A Change of Pace

Whoa. This will not be DnD or writing related. I seem to be going on at great length about those two topics lately, which makes sense as they are my Big Thing(s) right now. Anyway, I decided I wanted to ramble about Planescape: Torment. Well, I guess this post will have to be DnD related because Torment is a DnD game. Anyway, we'll see where this takes us and work on the labels when we're done. Torment is hands down my favorite computer game in the whole wide world. It tops Fallout and Oblivion and Disgaea. Heck. If Fallout fucked Disgaea and their gay child had a civil union with Oblivion and they adopted an at risk Chinese girl, she would not hold a candle to the gloriousness that is Torment. (This bit functions under the assumption that your environment and role models play a big part in the quality of person you become). Torment is an older PC game, can't remember specific year it came out but it was around the time of the original Fallouts and Baldur's Gates and Icewind Dale. Granted, I enjoy all of those games and they are all in some way connected to Interplay and/or Black Isle, but Torment is King.

In Torment you play an undying amnesiac with skin about the thickness of a concrete block due to the mass of scars you've become in your time wandering the planes. You wake up in a mortuary, or rather THE Mortuary of Sigil (center of the effing Multiverse). You're Clueless, and your only companions (so far) are the cryptic messages etched into your flesh and a floating skull with a mouth fouler than Satan's asshole after playing the catcher in his own civil union.

Hmm, in retrospect that may have crossed a line. Lets move along.

My love of the game comes from the fact that like the setting it is based in, your actions, your very thoughts and words, can reshape the planes to your liking. If you give yourself a name for people to call you by, a man by that name (created by your will and the speaking of the name by others) becomes real and you find him and can unmake him with your will, or you can allow him to forge his own path in the Multiverse.

The entire point of the game is to define who you are, to figure out what determines the nature of a man. And also to track down your errant soul and possibly figure out who the fuck is trying to kill you and why. Granted, killing you is a minimal impediment to the quest at best, but the story goes that the more often you die the more fragile your memories become, thus your current state of being a clueless sod.

Don't worry though, you can eventually become a cutter whose very steps shake the planes.

Part of the appeal of the game is that a large portion of it can be completed just by talking. You can gain thousands of valuable XPs just by discussing shit with your companions (the talking skull, a puritan succubus, a man who has become a living portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire, a planar robot on a quest to find individuality, a suit of armor animated by the ideals of justice and vengeance, a half-fiend that hates you as much as she loves you, and Dak'kon who is hard to break down into half a sentence). In fact, the final boss of the game can be defeated through a combination of will (i.e. high Wisdom, Intelligence, and Charisma scores) and astute dialogue choices. I have never seen that in any game I've played. There are modern games that allow you to "talk" your way out of shit, but I've always had to put a round between the eyes of the Big Fucking Evil Dude in the last room.

Along the way to the story's multi-ending conclusion you encounter a variety of insane locations and the denizens therein. You find a rat king so large and so powerful its very thoughts can assault you with violence. You help a living city give birth. You can ensure the eternal survival of a city long destroyed. You parley with a golem the size of a building trapped in a war machine of entropy bent on breaking the bonds of the Multiverse. On and on and on.

So yeah, that is a bit about Torment. To be clear, it is the barest tip of the iceberg.

Hmm...cue installation process.

Music: Nictotine Stains - Siouxsie and the Banshees