![]() ![]() There’s a semi-faction we’re introduced to, the anti-Anarchist Daughters of Light, and most important of all are some new details on Undersigil, an undeveloped part of the city that plays a small role in Faction War. If you jump past this prelude, you’ll miss learning about the Garianis family, essentially a mafia-type group trying to run the Lower Ward, and never find out about Little Arcadia, the location where Celestials tend to hang out (plus a nice side-jab at our least favorite haunt, The Ubiquitous Wayfarer, “ that every tout tells a body are in taverns drinking with fiends aren’t as easy to come upon as the touts claim, in reality”). me, it can’t actually be skipped, because sprinkled into these sections are plenty of new, quite good tidbits on the city. ![]() But even for setting experts who’ve stuck with Planescape from the beginning, i.e. The first 32 pages of the book are devoted to recapping Sigil in a section titled “Peering into the Cage.” This includes brief rundowns of the city’s wards, as well as all 15 of its factions. Unlike the mega-adventures that came before it, Faction War is a weird book in how much of it isn’t actually devoted to the adventure itself, and my only complaints about the product are related to this. Conclusions give meaning to what comes before them, and while I wouldn’t recommend starting any Planescape campaign post- Faction War (it’s a situation players should have to arrive at in order to see how different things are), it is a hell of a way for things to go, and ends the setting on a bang rather than a whimper. Soap operas that go on forever are a lot less interesting than, say, The Sopranos. But having an adventure that mostly serves to blow things up is a good thing, and I’m a big fan of building endings into D&D. And to be frank, running a post- Faction War campaign is a lot more work for a DM, which I suspect is the other reason fans hated this module. ![]() However, the very existence of so many resources spent on Sigil meant that fan resistance to change was almost equally inevitable, even with every one of these books making a point of illustrating how this city was in fact amorphous and ever changing. This mismatched governmental system is far more interesting and entertaining than that of any other fantasy city I know of, and its contradictions are also its charm. The 15 groups of philosophers with clubs coexisting within Sigil were designed to be combustible, and that was much of what made the city fun. Reading/rereading through all of the Planescape books in such close succession, and with an understanding of where it’s all headed, has made it clear that something along the lines of Faction War had always been intended. However, the adventure is still a pretty wonderful way for the setting to end, not just because of how much it wrecks this wonderful playground we’ve been reading about for the past few years, but that it does so in such a simultaneously fun and logical way. But we never got the chance,” said Vallese. “We wrote Faction War with the intention to break things, explore the ramifications in a few other products for a while, then rebuild. As noted in our interview with Cook, Vallese, and Colin McComb, more was planned for the setting. For one thing, although it feels a lot like Faction War was intended as the end for the setting, this wasn’t the case at all. The general criticism that’s surrounded the release for the past two decades+ has been unfair for a couple of reasons. This would not change, and over the years it grew somewhat infamous for just how much it upended the structure of Sigil, the setting’s most important location. At the time of its release, Monte Cook and Ray Vallese’s Faction War was the most controversial work Planescape had ever published.
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