Tag Archives: avellone

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Usually if you choose the longest dialog option, that’s the best option.

— Chris Avellone

Quite some years ago now, I briefly interviewed Brian Fargo about Interplay’s 1988 adaptation of the William Gibson novel Neuromancer. He was plainly busy and a little distracted with more modern game-development matters — this was in the midst of the Kickstarter-funded Wasteland revivals — but he was helpful and friendly enough during the half-hour or so that I spoke to him. Toward the end of our conversation, he mentioned that he had a box full of papers from his Interplay days gathering dust in a filing cabinet in his home office. Upon hearing this, I leapt immediately to make a pitch for my archivist friends at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. And lo and behold, a Brian Fargo collection showed up at the Strong within a year or so. I don’t know whether these two events are related, but I like to think that they are.

Regardless, the next time I made it up to the Strong, I naturally made it a point to go through the collection. And it was there, amidst a mishmash of other documents spanning the nearly twenty years that Fargo spent running Interplay, that I first stumbled upon the original pitch document for Planescape: Torment, the one that crossed his desk in June of 1997 and led to the project being formally green-lit. I found this document rather shocking at the time, in that its tone was so totally out of keeping with the hallowed reputation which the game had long enjoyed even then as the most credible claimant to the status of true Interactive Art that the CRPG genre has ever produced. Much of this pitch, by contrast, seemed to have been written by Joe Lieberman’s most stereotypical nightmare: by a sadistic, DOOM-addled teenager who turned it out in between dry-humping everything around him with an even vaguely feminine shape.

No more using boring swords, daggers, or bows to carve bloody swaths through opponents. Plunge scalpels into foes’ eyes, lace their food with poisonous embalming fluid, push them into man-eating pockets of ooze, sic them with sarcastic biting skulls, hurl them into razorvines, conjure burrowing rot grubs within a victim’s brain, cast spells that make them bleed from every orifice, or change a person’s scent so they attract packs of hungry rats. Deliver punishment in ways that will bring a smile to your face.

“Fireball” can go hide in the fucking corner when you unleash your arsenal. Jam your hand into an opponent’s body, rip out his soul, and tell it to kill its owner. Make a gesture and summon a blanket of crawling, biting insects to turn your enemy into a Happy Meal. Send your foes on a field trip to Hell without a permission slip. Taunt someone to death. Summon your darkest shadows from across existence and send them into battle to feed on your opponent’s physical strength. Your succubus ally can kiss your opponents to death — they die with a smile on their face.

This game will have lots of babes that make the player go wow. There will be fiendish babes, human babes, angelic babes, Asian babes, and even undead babes. Think babes. Then think more babes.

To which one can only reply, whoa… whoa. Settle down there, Beavis, before you rub that thing raw.

This document, which has long since surfaced publicly and made the rounds of the Internet, has become something of a problem for Planescape: Torment’s cult fandom, being so markedly at odds with what they wish the game to be. Some have gone so far as to claim that the juvenile profanity was nothing more than an elaborate ruse to get Brian Fargo and his marketing cronies to sign off on such an uncompromising piece of art, or that this is the only corporate pitch document in the history of the world to inhabit the category of satire. But personally, I’m not buying these pat explanations. I think that the finished Planescape: Torment that we know is a blending of the adolescent and the rarefied, the commercial and the idealistic. It’s not that the higher concepts and grander themes don’t exist. It’s just that they’re embedded into a licensed and branded Dungeons & Dragons computer game — made by, let’s face it, a bunch of nerdy twenty-something American men with the same predilections and blind spots as their peers elsewhere in the industry. We probably shouldn’t allow ourselves to get quite as precious about it as we often do.

For what’s worth, I suspect that Chris Avellone himself might more or less agree with this assessment deep down in his heart of hearts. In every interview I’ve seen him give on the subject of Planescape: Torment, he’s been distinctly reluctant to take on the persona of the auteur creating timeless art for the ages. He tends to speak more in the terms of a creative professional who was given a job to do: “Like just about every game I’ve worked on in my career, the franchise or premise was mandated, and then I worked within the parameters given.” He prefers to frame the protagonist’s journey to self-knowledge more as a way of flattering the typical gamer’s sensibilities than a conscious artistic masterstroke.

It is a very selfish game. After about ten years of game-mastering players… that’s really all they care about. They want the entire adventure to revolve around them. Players want to hear people talking about them. It’s the ultimate ego stroke.

Again, this is not to say that Planescape: Torment doesn’t resonate in certain places with the proverbial human condition. It’s merely to say that it’s a complicated, piebald beast. Is it art? Maybe, depending on how you define such things, since art is always in the eye of the beholder. Is it a penetrating work of moral philosophy? Maybe, to some extent, but maybe not quite so much as some folks want it to be. Is it well-written? Intermittently, although seldom on a sentence-by-sentence level. Is it brave and groundbreaking in the context of its time and circumstances? Absolutely. Is it a great game, full stop? Eh…

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Fair warning: a considerable number of Planescape: Torment spoilers follow!

Baldur’s Gate, the only Infinity Engine game to precede Planescape: Torment, attempts very explicitly to recreate the pleasures of playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons with your friends. The companions whom you collect around you could easily be the avatars of said friends. Each of them is an archetype — fighter, magic user, cleric, thief — which constitutes one part of a Gary Gygax-approved well-balanced adventuring party. The game employs the classic “a group of adventurers met in a bar and went questing” setup. There’s an overarching plot, but it’s really just an excuse to explore more terrain, fight more monsters, and grow steadily stronger.  If you want, you can even play Baldur’s Gate together with your real-life friends, with each of you taking control of one character (although it’s rather clunky in practice, being subject to the technological limitations of the late 1990s).

Whatever else it happens to be, Planescape: Torment is nothing like that. It’s the very specific story of one very specific character, presented it a way that would never have worked with a gang of others sitting around the tabletop. Companions do arrive to accompany him, but they are always peripheral to his central psychodrama. There is no multi-player mode here. Having one would make no sense.

The protagonist of Planescape: Torment is the appropriately named Nameless One, a zombified shamble of flesh and bone who wakes up at the beginning of the game on a mortuary slab in Sigil, the city of inter-planar doors, with no idea who he is or how he got there. So, he sets off to try to find out. Along the way, he meets the aforementioned companions who join him on his journey. One or two of them he even meets in a bar, but these are not your typical happy-go-lucky adventurers with mercenary stars in their eyes. The fact is that each of their stories has long ago become interwoven with that of the Nameless One himself, generally to their detriment, and even though he can’t remember any of it. His own backstory will prove to be far longer and stranger than you or he might ever have thought possible, encompassing hundreds of lifetimes lived out all over the planes of existence, during which he has been good and evil and everything in between. His true quest, it will gradually become clear, is not merely to find out who he really is. Doing so is just a prerequisite to stopping the cycle of rebirths, owning his sins, and finally bringing his story to an end.

Not only does Planescape: Torment subvert the traditional plot outline of a CRPG by turning a triumphalist power fantasy into a tragic journey of self-discovery, but it subverts many of the standard CRPG mechanics to serve its agenda. The Nameless One is immortal, which means that defeat and “death” in combat is a minor inconvenience at worst; he will always wake up once again on his mortuary slab, with all of his inventory, companions, and experience points intact. (In some places, he is even required to “die” in order to advance the plot.) With physical threats being thus robbed of their menace, a clever dialog response is almost always worth more experience points than defeating the same interlocutor in battle. Swords, armor, and most of the other usual trappings of heroic adventure are seldom seen, replaced by stranger concoctions, like a floating skull who can upgrade his attack by acquiring sharper teeth. Planescape: Torment is not your parents’ CRPG.

To wit: if you come to this game expecting a plane-skipping roller-coaster ride through a wide variety of environments, I’m afraid you’re destined to be disappointed. Most of it takes place within Sigil. You start out in the slums and eventually make your way to slightly posher districts of the city, but the general atmosphere remains one of futility and decay from first to last. I’m frankly not sure how to respond to this. My wide-eyed inner child, the one who used to consume pulpy sci-fi novels by the dozen, thinks it’s false advertising to promise us a city of doors to infinite possibility and then deliver only this sad-sack assemblage of run-down mundanities. My more mature incarnation, the one who studied (or in some cases suffered through) the literary classics at university, thinks it might be an admirable case of a game sticking to its guns. But even he begins to feel crushed under the sheer weight of misery on display here, begins to wonder what pathetic excuse for a multiverse this is that has such a squalid, nihilistic centerpiece.

In practice, much of your time in Planescape: Torment will be spent wandering through each new district of Sigil as it opens up, clicking on every character who has a name or otherwise non-generic description in order to initiate conversation. Make no mistake. These people like to talk… oh, my God, do they like to talk. A minority of them have information or assistance to offer that pertains to the main quest, or at least to one of the many side-quests. Most of them, however, just “rattle their bone-box,” as the Sigil lingo goes, for the sake of hearing it rattle, telling you all about their hardscrabble lives in paragraph after paragraph of text. I find that it becomes numbing after a while, a symphony of despair that just keeps hammering away on the same relentlessly grim note. It’s Down and Out in Paris and London, except an order of magnitude longer in a different dimension.

The Cant — the Cockney-inspired lingo of Sigil — is striking, even if it is lifted from TSR’s Planescape boxed set rather than being an innovation of this development team. All the same, the writing has a rough-draft quality to it that includes but is by no means limited to the typos and minor grammatical errors that are strewn fairly liberally throughout, the well-nigh inevitable result of laying down so very much text in a relatively short span of time. It’s enough to make you long for the days when computers were primitive enough that even text was expensive, such that developers had to choose their words with care, had to make sure that every single one of them counted. Failing that, we might wish that someone in Interplay’s marketing department had insisted that the whole game be voice-acted, which would have served the same purpose of forcing the developers to include only those words that really matter. (As it is, only the occasional line or two is voiced.)

Editing, in any sense of the word, was clearly not a priority here. Back in the 1980s, Infocom employed a full-time editor from the book-publishing world to polish and tighten the prose in its games. But alas, such work was far beyond the core competencies of a 1990s studio like Interplay. The only guiding principle here seems to be the more words, the better. Matters reach a kind of absurd climax when you wander into a bar in which the patrons spout verbatim paragraphs from the old TSR Planescape campaign setting, copied and pasted into the computer game. One can easily imagine that the developers must have been paid by the word, the way people like to say that the similarly verbally incontinent Charles Dickens once was. Whether they were or not, talk is way, way too cheap in Planescape: Torment.

At times, you can almost palpably sense Chris Avellone and his friends straining to put words in the mouths of so many superficially indistinguishable characters in ways that might make them stand out. You want to tell them that it’s okay, give yourself a break: literary merit is not measured by the kilogram of verbiage. Occasionally the writing surrounding the many bit players of Sigil can surprise you with a clever metaphor or a flash of insight or compassion, but more often it just wallows in the squalor. Many of the grotesques you meet are gross just for the sake of being gross, thus revealing that the sniggering lover of blood and boobs who wrote so much of the pitch document remains a part of the development team’s collective unconscious if nothing else.

A man is looking at you with a strange, bug-eyed stare. His eyes are huge… so huge they look ready to pop out of their sockets and roll across the cobblestones. He nods eagerly as you approach, bobbing his head like a bird… and as you near him, you suddenly notice the smell of the urine and feces surrounding him. The man sniffles, wiping his nose on his sleeve, then opens his mouth to reveal blackened, rotted gums…

Reekwind coughs, his eyes almost popping out of his skull as he does so. His cough seems to loosen his bowels, for he breaks wind loudly, as if to accentuate his point…

The companions with whom you hack your way through this forest of words instead of monsters are a mixed bag. Morte the talking skull is your first party member, already at your side when you wake up on the mortuary slab for the first time, already seeking to make up for having betrayed you in one of your earlier lives. His redemption arc aside, he’s clearly meant to provide a note of comic relief amidst the cavalcade of misery you encounter, even if in practice his humor misses rather more than it hits; the necrophiliac jokes about every female ghoul and zombie you meet get pretty old pretty quickly.

Your companion Dak’kon belongs to the githzerai, a planar race of ascetics who prize order and harmony over all else. Unfortunately for him, a crisis of faith has led to him being cast out by his own people.

Nordom is not so much cast out as dropped in from what feels like it ought to be a different game entirely. Recruitable only via a lengthy side-quest that’s disarmingly easy to miss completely, he’s a robot who has evolved into sentience and is trying to figure out what to do next. He’s essentially WALL-E nine years before Pixar came up with him; he’s even drawn in a cartoon style, a jack-in-the-box with big, sad eyes and way too many gangling limbs.

And then we have the two female companions. They are defined by their gender and sexuality in a way that their male counterparts are not, occupying an uncomfortable liminal space between adolescent wish-fulfillment and earnest character-building. The pitch document tells you most of what you really need to know about them when it promises “to fill the game with deep, meaningful interactions with characters that happen to have swaying, pendulous breasts.” Both Fall-from-Grace the reformed succubus and Annah the reforming tiefling thief look like your standard videogame hot chicks. The way they’re written, on the other hand, arguably provides less fodder for students of literature or philosophy than it does for psycho-anthropologists who happen to be studying a certain subset of turn-of-the-millennium young men.

Fall-from-Grace runs the embarrassingly named “Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts.” This establishment is full of hot chicks just like her, who invite their male customers in to… well, just to talk to them about all the nerdy interests that cause other comely young women to roll their eyes and start sidling toward the nearest exit.

Annah is an apparently jaded girl of the streets who, it will eventually turn out, has never known the touch of a man (because of course she hasn’t) and thinks that The Nameless One might be the right one to finally teach her the ways of love (because of course she does).

Now, I don’t want to jump all over Chris Avellone and his friends for this. I believe we should weigh intent at least as heavily as effect when passing judgment on anything, and the intent here is as sweet in its way as it is perchance inadvertently revealing. If the “babes, babes, and more babes” guy from the pitch document is the person these lads were with their peer group, then the wide-eyed romantic who came up with Fall-from-Grace and Annah was likely the person they became alone at night after their buddies had gone home. I remember seeing the girls I crushed on — the ones I really crushed on, that is — in much the same way when I was their age or only a little younger. To my teenage eyes, they were well-nigh celestial beings whom I wanted to shelter from the ugliness of the world (not least all those other guys who were better at sports than I was) and commune with in a way that transcended sex (not least because I was none too confident in my own abilities in that department in comparison to those other guys). It’s a phase a lot of us go through, but also one that we hopefully outgrow. The problem with such attitudes is that they still preclude one from seeing the object of one’s fancy as a fully-realized human being with a full measure of agency in her own right. Men have been using these velvet cages, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, to hold women down since time immemorial. The women of Planescape: Torment contribute to the sense of a writing team who are punching a little too far above their own weight — or, maybe better said, their life experience.

The overwriting and the gawkiness are present in the main plot line as well. Below is a short extract from the game’s turning point, a long-sought-after and predictably prolonged dialog with Ravel Puzzlewell, a witch who knows much about The Nameless One’s real nature.

“A shadow with substance, a-seeking that which casts the light. I know you more and no… know…” Ravel pauses, her eyes dimming. “No more than I know the nature of ANY man. Crossed pasts have we… a man tainted with un-death, still feeling the pangs of separation, and an old withered crone, now all-imprisoned. Seems it that we are a-meeting for the first time? No, no, not, not… knot?” Ravel seems confused for a moment, then shudders, as if throwing off a weight. “Knot at all. An echo of a future meeting this is… or a past meeting, depending on which way time is facing.”

The first thing we notice here is the inverted sentence structures of Yoda-speak, a kind of default setting for mysterious and profound characters in way too many games. It serves to remind us that, for all their aspirations toward Philosophy, these writers are better versed in the works of George Lucas than Aristotle or Nietzsche.

Meanwhile all this punning on “know” and “no,” “passed” and “past,” “not” and “knot,” is the sort of thing that clever and ambitious young writers often turn out, and grizzled and remorseless editors draw a line through just as quickly. For it works only on the page (or the screen, in this case); if it was spoken, as we’re supposed to imagine dialog being, it would all fly right past the interlocutor. In the end, then, the only purpose it serves is to point out the cleverness of the author, which isn’t — or oughtn’t to be — the purpose of writing anything. If we keep at it long enough, most of us writers learn to nip such cherished little darlings in the bud before they can pull our readers out of the story we’re trying to tell.

And now, looking back on what I’ve written, I see that I’ve been hard on Planescape: Torment, harder than I really intended to be. And yet there are criticisms I haven’t even gotten to yet. For example, I haven’t mentioned how unsatisfying and annoying the combat is — yes, it does exist, and is actually quite extended and extensive at times, such as when you have to leave the streets of Sigil to delve into its tombs and sewers, or when you leave Sigil’s dimension entirely during the last quarter or so of the game. (Never fear: the other dimensions you visit are if anything even bleaker than this one.) Ironically, the same changes to the Infinity Engine that make this game feel more personal than the likes of Baldur’s Gate also serve to explain why Bioware made the choices they did for their own, more conventionally combat-oriented CRPG. Here, the close-in camera makes it harder to keep track of what is going on during a fight, even as the other interface changes make it harder to micro-manage your party when you really need to. Most of the standard CRPG elements — character levels, ability scores, spell books, etc. — feel like phantom limbs here; tragic psychodrama makes a strange fit with the power fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons. The final impression which I just can’t escape is that of an engine and system of rules which are badly out of sync with the game they’re being asked to present. If you want to call that further evidence of subversive intent on the part of the development team, be my guest. I just call it unfortunate.

For all that, though, I don’t want what I’ve written to read as an invalidation of the experience of those who have played Planescape: Torment and felt a wind of profundity blowing through its dreary environs. I’ve felt the same wind myself. (And no, I’m not talking about our friend Reekwind.) As you learn more and more about The Nameless One’s endless cycle of pain and suffering, both caused and endured, themes and ideas that games seldom touch on begin to emerge. One particular question is brought up again and again: “What can change the nature of a man?” To its credit, the game never offers a definitive answer, but two possibilities come to the forefront: “Regret” and “Belief.” As Saint Augustine tells us, these are two sides of the same coin: the weight of Regret engenders Belief, while our Belief fills us with Regret for all the ways we fail to live up to our moral potential. Thus the need for Confession to cleanse our souls and be worthy of that which we believe in… and so the cycle continues.

In a revelation that genuinely shook me, you learn near the end of the game that resurrection isn’t free, that every time The Nameless One is brought back to life on his familiar mortuary slab after a failed combat or some other misguided escapade, the life of some other poor mortal schmuck is taken in compensation for his rebirth. The “best” ending has him breaking that cycle by recognizing, acknowledging, and internalizing the suffering he has caused, looking that unwanted self-knowledge and its terrible consequences straight in the face. What follows is by no means conventionally happy, but it is the only fitting way to bring his story to a close. Kudos to Chris Avellone for not chickening out at the last minute, as other game designers have done.

Planescape: Torment is the first game of any stripe that I know of since Infocom’s Trinity to unabashedly don the mantle of Tragedy in the classical sense. Although Chris Avellone’s understanding of what that means is perhaps less nuanced than that of “Professor” Brian Moriarty, the author of Trinity, his take on it is more searingly immediate. For Trinity is the tragedy of an entire civilization, bereft of any characters at all who aren’t bit players, while Planescape:Torment is the tragedy of an individual whom we come to know all too well. Regular commenter P-Tux7 asked in response to the first article of this little duology of mine whether “it is right to punish someone who doesn’t remember doing the crime,” whether “someone can ever become not the person who did the crime,” and whether “justice demands an equivalent amount of suffering.” Such questions constitute the essence of tragedy, which writers have been struggling with as long as the written word has existed.

Despite all its granular failings of execution, then, Planescape: Torment leaves us with much to ponder, regarding both the nature of a man and — on a slightly more plebeian note — the nature of game design. Some of the themes that this game broaches are among the most profound we can wrestle with as human beings. The story of The Nameless One rhymes with the myth of Oedipus, who also looked terrible self-knowledge right in the face and had his soul shriven to the core. Or we might choose to read The Nameless One as a Christ figure, who redeems his fallen companions through a supremely unselfish final sacrifice. But there are likewise obvious parallels to Eastern religion and philosophy, which stress the need to escape the very same eternal life that Christianity purports to offer us. Meanwhile the existentialists among us must ponder whether a Nameless One who can’t remember the actions of his previous incarnations, who possesses no obvious continuity with his previous selves, can be said to truly be the same man at all. In fact, can any of us be said to be the same person we were when we were younger? After all, time is a river that changes all of us second by second, and, as Heraclitus told us almost 3000 years ago, it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Any game that can make its player ponder such thoughts as these is not to be dismissed lightly.

At the same time, though, Planescape: Torment belongs to a category of critic’s darling that always seems to get my curmudgeonly dander up (and tends to land me in hot water with some of my readers): games which are said to be so ridiculously effective as stories and settings that any gameplay inconveniences that dog them pale into insignificance by comparison. Grim Fandango is one of these: we’re told to forget the clumsy interface and nonsensical puzzle design and just enjoy the ride with a walkthrough by our side. Final Fantasy VII is another: forget the endless cavalcade of tedious random encounters and the fact that you can win all of them just by pounding the “attack” button over and over and enjoy the story. No matter how hard I try, I can’t see my way to giving games like these a pass. I love a good story and setting, but the fact remains that interactivity is the defining attribute of a game. It seems to me that it needs to work well too if we are to start throwing around accolades like “masterpiece.”

Much of what strikes me as flaws in this particular would-be masterpiece could have been fixed with a little more time and some more judicious oversight. The writing could be pared down at the same time that it was polished up; 800,000 words are not needed to convey a vivid sense of place and atmosphere, only a subset of the right ones. The tedious combat could be overhauled or perhaps eliminated entirely. Indeed, I sometimes think that my ideal Planescape: Torment would be a ten-hour point-and-click adventure game that doesn’t waste my time with unneeded mechanics or unnecessary talk, that makes every moment count. I doubt that Chris Avellone would go that far, but, again, I sense that he may just agree with me about some of the game’s infelicities. It’s just that he would prefer to improve the other systems rather than narrow the focus to the core story. “If the moment-to-moment gameplay is lacking,” he says, “then you’ve failed as a game designer. The combat was pretty weak, and I did feel it could have used more dungeon-crawling areas for players to explore and have fun in in addition to having fun exploring the conversations in the game.” Who knows? Maybe that would work too.

For when it comes right down to it, I still don’t know quite how to feel about Planescape: Torment; when I called it confounding at the start of this pair of articles, I meant it. I first tried to play it not long after it came out, only to give up after a few hours, bored by the depressing setting and all of the people there who never shut up. I returned to it in order to write these articles, and my sense of professional duty carried me all the way through this time around, even though I was once again bored for much of the time. Still, I’m glad I stuck it out, glad to truly know one of the most celebrated computer games in history. Yet I must confess that I’m equally glad to be done with it. I am of the opinion that the most fundamental responsibility of a game, before theme and meaning can even enter the discussion, is to entertain or at least interest its player. Planescape: Torment failed that test too often for me to call it a great game. If you want me to call it a brave and intriguing one, though… well, that I can definitely get behind. Seldom has any group of creators in this field challenged the expectations of their audience so thoroughly. And that in itself is a brave feat well worth applauding.

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Sources: The book Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock; Computer Gaming World of March 2000 and April 2000; the 2015 Games^TM special issue on “controversial” games; Retro Gamer 113. Plus the materials found in the Brian Fargo Collection in the archives of the Strong Museum of Play.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview with Chris Avellone for his Designer’s Notes podcast, a Last Game Standing interview with Avellone, and Guido Henkel’s pictures and memories of posing for the Planescape: Torment box cover.

Where to Get It: Planescape: Torment is available as digital purchase from GOG.com in an “enhanced edition.” Buying it also gives you access to the original version.

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My power fantasy when playing a role-playing game is to confront a villain, explain point by point why his master plan is flawed, and then get him to admit that he hadn’t thought things through as carefully as I had, and ask me what I think he should do. Conversation-based player characters can have their bad-ass moments just as much as someone wielding a gun…

— Chris Avellone

Planescape: Torment is the damnedest game. Its list of failings is longer than that of many a game that I’ve simply written off as bad, full stop, and moved on from without a second thought. The pacing is glacial for long stretches; the interface is fussy and clunky; the combat is both irritating and utterly superfluous to the game’s design goals. Even much of the writing, by far the most celebrated aspect of Planescape: Torment, tends to seem proportionally less profound and more banal as one becomes farther removed in age and life experience from the twenty-somethings who first put all of these words — so many, many words, a reported 800,000 of them in all — onto our monitor screens more than a quarter-century ago. In so very many ways, Planescape: Torment is an undisciplined hot mess.

And yet it’s a hot mess that refuses to be dismissed lightly. For Planescape: Torment is also a vanishingly rare thing in the realm of game narratives: a genuine interactive tragedy, in the sense that Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche understood that word. That it recognizes the tragic side of life while inhabiting a genre whose whole point in the eyes of most of its fans is the triumphalism of going from a weakling to a demigod is incredibly brave and subversive. That it did this in 1999, when the games industry was smack dab in the middle of one of the most homogenized, risk-averse periods in its history, is as inexplicable as it is astonishing.

Clearly we have much to unpack…

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Whatever else it is, Planescape: Torment is first and foremost a licensed adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, a part of Interplay’s attempt to revive that storied tabletop game’s digital fortunes amidst the collapse of its parent company TSR and TSR’s acquisition by Wizards of the Coast. This particular computer game was no mere branding exercise, as was the case with some of them that came out in Dungeons & Dragons trade dress during the 1990s. On the contrary, Planescape: Torment was deeply, intimately informed by the creative work that took place in TSR’s Wisconsin headquarters earlier in the decade. The extent to which this is the case is often glossed over or forgotten entirely when retrospectives of it are written today. So, let me make it crystal clear here right from the start: love it or hate it, a huge chunk of what makes Planescape: Torment so unique and memorable originated not in Interplay’s Southern California offices but in the nation’s dairy-cow heartland.

It will presumably surprise no one when I write that the “planes” of Planescape are alternate planes of existence, separate from the “Prime Material Plane” in which most Dungeons & Dragons campaigns take place. They were introduced by Gary Gygax already in the late 1970s, in the iconic first editions of the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. His cosmology was a melange of a little bit of everything: quantum physics, Renaissance-era alchemy and astronomy, the holy texts of various religions, New Age philosophy, Dante and Milton, twentieth-century fantasy and horror novels.

The Prime Material Plane stands at the center of it all, much like the Earth was once imagined to stand at the center of our universe. It is surrounded by the Inner Planes that embody the physical building blocks of existence, which are in turned enclosed by the Outer Planes that embody the metaphysical alignments, those nine possible combinations of Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic, Good, Neutral, and Evil.

Gygax was always prepared to muse and to elaborate, on this subject as on so many others. Small wonder that these alleged rule books — surely the most chatty and discursive books of rules ever written, the heart of the Gospel of Saint Gary — were perused and pored over endlessly by his young fans, many of whom were discovering for the first time the countless disparate philosophical ideas he threw into the pot. Gygax wasn’t an overly sophisticated thinker in most contexts, but he was a prolific one, who always had ten more ideas waiting in the wings if you didn’t respond to his last one.

For those of you who haven’t really thought about it, the so-called planes are your ticket to creativity, and I mean that with a capital C! Everything can be absolutely different, save for those common denominators necessary to the existence of the player characters coming to the plane. Movement and scale can be different; so can combat and morale. Creatures can have more or different attributes. As long as the player characters can somehow relate to it, then it will work…

I have recommended that Boot Hill and Gamma World be used in campaigns. There is also Metamorphoses Alpha, Tractics, and all sorts of other offerings which can be converted to man-to-man role-playing scenarios. While as of this writing there are no commercially available “other planes” modules, I am certain that there will be soon — it is simply too big an opportunity to pass up, and the need is great.

This was a remarkably prescient description of where planar travel in Dungeons & Dragons would go — eventually. For a long time after The Dungeon Master’s Guide appeared in 1979, the other planes of existence were one of those Dungeons & Dragons concepts that were kind of floating out there in the ether (or was it the Ethereal Plane?) without anyone knowing quite what to do with it. Apart from some sketchy guidelines for “ethereal” and “astral” travel and combat, the rule books remained sadly short on specifics. The 1980 adventure module Queen of the Demonweb Pits, designed by Gygax and David C. Sutherland III, did take players on a jaunt to the Abyssal Plane, but that was a one-shot thing. For all that Gygax had claimed, in his indelibly Gygaxian way, that “the need is great,” as if an understanding of the planes of Dungeons & Dragons was an urgent matter of national security, neither he nor anyone else seemed to be in all that much of a hurry to address said need. The occasional slightly dodgy article in Dragon magazine aside, Dungeons & Dragons remained in practice a very Prime Material sort of game.

This situation first started to change in the latter half of the 1980s. By then, Gygax was on his way out of TSR and the Dungeons & Dragons craze of the decade’s beginning had just about run its course. Necessity was forcing TSR to adjust its business model, from selling the core Dungeons & Dragons game to new players to selling an ever expanding lineup of rules extensions, campaign settings, and pre-crafted adventures to its surviving base of loyal, hardcore players. The planes seemed like fresh fodder for all three types of product.

A longtime TSR stalwart named Jeff Grubb took the first concerted swing at it. In 1987, the company published his Manual of the Planes, the latest in its ever-growing line of new Dungeons & Dragons hardbacks for the hardcore. Grubb took it as his mission to give Gygax’s abstract cosmology a grounding in lived experience, to explain what it would actually be like to visit these places. Unfortunately, he prioritized alchemical realism over playability, winding up with a collection of environments that were as brutally, hilariously inhospitable to even high-level characters as one might imagine a plane of nothing but fire or air to be. “The book was fascinating reading,” notes Dori Hein, an ordinary Dungeons & Dragons fan at the time whom we will meet again in another role. “I loved the mythology and the grand majesty of all the planes, but — try as I might — I couldn’t create an adventure without killing all my players.” In the same vein, Sean Gandert of the website Exposition Break writes that “the planes’ complete resistance to being remotely welcoming is both what makes them fascinating to read about and also makes the book completely skippable and largely irrelevant. It is a work of cosmology and mythology, not a plan for where to send adventurers.”

The Manual of the Planes went out of print in fairly short order anyway, after TSR commenced rolling out a second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1989. The cynical interpretation of this initiative is that it was the best way TSR had yet devised for continuing to extract money from its static pool of players, by forcing them to buy the game they loved all over again in its most basic form in order to stay up to date with the times. The idealistic one is that it let TSR clean up a game system that had grown ever more baggily shambolic over the past decade of supplement after supplement. In reality, the second edition was doubtless a little of both, being seen one way by the people surrounding Lorraine Williams in her executive suite and another by the creative types in the cubicles.

That said, and looking back on what I’ve written about the later period of TSR’s history elsewhere on this site, I fear I may have overemphasized the cynicism at the expense of the idealism. There’s no question that the company fell prey to a set of perverse incentives during the last decade of its existence, many of them born out of idiosyncrasies in its longstanding distribution contract with the book publisher Random House. By the early 1990s, this had resulted in an absolute hailstorm of product brought down upon the heads of Dungeons & Dragons fans, more than all but the most well-heeled among them could possibly afford to buy, much less find the time to bring to the tabletop. But there’s likewise no question that these products were made with enormous love and care by the creative staff. This was the heyday of the alternative campaign setting, when TSR offered up the chance to leave conventional high fantasy behind and play Dungeons & Dragons in post-apocalyptic worlds, in the lands of the Arabian Nights, in Gothic castles, on the high seas, even in outer space. So what if there was no way to justify so many settings’ existence as commercial products, if each successive one sold worse than the one before, especially after the collectible-card game Magic: The Gathering arrived on the scene to tempt away large chunks of TSR’s remaining customer base. Circumstance had granted the people making these settings a rare reprieve from the harsh logic of supply and demand, and they didn’t let it go to waste.

Given this cavalcade of rich but disconnected settings, it was perhaps inevitable that TSR would look once again to the planar multiverse as a way of unifying a crazily diverse set of experiences bearing the name of Dungeons & Dragons. A boxed set reviving Gygax’s multiverse could bring them all together conceptually, could even provide a set of practical mechanisms to allow the same set of player characters to jump from setting to setting, just like Saint Gary had first proposed all those years ago.

In addition to being a unifying force for Dungeons & Dragons itself, Planescape was quite explicitly intended as a response to Vampire: The Masquerade, an RPG from an upstart company known as White Wolf Games that flipped everything you thought you knew about the tabletop scene on its head. Whereas Dungeons & Dragons, even in its supposedly cleaned-up second-edition incarnation, was infamous for the complexity of its rules, Vampire gave you just enough of them to provide a runway for storytelling. That fact, combined with its subject matter, attracted fresh blood to the hobby: Goth rockers and theater kids and Anne Rice readers, among them a surprising number of girls and women. At the end of the day, Vampire may have been full of as many clichés as vanilla Dungeons & Dragons —  clichés which are all the more evident from the perspective of today, after several more decades worth of vampire fictions — but they had the advantage of feeling relatively fresh from the perspective of the early 1990s. Indeed, this was the only period in the entire history of tabletop RPGs when it seemed possible that a different game might just unseat Dungeons & Dragons from its throne as the undisputed standard bearer for the hobby. Vampire’s rise made TSR nervous enough to want to make something of its own that was grittier, messier, and a bit less morally straightforward, less of a single-unit wargame and more of a vehicle for improvisational drama. It was no accident that the Dungeons & Dragons brand appeared on the eventual Planescape box only as a small logo tucked away in the corner.

David “Zeb” Cook, another veteran TSR hand, was made lead designer on Planescape. Dori Hein, who had by now graduated from merely playing TSR’s games to working there, became the producer, overseeing a team of artists, cartographers, writers, editors, and play-testers. They pulled out all the stops for a set that wound up consisting of no fewer than four separate books, printed on thick and creamy Pentair Suede paper, and four sturdy cardboard posters. The luscious package was capped off by the most intimidating Dungeon Master’s screen ever devised. One of TSR’s purchasing managers had a sign hanging in his office: “The pleasure of a product well done lingers far longer than the excitement of a bargain.” As it happened, though, the Planescape set was both: it sold for just $30, a ridiculously cheap price for such a luxurious product even by the standards of the 1990s. It may have been no more than a break-even price, or not even that, settled upon in the hope that Planescape would revive TSR’s flagging fortunes in the longer run by spawning a whole new ecosystem of supplements, adventure modules, and tie-in novels.

Zeb Cook’s first and most important stroke of brilliance was to give his vision of the planes a hub around which to operate. This was Sigil, a “city of doors” giving unto the many other planes, a meeting ground and melting pot for the entire multiverse. Ranging far afield from the pulpy fantasy of Jack Vance and the stately epic fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien, the two most obvious inspirations for traditionalist Dungeons & Dragons, Cook read postmodern, experimental novels by Milorad Pavić and Italo Calvino for inspiration. Sigil, a city of angles as well as doors, became a physical embodiment of their twisted, self-referential approach to narrative: “Get it right out front: Sigil’s an impossible place, a city built on the inside of a tire that hovers over the top of a gods-know-how-tall spike, which rises from a universe shaped like a giant pancake.”

Sigil is not so refined a place as some might expect for the central hub of the multiverse, but that’s fair enough, given that Cook’s multiverse itself isn’t all that refined. The dominant note of the city, even outside of its plentiful and teeming slum districts, is what we might call dirty Victoriana, of a piece with 21st-century novels like Sarah Water’s Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, which read like genuine Victorian “sensation novels” with the added ability to state outright the disreputable things that their ancestors could only imply. The dialect of Sigil’s streets is vintage Cockney slang in spirit if not always in the details of the vocabulary, with the same uncanny talent for being roundabout and penetrating at the same time: “berks” and “cutters” are no-account people; “the dark” is knowledge; “jink” is money; one’s “kip” is one’s (usually humble) abode; one’s “bone-box” is one’s mouth; to “pike off” means to scram. In keeping with all the best slang, these are words that you know when you hear them even if you don’t actually know them, if you take my meaning. As we’ve already seen, the books in the Planescape box that describe Sigil are themselves written in this vernacular: “Welcome, addle-cove!” begins the Planescape “Player’s Guide.” This is not the Dungeons & Dragons of 1980s school cafeterias; both dungeons and dragons are mostly missing from Sigil, replaced by far stranger things.

Instead of embracing the simplistic good-versus-evil dynamics of traditional Dungeons & Dragons, Sigil is divided into fifteen factions whose adherents are aptly described as “philosophers with clubs,” from the chivalric and vaguely fascistic Godsmen to the nihilistic Bleak Cabal, who preach that “once a sod believes it all means nothing, it all starts to make sense.” Ruling over the whole place, ensuring that no single faction gets too powerful, is the Lady of Pain, who can flay the skin from a poor berk just by looking at him. The overriding theme is that ideas and beliefs matter, are literally woven right into the substance of the multiverse, and can kill or save you just as indubitably as the physical elements of earth, air, wind, and fire. Sigil is the ultimate argument for the value of a good humanities education.

If there’s a weakness to the Planescape set, it’s that it spends so much space on Sigil that it doesn’t have enough left over for all those other planes of existence that were supposed to be the whole point of the endeavor. Instead of offering a wide-open set of possibilities, it can feel paradoxically claustrophobic, like the crowded filthy alleyways of the city itself.

Nevertheless, the Planescape box was endlessly audacious and imaginative, as different from the typical Dungeons & Dragons experience as anyone could have asked for. But, whether despite or because of these factors, it was not a commercial success. It sold just 60,000 copies over the five years after its release in April of 1994, a thin foundation indeed on which to build a new gaming ecosystem. The add-on lines, which offered opportunities to flesh out the multiverse in some of the way that the boxed set had failed to do, continued in fits and starts for longer than you might expect — another tribute to the topsy-turvy economic incentives that marked TSR at the time — but petered out for good after the failing company was acquired in 1997 by its own worst enemy Wizards of the Coast, the maker of Magic: The Gathering. The Vampire craze did eventually fade, but its travails had nothing to do with TSR’s efforts. It was rather something to do with the ever-shifting winds of pop culture, which soon replaced teenagers’ Cure and Alice in Chains records with the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears.

So, had things turned out just a little bit differently, Planescape would be fondly remembered today only by a few tabletop nostalgics as a piece of work of unusual vision that never got its due. Instead, though, it went on to become a landmark of another stripe, in a different medium entirely.

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TSR had begun dangling the prospect of a Planescape computer game in front of publishers even before the boxed set shipped; such a thing was regarded as a potentially vital part to the product line that had become the latest Great White Hope for reversing the company’s accelerating downward spiral. Interplay rose to the bait, signing the contract before 1994 was out. In fact, it went so far as to hire Zeb Cook himself, who had concluded that “it didn’t seem like there was going to be a long-term future” for him on the tabletop. But the initial rush of enthusiasm petered out; Cook soon departed again, leaving the digital future of Planescape in limbo. And yet the idea of a Planescape computer game never completely went away. Late in 1995, when an inexperienced youngster named Chris Avellone came to Interplay for a job interview, he was asked how he would design such a game. He brainstormed in the spur of the moment the genesis of the eventual Planescape: Torment: “I would start it after the death screen. What happens after the main character dies?”

Avellone had grown up in the 1980s playing Dungeons & Dragons with his friends in his hometown of Alexandria, Virginia. By the time he went off to university, he had two possible futures in mind for himself: either to become a comic-book author or to become a tabletop-RPG designer. Neither field could exactly be called a growth industry at the time, but he made the best of it. On the gaming side, he sent a long string of submissions not only to TSR but to Steve Jackson Games, the maker of GURPS (“Generic Universal Role-Playing System”), and to Hero Games, the maker of the superhero RPG Champions. Initially, he met only with rejection; his closest brush with his heroes at TSR came when Monte Cook, yet another well-known name among the Dungeons & Dragons cognoscenti, took time out to plead with him personally to just stop submitting stuff already.

But Avellone persevered, and finally began to see some of his gaming material accepted and published. Yet he still had to confront the reality that the life of a freelance tabletop-RPG writer and designer left a little something to be desired: specifically, money. Most of the royalty checks that came in from the beleaguered companies that published his work — the Magic: The Gathering craze was in full flight, pushing RPGs to the margins of the same shops where they had once been the dominant attraction — had just two digits before the decimal point. Avellone, who had by now graduated from the College of William & Mary with a Bachelors in English, was still at loose ends when it came to the all-important question of how he was going to put food on his table as a responsible adult. Everyone told him that the wise choice was to acquire a teaching certificate, but all he wanted to do was find a way to make games full-time.

Oddly enough, he had never seriously thought about becoming a computer-game developer, despite having played his fair share of The Bard’s Tale and its ilk as a teenager. It took Steve Peterson, his editor at Hero Games, to point out to him how different the economics of that adjacent industry were. Peterson pulled some strings to secure Avellone an interview at Interplay Productions, for something which he was unlikely to find anytime soon in the moribund tabletop field: an honest-to-goodness full-time job. He got the job.

Although he had been asked about Planescape at his interview, he wasn’t allowed to spend all or even most of his time on that perpetually incipient project after he was hired. As the low man on the totem pole, he was shuffled around from team to team, plugging gaps in the design plumbing wherever needed. He worked on the infamous Descent to Undermountain, the nadir of digital Dungeons & Dragons during the 1990s; on Conquest of the New World, Interplay’s workmanlike take on the same theme as MicroProse’s Colonization; and on Starfleet Academy, an attempt to do TIE Fighter in the Star Trek universe that never felt true to its source material, in that it had the usually stately likes of the USS Enterprise dog-fighting in space as if it was, well, a TIE Fighter.

But betwixt and between all of the above, Avellone sat in his cubicle writing his Planescape game. He did so as much for his own peace of mind — because he needed something that he could feel passionate about — as out of any real conviction that the game would ever get made. The winds blowing against it seemed positively gale-force. For by now it was clear that Planescape would not prove the savior of Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop. The TSR boxed set had barely sold at all, even as, commercially speaking, CRPGs were scarcely in better shape than their tabletop counterparts in the mid-1990s. Interplay already had one game in the stagnant genre under active development, in the form of Fallout. That looked like one too many in the eyes of most of the bean-counters.

Slowly, however, the murky picture started to take on some brighter shades. Just as 1996 was turning into 1997, Blizzard Entertainment unleashed a game called Diablo. Debate raged on Usenet and the young World Wide Web over whether Diablo, with its procedurally generated dungeons and its emphasis on constant action over a fleshed-out narrative, was a “real” CRPG at all or just a watered-down pretender. What was undeniable, though, was that it sold like crazy, raising the question of whether more complex, textured CRPGs might be ripe for a revival as well. Meanwhile a bankrupt TSR was by now in the process of being acquired by Wizards of the Coast. Wizards was saying all the right things about resurrecting Dungeons & Dragons for this new era, and its Magic revenues left it primed to spend more money on that endeavor than TSR could ever have dreamed of even before the collectible-card-game craze had cleaned its clock.

In what had seemed at the time like a triumph of hope over recent experience, earlier in 1996 the Interplay producer Feargus Urquhart had enlisted a fledgling Canadian studio known as Bioware to make yet another Dungeons & Dragons CRPG for Interplay to publish. In what had seemed a minor stipulation of the deal at the time the contract between Bioware and Interplay was signed, the former had agreed to allow the latter full access to the “Infinity Engine” it planned to use to build and run the game. By the spring of 1997, those arrangements were looking like they might prove more important, both to Interplay and to the whole industry, than anyone had anticipated at the time.

The Bioware game, for which Feargus Urquhart himself had come up with the name of Baldur’s Gate, was pitched straight down the middle, being about as traditionalist as a Dungeons & Dragons CRPG could get. It took place in the game’s more or less default setting of the Forgotten Realms, a world that took every cliché of epic fantasy and ran with it. Obviously this was the safest choice for a revival. But, in the wake of Diablo’s smashing success, Urquhart thought there might be space to throw up a curve ball as well to serve as a more outré companion piece. He asked Chris Avellone to condense his massive Planescape notebook into a proper project proposal.

The proposal reached the desk of Brian Fargo, the founder and head of Interplay, at the end of June 1997. “There was always a balance in running a studio between being commercial, being creative, and having your creative people be happy, and having them do things that are interesting to them,” says Fargo. “I was willing to take creative risks from time to time in order to allow these things to happen. Planescape: Torment was clearly one of those. When it came across my desk, I said, ‘Well, that’s as high-concept as you can get.’ But I thought that RPG players would like it, and I loved the writing and sensibility they put into the document. That got me interested in doing it.” It didn’t hurt, of course, that it ought to be possible to do the game fairly cheaply, since it would be able to re-purpose Bioware’s Infinity Engine.

The heart of the Planescape: Torment team was lead designer Chris Avellone, lead programmer Daniel Spitzley, the artists Tim Donley and Aaron Meyers, and producer Guido Henkel (a recent German immigrant who had helped to make the CRPGs Blade of Destiny and Star Trail in his native land). The project was not a major priority at Interplay for the majority of its existence, even after Fallout came out late in 1997 and sold pretty well, thus demonstrating that there truly was a reasonably sized market for more complex, conversation-heavy CRPGs than Diablo, provided that they were done well. In fact, in an ironic sort of way, Fallout’s success was to Planescape: Torment’s detriment. Eager to capitalize on the first non-sequel, non-licensed Interplay release to garner an appreciable buzz among hardcore gamers since Descent in 1995, Brian Fargo decreed that a Fallout 2 had to come out within a year of its predecessor. As a result, Planescape: Torment was all but suspended for much of 1998, while most of the team, Avellone included, moved over to pitch in on the Fallout sequel.

Although they did get it done on time, the biggest CRPG success story of the Christmas of 1998 proved not to be Fallout 2 but rather Baldur’s Gate, which introduced digital Dungeons & Dragons to a whole new generation of gamers who were more familiar with Diablo than Pool of Radiance. Just like that, Dungeons & Dragons on the computer became a hot topic again. With a Baldur’s Gate II not slated for release until 2000, Planescape: Torment was left to carry the Infinity Engine water in the interim. That brought a fresh influx of energy and resources to the project, and these were sufficient to get the game finished just in time for the Christmas of 1999.

It entered stores accompanied by stellar reviews whose fulsome praise felt only slightly obligatory in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of way. (Many reviewers did point out the “tome of text” to be read in tones that suggested that they might not have found it as uniformly delightful as their five-star verdicts suggested.) Nonetheless, as a computer game based on a tabletop setting that had been discontinued more than eighteen months earlier, Planescape: Torment was in a strange position for a licensed product. Even against weak competition — the only other high-profile CRPG release that holiday season was the abjectly terrible Ultima IX — the game’s sales were a shadow of the figures put up by Baldur’s Gate. In an ironic way, the lack of ringing commercial success may have been a positive for Planescape: Torment’s legacy, confirming its modern status as a cult classic that’s for the CRPG sophisticates rather than the hoi polloi.

As for my opinion… well, I’m afraid I’m going to need another article to properly interrogate the reputation and reality of the game. For, whether one happens to be sitting with the prosecution or the defense or just back in the jury box trying to sort through it all, the case of Planescape: Torment is a complicated one.

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Sources: The books Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs, Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock, and Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry volumes 1 (the 1970s) and 3 (the 1990s) by Shannon Appelcline; Dragon of March 1994, April 1994, May 1994, July 1994, and August 1994; Computer Gaming World of March 2000 and April 2000; the 2015 Games^TM special issue on “controversial” games; Retro Gamer 113. Plus the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Manual of the Planes, and the Planescape boxed set. Plus the materials found in the Brian Fargo Collection in the archives of the Strong Museum of Play.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview with Chris Avellone for his Designer’s Notes podcast, a Last Game Standing interview with Avellone, and Sean Gandert’s series of articles about the evolution of planar travel in Dungeons & Dragons for the website Exposition Break.

Where to Get It: Planescape: Torment is available as digital purchase from GOG.com in an “enhanced edition.” Buying it also gives you access to the original version.