupt, and the Harmonium had to deal with it. Looking for the source, they wandered into the Outer Planes.

The sad thing about this is, it would benefit a lot more if the people involved had re-read their source material: Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series. Because they have actual descriptions in there of what a plane where Law gains dominance looks like, and they’re a lot more interesting than “asshole fun police show you the ginger beer trick.” These guys are like Ned Flanders, Blood Knight. The problem is they’re sort of entrenched in the setting, being behind at least two major planar shifts in the Planes of Law boxed set and the adventure Fires of Dis.

FrankT:

In order to make “peace and harmony” less attractive, the Harmonium's home world is apparently a genocidal dictatorship where things are peaceful but unhappy. Take that, you bad nasty straw-men of Law!

AncientH:

In keeping with the fact that none of the people writing these sections actually talk to each other, we have an inexplicable paragraph about Dark Sun, revealing more information than most of the PCs who play the game are supposed to know. Keep in mind, Dark Sun is a weird setting and not always in the same cosmology as the rest of PLANESCAPE, so this is just a bizarre tie-in.

FrankT:

The Harmonium is also used as the villain organization in a bunch of pre-packaged adventures. Because that's what passed for irony in 1995. Having nearly exhausted the well of weird anti-Law arguments to try to put off players, this book then goes off on a weird argument that the Harmonium is dangerous and wrong because Darksun. Yes, really.

Now superficially, all the big nasty happened on Athas long before the Harmonium ever came into existence. And this book admits that, but they point the sticky finger at the Champions of Rajaat anyway and say that the Harmonium are dangerous and wrong because they are like the Champions of Rajaat, and the Champions of Rajaat destroyed the world. Which of course, they are not and did not. Even if the Champions were fighting against “chaos” to bring peace and harmony rather than to wipe out the peoples of the world so that their dragon god could bring back the oceans, the oceans were already gone you assholes! The brown tide happened actual ages before Rajaat was even a dude that you could be a champion of. This Law defamation is pretty damn bizarre. I mean, they are actually making up canon, they could just have Harmonium elders rape little boys or something, they don't have to take up space in the book with “These guys are bad because of things that aren't their fault or the fault of people that they agree with in the slightest that happened hundreds of years before they were born in a place that had already become post-apocalyptic hundreds of years before that”.

AncientH:

Factol Sarin is a 19th-level ranger 16th level Paladin! Though of what god we’re not exactly sure. Unfortunately, he’s also from Red Steel, one of those more obscure D&D settings where the special mechanics don’t quite work right. Perhaps the scariest thing about him is that he’s married to a 1st-level priestess and has nine kids.

FrankT:

The head of the Harmonium in Sigil is a 16th level Paladin in 2nd edition where they aren't allowed to have Evil people working for them. There are Evil Harmonium members because... I have absolutely no idea why. Factol Sarin uses two scimitars because it was 2nd edition and everyone wielded two scimitars back then.


It was the style of the time.

AncientH:

The City Barracks is Harmonium HQ, a peaceful law-abiding quarter that is almost uninhabited because almost nobody can put up with the Harmonium’s uptight shit. If for some reason you do go to visit, and somehow manage to avoid being arrested, there’s not a whole fucking lot of things for you to do because the entire building is built for the training and housing and administration of the Harmonium; it’s a police academy-cum-military installation. Also, just because the Fated own the Hall of Records, the Harmonium has their own Records, because you absolutely cannot be lawful without developing a crippling beauracracy.

FrankT:

I have to say I am pretty unimpressed with “the city barracks”. It houses “over a thousand soldiers”, but the Takers are housing more than double that number in the hall of records. Basically no effort has been taken to make the various numbers match up in this book. Every time a “big number” is quoted, it's basically random. I don't think the authors could reliably order numbers bigger than a hundred from smallest to largest.

Even when they start going off about how “big” the faction is, they start dropping things like how they have ten thousand people in Melodia. Ten thousand people is a small town. Their “entire planet” that they also have is many hundreds of times that size at the low end. Seriously, counting is not these peoples' strong suit.

AncientH:

The Harmonium combines a lot of the sidereal elements of a police force/army—the closeknit group structure, the comraderie, the importance of following orders, the disdain for “civilians” and the villainization of anybody that doesn’t fall neatly into their mental philosophy. Anything strange or weird is seen as a challenge or “wrong” to be corrected. From a player character standpoint, the Harmonium is open to anybody Lawful, but practically that generally that’s skewed toward humans and dwarfs and fighters and paladins, making this the least homogenous group covered so far. While there isn’t a racial prejudice against elves and gnomes per se, it wouldn’t be too difficult to see that kind of thing crop up.

One thing they don’t talk about are ex-Harmonium members; I could totally see some guys getting disgraced and forced out, setting up shop as hard-nosed, hard-drinking private eyes hated by all their former buddies on the force…or turning into private cops for any of the other powers-that-be in Sigil.

FrankT:

This being a lawful faction in Planescape, it has 17 ranks. I don't know why this book has such a hardon for the number 17, but it does. As a member of the Harmonium, you get abilities based on your level, but only if you also rise enough in the ranks, meaning that there's a potential dissociation between character level and abilities. Assuming you rise in rank fast enough, you get a modest trick every three levels. At 1st and 10th level, you get 1/day spell-like abilities that let you charm people. At 4th and 7th level you get some modest combat boosts (+1 to-hit with your favorite weapon and +3 to saves vs. Fear). The faction has no drawbacks, aside from the fact that the authors of this book are crazy desperate to show that you aren't as Good as you claim.

AncientH:

Since these are cops, and are supposed to be doing cop things, you might think that the Sigil plot hooks would involve interdimensional drug trade or slave trade or sex trade or any other actual illegal activity—but that would make too much sense. Instead, the Hardheads are gearing up to not-fight the Doomguard and bash the heads in on some hippies Anarchists and Indeps. The secret-secret stuff is basically just “Go play these other tie-in adventures we already mentioned.”

FrankT:

The big plot arc here is about moving planar layers to different spokes of the Great Wheel. This was the supposed to be a Really Big Deal™. Basically, Menausus, the lowest level of Arcadia transmigrated to Mechanus and took the Formians with it. This was a big plot point and was somehow the Harmonium's fault in a way that didn't actually make a lot of sense. If you can't actually name the other layers of Arcadia or can't even recall how many layers Arcadia is supposed to have, you aren't alone. Also, since each of the planar layers are themselves distinct planes that can only be reached by portal or planeshift, I don't know what the difference was supposed to be. Heck, I could not tell you what the difference between a Lawful Neutral plane with Neutral Good Tendencies that was closest to Lawful Neutral and a Lawful Neutral plane that is closest to having Lawful Good Tendencies even is. The 3e Manual of the Planes just says “fuck it” and relegates the moving of Menausus and the Formians into Mechanus as an event that happened thousands of years ago and writes the Harmonium's involvement out completely. And no one cared, because while shifting towns from prime worlds or the Outlands into outer planes is a thing that matters, shifting planar layers to be layers of other planes with the same alignment traits doesn't matter at all to anyone.

AncientH:

The Harmonium are basically NPCs. Trying to work a Harmonium PC into an adventure group is a bit like trying to work a cop or an infantryman into a PC adventure group; these guys have day jobs that are quite strict and want to know where the fuck they are and what they’re doing, with severe limits to after-hours shenanigans. I’m not saying you couldn’t have a Harmonium PC, I just don’t know why you’d want to be one: they’re well-intentioned extremists with an authority equals asskicking vibe and the idea that they should win just because their cause is Right and Just, even if they did maybe commit the Genocide of the Elves. Really, these guys should be Grey Guard material, but the guy writing this section couldn’t decide how tarnished those badges should really be.

(And honestly, given the relatively small size of the Harmonium, I’d like the idea of them as planar sheriffs wandering into bordertowns better than as the default police of Sigil.)

[TarkisFlux]

Free League
Who enforce Peace through Might.

Got a bad title header there AH.

[Ancient History]

QUite right. Fixed.

[Chamomile]

That actually had me really confused, because these Planescape factions have like six names each. So I was thinking that maybe the Free League was a different name for the Harmonium or something.

[Ancient History]

Mercy Killers
Who bring Justice to the Deserving.

FrankT:

The Mercy Killers represented Retributive Justice. Well, that's what they would have represented if Zeb Cook had known what a Theory of Justice even was. Practically speaking, you have 3 flavors of “Lawful” faction and 3 flavors of “Chaotic” faction, and there are three flavors of Lawful alignment so by jove each Lawful faction is going to fucking well have tendencies towards one of the three. The Guvners tend LN, the Hardheads tend LG, so the Red Death tend LE. Because that's what's left.

The Mercy Killers are big on “Justice”, but they don't have police powers or judicial authority or anything. They run the prison and also serve as the city's executioners. This having been written by someone who has no idea what kind of numbers there are on crimes and punishment seems to think that this is a really big and important function. But basically we're looking at guys from the Prison Guard Union with delusions of grandeur ranting about how they have a mandate and a destiny to do routine patrols of cell block five in twenty minutes, which is why they can't be expected to do any dishes after lunch. Because destiny will not wait. Considering how many major cities in history managed to survive with like one executioner, I don't see how or why the Harmonium or the Fraternity of Order actually needs these people for anything.

In the backstory, the Mercy Killers formed out of two different factions: the Sod Killers (LE) and the Sons of Mercy (LG). And they joined forces to combat their common enemy: not having enough namers to survive the Lady of Pain's purge. This marriage of convenience actually ends in canon shortly after this book, with the faction splitting into three groups taking the names Sod Killers (LE), Mercy Killers (LN), and Sons of Mercy (LG). Of those, only the Sons of Mercy remain a faction in post Faction War Sigil, if you care.

AncientH:

Minor quibble with Frank: the Mercy Killers are supposed to be Lawful Neutral. But since that’s taken and their boss is an insane fanatic anyway, it’s a small point.

There is a theory—and I like this one—that there is no balance of good and evil; there is only the struggle, and evil is winning. To put this in perspective, the Mercy Killers are like the over-the-top grimdark superheroes that came after Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns; their bloody version of justice marks them as fanatics. Of course, it helps that their factol is positively insane and wants to kill the Lady of Pain herself. That alone should warn players that this faction isn’t going to hang around that long.

FrankT:

The Eight Principles of Justice read like a motivational speech from a shonen anime. And I mean that in the sense that they are so garbled that it would be comforting if they had arrived in this state by being translated poorly from Japanese. In order to impress you with how cutthroat and borderline Evil these guys are, they proclaim their desire to punish according to the law while disregarding extenuating circumstances. That position only makes sense in a children's cartoon, because extenuating circumstances are part of the fucking law. Hell, these guys themselves act as executioners – which means that without the extenuating circumstances of “is a legally appointed executioner carrying out their normal duties” they would be legally condemned to die for premeditated murder. I can't help wondering how many Mercy Killers would be compelled to immediately cut off their own heads if you brought this to their attention. Planescape was a pretty cartoonish setting in a lot of ways, so I'm guessing a non-zero number.

Cannot cut off another's head until he cut his own off!

AncientH:

Alisohn Nilesia is factol of the Mercy Killers, and her resume looks like a list of warning sides you should hand out to parents and teachers. Currently 19, her mother died in childbirth in a prison, and Nilesia was raised by a surrogate mother in the prison who “mysteriously died” when Nilesia turned eight. The 8-year-old tiefling wizard tried to join the Mercy Killers but was rebuffed—they may be hard men and women, but apparently they hadn’t yet descended to using child soldiers—until she turned 11, when they gave up and let her in. Her “organizational skills” and rabid beliefs kept her going until the old factol died, and they made her the new factol, at which point she quietly started cleaning house and killing off her detractors.

I’m sorry, has she already saved the universe?

FrankT:

The Red Death has apparently 25,000 soldiers in Sigil. Considering that this is more soldiers than have been accounted for in all the other factions so far in this book combined, while the Mercy Killers don't actually have anything to do except run a prison and administer punishments, that's completely absurd. More evidence that all numbers of three digits or more in this book are basically pulled out of a hat. There's more weird time warping going on. The swelling of the ranks comes from the mad intensity of their new factol, but she has only had the job for 2 months. I have no idea how long the authors think it takes to train and outfit a new soldier, but I am totally positive that they are lowballing it by a lot.

AncientH:

The Red Death really want the Harmonium’s job, but instead they have the next best thing: running the prison system. Which basically means that if you go to prison in Sigil, you’re probably going to die there, and in any one of several unpleasant ways—because there is nothing quite as bad as a screw that is really devoted to their job and thinks you shouldn’t be breathing and basically isn’t answerable to anyone if you and your paperwork end up in a sphere of annihilation.

On top of that, let me just say that prison campaigns are very rare, and for a good reason: they suck mightily. PCs are often kept apart (especially if any of them are the opposite sex), have little privacy, probably no pull with the boys in the yard, and none of their standard gear. Basically the only thing to do in a prison campaign is to try and escape (see: Star Trek VI), and if you try that here you’re liable to get a one-way trip to the demiplane of fuck-you-very-much.

FrankT:

The Prison itself is probably the ultimate NIMBY in fiction. Not only is it, well, a fucking prison, but it's specifically ugly and has a simple mechanism based on continual light to have searchlights flailing about night and day. For some reason, this building is in the middle of a wealthy neighborhood, even though it is difficult for me to imagine something that didn't drill for feces gushers that could possibly be expected to lower property values more. It's a hideous eyesore that produces constant light and noise pollution, is full of bored fanatical prison guards who are armed to the teeth and have nothing to do, it brings in a steady stream of thieving street kids to do temp work, and of course it's packed full of the city's worst criminals – many of whom have nothing to lose. That pretty much checks off every bad thing it is possible to do to local property values that doesn't involve radiation or scat humor. But apparently in Zeb Cook's world, people are willing to pay big bucks to live next to that.

The numbers involved are of course, completely insane. The prison has a potential capacity of over thirty thousand, which makes it six times larger than the largest prison in the United States. Even Tihar Ashram isn't half the size of this crazy thing. But I'm going to chalk this up to large numbers having been pulled out of a hat combined with this book having been written in the days before the Internet would give you plausible sounding numbers with a couple of key strokes.

AncientH:

There are visiting privileges at the prison, which is presumably the only point where any PCs would even consider going to a prison in the course of an adventure: to meet with somebody inside and get some information from them, or maybe to relay some information.

Below the prison but not listed on the accompanying illustration are “The Cellars,” underground work centers and the secret rooms where prisoners are taken to die in unofficial ways, and somewhere beneath that is “The Grotto.” I’m not much into structural engineering, but plopping a 7-story tower-fortress-prison on top of a bunch of sub-basements and then a frickin’ Batcave is structurally sound.

FrankT:

This book posits daily executions (plural). Later in the book they posit 1600 executions a year. Sigil only has a population of a quarter million, and these people are racking up an execution-based death toll in excess of the entire People's Republic of China. These guys literally kill more people than cancer.

AncientH:

In an adventuring party, that means a Mercykiller PC can’t automatically punish a fighter for slaying an innocent peasant, or kill a thief for picking a noble’s pocket. The Mercykiller’s got to stay his hand until the “criminal” has been duly arrested, tried, and found guilty.

But seriously, murderhoboing is half the fun of being an adventurer. I don’t think they even have a Citizen’s Arrest thing in Sigil. On top of that, faction penalties actively discourage Mercykillers from working together unless they agree on everything. “Don’t kill the orc, he has to be tried before we hang him!” could cost a wizard or cleric half their daily spell slots.

FrankT:

The discussion about playing a Mercy Killer is bizarre. Remember that Mercy Killers don't actually apprehend criminals or hold courts. They are just executioners and prison guards. They really apparently don't have any business adventuring or doing much of anything. I mean, you're basically running Belle Reve or Arkham Asylum or something, but aside from the one adventure where the Joker takes over the prison, you really don't have anything to do. You're only allowed to attack people who, not to put too fine a point on it: have already been defeated. Rendering the entire thing more than a little pointless. You know this is a 2nd edition document, because there's a tirade about how if two Mercy Killer characters can't come to an agreement about what to do regarding “Justice” with respect to a situation, that one or both of the characters should get amazingly draconian penalties (losing half their caster levels, for example) until the crisis of faith is over and Justice Is Served.

AncientH:

Mercy Killer PCs technically only need to be lawful, but given that they are complete assholes even by the standards of the Harmonium, and also has a No Homers No Rogues rule. Mister Cavern is allowed to waive this if they impose special roleplaying restrictions on how classes can use their abilities. The given example is that a Mercy Killer thief could hide in shadows, but not pick pockets. Well, shit. Also, clerics (and one would guess, paladins) aren’t supposed to dish out justice on behalf of their deity (that would be wrong somehow), they’re supposed to do it FOR GREAT JUSTICE!



Naturally, this sucks to be you. On the other hand, joining them is pretty easy: enlistment day is once a fortnight, you sit around with a bunch of other candidates talking about justice, and anyone still standing when it’s time for coffee and donuts gets a job at the prison! Fuck, that sounds like an AA meeting I went to with a friend.

FrankT:

The faction has many ranks, but the book doesn't bother telling you what they are. It's a Lawful faction in this book, so I assume there are 17 ranks. Actually being one of them is a pretty awesome deal. You get to Detect Lies every day as if you were a 7th level Cleric. As a spellcaster, you get some 1st level spells added to your list and don't care. Also you get to spend some of your hit points to do double damage (even with spells), which in this edition is amazingly bad ass. But the structure really seems to preclude adventuring. You don't really go and do things until you can become a Justicar (basically Inspector Javert) and get charged to go chase down known criminals (I have no idea why this doesn't fall under the auspices of the Harmonium). And you don't get to be named a Justicar until you hit 5th level. I have no idea how you are supposed to hit 5th level considering that you aren't allowed to go on adventures and gain levels before that point. The whole thing seems poorly thought out.

AncientH:

There’s a picture of a frog-man-thing with what I think is a vagina (but maybe is just a shadowy over-detailed tailbone?) on this page, and I don’t know why.

The big problem with a dedicated bunch of prison guards is that all the fun parts of prison--the bribery, the prison economy, the escape attempts, the cage matches--none of that shit really works if the guards aren't in on it or behind it.

FrankT:

The big plot lines thrown around in here are about how the new factol has put up new sentencing guidelines that are draconian. This makes no sense, because the Red Death don't hold any judiciary power and have no ability to sentence anyone to anything. There's a fair amount of foreshadowing for Faction War in this segment as well as repeated admonitions to go read In A Cage – A Guide to Sigil. But the core thing of how the young Tiefling Wizard factol is showing how evil she is by ramping up sentences for people doesn't square with the way crime and punishment are supposed to work in this city. Like, at all.

AncientH:

There’s an erinyes in the prison that’s kind of chilling out called Lygess the Cruel, which represents the only really useful NPC in this section, because crime lords running their scams inside the safety of prison walls is still cool.

On the disturbing note, the 50-at-least head of the Fated is courting the 19-but-not-right-in-the-head head of the Mercykillers. Given the guy is trying to put the moves on a gel younger than his own fully-grown sons is just a bit of squick.

Another side note: why the fuck are the Mercykillers in a pissing match with Acheron? I mean, I could sort of see them getting into professional differences with Carceri, but one of the Nine Hells?

Okay, side note over, let’s check: the Warden of Sigil’s impossibly large and deadly prison is an insane Joan-of-Arc type, a very sketchy child fanatic who wants to bring the Lady of Pain to justice. The Mercykillers are the prison guards, a position which is immensely frustrating (since they don’t get to sentence or arrest anybody, technically), and which they deal with by taking it out on the prisoners and being general assholes.

Man, I miss it when the Patrician just sentenced mimes to the scorpion pit.

[Koumei]

If we assume every faction was written by a different author and without consulting with one another, it makes more sense: "These guys are the police!" "Huh? But THESE guys are the police!"

Alternatively/additionally: nothing is Lady-Endorsed Official. So there are seriously three groups writing the laws, and two of those go around policing these things, one of which also punts people's heads off after the arrest.

On the disturbing note, the 50-at-least head of the Fated is courting the 19-but-not-right-in-the-head head of the Mercykillers. Given the guy is trying to put the moves on a gel younger than his own fully-grown sons is just a bit of squick.

Don't worry, with the judicial power she apparently has here, she can redefine the age of consent as "my age plus one", then rewrite the penalty for paedophilia as "Death by stab".

Also, on the Dark Sun thing... wasn't its big deal "Totally different planar layout, not compatible with Planescape"? Or does Planescape have a "Compatible with everything ever regardless of what they say" rule and it's up to your group what trumps what? The first Planescape game I ever played, we went to Dark Sun and ended up giving a defiler a Decanter of Endless Water (this can't go badly) to get the thing we wanted.

I recall people on IRC bitching that "that couldn't possibly happen, your DM is a fuckwit. You can't go to or from Dark Sun!" My response was basically that the best thing about PS is shitting all over the campaign settings you don't like - "Dragonlance, you're on notice!"

[Ancient History]

Re: Dark Sun - It was a bit of both, depending on the module and the edition. In AD&D generally speaking, Athas was technically accessible through the Planescape cosmology - the adventure Black Spine was based on the idea, and also that the Dark Sun Gith were a degenerate remnant of the Githzerai. However, that didn't fucking work, since any planar gate would mean Athas could import as much metal and water as it wanted, so starting with <fuck if I can remember> the Dark Sun cosmology was squished around so that it was mostly incompatible with Planescape.

[fectin]

Pretty sure you're conflating affirmative defenses with extenuating circumstances. That doesn't make the other seven principles any less crazy.

[name_here]

I seem to recall that officially all the settings with special cosmologies were simply stupidly hard to reach from Sigil.