#planescape torment meme | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

talenlee · 6 months

Text

The Worst People Unalive

For years now I’ve been holding back on penning this description of one of the worst places in Cobrin’Seil, and only because it’s the worst in a different way to you’d expect. Oh it’s a tightly controlled city with a gaggle of liches trading favours at the top making the whole place a necromantically controlled undead polity, but the real problem the city has is its housing rates and fad technology bubbles.

Welcome to Uxaion.

The player’s basics

Here’s your high-level pitch. Uxaion is a necromantic cyberpunk city where it’s always night and people and gangs squabble in the underclass dealing with economics of living in a rich place where the richest people are able to literally siphon off your life if they can make you desperate enough to give it. It’s a city haunted by capitalism, where even if only one in four of the Startup Necromancer businesses that are Changing The World are run by an Evil Necromancer, that’s still a shitload more Evil Necromancers per head. It’s an adventure city where it’s always grimy and you have pacts with ghosts and the undead and people flip open skulls they use for communication with The Boss.

It’s one of a number of states in Cobrin’Seil that have the appleation of necrostate. One of them, The Osteon, has already shown up in a conversation about The Szudetken, where there, the undead are both sanitised and used as a form of mass industrialisation. The Osteon is very Victorian. Uxaion (“Out of Time”, they claim) is much more Big Tech, Big Noise, Big Indulgence. The city is decorated in vibrant paints and bright colours and ugly architecture because they can always spend to maintain things and the living feed the dead with their time and effort. Being a necrostate is obviously politically fraught, because most other places are either jealous of you (oh wow, no continuity of government problems and no fear of death if I, a king, live forever), or deeply worried by what you represent (wow, we couldn’t get rid of one of our shitty kings?). This gives the city a tenuous position politically, almost no form of extradition or legal imposition of other countries, but also not isolation.

Some example characters that might come from Uxaion:

A boneyarder, someone who works for or around the criminal gangs that populate the underclass of Uxaion. You may have necrosymbiotes or a soul pact, or a contract with a necromancer for your resuscitation

A worker in the city who has to bounce between the Response-Incident Patrollers, Private Security Firms and gangs in order to navigate their day. They may have a day job that involves running rituals for hours at a time to maintain their work spot until something goes wrong one day.

One of the experiments of the necrotic state! Who’s to say you haven’t been brought back for a bad reason and now you’re putting together your new life, while trying to find a way out of the contractual ownership your resurrector thinks they have over you?

A necromantic prodigy, trained in the city to wield the magic of death, full of idealistic ways your gift can be used while being surrounded by people who are just using it for The Worst Possible Reasons.

Important inspirations for Uxaion are Planescape Torment, Hard Wired Island, Cyberpunk 2077 (just the memes), The Locked Tomb, silicon valley excess, fads like ‘AI’ and blockchain and uber app style services, the housing crisis, and the need in the real world for people to be toppled and have their entire worlds burned. In minecraft, there are people who need to burn.

Uxaion

Island Urbanised Independent Micronation, The Spectral City

Cultures

Uxaion is one city, on a set of islands, spread across a variety of districts. Most people who live there live in the poorer areas, known as ‘Minimal Needs’ Housing, which is to say, just a bit better than a closet in which people store skeletons. The greatest burden of the people in Uxaion is the needs for housing, which, thanks to the island’s hunger for both space to do experiments in and people to do experiments on, puts a lot of living in the city under pressure. As large cities, almost all cultures are extremely common, but particularly of note, in Uxaion, undead characters like Revenants and Necropolitans are much more common.

While Goblins show up everywhere, they are much less common in Uxaion than you’d expect, and often are part of very small family units of only 2-3 Goblins at at time. Abilen traders also regularly visit, but very rarely live in Uxaion, due to its constant night and inclement weather.

Common: Half-Elves, Half-Orcs, Halflings, Humans Uncommon: Eladrin, Elves, Kobolds, Orcs, Tieflings, Shadar-Kai Rare: Abilen, Dio Baragh, Drow, Goblins

Reputation

Opinions on Uxaion are mixed. They’re absolutely known for their necromancy, and if you know only one thing about the place, it’s that it’s a necrostate. The chain of islands have one large linked city spread across them, with some smaller islands regarded as holding areas or holding housing estates meant for the richest members of the society. You may even know about the way the city has positioned itself, and manipulated the sky, so that it is always night there, somehow.

Uxaion may mean to you, a place of immense magical research, with a great university system and a willingness to engage in complex magic that has been considered ‘too dangerous’ in the past. They’ve done amazing things in the field of medical research, saving and restoring lives, communicating with ghosts, and even undoing magical fallout from terrible curse. You might know Uxaion as a place that normal people can go, and can sign up for amazing projects that may help them cheat death or become fabulously wealthy, in exchange for life force or unique practices.

Uxaion may also mean to you its profile of tall spired towers, full of magical research, and a population of indulgent, reckless undead leaders who are constantly searching for novelties. They’re a place that invents new games and new ways to have fun and tries reckless new things, because they know they’re dead and they know they can be restored.

If you’re from Uxaion you probably know those things are overblown. Yeah, there are the reseachers. Yeah, the rulers of the city, the Necropolitans, are undead. Yeah, there’s a lot of use of ghost energy to power the trains and the lights, and yeah, the undead are common sights across the city. But who isn’t and what isn’t? It’s a city, like a lot of others, built across the water, and full of people who are, generally, just trying to live their lives.

locals

If you live in Uxaion, you are complaining about the rent. You may also be complaining about the latest fad the necromancers are working on because that’s a new thing you’re going to have to hear about that’s going to change everything before they eventually go back to doing the basic three necromancer things of bones, zombies, and ghosts, but much more annoyingly. You are almost certainly overworked and underpaid, and a lot of the things and spaces you would rely on to give you community are limited or under stress. The most common place people gather is a bar, because almost all the park space in the city is private, and almost all the privatised park space has been replaced with necromantic experiment spaces.

You might be on a contract with a necromancer, to give a little of your life force regularly. You may have a postmortem contract lined up, meaning that when you die, you can work off a debt as a resurrected undead. Some of these contracts even split you into a ghost and a zombie, so your two halves can work at the type of labour they can do in the name of working off a debt. Most of these debts are so brutal and set up so predatorially, you may just be working now to pay off the interest. What’s more, you might not have earned the debt directly, and instead inherited it, or had it bequeathed to you by someone gaming a system of legal debt and re-dying.

You might be in a gang. You might have to deal with the city’s most common type of guard, the Response-Incident Patrollers who believe themselves entitled to taking samples of your blood when they inspect you, or the ones who demand you swallow a tooth as a security measure while talking to you. You may live somewhere the RIP don’t operate and have to deal with one of the major research guild’s street guards. You may have a weapon you keep at home to defend yourself because you know you don’t live somewhere nice enough for the two different flavours of watch to protect you. You probably know something that could be valuable to someone, if you just gave up on trying to play by the rules, and be nice.

Travellers

Lots of people have reason to travel to Uxaion and also to leave Uxaion. Uxaion is one of the most active cities per capita of Adventurers, because a lot of the businesses that work there employ Adventurers’ Guild operators to do work of various types. It’s the step in respectability above gang member, but also crucially, still lets those Adventurers interface with gangs.

Travel to and from Uxaion is by boat, which means that you can be stuck on the islands for a time, based on a transport contract or a holdup in the company managing your ferry. This can make travel to the city relatively easy, but out of it hard. This is not seen as a bug by the city’s administration and more of a feature in case of people trying to leave while still having debts or contracts.

Rivalries

Officially, Uxaion has no ill will with, and no problem with, the Eresh Protectorate. In fact, they’ve floated the idea of applying to become a member of the Eresh Protectorate, and have even at times, documented the paperwork necessary to apply. What they’ve heard in response, before the paperwork was delivered, was that the Eresh Protectorate has never had to refuse an application before, so they better not apply and make themselves the first.

This is because if you’re going to join the Eresh Protectorate, part of what makes it easy is the diverse power base of the Protectorate. Across all its cities, there are basically six major power blocks.

The Eresh Crown, which is extremely pragmatic and largely amoral in terms of expanding its access to power. They do not care about Uxaion and would view its application acceptably if they could arrange any coalition of other power bases to support it.

The Tzarumites, who are extremely legal and law driven, and who have a firm policy against necrostates. This is partly ideologically driven (undead icky), but it’s also heavily entwined with the idea that any law written has to be considered precedent. Because of this Tzarumites are extremely reluctant to open any new space in the law code that can’t be done with regulation and control already in place. Any laws passed for operating with necrostate actors would be absolutely not fit for purpose and would not be evident as being so for centuries. Simply put: It’s too hard to make laws for undead state actors.

The Raguzans, who are libertine and free roaming find the idea of contracts that last beyond death, that people couldn’t escape, as absolutely horrifying. If such individuals fled Uxaion and the Raguzans were asked to recover them, it would be, in their opinion, asking them to be slavetakers. In these negotiations, the Ragauzan Praetor promised that if Uxaion became a member of the Eresh protectorate, their first action would be declare war against it, and win.

The Lethenites, who are scholarly and extremely focused on magical containment find the Uxaion ideology of revolutionary magical technology irresponsible. Especially, they find the way that Uxaion treats undeath as an all-purpose solution to all problems as untrustworthy. They see the entire city as an ongoing project in playing with Demon Cores, and refuse to sanction it.

The Chardunists, who are spies and investigators who focus on protecting psychics across the Protectorate. They ostensibly have not voted against Uxaion but have communicated that if Uxaion joined the Protectorate, they would start assassinating people and not stop until they weren’t concerned about the association any more. Basically, Chardunists favour direct action over votes.

The Church of Olifar, a Catholic-like organisation that’s kind of Pauline Christian in their idea that ‘we would really rather you focus on this’ as a matter of ongoing holiness. Not in the ‘women suck’ way. The Church of Olifar holds that undeath is a moral failing, and while lots of people disagree, they’re a hard no on accepting a necrostate.

So with two potential declarations of war on the books, Uxaion decided not to apply for the Eresh Protectorate. They still consider them a great trading partner and have built ports for Halfling trade ships, but there’s no direct linke Uxaion and the King’s Highway.

trade

The most common thing for Uxaion to export is magical technology. While some of this is pretty obvious, things like cursed weapons, necromantic devices and traps, it’s a much more profitable trade over time to work with businesses in terms of long-term services. Uxaion, bar none, have the absolute best technology in the world for corpse preservation, so Uxaion wizards are hired by large companies and guilds for things like protecting records of the dead or reconstructing data from historical battlefields, while also being used for making meat more widely transportable while fresh.

Uxaion’s systems have even given rise to some really useful services that other countries export and trade for. Resurrecting dead languages through direct consultation with their speakers, healing of extremely challenging injuries through recreation of bone and lost flesh, safe and reliable building materials that can be trusted to not harm an ecology (through bone), Uxaion are doing things that people want to pay for. But also, as a state, most countries don’t directly deal with Uxaion, and prefer to deal with middleperson like the Halfling Trade Houses. Uxaion does trade directly with Seibelmarsh but they have no current access to the Osteon.

They do trade with Visente, with one of the most common things traded between them being day labourers – it’s not uncommon for people from Visente to boat over to Uxaion for a six or nine month contract doing some kind of service job, before heading back to Visente.

What Uxaion needs the most of is raw materials, which given their endless appetite for novelty and constant exploration of stupid ideas kind of makes them a perfect consumer of almost everything. Almost all kinds of farm good gets imported to the island and purchased, and if you want to eat anything that wasn’t made by a necromancer, you’re going to be eating stuff that was imported recently.

And thus Uxaion. It’s a place of contradictions; high tech, no life. It’s important to me to give a place like this room to be both a stable place with legitimate reasons for existing and also a garbage place that any player character would want to avoid, or escape.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Cobrin'Seil #Dungeons &amp; Dragons #Games

1 note · View note

oneinathousand · 3 years

Text

Weird/Disturbing cult games, inspired by @vinolentcogent rpg maker post, so look at it here before you tell me I forgot a bunch of RPG Maker games.

#retro gaming #obscure games #horror #rpg maker #harvester game #planescape torment #i have no mouth and i must scream #pathologic #spongebob meme #spongebob squarepants

194 notes · View notes

adhdedrn · 3 years

Text

A family doesn’t have to be a mum, a dad, and kids.

Sometimes a family can be:

An immortal amnesiac trying to find out who he is and how to die;

A wise-cracking floating skull that collects insults;

A githzerai warrior-mage that survived a genocide and who’s trying to figure if he wants to help or kill the amnesiac immortal;

A Scots tiefling thief with a thing for older men and flash burns;

An asexual succubus whose entire existence is one extended existential crisis;

A fire mage who thinks that being permanently set on fire was the greatest thing that ever happened to him;

A sentient cube that is learning about this thing called Individuality;

A set of animated armour kept alive through uncompromising zealotry;

And the countless ghosts of the unjustly slain stalking the immortal amnesiac to demand vengeance.

#Planescape: Torment #Memes #The Nameless One #Morte #Dak'kon #Annah-of-the-Shadows #Fall-From-Grace #Ignus #Nordom #Vhailor

69 notes · View notes

mr-dongleopolis · 5 years

Photo

#disco elysium #meme #Fanart #ms paint #played expected got #slavoj zizek #oliver sacks #planescape torment #lisa the painful #video games

287 notes · View notes

vvanini · 3 years

Note

whats your favorite obscure hc about each of the losers?

Fucking perfect thank you

1- Mike he reads books or articles like “how to understand woman”, “why women like jerks”, not because he wants to woo woman or is a nice guy or anything but just because he thinks it’s interesting

I don’t think he’d date anyone

Gives great dating advice tho

Reads manga Likes Junji Ito

“The manga/book was better” kind of guy

I don’t know why but I feel like he’d be this ENTP-ish dude who likes to gather information about a lot of useless things and likes to debate He likes film and game theories Watches MatPat for sure

Also he likes The Walking Dead and… zombies in general

Also I’m sorry but he likes Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson

He likes grindhouse movies and appreciates the gory details but is chill about it Likes cinematography in general

Watches video essays about movies

2- Richie

Unlike Mike, Richie isn’t chill about gory details and whenever someone gags while watching a movie he goes “You think that’s disgusting??? Lmaoooo that’s nothing.”

He’d be the type of guy who brags about being immune to disturbing shit

Google searches include “top ten disturbing movies of all time” “scariest movies ever” “movies worse than a serbian film”

Still likes pink guy and thinks Joji is a genius

Unironically loves the song “I Love Sex” by Pink Guy and listens to it at least once everyday

Uses Discord a lot

Always starts studying on the last day

I think he’d like history

Not like Mike tho, he just likes textbook history and world wars etc

Plays Hearts of Iron and League of Legends

Also :) he likes to code

he is a Linux >>>>>>>>>> Windows kinda guy

Likes breaking bad

And Rick and Morty

Understands politics really well

His music taste is… anime opening songs

Evangelion especially

Likes science fiction books

Pretends to be a flat-earther/conservative/anti-vax for the meme

3- Ben

LIKES BACKSTREET BOYS

and boy bands in general

he is old school and still carries an mp3 around

Doesn’t use spotify, he illegally downloads songs like a champ :D

Likes story rich games

Especially RPG’s. He really likes Planescape Torment and Baldur’s Gate

Kinda lame about women, like he hears Jordan Peterson say something like “the eternal image of the divine feminine” or some shit like that and he goes “wow poetic. agreed”

Doesn’t read “How to woo women” books like Mike but thinks about it a lot that’s for sure

Likes Audrey Hepburn

And Steinbeck

Saves different versions of the same song to his mp3. “The Less I Know The Better but you’re crying in a bathroom” “The Less I Know The Better Slowed & Reverb Listen With Headphones” “The Less I Know The Better Nightcore”

Shares playlists with Eddie

ALWAYS. ALWAYS waits for the person who’s tying their shoes

He notices if someone is walking behind the group alone and walks back to accompany them

If no one laughs at your joke, he does

Bleached his hair once and regretted it immediately Writes poetry in his free time and makes Stan proofread it

Into psychology

Hands always in pockets

Probably owned lots of lego sets as a kid

People go to him for dating advice because he is seen as this “romantic guy”, I mean he is but he gives terrible dating advice

4-Stan

He likes geography

Literally knows all the flags in the world and all the capitals

Blindfold him and give him a country name, he can show you exactly where it is on the map

Also he plays those google earth games where you get a random location and try to find out which country you’re in/ or try to find the nearest airport

Also I feel like he’d like planes a lot

Idk he just likes things that fly lol. Birds, planes etc.

Likes to read classics

LOVES H. P. Lovecraft

carries little poetry books with him everywhere and reads them he’s so cute

Dark academia is his aesthetic

Can play the piano

Likes to read Ben’s poetry :D

Dark humor

His ringtone is Le Festin :)

Has an instagram account but never posts, just watches people’s stories

Very photogenic tho.

He’s a man of culture. He likes visiting aquariums and museums

Hates zoos tho, thinks it’s evil to cage animals

Also I don’t know how to explain it but… He just likes to decorate his place? Like to the clubhouse he’ll bring stuff he likes and just quietly claims a corner as his own and make it as comfortable as he can

Has...beautiful hands

you know how some people cut the cothing labels because it irritates the back of their neck? Stan does that with everything he buys

5- Eddie

Likes Backstreet Boys because of Ben

Replies to texts immediately. Communication and social interaction gives him serotonin

I have no idea why but I feel like he’d have an obsession with Tekken and his favourite character is Ling Xiayou

Big fan of classic playstation games. Loves Spyro, Crash Bandicoot and Ratchet and Clank

He likes wearing long sleeves under t shirts

Listens to emo music, stares out the window and imagines scenarios matching the song he’s listening to

He considers MCR to be emo btw. Loves G note memes

Likes astrology

Can’t watch horror movies, and gets teased by Richie about it

However he likes media that is presented as funky/funny/happy but is actually depressing/disturbing

He likes courtroom dramas

Wears sunglasses indoors for no reason

Probably likes fallout and metro games

Has a collection of finger skateboards

#weirdcore #oddcore #nostalgia #grunge

buys and wears random college sweatshirts

Hates and loves study groups, hates it in the sense that he can’t focus on anything and just wants to hang out and talk, loves it in the sense that he CAN hang out with his friends and talk

Romanticizes everything

6- Bill

Has lots of taurus energy and is sleepy all the time

Has major Leonardo DiCaprio in The Basketball Diaries vibes

Dresses effortlessly

And likes basketball lol.

He just has… boy energy. If that makes sense. Boy next door

Likes to draw his friends

posts his drawings on Instagram

Has lots of OC’s but doesn’t know they’re called OC’s, just refers to them as “this character I created”

He likes being praised a lot ngl

His taste in memes is very similar to Richie’s

You know how they put a random word on top of a random image and it doesn’t make sense at all. He laughs at things like that. Like Richie sends him something like this:

ME WHEN I WHEN

[image of monkey]

BOTTOM TEXT

and he thinks it’s funny and loses his shit im sorry

Like someone sends a picture of Keanu Reeves to the groupchat and texts “g” and he thinks it’s funny???? He sees a picture of a cow in the backrooms and starts choking

He memorized every line in Boneless Pizza and can quote it wihtout stuttering. Like he would be sitting alone talking to himself saying shit like “ya pizza. Watchu want. 2 liter machine broke we got one liter tho. fuck you mean B.”

Never answers calls? Doesn’t like talking on the phone. He just has “Don’t fucking call me when you can text!!” energy

phone is always on silent mode

doesn’t do anything but attracts people anyway

7- Bev

Likes musicals

Theatre kid

Chews gum a lot

And swallows them :(

Likes cottagecore

Buys notebooks with cute covers but can never fill them so she just gives them to bill who turns them into sketchbooks

I think she’d give advice or reaussure people in a way that sounds kinda rude but isn’t really? Like she tells it like it is. Blunt

Likes Avatar The Last Airbender

Sense of humor is:

[Picutre of the fox from Zootopia]

why is he hot help 😭😭😭

wears baggy clothing + long skirts

#headcanon #richie tozier #eddie kaspbrak #mike hanlon #beverly marsh #bill denbrough #ben hanscom #stan uris #stanley uris #hcs #ask

114 notes · View notes

imsobadatnicknames2 · 3 years

Text

The level of cognitive dissonance required to make this meme and include a character from Planescape: Torment on the side of Good RPGs That I Like is astounding. Gamers truly are something else.

Like if you associate "plot that says violence is bad" more with undertale than with Planescape: Torment you didn't get Planescape: Torment

#fnv #planescape: torment

17 notes · View notes

everygame · 3 years

Text

Wasteland Remastered (PC)

Developed/Published by: inXile Entertainment Released: 25/02/2020 Completed: 09/05/2021 Completion: Finished it! Trophies / Achievements: n/a

So many weeks ago I saw this meme and I thought “oh, that’s good, that is” and I got a big hunger to play me some Fallout: New Vegas, even though I played it till I was sick to death of it in 2017. I guess it’s been a few years. Instead of doing that, I did the sensible thing and played through Wasteland Remastered, because why not finally try out the daddy of them all as the alternative would be playing Fallout 4, or Fallout 76, and I’ve heard they’re shite.

Wasteland Remastered is pretty interesting, because it’s my first time really engaging with the recent trend of remastering things but really not doing that much to them at all, which is more popular in the old RPG space with the likes of your Baldur’s Gates and that (I’d already played through Planescape Torment, so I didn’t need to revisit the enhanced edition, for example.) And when it comes to Wasteland, you’re playing something that is pretty insanely old and crusty. Ultima IV crusty.

All they’ve done here is basically throw up a sort of vaguely “board game” inspired 3D map and feed the interface through that--I’m 100% sure that the original game is just running in the background (it’s a shame you can’t flick between graphical styles like with R-Type Dimensions, or something). It doesn’t totally work, but the original game looked like shit (completely un-evocative of its setting) so it’s a big improvement.

The issue is that the game itself is, as I said, Ultima IV crusty, so it’s extremely obscure, full of weird issues, unwinnable situations and half-designed concepts that were clearly never playtested by anyone. But, much like Ultima IV, it’s interesting, it gets your imagination going to fill in the blanks, and if you are willing to cross reference a few walkthroughs… it’s actually fun? And unlike the Ultima series, which suffers the critique “sure these games were fun at the time, but they haven’t influenced much” you can see the influence of Wasteland’s open-ended design all over the shop even if you don’t count Wasteland 2 and 3.

I didn’t even mind the crusty battle system because the battles were over so quickly. The main issue, of course, other than the crust, is that like a lot of these games the ending is sort of underwhelming. It doesn’t really build to anything and the final dungeon is using some keys. There’s no exciting confrontation… But in the remaster they do a Fallout-style “here’s the effect you had on the wasteland” thing that cheered me up, so it has that.

Will I ever play it again? I won’t, but I’m almost convinced to start playing Wasteland 2 already, which is something.

Final Thought: I liked this, and I think that online walkthroughs are a bit limiting in how they tell you how to play this, so I thought I’d give you some sweet alternative tips if you’re ever going to play this:

Don’t worry about all the weird skills. You can always pick up an NPC that has the required skill if required. But do get brawling, assault rifles, perception, swim/climb etc. Though skip the other weapon abilities.

The reason to do this is because you want to try and put more points into skills like picklock, because using skills is an almighty ballache even though they eventually work. You’re not a wean anymore, and sitting pushing the macro button until you eventually unlock a door is a huge pain, so even a tiny edge can help.

But yeah, learn how to use macros. You’ll be using them unless you plan on typing things like U-1-1-7 a LOT.

And do re-roll to get 17-18 intelligence (and keep rolling till all others are above 10, honestly) because you want energy weapons for everyone at 23 so you’re stuck pushing 3 levels of upgrades into intelligence at least, never mind if you want to unlock doctor (you do.)

Don’t fill your party to 7, because you can’t disband an NPC and pick another one without losing one forever. This will be annoying if you’ve got a full party when you get to PLACE and you want to rescue CHARACTER. Plus you obviously want to get AWESOME CHARACTER at the end because he’s wearing cool sunglasses!

Also in spoiler territory, the hidden safe in the hideout is bugged so you actually will have to camp next to it till you see it (have an NPC with clip pistol ability in your party.) It’s maybe not worth it.

Grenades are fine early game but just sell/ignore AT weapons unless you’re going to use them to blow up doors, because the reloading factor is crap compared to burning clips (because they only ever hit one enemy. Unless you want to try and kill the scorpiontron in Las Vegas, which you 100% don’t have to bother with.)

While you can easily get yourself into an unwinnable position by, like, discarding a key or something, it’s really hard to completely fuck up in a battle as the baddies are sporting and step back if you’re all knocked out, so feel free to try and tank occasionally. Just be aware there’s no healing, only camping, so be prepared to do a lot of waiting in difficult dungeons.

Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi.

#video games #gaming #inxile entertainment #wasteland #wasteland: remastered #review #txt #text #2020

1 note · View note

warsofasoiaf · 4 years

Note

Please do a small essay for Planescape Torment! Love to read your blog!

A game as transcendentally excellent as Planescape: Torment cannot be satisfied with a small essay. This is heavy spoilers so readers beware, so I’ll write something on the Nameless One and the journey he undertakes.

Planescape: Torment is widely considered one of the best written RPG’s in the history of computer games. At a first glance, it’s hard to get into. The setting is incredibly dense and strange, which can be incredibly discouraging to new players who find it difficult to connect to a game that’s so far removed from a traditional fantasy. Similarly, combat in the game can be frightfully tedious, even a slog at times to get to the next part of the game. You can’t die permanently save in a few specific circumstances which helps remove the threat, but you usually end up either back in the Mortuary or in some tucked away corner of a map, so you have to march your way back, which takes up time just like reloading a saved game would. The mandatory combat exists partially as a limitation of the setting and of the engine, partially of game design because otherwise it would be a long chain of text boxes and exploring down decision trees to get to your objective. But for those who are willing to put up with it, the journey is deep and thoughtful. For all the weirdness that Planescape offers, the adventure that you go through is actually quite familiar. It’s a moody, introspective journey about regret, about the impact you have on others, about belief, about atonement, and about meaning.

The Nameless One waking up on a mortuary slab is an iconic opening, because it changes the blank slate of character creation on its head. Unlike traditional Infinity Engine D&D games, you do not pick a class, race, even a portrait. You’re always some zombie-looking dude with sick dreadlocks and a bunch of tattoos, which end up being a written record of helpful hints. Certainly, this is a bizarre way of delivering exposition and quest direction, but let’s be honest RPG’s often have NPC’s whose job it is to further your game progress and enrich its world. Making them tattoos is unusual but it still performs the same function. Similarly, your first companion is a friendly, floating, wisecracking skull. That seems weird of course, but often the first companion you get in an RPG is a friendly sort to help you get your feet wet during the game, as well as provide exposition. Imoen from Baldur’s Gate was perky and bubbly, but both Morte and Imoen provide comic relief to help keep things light in the initial stages even though you as the character have gone through some rough stuff, and Morte says that he’s a mimir, which is a literal repository of knowledge and thus a natural source for an exposition dump according to the rules of the setting. The first couple of puzzles in this dungeon are mostly finding items, fulfilling requests from NPC’s, and exploring the map, which are standard fare for the Infinity Engine games. The window dressing is strange, but the functions carried out are still familiar, helping to ease the player into the strangeness to come. But even at character creation, there’s hints to come that you aren’t the traditional blank slate character. The Wisdom stat suggests that remembering things will be important, and the tattoos clearly had to come from somewhere before the game starts, so it’s in the back of the mind while the players start to acclimate themselves to the mechanics of the game

As the journey continues though, and the exposition of who you are starts becoming more apparent. A ghost on the first floor of the Mortuary calls you “my love” and you can feel the strength of that, and that what you might say could be very dangerous so you must pick your next words with care, so very soon, the game gives you two critical pieces of information. What your character did before the game is going to be important, and you’re going to need to read and think about what you do in the text boxes just as much as you will in combat. This ghost is one of the most important characters in the game, but here you’re as confused as the Nameless One is, replicating the character’s confusion in the player. There’s a lot of information in Planescape: Torment, and the use of dialogue-heavy boxes encourages taking your time, slowly exploring and discovering things, remembering them, and piecing them together, and presenting them means replicating the Nameless One piecing everything together by forcing the player to do likewise. This was the right decision to make because exposition and discovery are the primary ways that the themes are explored, and so establishing a slow pace is a way for the game to let the player mull the things over in their mind (along with the ubiquitous ‘updated my journal’ line that the Nameless One says to make sure the player reads the darn thing). So, in a rare dramatic move, an amnesia plot is actually given the respect it deserves using the unique advantage of video games by allowing the player to be the one to make the discoveries rather than attempting to carefully script reveals in more passive media that often end up fumbling. Who is the Nameless One, why did he wake up in a Mortuary, and what the heck is going on in this game?

Of course, the answer to the second question is an easy answer but it evokes questions all its own. The Nameless One woke up there because he was dead and that’s where bodies go. This case of death though doesn’t seem to be very fatal. Indeed, when you die you get back up again. In D&D, where death is not as permanent as it is in real life, there are plenty of jokes and memes about the revolving door afterlife, but in Torment, this becomes another great mystery. What the heck is happening here? Clearly, this is powerful magic, but who is casting it, and how are they constantly able to get to you no matter where you seem to be? There’s another goal here, to get the player to think of death in combat not as a means to immediately reload the save game like you would in Baldur’s Gate (even if it’s an NPC that dies instead of the plot-critical main character, it’s usually better just to reload then cart yourself over to the temple than deal with picking up their inventory - at least until higher levels when you have a party member cleric or druid to cast the spell), but rather it’s a nuisance to have to get back to where you were, just as annoying than the cranium rats or other minor monsters you fight, so that you no longer fear it, which is an excellent way to channel players to not worry about it so that the punch can land later. Later, when a Sensate asks to kill you so she can experience the sensation of murdering someone with her bare hands while not actually killing anyone, it’s treating as a bizarre commercial transaction, not the seriousness that such an act would normally be.

Upon leaving the Mortuary, the Nameless One is prodded to find Pharod, but there’s no sense of urgency by placing a time limit on it, leaving you open to explore Sigil and find out about this world. It’s here where the setting can really start to be reinforced by letting the player explore it. Almost every character can provide an interesting piece of setting and worldbuilding that helps immerse players in the experience, and the themes start to get reinforced here. The importance of belief is a central theme in the setting, but the hints of it are seeded when Mourns-For-Trees asks you to believe in them and for you to get your companions to believe in them too, and it pays off when you get enough of your party members to believe in it by dispensing XP as a quest reward. Far before finding out that learning your name is a central part of the game, the Crier of Es-Annon worries about the loss of the name, and the Nameless One can help by getting the name recorded on a tombstone, freeing the Crier to pursue a new life. By being mindful of the central themes, the writers could seed the themes through the game early, to get the player to think about them before revealing how important they were all along.

The factions are one of the best ways that the worldbuilding of the setting reinforces the central aspects of the character and the quest and how that enriches it. The factions are great on their own, because they explicitly deal with the meaning of life and existence which are important philosophical concepts, and are difficult to reach in a setting of infinite possibility like Planescape. One of the central themes in the setting is called the “Center of All.” Since the planes are infinite, nothing can be proven to be the center, so the center is where you are right now. In a game with that as a setting, it’s no wonder that the quest is a deeply moody and introspective one. It would seem counter-intuitive, Planescape is literally infinite which means you can do whatever you want, but that makes the most sense when evaluated under the “Center of All,” the journey of the self is the journey of the planes and vice versa, and the factional understanding of existence is mirrored within as the player and the character have to rationalize existence as best they can. The arc words of “what can change the nature of a man” take on weight when evaluated under the Center of All. Since changing a man’s nature means changing the center of the planes, the question asks what is so powerful that it changes reality, and it’s these beliefs, underlining its importance.

The factions that you can join represents an element of the Nameless One’s past and/or his journey. The Sensates are the clearest example, since The Nameless One has been a Sensate before, and the unique circumstances of him constantly being reborn but forgetting means that he probably has one of the most experiences in the multiverse, combining an immortal lifespan with a mortal’s curiosity and subjective perspective. The Sensates are true empiricists, they believe that once someone experiences everything that they will achieve enlightenment, but despite all that the Nameless One experiences, the amnesia he has on death means he loses them, and so he never reaches it. The Believers of the Source believe that life is a trial and that it must be overcome to ascend, and indeed, the Nameless One is caught in a trial that he must constantly struggle toward completing, in a meta sense that’s the game itself. The Dustmen believe that death is false and purging yourself of passions is necessary to reach a nirvana-like state of True Death, and for the Nameless One death is indeed false and he seeks a way to end that state. The Independent League states that the factions are delusional and need to be overcome, and indeed, to complete the game you need to use at least two factions to get the tools you need to reach the endgoal. The Chaosmen are the hardest one to pin down, because alignment is determined by your actions and you can be lawful instead of chaotic, but the state of the Nameless One is a transgression against the natural laws that the Chaosmen struggle against.

As you adventure though, you start learning about how the Nameless One’s past incarnations effected the world, and often for ill. You learn that your past selves have been some of the worst people that the multiverse had the misfortune of experiencing. The Practical Incarnation is the most infamous of these, and he is a man utterly driven by self-serving utilitarianism. Other people are nothing to the Practical Incarnation except as tools, and he uses and discards them as if they were mere objects without thoughts or feelings, friends and enemies alike. When he found that Dak’kon possessed a zerth blade, he resolved to bring it under his control. The Practical Incarnation found Dak’kon broken and adrift, where a crisis of faith weakened the walls of the githzerai capital and sanctity Shra'kt'lor, as the walls were forged of belief and in Dak’kon moment of doubt the real walls crumbled. The Practical Incarnation took this broken man and devised an elaborate ruse to get Dak’kon to come to the conclusion that he wanted to so that he would be useful. A deeply personal moment of faith was taken and manipulated as if it were nothing more than puzzle pieces that needed to be put together. Another incarnation, the Paranoid Incarnation, awoke confused as angry ghost and shadows leaped out at him, leaving him incapable of trusting anyone. He learned the most obscure language in the world and then murdered its only other practitioner just so he would be the only one to know his thoughts. Another incarnation found a sick enlightenment in torture and suffering and taught a wizard this path to power, torturing him so that he might learn power, and after that incarnation was gone, that wizard became that same conception of power, revisiting the crimes of the Nameless One on other potential seekers of knowledge. In an excellent scene, you can see when you lured Deionarra, the ghost from the Mortuary, to her death, and in a brilliant moment of writing, you experience both sides of it. You experience Deionarra’s love for you, and you feel your hatred of her. Not only do you experience your own act of cruelty but you explicitly feel the pain of what you were betraying. In Planescape under the Center of All, this deeply personal act of betrayal has much meaning because of how much it meant to Deionarra as she is the Center of All. The infinite planes may experience an infinite such betrayals, but this one had meaning to her, and through her experiences, to you.

The symbol of Torment on the Nameless One’s arm acts as a metaphorical beacon for the broken to drift to him, and plenty of the broken are the way they are because the Nameless One broke them. The more crimes you learn, the more the discomfort grows. You did not do those things, the Nameless One awoke as a blank slate and you the player never did them, but they were done in the past and the hurts are still there. Will the player address them in this new incarnation? Will he feel bound by them and try to rectify them? Do you try to rectify them because it’s the right thing to do? Do you give up knowing that the next incarnation might do them again? Or do you take the lesson from them that this is what you have to do to escape, and thus continue betrayal after betrayal? As is common in an RPG, the chioce is yours. Unlike most RPG paths, the evil path is not considered the opposite of a binary choice, and the most evil you do is not stock Evil Overlord type stuff but rather deeply personal betrayals. You can betray Morte and shove in back into the Pillar of Skulls, you can sacrifice Annah and/or Fall-From-Grace to them for knowledge, you can sell your companions into slavery, you can give the Modron Cube to Coaxmetal for a powerful weapon of entropy while letting him roam free to destroy everything, you can lie to Deionarra one more time, leading her love to you along one final time to squeeze out just a little more usefulness out of her.

It’s also reinforced in the mechanics of the game. As mentioned before, the game treats death as an inconvenience, but not something to be undone. The Nameless One simply gets back up again. It’s an easy thing to do, and then you discover later through the game after you’ve already died the true and terrifying cost. Every time you die, someone in a Prime Material plane somewhere dies and you pay for your new life with theirs. The reveal of it hits hard if you’ve gone through the game dying without thinking. That Sensate who didn’t want to murder someone but wanted the experience, so they offered to kill you because they thought there were no consequences. There was for you and her both, she paid you to kill someone and you took those coins without thought, but there were true and dramatic consequences. There always are, just as you learn through the game that your past incarnations’ efforts to learn had consequences from Ignus’s mania to the Practical Incarnation’s betrayals, the player ignoring the deaths mattered, and will continue to matter. You had been killing people, snuffing out lives and leaving heartache for countless souls on the Prime Material. Those who died ended up becoming horrible shadows, condemned to a terrible fate, just so you could have a bit easier of a time at it all. You had infinite time to fix everything, someone else just paid the price.

Much later, you find out that even all of that paled in comparison to what you had done previously. You committed great crimes, and to avoid punishment you sought out Ravel Puzzlewell. Using her powerful magic, she separated you from your mortality, and thus the Nameless One’s First Incarnation was supposed to be freed of the cosmic consequences, but it didn’t turn out that way. Since you forget what you did, the goal of making up for the crimes ended up being impossible since the Nameless One could not even know what it was that he did. His pursuit of freedom left him instead chained, chained to an amnesiac body that slowly becomes more and more scarred as his travels literally turns him into a walking mass of scar tissue. Scars are often used in literature to signify a remnant of a past pain, and that the Nameless One is nothing but scars from head to toe shows that he is inexorably trapped by the past even if he can’t remember it. What he has gone through show him to be not a person so much as a collection of past regrets. This is reinforced through the ending, where the finale takes place in a fortress literally forged by the regrets of your past, and since you have had so many lives and so much regret, they become a literal manifestation of your final journey. The monster at the center is the Transcendent One, the monster of your own mortality attempting to stop you from reaching this place and ending its own existence.

Yet, the Nameless One isn’t doomed. Ravel’s magics are weakening to the point where he doesn’t forget anything, either in the momentary flashes of insight that come up or in that the player remembers everything that happens when the Nameless One dies instead of starting over again. Similarly, the Transcendent One is weakening to the point where he can’t leave the Fortress of Regrets and has been for a while, making the journey possible instead of having him snuff you out like a candle. And during this journey, the Nameless One can make up for the things he did. He can go through the Practical Incarnation’s fake Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon and reveal its deception to Dak’kon, allowing him to come to his own resolution. He can apologize to Deionarra for what he did and allow her grieving father access to her room at the Sensate’s to give him some peace. He can apologize to the linguist that the Paranoid Incarnation murdered and learn the same language, not out of paranoia, but compassion. You can visit that compassion to the Paranoid Incarnation, showing that you are not an enemy, giving empathy to his plight of living in a confusing world where everyone wanted to kill him, and let him absorb into you so he no longer has that terrible burden. And at the very end of the game, you can learn about the First Incarnation, and you can complete yourself by learning your name, an act that gives you a whopping 2 million experience points, far more than anything else in the game, if you kept the Bronze Sphere MacGuffin and allow the memories of it to become with you again.

When that happens, the Nameless One is truly complete and nothing more can stop him. The finale has great ways to resolve itself. The arc words “what can change the nature of a man” can be posed to your lost mortality. A static thing since it was ripped from you, it retorts that nothing can change the nature of a man, but the Nameless One’s journey can already show that such a thing cannot be true, because the planes were shaped by belief, the Center of All shows that the centrality of belief is paramount, and so belief is the thing that changes the nature of a world and of a man, and that both are the same thing. Even stronger, by knowing your own name you show that you are completely dominant over this monster of your own mortality. You can force it to merge with you, force you and it to stop existing, and even its neverending hatred of you cannot stop your will. The Nameless One can end the blight of their existence that continually saps the lives of others, and fix one of the greatest cosmic wrongs to ever stain the multiverse and a man both, the Center of All demonstrates that both are equally as important. And so even an eternal punishment in the Blood War is not as bad as what was, and the Nameless One moves forward, free of what came behind and capable of making his own path.

Why is the game considered one of the best written games of all time? Because I wrote that much about it and barely touched any of it. I didn’t even discuss the companions or the major characters like Ravel or Trias. There’s so much to say about Planescape: Torment because there is so much there.

If anyone is interested in essays on other parts or components of the game, let me know.

Thanks for the question, Messanger.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#planescape: torment #planescape #writing #the nameless one #video game reviews #character analysis

27 notes · View notes