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Well of Worlds
(Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Planescape Adventures, 2604 Book and Poster Sized Map)
210 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1994
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October 28, 2022This is an anthology of adventures: after an introduction about what makes planar adventures special (philosophy! belief!), there’s nine adventures.
1.To Baator
Plot: The non-planar PCs stumble into a wizard’s lab and get transported to Baator (Hell) and need to find a portal to Sigil to be safe.
Utility: Another sort of introductory adventure.
Highlight: The PCs meet a pillar of heads, each with their own opinion about how to get to the gate.
Length: 16p
2. The Mazes
Plot: The PCs get tasked with entering one of Sigil’s Mazes — the prisons where the Lady of Pain puts people who threaten her rule — to recover the magical sword from an ex-faction leader. A sword that several other factions want.
Utility: I guess a sort of introduction to faction politics? The fact that people want a sword make this one feel ordinary — like where’s the philosophical issues that make factions interesting?
Highlight: The keys to get in about of the maze are nicely weird: a honey-dipped, gold-plated rose to get in and to get out, a plate for the prisoner’s meals.
Length: 9p
3. Love Letter
Plot: PCs have to deliver love letters from fiends on opposite sides of the Blood War.
Utility: Not everything on the planes is about gold and glory!
Highlight: Just a real solid plot, with real nice notes for scaling the adventure.
Length: 12p
4. Blood Storm
Plot: Fiends are staging a battle on a prime material plane and they have a deal that they can only bring so many of their type — so each tries to hire the PCs to take part on their side. Involves maybe following some disguised chaos fiends as they try to show you a good time.
Utility: An introduction to the weirdness of the Blood War between the fiends
Highlight: n/a, a bit of a dud for me.
Length: 9p
5. Hard Time
Plot: The dead soul of a scholar who knows all about portals has been sent to the wrong afterlife; now the PCs need to go to Carceri to rescue that dead soul, who is making his way to a portal in an evil titan’s temple.
Utility: Nice intro to the people who are here because they’re dead
Highlight: Traveling through Carceri is dangerous because of environmental factors, but almost everyone else you meet is combat-optional
Length: 15p
(Quick note on page length: I’m not including full page art that doesn’t speak directly to the adventure, especially because this full page art is reused from other books, as far as I can tell. Also: boo!)
6. Epona’s Daughter
Plot: The PCs get hired to travel to a backwards planet to rescue a magical horse from a good guy who thinks that helping his people is more important than a magical horse.
Utility: I, uh, guess this shows how you can have old Star Trek style “planet of the week” adventures.
Highlight: No one is evil here, just misguided: the locals believe in good and evil fairies, but have not a lot of experience with demiihumans and clerics, so the PCs are naturally going to be stepping in it, culturally speaking, all over the place. But still kind of a weird dud for me.
Length: 16p
7. The Recruiters
Plot: The town that borders the Abyss starts to get so chaotic and evil that it’s about to slide into that hell. The leader of the town is actually trying to foment chaos so that he’ll be rewarded by the devils there, while the devils are actually trying to eliminate him. And now the PCs are trapped in this town. (If they try to escape, that’s selfish — read “evil” -- enough so that the town falls even faster into the Abyss.)
Utility: A great little introduction to the idea that places can slip between the planes if the vibe changes too far one way or another.
Highlight: The premise is just so solid and weird that I don’t mind that it feels a little thin in terms of resources for the DM. Like, it’s essentially a sandbox: can you stop these bad people and also make more people good and law-abiding? But there’s no real rules beyond “can you fight this demon?” I’d love to see “can you organize a mutual aid block?”
Length: 16p
8. The Hunt
Plot: The PCs have to keep a hunter safe, but when he kills a magical deer, they get transported to the Beastlands and hunted. It’s all one big chase to a place where people think they’ll be safe. Twist ending: They aren’t safe there, but the beasts hunting them are all good, so no one gets killed.
Utility: Not really sure.
Highlight: I guess that ending. This seems like a difficult adventure to run since it seems like the PCs could easily die if they fail their skill checks at running away — or at least, that’s what the players will think. And if the PCs kill some of the wolves/hawks chasing them, then wouldn’t someone want atonement? I’d almost prefer to see the follow-up adventure, where the PCs have to help some clueless hunter atone.
Length: 10p
9. People Under the Falls
Plot: The PCs discover a slaad invasion force and have to destroy the portal the slaad are using to get from their home in Limbo to their hunting ground in one of the upper realms. There’s a lot of backstory for what the head slaad is trying to do that doesn’t seem too interesting to me.
Utility: It’s, uh, an introduction to slaad, I guess?
Highlight: Uh, well, the PCs discover an inn where everyone has been slaughtered and then follow the blood trail into a cave, which gives this a different vibe. Not a good vibe, per se, but a different vibe.
Length: 8p
Some notes:
* Some of these adventures give ranges of levels and include notes about scaling up or down challenges, which I appreciate.
* There’s a few adventures that seem sort of like duds or too generic or maybe just the wrong frame for my tastes. (Like take “Epona’s Daughter” — right now it’s “find the magical horse and then … get it back.” What if, instead of that sort of open-ended method, you just said, for various reasons — like not wanting to negotiate with a kidnapper or let him know where you come from — that this was a heist.)
* But there’s a few here that really seem like they’re getting at something important about Planescape, like Love Letter, Hard Time, and The Recruiters.
What can we learn from these specific adventures? I think my take away is, given the choice between something people have seen before and something totally new, give them something totally new. So: “hunter turning into hunted” is a fairly standard trope, and the twist here of never really being in danger means the PCs may feel cheated or overreact; but this setup raises the question: if you were wronged someone when you didn’t realize it, how can you atone?
(So rather than an entire adventure that’s “run away,” have the PCs overwhelmed by the huntsman, their charge kidnapped or cursed so that all animals go crazy around him, and now the PCs get hired to make amends — or even convince the recalcitrant and dumb hunter why he needs to.
1.To Baator
Plot: The non-planar PCs stumble into a wizard’s lab and get transported to Baator (Hell) and need to find a portal to Sigil to be safe.
Utility: Another sort of introductory adventure.
Highlight: The PCs meet a pillar of heads, each with their own opinion about how to get to the gate.
Length: 16p
2. The Mazes
Plot: The PCs get tasked with entering one of Sigil’s Mazes — the prisons where the Lady of Pain puts people who threaten her rule — to recover the magical sword from an ex-faction leader. A sword that several other factions want.
Utility: I guess a sort of introduction to faction politics? The fact that people want a sword make this one feel ordinary — like where’s the philosophical issues that make factions interesting?
Highlight: The keys to get in about of the maze are nicely weird: a honey-dipped, gold-plated rose to get in and to get out, a plate for the prisoner’s meals.
Length: 9p
3. Love Letter
Plot: PCs have to deliver love letters from fiends on opposite sides of the Blood War.
Utility: Not everything on the planes is about gold and glory!
Highlight: Just a real solid plot, with real nice notes for scaling the adventure.
Length: 12p
4. Blood Storm
Plot: Fiends are staging a battle on a prime material plane and they have a deal that they can only bring so many of their type — so each tries to hire the PCs to take part on their side. Involves maybe following some disguised chaos fiends as they try to show you a good time.
Utility: An introduction to the weirdness of the Blood War between the fiends
Highlight: n/a, a bit of a dud for me.
Length: 9p
5. Hard Time
Plot: The dead soul of a scholar who knows all about portals has been sent to the wrong afterlife; now the PCs need to go to Carceri to rescue that dead soul, who is making his way to a portal in an evil titan’s temple.
Utility: Nice intro to the people who are here because they’re dead
Highlight: Traveling through Carceri is dangerous because of environmental factors, but almost everyone else you meet is combat-optional
Length: 15p
(Quick note on page length: I’m not including full page art that doesn’t speak directly to the adventure, especially because this full page art is reused from other books, as far as I can tell. Also: boo!)
6. Epona’s Daughter
Plot: The PCs get hired to travel to a backwards planet to rescue a magical horse from a good guy who thinks that helping his people is more important than a magical horse.
Utility: I, uh, guess this shows how you can have old Star Trek style “planet of the week” adventures.
Highlight: No one is evil here, just misguided: the locals believe in good and evil fairies, but have not a lot of experience with demiihumans and clerics, so the PCs are naturally going to be stepping in it, culturally speaking, all over the place. But still kind of a weird dud for me.
Length: 16p
7. The Recruiters
Plot: The town that borders the Abyss starts to get so chaotic and evil that it’s about to slide into that hell. The leader of the town is actually trying to foment chaos so that he’ll be rewarded by the devils there, while the devils are actually trying to eliminate him. And now the PCs are trapped in this town. (If they try to escape, that’s selfish — read “evil” -- enough so that the town falls even faster into the Abyss.)
Utility: A great little introduction to the idea that places can slip between the planes if the vibe changes too far one way or another.
Highlight: The premise is just so solid and weird that I don’t mind that it feels a little thin in terms of resources for the DM. Like, it’s essentially a sandbox: can you stop these bad people and also make more people good and law-abiding? But there’s no real rules beyond “can you fight this demon?” I’d love to see “can you organize a mutual aid block?”
Length: 16p
8. The Hunt
Plot: The PCs have to keep a hunter safe, but when he kills a magical deer, they get transported to the Beastlands and hunted. It’s all one big chase to a place where people think they’ll be safe. Twist ending: They aren’t safe there, but the beasts hunting them are all good, so no one gets killed.
Utility: Not really sure.
Highlight: I guess that ending. This seems like a difficult adventure to run since it seems like the PCs could easily die if they fail their skill checks at running away — or at least, that’s what the players will think. And if the PCs kill some of the wolves/hawks chasing them, then wouldn’t someone want atonement? I’d almost prefer to see the follow-up adventure, where the PCs have to help some clueless hunter atone.
Length: 10p
9. People Under the Falls
Plot: The PCs discover a slaad invasion force and have to destroy the portal the slaad are using to get from their home in Limbo to their hunting ground in one of the upper realms. There’s a lot of backstory for what the head slaad is trying to do that doesn’t seem too interesting to me.
Utility: It’s, uh, an introduction to slaad, I guess?
Highlight: Uh, well, the PCs discover an inn where everyone has been slaughtered and then follow the blood trail into a cave, which gives this a different vibe. Not a good vibe, per se, but a different vibe.
Length: 8p
Some notes:
* Some of these adventures give ranges of levels and include notes about scaling up or down challenges, which I appreciate.
* There’s a few adventures that seem sort of like duds or too generic or maybe just the wrong frame for my tastes. (Like take “Epona’s Daughter” — right now it’s “find the magical horse and then … get it back.” What if, instead of that sort of open-ended method, you just said, for various reasons — like not wanting to negotiate with a kidnapper or let him know where you come from — that this was a heist.)
* But there’s a few here that really seem like they’re getting at something important about Planescape, like Love Letter, Hard Time, and The Recruiters.
What can we learn from these specific adventures? I think my take away is, given the choice between something people have seen before and something totally new, give them something totally new. So: “hunter turning into hunted” is a fairly standard trope, and the twist here of never really being in danger means the PCs may feel cheated or overreact; but this setup raises the question: if you were wronged someone when you didn’t realize it, how can you atone?
(So rather than an entire adventure that’s “run away,” have the PCs overwhelmed by the huntsman, their charge kidnapped or cursed so that all animals go crazy around him, and now the PCs get hired to make amends — or even convince the recalcitrant and dumb hunter why he needs to.
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