[OSSR]Factol's Manifesto

[Username17]

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

That depends on what version of law you're talking about. If we're talking about law being specifically British, then extenuating circumstances are things that do not change the verdict from guilty to innocent, but do change the proper sentence. But it's still according to the law. Demanding sentencing according to the law while ignoring extenuating circumstances is kind of more crazy if we're talking about British law than it is if we're just talking about everyday definitions of the words.

-Username17

[ishy]

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.

So because she was born in prison, she was a prisoner till she got into the prison guard faction?
And the prison guard faction recruits prisoners? That seems like a good idea.

[Ancient History]

Revolutionary League
Who topple the Structures of Power.

AncientH:

The Anarchists aren’t anarchists as we understand the term. The text does distinguish between Anarchists and anarchists, but the representation of both is really fairly insulting. The Anarchists are another inherently destructive not-gang that is supposedly about personal freedom but inherently destructive about on the level of the Doomguard, except instead of setting shit on fire they try to knock down any kind of organization. That’s just not a fun group to hang around.

FrankT:

The Anarchists are like what you'd think “Totally Extreme Anarchy!” would be if you had no idea what Anarchy was about. Zeb Cook was a highschool teacher in Nebraska, so I assume that his template for understanding anarchist political thought was teenage rebels without a clue during the Carter administration. These guys have all the complexity, sophistication, and depth of a 15 year old who tries to get kicked out of class by name dropping The Sex Pistols.

Rather than having any theories about how to run society without leaders (of which there are many), they just want to knock over all the other political factions and then disband. That's it. So I guess in Faction War, they “win”. Which is why they go back to Carceri and a schism faction goes back to Sigil called Second Wave.

AncientH:

I’ve mentioned before that the timing of faction events are usually vague and weird, so that the organizations that are supposedly ancient are fairly young compared to some groups in the real world. But this one gets weird: 300 years ago (roughly) the Anarchists started a war between the factions that wiped out three entire factions. Since this was after the Great Upheaval and there’s still 15 factions running around, that suggests that at least 3 factions are less than 300 years old. But all of them so far claim to have been around longer. So either this is a bad editing mistake or general lying.

FrankT:

The history doesn't make any sense. Supposedly they managed to start a faction war that killed off 3 of the factions 300 years ago. But the factions were culled down to 15 about 600 years ago and all the factions (except maybe the Xaositects, who reformed 150 years ago) that are here claim to have been around at that time. I'm not really sure how condensing power into a smaller number of hands advances Anarchy in any tangible way, but that is how they apparently roll. Their goal isn't to create a way of life without rulers, it is to reduce the number of rulers. And since every writeup has to be the ultimate evar, we have a situation where the Revolutionary League successfully destroyed factions that couldn't have existed because the Lady of Pain had already destroyed them. It's a “my dad can beat up your dad” argument, but with fictional characters.

Being an Anarchist is also apparently illegal. I don't know what the legal theory is here, because while it might make literary sense for the anti-authority faction to be fighting The Man and for The Man to be fighting back... it doesn't make any actual sense. This is a city which is dedicated to the balance between Good and Evil, Law and Chaos. You're allowed to be a fucking Doomguard, so I don't know what collective crime they could possibly be guilty of that would make membership a hanging offense.

AncientH:

The most revered Anarchist is Omar.

Not that Omar. This Omar managed to become Factol of the Harmonium, presumably because every collective asshole in there thought he was such a great guy they never used detect lie (yes, yes the Anarchists can pose as a member of any other faction without being detected, but the other factions know that), and then tried to close the whole faction—yeah, that didn’t happen. But Anarchists do respect Omar for his massive adamantine balls in almost pulling that one off.

FrankT:

Many people would say that Beringe, the not-factol of the Anarchists is an illegal character. He is a dual-classed Fighter-Thief with equal levels in both that nonetheless uses both the Thief Skills and the Fighter Armor proficiency at the same time. According to a common reading of the Dual Classing rules, you can't do that. But if you read them the other way, he could have started Fighter, then raised Thief enough to get his Fighter powers back, and then dual classed again into Fighter (his Strength and Dexterity are high enough that either class qualifies both as a class to leave from dual classing and as a class to dual class into), then once he passed Thief with Fighter again he could in essence jump back and forth to his heart's content because the conditions to restore class features in either class would have already been fulfilled. I feel extremely dirty for remembering that argument. 2nd edition Dual Classing Rules are a train wreck. Interestingly: the 2nd edition Dual Classing rules and the fact that they are completely 100% silent as to what the hell happens if your original class also qualifies as a target class to switch to is another thing that is Zeb Cook's fault.

AncientH:

The Anarchists don’t have a headquarters, just like they don’t admit they’re Anarchists, but they do have a number of safehouses established under the cover of legitimate businesses. If this sounds a lot like a bunch of friends pretending to be a gang and hanging out in each other’s basements rather than the terrorist/guerrilla/intelligence cell approach, well, there’s not a lot of difference that I can see. We’re given a short peek at a number of Anarchist safehouses, which is actually a nice change of pace from the broken-number HQs. Unfortunately, I wish that these had been a little more diverse. If I was writing up this faction, I’d have a women’s shelter and a bordello and stuff, places which already have a good excuse to be quiet and maybe have a bit of security.

FrankT:

The Revolutionary League has a network of safe houses all over town. They are front businesses that you can walk into, say the password, and get briefed on your secret mission. Like you were in Get Smart or Inspector Gadget. It's possible that they were trying to channel Mission Impossible or some other semi-serious piece of cold war spy shenanigans, but I doubt it. Basically you go to cafes and warehouses and shit, and then after giving the password you find Chief Quimby in a box or under a table or disguised as a dog or something, and he gives you your secret mission. Then you toss your exploding instructions back in with Chief Quimby who promptly gets blown up and groans. Then you start your mission.



There's actually a bunch of location writeups, but I can't quite get my go-go-gadget-give-a-fuck going.

AncientH:

Anarchists are rogues almost by default; the main perk of joining the Anarchists is that you can take rogue proficiencies, which sounds a lot like what a Thieves’ Guild should be. The only real restriction on Anarchists is that they don’t accept Lawful members (damn, there goes the rebellious paladin!) Of course, the problem is that it’s illegal to be an Anarchist, so you have to lie constantly and pretend you’re either a member of another faction or that you have no faction at all, which is a bit like wearing a sign saying “Convert me!”

FrankT:

We're told that the Anarchists have a cell structure and that when they get cracked down on it drives more undecideds into joining the Anarchists. You know, like a terrorist or revolutionary movement in anywhere, anytime. This is to contrast it with being “complete chaos”. Because the book wouldn't know a consistent definition of Law and Chaos if it had been known by one in the biblical sense first.

AncientH:

Also, completely unlike the coffee-and-donuts session that the Mercykillers have, you actually have to work to become an Anarchist. First you have to hear about them. Then you have to find them. Then you have to convince them to let you be their special friend. (Fuck, it’s like being a closeted homosexual back in the 70s.) Then maybe they’ll introduce you to their other special friends. (Oh gods this metaphor works.)

FrankT:

The Revolutionary League demographics is about what you'd expect: mostly Humans, few Dwarves. Lots of Thieves, few Priests. You're not allowed to be Lawful because for some reason Lawful people wouldn't want to overthrow this completely fucked up society. I want to point out that the factol of the Mercykillers is Lawful and wants to overthrow this particular society. Maybe I'm just setting my expectations of chapter to chapter consistency too high.

AncientH:

Apparently the Anarchists’ worse enemies are other Anarchists. Which makes no sense, because the Harmonium, Mercykillers, and Guvnors are willing to kill them all and send them to prison, and they don’t care about the order, and the Doomguard want to burn everybody down. So the idea that a rivalry in the proper way to perform civil disobedience is the number one problem facing your not-organization suggests a pathological level of self-centeredness and disconnect from reality. It’s a hanging offense to be an Anarchist.

FrankT:

Apparently the only thing that stops these guys from taking out all the other factions is that they are too disorganized. Like, apparently their group is on the whole basically way more powerful than any other faction but is riven by internal strife and lack of clear workflow procedures. I don't know what to say about that. But given that the system described in the rest of this book is pretty repellant, and holding Aztec style mass executions every day – I could see as how there would be a big desire to bring it down.

AncientH:

Honestly, I like the idea of an entire PLANESCAPE campaign where each of the PCs is secretly an Anarchist but pretending to be a member of another faction. It probably wouldn’t last more than a session or two, but it’s a fun conceit.

FrankT:

Actually being a member of the Revolutionary League has as its primary draw that you can count as a member of a different faction for social purposes without getting their actual powers or drawbacks. Since some of the factions have social bonuses as their entire powers (notably: Godsmen), I don't know how this is supposed to work. Your secondary ability is that if you are not a Rogue (which in 2nd edition means “Thief or Bard) you get the Rogue skills added to your skill list, and if you are a Rogue you get a modest bonus to your Rogue skills. Now before you get too excited, let's remind ourselves that this is 2nd edition AD&D, and so a lot of things we think of as iconic “Rogue Skills” weren't actually part of the skill system at all. Hiding, Lockpicking, Stealing, Finding Traps and all that jazz were class features of Thieves and Bards, and not skills at all. That's enough 2nd edition mechanics for this review.

AncientH:

So, here’s the deal with the Anarchists: they have no leader (like the Free League), they have no end game (like the Free League), they have no headquarters (Free League), they have no appreciable organization (Free League), it’s every cell/namer for themselves when it comes to filling out their goals (Free League), and actually declaring yourself an Anarchist is a good way to get killed by the planar cops (Free League). Really, you could make an argument that every member of the Free League is an Anarchist and vice versa, and they did it so that Sigil would have the magic number of 15 factions.

Except despite being almost identical for most purposes, the Free League gets a deadly STD. Whoo, An-ar-chy!

I cannot help but imagine this chapter would have been much better if written by someone who had read Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles.

[name_here]

So because she was born in prison, she was a prisoner till she got into the prison guard faction?
And the prison guard faction recruits prisoners? That seems like a good idea.

I think he means that she was raised by a member of the prison staff, not that she was automatically a prisoner.

[Ancient History]

Sign of One
Who place each Being at the Center of All.

AncientH:

“You think that’s air you’re breathing?”

The Sign of One (Signers) are self-centered to the point that they believe the multiverse is shaped by their beliefs, and if they believe shit hard enough they can change the ‘verse. It’s more than a bit new-agey Power of Positivity kinda thing, and has a lot in common with, say, Thelema and the Prosperity Gospel. Not that I think any of the people writing this know what Thelema is.

FrankT:

The Signers have a philosophy that is probably supposed to be completely incoherent, so it's not much of a surprise that it is. Evangelical solipsism. It's as stupid as it sounds.

But not having the guts to actually go through with writing up solipsism, we're back to The Secret again. Wishful thinking and the Law of Attraction, exactly like the Takers. But the justification for this bunch of positive thinking claptrap is harebrained solipsism rather than a Randroid sense of entitlement.

AncientH:

I’m not going to lie to you, the Signers are a Mitt Romney-meets-Spider-Man kinda group: “With great power comes no responsibility.” They were founded by an overbearing rich bitch that was bitten by a deadly orange speckled recluse spider (from her personal collection of exotic siders) but didn’t die. She took her wealth and success and luck as a sign that she was special, and if she only though happy thoughts everything would go her way…and it did. This jumped the shark when she got a bunch of her Signer acolytes to pray for someone else to die and they up and died. Not cool, yo.

FrankT:

There's some sort of war between the Bleakers and the Signers. See, the Signers think grim thoughts and do actual positive works in the real world. The Sign of One doesn't do shit and maintains positive thinking 24/7. They are at war over this. The Signers want the Bleakers to stop being so pessimistic and also to stop doing actual good works for actual real living people. That is why they periodically use psychic powers to murder Bleakers. That is why the leader of the Signers is Neutral Good.

AncientH:

“We are the elect,” the facto1 declared. “We admit into our ranks only those cutters who can sculpt reality.’

The Signers don’t proselytize as such; they’re more interested in being declared the creators of the multiverse than gaining new members. Again, this gives them the really overbearing self-centered feel that doesn’t seem all that different from the Fated when you squint and look at it sideways.

FrankT:

In order to prove how powerful their powers of positive thinking are, the Signers are working to wish some dead gods back to life. Considering that Planescape in general holds that the gods need and use belief to power their miracles, this plan would almost certainly work. This seems like it would have been a pretty big plot point, but to my knowledge nothing was ever done with it. The entire setting gets scrapped before this plotline goes anywhere.

AncientH:

Exposed to rationalism, hedonism, stoicism, mysticism, solipsism, existentialism, and other systems of thought from an early age, Darius became cynical toward intellectual exercise. Her contempt for the mental realm changed when her father introduced her to spellpower: Clearly, thought properly channeled could accomplish a lot!

If there’s a point where the Signer philosophy falls down even harder, it’s with their Factol Darius pointing out that there are already a couple dozen ways for thought and will to affect reality in the AD&D verse—arcane magic, divine magic, psionics, go to Limbo and play with the elements, etc. So saying that they just imagine things and it happens is a bit of a cut-out, it ignores all the hard work and study and discipline that goes into those powers in favor of “Fuck it, I’m the chosen one.” Bollocks.

It’s even apparent that they cheat! They hire assassins and healers and intermediaries and shit to make their wants come true!

With regards to this whole plan to dream a dead god back to life, Factol Darius is a bit leery of picking Aoskar because in part:

Aoskar’s revival would require the destruction of the Athar’s magical tree, the Bois Verdurous

Logically, there’s no apparent reason you’d have to kill the Not-God-Tree of Reverse Psychology, unless it really was…something. I’m just not following the reasoning here.

FrankT:

The Sign of One uses the council building as their guild hall. Or maybe they convinced everyone else to use their guild hall as the city council meeting hall. I have honestly no idea how they did that. No explanation is offered as to why the city government chooses to meet in the guildhall of a bunch of asshole solipsists. Considering that the actual administration of the government is done in the Harmonium's Barracks, and the Heartless Hall of Records, and the Guvner's Court, I really have no idea why the government keeps a fourth place as a council chamber. And when you consider that much of the day-to-day public maintenance is actually done separately by Dabus working directly for the Lady of Pain (who have their own independent bureaucracy), it gets even more incoherent. I do not see what is “in it” for any of the people who actually enforce the laws of the city (Harmonium, Fraternity of Order, or Mercy Killer) to accept laws passed in the guildhouse of the Signers. There is a major step missing from the all important question of why this government is considered to have any legitimacy at all. And that step is “the step where they give any explanation at all for why this government has any legitimacy at all.”

AncientH:

There’s a lot of problems with how the Hall of Speakers is portrayed, number one that groups like the Indeps that don’t have a Factol apparently have a voice in it, even though the Harmonium would arrest them on sight and the Indep write-up specifically said they didn’t have a voice in city affairs because, y’know, no Factol.

To go with what Frank said, this is not in anyway a checks-and-balances kind of government structure like readers might be familiar with. The Signers basically control what laws get to be passed, the Guvnors control the government archives and judge based on those laws, the Harmonium enforces the laws, and the Mercykillers are the Department of Punishment. Each one is their own fiefdom that isn’t so much dependent on the others as “really desperately wants to do all their jobs.” The fact that they cooperate at all is one of the mysteries of Sigil.

FrankT:

The Sign of One is open to all flavors of people. You're allowed to be any race or class. But it also goes off at length about how if you are Lawful or Good you probably won't feel comfortable with their solipsistic nonsense and general asshattery. Actually being a member gives you a free chance to disbelieve illusions you run across. That's either really good or fairly useless depending on how your DM is running illusions (and how often they are running illusions). They also get the ability to have a slightly worse than 50/50 chance to alter reality with their minds as if they cast a single spell of up to 4th level. It only works once a week, and requires an ability check where the “ability” in question is five less than the average of your Intelligence and Wisdom. Where it gets even weirder is that if you fail by rolling a natural 1, you become 80% less real for a period of time. Thing is: an ability check is actually a “roll under” affair in 2nd edition AD&D, so a 1 is not normally a failure. So I'm not sure what the fuck they are talking about here. There are cumulative penalties for retries, and as written the only way you could trigger that particular glitch is to push your luck and try to alter reality while you had no possible way of doing so. It's a poorly written ability and I don't think even the authors knew how it was supposed to work. At 10th level it goes apeshit crazy, being able to mimic spells up to 9th level (note: Priest Spells do not normally go up to 9th level, but you're specifically allowed to mimic them, requiring you to crack open Dragon Kings to find out what you can do). This sounds totally overpowered, and it is. But it also comes with poorly worded drawbacks that can cause you to lose the ability and even be removed from existence. So no one ever tried to use this shit. And just as well.

AncientH:

Small addition to what Frank said: in addition to Dragon Kings there’s also the nonsense about True Dwoemers and some stuff in a couple Forgotten Realms books—though I don’t know if they were out yet when this book was released.

They make a point that Paladins are basically screwed in Faction choices, either because they’re too damn Lawful for their own good or too damn Good to be comfortable. If I ever play a paladin in Sigil, I’m just going to form my own faction called the Saved the Spotted Dragon Society.

FrankT:

The plot hooks for the Signers are pretty weak, which is odd considering that their next big publicity stunt is supposed to be changing the number of gods in the D&D pantheon. The ones they want you to roll with revolve around how the Sign of One use paid actors to pad out crowds at political speeches like they were Mitt Romney. There's also a bit on how the Bleak Cabal is proposing that they simply stop recognizing the legitimacy of Signer government. Which seems eminently sensible considering that we have been given zero reasons why the Signer government has any legitimacy in the first place.

AncientH:

There’s some noise in the plot hooks about some deposed infernal proxy named Xaos that all the factions want to snap up as a member, but only the Dark Gods know why the Signers want him. Really, we don’t know why the Signers want anything. It would be much more reasonable and interesting if they all went to Limbo en masse and tried to imagine a new plane before the Slaadi found them.

FrankT:

The big reveal is that the speakers in the council wear magical grills that make their voices louder. I am not making that up.


T-Pain is the government. For... some reason.

AncientH:

No, seriously, magical grills. Gold wire and pearls. And some stupid centaur lost one! Now you have to go find it before everyone realizes the Signers cheat like mofos!

[fbmf]

AncientH:

Also, completely unlike the coffee-and-donuts session that the Mercykillers have, you actually have to work to become an Anarchist. First you have to hear about them. Then you have to find them. Then you have to convince them to let you be their special friend. (Fuck, it’s like being a closeted homosexual back in the 70s.) Then maybe they’ll introduce you to their other special friends. (Oh gods this metaphor works.)

While the closet gay metaphor is more appropriate, I immediately likened it to hiring the A-Team.

Game On,
fbmf

[virgil]

So because she was born in prison, she was a prisoner till she got into the prison guard faction?
And the prison guard faction recruits prisoners? That seems like a good idea.

I think he means that she was raised by a member of the prison staff, not that she was automatically a prisoner.

I can imagine her being forced to remain in prison

[ishy]

I’ve mentioned before that the timing of faction events are usually vague and weird, so that the organizations that are supposedly ancient are fairly young compared to some groups in the real world. But this one gets weird: 300 years ago (roughly) the Anarchists started a war between the factions that wiped out three entire factions. Since this was after the Great Upheaval and there’s still 15 factions running around, that suggests that at least 3 factions are less than 300 years old. But all of them so far claim to have been around longer. So either this is a bad editing mistake or general lying.

Do the anarchists actually count as a one of the 15 allowed factions (seeing as being an anarchist is actually illegal)?
Could they have wiped out other secret 'not-faction' factions?

[Ancient History]

At least two of the factions (Indeps and Anarchists) are arrest-on-sight.

Society of Sensation
Who find Truth only in Experience.

FrankT:

The booze for this section is Metaxa. The Sensate tagline about finding Truth from Experience may trick you into thinking you're about to read about a bunch of empiricists, on the ground that that is an actual philosophical theory. You'd be wrong. They then go off on a rant about how they are about all kinds of experience, not just ones where they eat cake and get blow jobs. This is a damned lie. No Sensate in the history of anything has ever been portrayed in any way other than:

• Getting blow jobs while eating cake.
• Doing something stupid for comic relief purposes.

Seriously. That's it.

AncientH:

This is the faction to join if you want your character to get laid. Between all the high-minded jabber the uniting theme of the Sensates is to experience everything the multiverse has to offer, without getting locked into any one kink or stimulus. It’s a lot like people that turn bisexual while they’re in college and I suspect they should have a fairly high attrition rate, but there are supposedly more of them than there are cops in Sigil.

FrankT:

When it comes down to it, the Sensate philosophy isn't about empiricism or hedonism. It's just about not having inhibitions. Supposedly you can give a Sensate a proposition of basically any kind and the correct response is for them to say “Sure!” Being a Sensate is like being on Rohypnol all the time.

These guys are put in charge of the Civic Festhall, and for once this seems like something that society would actually do. You have a bunch of people who have no inhibitions and are willing to be conned into doing stuff and they also are into cake and blowjobs in a big way, so you put them in charge of the city's convention center. This makes total sense.

AncientH:

The Civic Festhall looks a bit like a vagina.

Factol Erin Darkflame Montgomery is a 9th-level female human priest with a psionic wild talent. Not exactly a smorgasbord of abilities there, but not bad. Her backstory ties in with the history of the factol of the Signers, something about a bunch of tanari’i doing a raid on Tir na Og. She also managed to free a half-elf sex-slave whom she keeps as her consort, ‘cause a blood’s gotta have her fun. From the way we’re describing it you probably doubt there’s a male or female in Sigil that hasn’t had her one way or another, and…um…well, she’s supposed to be playing down the hedonism thing, so maybe not?

FrankT:

Factol Erin Darkflame Montgomery reads like the fapping fantasy of one of the authors or perhaps a shoutout to a girlfriend or something. Much of the text is supposed to be an interview with her. It has sinister overtones because she totally had the interviewer murdered and redacted some information! Swoon! But the flow of this is completely garbled by the fact that there's still game stats in the middle here. It also doesn't help that the secrets she actually has don't really seem like the kind of thing it would be worth killing a dude over.

AncientH:

The Sensate you’re directed to at the Festhall is an angora bariaur with glasses, suggesting an unhealthy knowledge and obsession with such things long before it became fashionable.

Now, there’s not much talk of money changing hands for any of the Sensates’ entertainments at this point, but given that most people won’t fist a gerbil for free I have to assume that someone somewhere is actually footing the bill, and it may well be the looky-loo. This is reinforced by the idea that the Sensates own or operate most (if not all) of the major and minor theaters and entertainments in the city of Sigil, which means that Erin Darkflame Morningwood probably gets a copper for every silver piece you spend on a blow job in the City of Doors. What a lovely thought.

FrankT:

The Civic Festhall certainly has its stupid elements. They have lots of different textures of granite on their walls so that you can feel different levels of rough and smooth by rubbing your hand across them. I don't even know how that's supposed to be a big deal, but whatever. The basic idea here seems to be that you could really spend a whole long time in the Civic Festhall just experiencing it you happened to be on MDMA. I suspect that Sensates spend a lot of time on MDMA.

The Sensates also have a giant prison-orgy called the Gilded Cage. It's one of those Hotel California deals where you get as much cake and blowjobs as you want but there aren't any doors that lead out. If people get too annoying or expensive or know too much or too little or whatever, the Sensates get rid of them forever by dumping them on a wine soaked water slide into the brothel prison. It's an interesting take on making people disappear.

AncientH:

Money finally comes into play with the Public Sensoriums, classrooms, etc. Basically the Sensates operate an open university-cum-brothel-cum-entertainment complex where you can pay for basically any experience and most training, available to anyone. On the rare occasion you have a new sensation to offer, they may even pay you!

FrankT:

The Sensates have a piece of magitech that allows them to store and playback sense data. Like a video recorder, but it can also do touch or taste or whatever. They use this tech to make little nickelodeons like they were Prohibition era Atlantic City. These “Sensoriums” are like emporiums where you can get sensations. In addition to being able to watch women dance nude for a nickle, people also record other stuff. Some of it is training videos. I have no idea if you're supposed to be able to gain actual Experience Points from this sort of thing. It seems like you would, but that would also be ungamebalanced. But this is AD&D 2nd edition, where game balance was a concern that they made fun of openly. So who knows?

AncientH:

Trying to actually roleplay a Sensate is difficult and probably particularly taxing to Mister Cavern, who has to stop and explain what the texture and smell of ever gods-be-damned thing is in detail for the PC Sensate “trying new things.” Also your fellow PCs are probably going to have a sharp limit to the amount of crap they’ll take off your character: sleeping with the barkeep’s daughter is annoying, trying to score with the medusa could get them all killed. And sometimes the Sensate philosophy just doesn’t make any sense:

A real Sensate respects his comrades’ wishes; if they don’t want to try something, he won’t force the issue. Likewise, a real Sensate won’t try something that might cause him or another bodily harm.

This is rather bollocks, but I suppose BDSM falls under Neutral Evil rather than just plain Neutral. Still, you’d think that the Sensates would be open to giving new experiences to others.

Classwise, Sensates are more often dual-classed and multiclassed, with few specialists as that limits their options. You’d think they’d have a lot of illusionists, since the vast archive of sensory data would make illusions more potent and convincing (depending on who’s writing the magic whatsits this edition), but apparently a lot of Sensates deride them as fakers so not many join.

FrankT:

True Sensates are like True Scotsmen. They are a fallacy and probably do not exist. The discussion about Sensates rambles on about True Sensates a lot. Apparently they are above cake and blowjobs. Not that you would ever know, because they also won't turn down cake. Or blow jobs. Or blow jobs with their cake. The Society of Sensation is quite explicit about having all the alignments, and apparently:

Few Sensates are ever appalled by the acts of their fellows, often cooperating to help grant the experiences another faction member seeks.

I'll just leave that there. Even putting up another picture of Hedonism Bot would at this point be redundant.

AncientH:

I like to think that the Sensates evolved out of a multidimensional prostitution ring, and the abilities seem to match that. Infravision, to see in the dark. Ability to read body language. Extra starting money. Empathic healing sensory touch which is a “laying on of hands” deal, and gossip like a bard.

FrankT:

Membership has its privileges. In this case, the privilege to see Infra Red. I am not making that up. Also you're slightly harder to poison and slightly harder to surprise. Because of all the debauchery, basically. It all makes sense except for the part where you see Infra Red. But seeing as how that is the “no clothes” cheat code for the universe, it seems like the kind of thing they would teach themselves if they could. They also get a very small chance to spot liars and start with more money because indulgent wastrels are all rich or something. They also get a really tiny hit point transfer thing at 3rd level and bonus history knowledge like a 1st level Bard. The money here is the Infravision and the bonus to surprise checks. Everything else can go pound sand.

AncientH:

The plot hooks for this section are terrible. In a faction that knows every secret between ever set of bedsheets (and standing up, lying down, in a nest, the Baatezu Jelly Roll, the Slaadi Cluster…) you’d think they’d have one of the better information networks in town, but maybe they’ve partied a little too hard. So instead of, say, some nifty sensations to go send adventurers out to experience or some bedroom secrets spilling out with legal consequences, we’re invited to consider faction politics between squabbling Fated and Sensates.

FrankT:

The big reveal is that Erin Darkflame Montgomery has a master plan. Her master plan is that she is going to transform everyone into beings of pure energy and thought, and then transcend throughout the multiverse like super aliens on Star Trek. She is even now putting things into place to launch stage one of her master plan: telling everyone that it would be really cool and they should start working on researching what the second stage of this plan might be.

Yes: the big reveal is that she is pretty sure that she can convince people to build the Transcendence Engine for her by... giving a philosophical monologue. Because no one has ever tried that shit in Planescape! Words fail. Maybe this is actually really subtle and the real big reveal is that Erin Darkflame Montgomery taken so much coke that she has completely fucking lost all hope of ever having any perspective and even incredibly pointless ideas of hers are solid gold. Honestly it reminds me of the time my neighbors shouted at me from down the street “DON'T TELL ANYONE WE'RE HAVING A COKE PARTY!”

AncientH:

The only things preventing Montgomery from launching Sigil’s first Snow Day is that she’s still dealing with politically ambitious Fated and the tanari’i from her terrible backstory are sniffing around the outskirts of the Festhall. Why they’re after her instead of Darius of the Signers is a question unasked, presumably because the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.


‘mmm kay?

[TarkisFlux]

AncientH:
Small addition to what Frank said: in addition to Dragon Kings there’s also the nonsense about True Dwoemers and some stuff in a couple Forgotten Realms books—though I don’t know if they were out yet when this book was released.

Nothing like cross-promotion of your own products. True Dweomers are the 2e build your own 10th level spell thing. It's in Chapter 6 of DM Option:High-Level Campaigns, which was out a month after the Manifesto, and is pretty spite worthy.

[hyzmarca]

The sad thing is that the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts from Planescape:Torment was really cool.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I have a certain amount of hatred in my heart for people like how the Sensates are portrayed. I caught so much hell from my peers (and to a certain extent I still do) because I tend to spend more time reading and exploring and trying to figure things out than I do chasing women. Like I'm less of a man when I'm out exploring the woods for a few days and not at some bar trying to convince women to drop their panties for me.

And I'm pretty sure I could take a 9th level 2e cleric in a fight...

[Avoraciopoctules]

No Sensate in the history of anything has ever been portrayed in any way other than:
- Getting blow jobs while eating cake.
- Doing something stupid for comic relief purposes.
Seriously. That's it.

http://www.planewalker.com/080703/desire-and-dead

The Sensate's plan was kinda stupid, but it didn't really feel like comic relief.

And what about Fall-From-Grace in Torment 1?

[Ancient History]

Transcendent Order
Who act before they Think – if they Think at all.

AncientH:

The opening page of this chapter was culled from an automatic fortune cookie dispenser. This pithiness extends to the entire chapter, which is excruciatingly short on wordcount and informational content.

FrankT:

The Ciphers are a faction that stresses the importance of saying short pithy comments that sound like they are wisdom. That's really about as deep as it goes.

There's a bit about how all time is just a sequence of “Todays”, but even that is just a bunch of deepisms. There really isn't anything here. Someone watched some episodes of Kung Fu with David Carradine and decided that they wanted a faction of people who talked like that.

AncientH:

The Ciphers manage to get along the most with other factions because unlike other factions they honestly do not give the tiniest shit about what their problem is. They leave them alone, and are mostly left alone in turn. Their philosophy boils down into a kinda whitewashed zen thing, where you live perpetually in the moment, act without thought. Of course, they spell this out very badly and show no deeper understanding of this philosophy.

FrankT:

Ciphers don't even bother trying to have a coherent philosophical viewpoint. They just do stuff. They hang out at the gym and flex their muscles. They communicate mostly with grunts and gestures. Every so often they come up with a koan to make it sound like they are thinking about things deeply. But even this is basically like the “wisdom” of Steven Seagal.

AncientH:

The Factol is a true neutral tiefling fighter/mage who prefers to kick ass in the smallest unit of time possible, apparently. She used to be evil, but we don’t hear much about those fell deeds because she is so enlightened now that she’s trying to be a bodhisattva.


Miss you, Bodhi.

FrankT:

Being a member of the Transcendental Order isn't just about lifting weights. They also paint. And arrange rocks. And do lots of other stuff that Eastern Martial Artists do in movies. The whole writeup is pretty short and drops such mind blowing bombs as telling you that Ciphers try to eat nutritious food.

AncientH:

You have to be part Neutral when you join up, but don’t worry about the group being too dominated by Neutral Chaotic/Evil/Good/Lawfulness, because your alignment opposite tends to join right afterwards! So sign up and get an alignment buddy for Mister Cavern to fuck with you with! As you get along in the order, you drift toward True Neutral anyway, without most of the alignment shenanigans except losing certain class abilities.

Joining these guys is also super easy, easier even than coffee & donuts with the Mercy Killers:

The Ciphers have pretty easy entrance requirements: A cutter goes up to a member and says, “I’d like to join your fine faction,” or somesuch, expressing a desire to seek harmony of body and mind

FrankT:

Members of the Transcendental Order are required to be at least partially Neutral – like a Druid in 3e. eventually they can switch to True Neutral and in doing so don't suffer XP penalties. The whole faction is given over to not giving a fuck, and boy don't they.

AncientH:

There are three levels of mastery in the Cipher order, and you get gradually worse at initiative tests as you get higher up. Which is rather lame.

FrankT:

Mechanically, being a Cipher gets you a +1 bonus to saves against mind control and a -1 bonus to initiative tests. Yes, I just said -1 bonus. Because it's 2nd edition and sometimes lower is better. Go fuck yourself.

AncientH:

We’re back to more worshipers of the Not-God of Reverse Psychology, and it’s getting depressing. Why can’t you be a member of more than one faction again? The sad thing is, this is totally unnecessary: there are rules in the game for people worshiping you after you’re dead until you become a demigod and can grant them spells.

FrankT:

The big reveal is that there are Clerics of the Great Unknown who get spells. This is seriously the third time in this book that we've gotten this big reveal, and it doesn't come off as big or revelatory any more.

AncientH:

That’s the chapter folks! It’s way supershort compared to the others, 7 pages versus the normal 10-15. If you want to figure out why anybody has a beef with these guys for minding their own business and trying to quietly ascend, you’re going to have to go check out the other faction write ups because the dude or dudette in charge of this one just could not muster the energy (or page count) to sum up.

[Ancient History]

Xaositects
Who spread Beauty through Chaos.

FrankT:

We had the Fraternity of Order, this is the Fraternity of Chaos. The chapter opens with the electronic prepress coordinator busting out the craziest fonts in their inventory. Yeah, they are off the hiz-ook with text that is Blue and in non-standard sizes and colors. They even use dingbats, because they have fucking fonts. Fonts with colored dingbats, motherfucker! Apparently, talking to Xaositects is incredibly annoying.

AncientH:

The opening section is fishmalk-speak, and utterly worthless except for the anecdote about eating an owlbear-egg omelet. I don’t know how you can eat an owlbear-egg omelet. Do you know what those things retail for?

FrankT:

The Xaositects are dedicated to CHAOS. This means that they do dadaist art projects. Some of them are well received, while others are considered vandalism. Also, the movement splinters and gets renamed from time to time. These guys are fishmalks, pure and simple. They are Chaos in the “haha, it's funny because it's crazy” sort of Chaos that people thought was a good idea in the early 90s. It was not a good idea.


The problem with this idea is that it is obviously a shit idea.

AncientH:

So, since we cannot get anything resembling actual language from the Xaositects, we go instead to someone less silly. Like with the Indeps and the Anarachists, they are another not-a-faction that doesn’t keep records and doesn’t play well with others. We are regaled with a few tales of the incredible mad feats of the Chaosmen, none of which we care about.

On the scale of creativity, it is recognized that the ability to think outside of the box can be valuable, delivering leaps in progress or innovative solutions to problems. The problem is, if you go too far that way, you become unemployable. When asked what 2 + 2 is, you may answer “Purple,” and that is just not productive. It is also terribly difficult to roleplay, and generally results in a lot of “look at me” nonsense that detracts from the entire game for everybody.

FrankT:

In order to demonstrate how “wacky” the Xaositects are, their factol quits several times a day and keeps coming back to the job. Xaositects “live in the moment” which apparently means that they somehow purge their own longterm memories. So they are all running around like that dude in Memento. They are a comic relief faction, saved for the end of the book so that hopefully the kind of disruptive player with a short attention span to whom this faction would appeal wouldn't get that far.

AncientH:

I like to think that all the numbers in this book are absolutely worthless not because authors fail at math so much as the city itself makes keeping track of any sort of population absolutely pointless. Even the factions don’t know exactly how many assholes they have on the roster, they tell you that right off the bat. The Xaositects epitomize this in that they don’t even guess how many assholes they have.

FrankT:

There is something badly wrong with the demographics of Sigil. The Xaositects come from a shitty, overcrowded slum. But the population of the whole city is only a quarter million. The populations just don't add up. There aren't enough people for there to be crowded slums. But sure, whatever. If we just assume that all the big numbers are “many” and that no one is actually counting or even sampling numbers in the thousands, we'll just fucking go with it. The Xaositects come from “The Hive”. It's a slummy neighborhood in a ward which is also called “The Hive”. I think that the places where they keep their flats in that neighborhood is also called “The Hive”.

AncientH:

Unlike the Anarchists and Indepts, the Xaositects do have a factol, sometimes, maybe. One recurrent burk that fills the role when he feels like it is Karan, a githzerai who probably took a very severe blow to the head at some point and cannot remember things for more than a few hours. I like to think of him as that guy from Memento. Karan has a special ability to use major creation three times per day, drawing on the raw stuff of limbo rather than the demiplane of Shadow because…um…um…because he’s crazy.

FrankT:

Xaositects are dangerous. They wander around with purple torches, and periodically they lynch a foreigner. They are like clown-themed skinheads. Actually come to think of it, they are the Jokerz from Batman Beyond.

AncientH:

Quake Lavender, a wild mage and factor of the Xaositects, was obviously written by someone with access to a copy of Tome of Magic because she has one of the most in-depth stats of anyone else in this book. She also has the ability to spurt off a wand of wonder effect at will, though without the chance to control it like a wild mage normally does. Kaos!

FrankT:

Chaos Men are expected to screw up their syntax while talking in order to make their language more irritating for others to listen to. Mostly Xaositects are about annoying the other players and shitting on any attempts to have a serious role playing session.

AncientH:

See, the Xaositects figure that if they acted chaotic all the time, they’d become predictable.

All Chaosmen (and women, and herms, and neuters, and myconids) are Chaotic, beyond that everything is fair game. The rules for joining are up to Mister Cavern, because this book was not designed to provide any sort of helpful guidance. Notable members include wild mages, minotaurs (?), and slaadi.

FrankT:

The book trolls potential Xaositect players by suggesting that what they really want to do to prove how “disorganized” they are is to play a Fighter who doesn't have weapon specialization. This is equivalent to asking the player to not wear their armor or leave their weapons at home. Or just voluntarily decline to gain levels. They are seriously asking players to make deliberately underpowered characters for role playing reasons. Advancing through the ranks of the Chaos Men (because they are a Chaotic faction, they have only 4 ranks rather than the 17 that they would have if they were a Lawful one) is a matter of doing stupid shit until the DM arbitrarily decides that other people decided to join in the “fun”. So you get to keep your current rank by running around doing stupid shit. If you end up bringing a mad train of stupid to be really disruptive, you go up in rank. Rank gains can happen to you twice, and maybe a third time if the current Factol dies or quits double plus for sure.

AncientH:

There are arguably supposed to be some pseudo-ranks, but they sound like the ranks in a Warhammer Orc & Goblin army—“Boss” and “Big Boss,” things like that. Because chaos does not approve of being the executive middle manager or the technical specialist, much less this bullshit factor/factotum/factol nonsense.

FrankT:

Mechanically, if you're a Chaos Man you get to use babble, which is the opposite of tongues. Yes, really. Everyone within 30' of you can't speak intelligibly in any language. Because just shouting and being an asshole wasn't attention grabbing enough. You have to be able to make it literally impossible for people to pretend you don't exist and continue having a conversation. If you advance in rank and get to 5th level you benefit from nondetection, which is somewhat wasted on you. And if you get to 9th level you get to drop confusion on people to be even more disruptive and annoying. Advancing rank twice gets you a special comic relief ability. There are other powers, but they are basically comic relief and wholly magic teaparty. They for example have the ability to find lost things, but only if there is no good reason for them to be looking for it and only if the DM thinks it is funny. Fucking fuck I hate these assholes.

AncientH:

Advanced abilities are random bullshit which is whatever Mister Cavern decides they are. You could shoot a wand of wonder effect or you could turn into a different colored slaad once a day. It’s random.

FrankT:

The big reveal is that the Chaos Men are giant trolls. As in they literally have a Minotaur who goes around pretending that he is going to have a serious conversation, then he spouts a bunch of gibberish and drives the people he is talking to insane. Then he runs away laughing.


And that's the end of the chapter and the book. On the plus side: we are treated to Tiefling sideboob. And we're talking Planescape Tieflings, who are hot. And not those 4e Tieflings who are not.

AncientH:

I’m glad this book is done. It’s been many many years since I read it, and looking back on it with more cynical eyes I can clearly see how every one of these groups is populated by raging assholes of different stripes and colors…and the Xaositects probably wear polka dots just to fuck with my metaphor. The thing to take away from this is that most of the abilities in this book are not terribly enticing to PCs—some of them are, I grant, but not many, and few are worth going through the bullshit that is being a member of a faction to get them. The plot hooks are uniformly shit, and the whole thing is only livened up from time to time by little bits like a frost giant librarian and an owlbear-egg omelet.

[Red_Rob]

So basically all the factions are badly thought out and philosophically and politically incoherent? Colour me disappointed. Although I never actually read much Planescape background the bits I saw sure made it sound much more interesting and well concepted .

Were there any bits that you did think were good conceptually or that surprised you? Part of me hopes some of the snark was exaggerated for entertainment purposes. Another, more realistic part of me is realising that Planescape wasn't some Nirvana of RPG's where all the cool setting ideas were actually followed through, and was just another campaign setting.

[Ancient History]

I think part of the attraction of doing this book for Frank and myself were how good the reviews were - on Amazon.com for example, it has something like eight five-star reviews, and goes for up to $80 and change. The problem is that pretty much all of these groups fall apart hilariously fast the moment you think about their supposed guiding philosophies and position in the city. They're assholes, and for the bulk of them not particularly useful ones or well-situated to their jobs. At least two of the factions are arrest-on-sight, have no factol and no headquarters, and a third isn't far behind.

I do think the best thing to come out of this was the Not-God of Reverse Psychology, which the guys specifically don't worship to not gain magical power. That was special.

The thing is, I do love multidimensional city settings. I love Cynosure in Grimjack, and I absolutely adored Nexus the Living City and wish it had continued on. There are parts of Sigil in this book I really do like, but they're incidentals. The Factions system is just unworkable as the authors have put it here, even the numbers don't work out. The average faction is supposed to have 20,000-30,000 members and there are 15 of them - that's more than the quarter of a million people that make up all of Sigil's population! Even if a sizable chunk of each faction is on other planes, that's madness.

[Koumei]

I think I met a character in a Planescape game who was a Sensate who basically just wanted to travel to every single plane and take field notes - a "I will write the Monster Manuals" sort. Not irritating, and not focusing on cake and blowjobs.

Though I imagine that, were I to travel to Sigil personally, after the crisis of "How am I in an imaginary setting? Am I now imaginary? Was I a shitty game character all along that someone wrote up? Crap, am I an NPC?" that should be expected, I would join the sensates for a (probably short) life of cake, opium and oral sex. Not out of any respect for the philosophies, mind you.

And do the Xaositects really use the star of ScientologyChaos as their symbol? Which only now resembles an asshole, come to think of it. Which sums them up pretty well. But really, does the CHAOS faction seriously use the same icon as 40k's followers of Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh, Tzeench, Nightmare Moon and Xom?

[Ancient History]

No, that was just me being clever. And Michael Moorcock came up with it.

[Koumei]

Ah, so GW and Scientology stole from Moorcock there.

[Chamomile]

So, here's a few ideas for some basic revisions to Sigil that could make it more workable.

1) The Lady of Pain isn't an arbitrarily powerful character, she is just really exceptionally strong and maintains the support of all the factions because they prefer her as a compromise to running the risk of allowing another faction complete control of the planar hub city, which would be a powerful trump card in the factions battle of supremacy throughout the planes. The Lady of Pain works to keep the factions balanced against one another, because if one were ever to gain an upper hand they would overthrow her and take the whole city for themselves. There's something special about Sigil itself which makes it very difficult for gods to assault. Their powers don't work right in the Outlands and therefore it becomes neutral territory mostly because you can't effectively fight a war there.

2) And yeah, about that, these factions exist throughout the planes. They actually fight each other in places, and they're involved in the Blood War and stuff. Outside of Sigil, they are functioning governments that hold sovereign territory.

3) Sigil itself is way bigger. It needs to be at least the size of New York and preferably larger than that. It's supposed to be a planar metropolis so let's give it a population that is actually impressive and, perhaps more importantly, can contain multiple very large factions.

4) Sigil's government is a bizarre and barely functional thirty government pileup, with different departments run by different factions which have overlapping responsibilities. The upshot of this is that Sigil's laws are basically whatever the faction currently in charge of this block says they are. Some factions will make an effort to actually run according to the laws agreed upon in the inter-faction legislature, others won't care. If your violations of the laws are too egregious, however, the Lady of Pain might decide that your entire faction needs to be culled. This once happened a few hundred years ago, when the Lady of Pain used some of the more powerful factions of the existing fifteen to wipe out a few other powerful but troublesome factions. A lot of weaker, less powerful factions got caught in the crossfire, thus bringing the total number of 34 screaming down to 15.

5) Due to the way Sigil law works, legislative power is measured in how many registered members your faction has. The more members you have, the more representatives you get and the more laws you can pass. Therefore it is required by Sigil law (a fairly universally enforced one, even) that you join only one faction. Members of separate factions can still generally help each other out, though.

6) Mechanically speaking, just don't play 2e at all. Factions are a roleplay choice and hopefully by the time I'm done here they will be a moderately coherent one.

With the overview out of the way, specific factional spot-checks.

The Athar want to use Sigil as a base from which to launch a campaign against all gods everywhere. Sigil is of course the perfect place to do this because the gods cannot easily retaliate, which at least allows militant anti-theists to engage the gods in a stalemate rather than being rapidly reduced to dust. They do not have a Not-God of Reverse Psychology and they provide obvious adventure hooks for undermining the power of the gods in Sigil and beyond. Unlike most factions, the Athar operate primarily out of Sigil and other locations in the Outlands because they are very much not popular outside of it. Individual Athar can still operate in other planes simply because gods can't often be bothered to attack a single individual, however, even if that individual and their allies are incapable of retribution. Thus there is a gentleman's agreement that the gods don't vaporize the Athar and the Athar don't build cities or run organizations outside of the Outlands, and thus the gods' servants can have adventures with Athar and everyone wins.

The Bleak Cabal is full of depressives because confronting the suffering in the world as well as its senselessness is pretty depressing. Not all Bleakers are necessarily depressed but it is really common. Regardless, they want to alleviate suffering as much as possible even though they regard the total elimination of suffering or even a significant reduction of it a lost cause. The Bleak Cabal is in charge of Sigil's welfare, and they're able to get a lot of that legislation passed by piggybacking it on other factions' laws. Unfortunately the welfare laws are only properly enforced in parts of the city that are run by the Bleakers, factions friendly to the Bleakers, or factions who enforce Sigil laws on principle even when they don't like them, so that's about half the city where people are not receiving the soup they are legally owed. The Bleak Cabal has a presence outside of Sigil, primarily on the Lower Planes where they try to make things suck less. A Bleak Cabal campaign would really just be your average do-gooder D&D campaign but with some nihilistic angst thrown in.

The Fated are just evil corporatist jerks. Yes, they believe in the Secret as justification for their Randian greed, but pragmatically speaking they think they should own everything and everyone. They get to be in the Sigilian Senate or Parliament or whatever, and they also run a lot of business. Now, the Fated were founded outside Sigil and their structure is very much designed to be an exclusive club with huge benefits just for being a part of it. This works against their Sigil branch, however, in that it strictly limits the number of people they can count as members of their faction, as other factions have lobbied against allowing them to have any kind of "entry-level" position that clearly does not include actual membership but allows them to count hopeful suckers as part of their faction for legislative purposes. Also, the Fated have a lot of business dealings throughout the planes. They are kind of a big deal, in fact. The Fated control the city's finances and are technically legally obligated to fund whatever the parliament tells them to fund, but by creating a bafflingly complex bureaucracy they are able to run all kinds of embezzlement schemes. They let just enough of the other factions in on just enough of the cut to ensure that they retain this power even as they're clearly abusing it. Like the Doomguard, these guys make for an obvious evil campaign setup if you want that but otherwise serve mostly as antagonists.

The Fraternity of Order were the first faction actually in Sigil in the sense of being a legislative power, because they were the original Sigilian government. Sigil, like many metropolitan areas, was originally a lot of different cities, and the Fraternity of Order were often called upon to resolve disputes in various different cities in what would be Sigil because is their job to have encyclopedic knowledge of everything. Other factions put down roots in these cities and when they grew together and restructured themselves as the single government of Sigil, the Fraternity of Order had their authority as the judiciary branch formalized, though since the Sigilian government is a trainwreck of failed bureaucracy which is in places completely non-functional, that's not as impressive as it sounds. The Fraternity of Order exists outside of Sigil, but they don't have much political agenda. Inside of Sigil, their political agenda is mostly "we would like it if the government actually worked." As such, they are best suited to campaigns taking place within Sigil itself with the goal of making the government function properly. You can also easily justify a Guvnor working for a campaign of another mostly-sane faction as a political favor in exchange for help making Sigil law functional.

The Free League don't believe in government, of course, but they do have representatives in the parliament/senate thing, because if they want to make the government smaller they are going to have to work with what they have (some Free Leaguers advocate a military solution, of course, but then all factions would go for a military solution if they thought it would actually work). The Free League protects small business with their legislation, which is usually defeated by the Fated and in any case is not typically well thought-out, but it still applies in the Grand Bazaar. The Grand Bazaar does not function as advertised, but the Free League maintains that this is only because there are too many laws in other parts of the city causing problems which bleed over into the Free League areas, where there are de facto no laws at all past the basics of "don't murder people" and "don't get caught in the act of stealing (but sending people to investigate thefts is too much government so feel free to leave as much evidence as you want)." Since the Free League only exists as a coherent organization for political reasons that don't apply outside of Sigil, they don't exist as an organization outside of Sigil either, however they still claim a lot of members who live outside of Sigil, including many who've never even been to Sigil, who agree with their fundamental philosophy. These aren't official members for Sigil legislative purposes, but they're generally friendly with other Free Leaguers. A Free League campaign would be a non-evil mercantile campaign, where the goal is ever-more profits but with the built in assumption that you are supposed to stick to your values and self-regulate to avoid dominating other sentients.

The Harmonium are the city's police force, and as such they hate the Doomguard for being an insane cult, they hate the Free League because the Free League hates them, they hate the Fated for not giving them the funds they should legally have, they hate the Mercy Killers for encroaching on their job, and they hate other factions in general for passing laws they don't want to enforce. The Harmonium are very much the kind of guys who'll let the small fry go in order to catch a bigger fish, which gives them a convenient excuse to not actually enforce laws they don't like. They have a lot of presence outside of Sigil. They helped Mechanus gobble up a layer of Arcadia, which basically means that they helped the powers of Mechanus invade and conquer Menausus. Which is what it means to transfer a layer from one plane to another, a change in government, since physically speaking all layers of every plane border every layer of every other plane exactly as much. The only thing stopping you from having a portal directly from the highest of the seven Heavens to the lowest of the nine Hells is the people running those respective planes not wanting such portals to exist. The Harmonium is therefore a police force and also a military. Harmonium PCs automatically belong to some kind of SpecOps unit that has more flexibility in how they advance the goals of the Harmonium. They are generally supposed to defend the law but the details of how are left up to them. A Harmonium campaign would revolve around both resolving differences within Mechanus and marching on other planes to add them to Mechanus. So long as these planes are a mutual enemy of the other planes (i.e. most lower planes), it should be easy for other factions to get on board with this.

The Mercy Killers actually do represent retributive justice. They're supposed to just be prison guards and executioners, but they are also extremely corrupt. They enforce their own laws and only pay lip service to the official laws of Sigil, something which is unsurprisingly perfectly legal according to the laws they wrote to justify doing exactly that. The Mercy Killers will thus go out and arrest people instead of the Harmonium, judge them instead of the Guvnors, and convict them for laws not actually written by the senate/parliament or the Lady of Pain, and then toss them in the same prison as the people who have violated the actual laws of Sigil. This prison is not technically corrupt in most ways because the Mercy Killers are allowed to run it however they like so long as people are let out when their sentence is complete, but the one way it is corrupt is that people's paperwork tends to get accidentally shredded or else they tend to be accidentally killed a few weeks before their release. The actual prison run by the Mercy Killers is basically a self-sustaining society where the Mercy Killers are a ruling upper class and multiple gangs of lifers run a middle class. Those who have been imprisoned shortterm (which is most people, because the Guvnors and the Sigil legislature are not insane) make up the vast lower class. Since the Mercy Killers go out of their way to make sure those sentenced to anything other than life or death have their paperwork lost, these lower classes effectively have no rights and unless they are badass enough to work their way into a gang they usually end up as more or less slaves. The gang boss middle classes are allowed by the Mercy Killers to ignore things like lockdowns or lights out, but the lower classes are not. The upshot of this is that you can totally have a prison campaign with enough of the usual prison restrictions turned off for the party, who are all middle/upper class in the prison society. In order to keep this campaign viable at all levels, the Mercy Killers should probably have portals straight to Carceri built into their prison, and they struggle with the Demodands in an effort to take over the greatest prison in the multiverse and run it the way they want to (i.e. in such a way as to profit themselves, mostly). This is potentially good fodder for anti-hero "we're jerks but at least we're not demodands" campaign, or else just a straight-up "we're jerks and possibly worse than demodands" campaign. You could also run an evil cops campaign in the streets as the Mercy Killers look for more criminals (or "criminals") to feed their hungry prison, and not necessarily criminals from Sigil.

The Sign of One are philosophically identical to the Fated, but with a more aristocratic/mystical bent. They are less powerful because they do not control finances, but have more legislative say because they're less picky about who's allowed to join. They are a bourgeoisie faction in its purest form and do not even administrate anything. They have wealth and political sway because they have wealth and political sway. As such, a Signer can go on adventures with anyone who promises not to offend their ego too gravely, which is not too steep a demand.

The Society of Sensation makes a lot of claims about being beyond blowjobs and cakes. But really, they're in it for the blowjobs and cakes. They are the city's entertainment department and otherwise are not terribly interesting even though their philosophy leads them to having a lot of members and therefore a significant presence in the parliament, even though all that really means is that shrooms and harlots aren't getting outlawed any time soon. On other issues, Sensates tend to be divided.

Non-political factions:

Seekers of the Source are not a political faction because they have no legislative goals for Sigil or anywhere else. They are basically the Athar's philosophy but stripped of any political implications and therefore, while they still have an awesome Foundry, they aren't a proper faction. A lot of Seekers are also Athar because of the overlap in philosophies and because introducing yourself as a Seeker is much less likely to get you attacked by Clerics.

The Dustmen are like the Seekers, a religious non-faction that are kind of interesting and also sort of serve the same function for the Doomguard as the Seekers do for the Athar, except in this case Doomguard will call themselves Dustmen to avoid trouble even when in Sigil because the Doomguard are illegal everywhere. The Dustmen oversee the city's funerary services as a private enterprise and they are a really fashionable choice for those who are not extra-religious, simply because their funerals are considered to be pretty cool looking.

The Transcendant Order, like basically any non-Athar faction with any sort of religious opinion, has no particular legislative goals. Which is too bad, because a religious organization that is actually aggressive enough to push their religion politically would be cool, but the Transcendant Order is most definitely not that. So they're just another religion, one that's popular because of deepisms and having very low entrance requirements.

Illegal factions:

The Revolutionary League have got a damn good point: Sigil's laws are incoherent and in many cases not actually enforced, and it's time for a regime change. They are not called Anarchists, because that is not what they are (most flavors of anarchy are already adequately represented by the Athar, the Free League, the Bleak Cabal, the Doomguard, and the Xoasitects). They are Revolutionaries. The Revolutionaries are a Sigil-only faction because overthrowing the government of Sigil specifically is their objective. They are not represented in the parliament, but they are pretty numerous and the Lady of Pain (as well as other factions) are beginning to worry that they might be able to actually successfully overthrow the government. The Revolutionary League attempted to stage a coup back when the city had 3 more factions than it currently does (this was after the civil war that cut it down from 34, and I have lost track of how many of these factions legally exist, since the Revolutionaries do not especially care about the Dustmen or Doomguard or other factions not actually part of the government at all), and they did enough damage that 3 factions disbanded entirely from having lost members, territory, and power to the Revolutionaries. Despite these early successes, the revolution was put down, consolidating power into a smaller number of hands and thus making everything worse.

The Doomguard are outlawed and have no official voice in the city legislature, but no one but the Harmonium really wants to deal with them, so they end up controlling large chunks of the city anyway. Since the Doomguard actively oppose any kind of government, the Lady of Pain is obviously wary of them, but a lot of factions have their weapons supplied by the Doomguard, so trying to force them to destroy the Doomguard is a risky move. Nevertheless it's something that could happen at any moment. The Doomguard are best thought of as an organization started by the Joker, who then died. Thus, while they were founded in Sigil, they have a presence on practically every plane, and none of these branches are actually connected to each other except by name, basic philosophy, and a general red-and-black-with-skulls aesthetic. The Doomguard are obviously better-suited to antagonists, but their philosophy makes a Doomguard campaign really easy to conceive of: Hey, let's loot this place, burn it down, then take the spoils to the Doomguard neighborhoods in Sigil and party before walking through a different door and doing it again tomorrow!

The Xaositects are an insane cult and very illegal because they periodically murder people for no reason at all. They're like a zombie plague but with insanity, in that they are all non-functional madmen who survive by stealing from others and continue to exist only because whatever magic insanity-inducing affliction has spread among them prevents them from fighting one another. So they're kind of like the Doomguard but with more emphasis on being crazy and less on being evil.

-----

Okay. Hopefully that is a coherent and functional Sigil (as a setting, I mean, as a government it's intentionally non-fuctional).

[wotmaniac]

Here's the dark on Planescape (fuck, did I really just do that ) -- the whole setting is based in absurdities. Every single thing about it is supposed to be absurd. It's part of the point, and it's done on purpose.

Fuck, just look at the geography -- I'll start from the top:
- Sigil: a city built inside of a torus (gravity?), that magically floats above an area that is a magic void (wait, what?). Oh, and it sits atop an infinitely-tall spire (I don't even)
- Outlands: in addition to it's infinitely-tall spire that you can see the top of, the plane itself is supposed to be infinite .... but it has a center, and an edge,
- Outer Planes: both the upper and lower planes each have a finite river that somehow connects infinite planes ...
And that's just the geography.

Then you have all these bat-shit-crazy factions, who happen to be trying to actually wrest control of a city from a supremely omnipotent being (talk about an exercise in futility), an eternal war that has no other point than to determine which side is more evil, and "neutrality" is a game of duck-duck-goose revolving around who gets helped and who gets fucked.
DAFUQ?!

And what is this purpose? Well, it's twofold:
1) part of the point of the setting (one of the themes, if you will), is for the PCs to try to figure out a way to make sense of something amidst this cesspool of absurdity.
2) this 2nd one is critical to the theme, tone, and mood of the entire setting -- it's about setting the bar for what is acceptable in a Planescape campaign. If you have a setting like Hyboria, then there is necessarily an expectation of how the world works, and thus how the PCs are supposed to interact with that world -- i.e., this is a place of gritty realism where the players are expected to play earthy badasses. With all the absurdity of Planescape, not only does the game tell you that there are no limits, the tone and mood of the setting actually condition the players to go as far out of the box as they can.

Oh, and about those factions. Yup, they are indeed all a bunch of incoherent assholes -- and good for them. It's called parody, and I find the factions to be a clever implementation of such (well, at least as far as D&D goes). It's a blatant commentary on our attitudes towards beliefs that differ from ours. The talking-heads and grandstanders of various belief systems are supposed to look like incoherent assholes -- unless of course you happen to subscribe to one of those beliefs, in which case everybody else are incoherent assholes. Fuck, that very dynamic (the subject of the parody, that is) is demonstrated ubiquitously right here on this very site -- just take a gander at the MPSIMS section.

And finally, let me say a thing or 2 about the LoP.
Why all the jaded cynicism? If you go looking for "DM penis extension", then that's what you're gonna find. However, perhaps you should look at it from a different angle: Without the LoP (or something like her), you'd actually have players who wanted to "conquer Sigil" -- which would be completely missing the point. Sigil is supposed to be nothing more than a venue for plot-point distribution -- get your plot points and get the fuck out there in the planes! The LoP isn't there to de-protagonize the PCs, she's there to keep the players' focus on what's important, the "big picture" if you will. I mean, who the fuckity-fuck cares who takes care of street repairs or waste management? If that's actually important to you, then Planescape is definitely not for you. If you are gonna get bogged down over all the reasons why this isn't SimCity:The RPG, then you need a goddamned reality check -- seriously, fuck off.
If you need a flavor reason to make her less offensive to you, then how about this: Sigil is actually the linchpin (literally) of the quantum fabric of the multiverse, and the LoP is its caretaker/protector -- that's some serious shit that is not to be fucked with. The entire rest of the setting is literally wide the fuck open to you -- if that's not enough for you, then you need a fucking therapist.

[Chamomile]

Having an incoherent setting is stupid and saying that you succeeded because failure was your goal all along is equally stupid.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

[Whipstitch]

Why all the jaded cynicism?

There's a deep irony at play here, given that part of the issue I have with Planescape is that the writers confuse humor with shitting lazy moral relativism all over everything, which is in itself a rather super cynical thing to do.