Stray Gems From Horvath’s Hoard

A while back I reviewed Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground, Stu Horvath’s engaging run-through of RPG history told via product overviews. Stu’s actually been nice enough to send me a little supplementary product – the zine-sized Experience Points, a selection of material cut from the book. The zine is available via Exalted Funeral, a well-regarded distributor who still, after years of promising they are Definitely Working On It, Pinky-Swear, don’t have an adequate UK/Europe shipping solution – a ridiculous situation that’s persisted for years and has left Necrotic Gnome without a local storefront shipping to their own country, because they closed their own store in the expectation that Exalterd Funeral would get their shit together on this front in an orderly manner – so I’m extremely grateful to Stu for making it easier for me to get hold of it.

Experience Points is, essentially, more of the same, but a touch more niche; I can’t put hand on heart and say that any of these entries absolutely should have been in the book at the cost of one of those that did make it in, but it is still nice to see these. There’s more D&D stuff, of course, primarily third-party releases this time; the collection starts with a discussion of the Judges’ Guild supplement The Unknown Gods and ends with a look at Petty Gods, which was conceived as an updated riff on the Unknown Gods concept; there’s also a look at the Stonehell megadungeon, but it’s the deities books which offer the most interesting narrative, if only for illustrating how a community-led project can fill a gap which the commercialised industry wasn’t touching and no one individual self-publishing creator would have spawned by themselves.

On the first-party side of the coin there’s a deep dive into the novels and modules which TSR put out to cover the Time of Troubles metaplot event. This was a bid to try and provide an IC explanation for the shift from 1E to 2E, a concept I always thought was pretty muddle-headed in its undertaking to begin with. Why even bother explicitly stating that all the assassins have spontaneously died when you can just stop mentioning their existence? Why publish the original Forgotten Realms box to begin with if you’re going to render it out of date almost immediately? Why run big cosmic events to tidy up continuity issues when you can just quietly decanonise contradictory perspectives that don’t pan out? Horvath unpacks why such metaplot events can rake in money for publishers even though they arguably provide no net benefit to players or referees on balance.

Horvath’s Hoard

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.

Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.

In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.

Over On Fake Geek Boy: A Review of Planescape: Torment

Whilst many are digging deep into Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve been enjoying a replay of Planescape: Torment, and have ended up jotting down my thoughts over on my blog for reviews of books, videogames, movies and whatnot.

A Draconic Autopsy

Histories of D&D and TSR have become thick on the ground. Representing the gold standard – in terms of completeness, standard of scholarship, and avoiding a slide into hagiography – are the works of Jon Peterson, such as Playing At the World (covering the design and initial publication of OD&D), The Elusive Shift (digesting the early fan discourse within the RPG fandom), and Game Wizards (covering TSR in the years under the control of Gary Gygax and the Blume brothers).

Peterson’s books hit the high standard they do largely because he primarily bases his research on surviving contemporary documents, which aren’t prone to the misrememberings, mythologisings, evasions, and other inaccuracies which creep in when you’re looking at statements made by participants, especially long after the fact. On the other hand, relying on witness evidence offered up decades down the line can often be more fun; Kent David Kelly’s Hawk & Moor series might be much more reliant on such recollections, but some of the material it is able to dredge up is pretty juicy.

Ben Riggs’ Slaying the Dragon takes a bit of a middle route here – Riggs admits his reliance on interviews with a good many of the primary actors in the story he’s telling, but he does a good job of flagging where this is the case, noting where he wasn’t able to talk to significant actors who might otherwise have given a different perspective, and even points out instances where he double-checked claims with other interviewees to corroborate some testimony. In addition, he is able to make some significant coups in terms of turning up documentation, and flags when he’s able to rely on that information in order to present his narrative.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Riggs extends the story into a period which has so far been poorly served by existing work. So far, most of the histories out there have tended to give a lot of attention to the Gygax-helmed era of TSR, and comparatively little to what came afterwards. Peterson and Kelly’s histories haven’t advanced the timeline past the Gygax era, but at least have the excuse of covering it in sufficient detail that giving a similar treatment to the Williams years would be a major undertaking in itself. Some of the more hagiographic treatments of the story have tended to either sing the praises of Saint Gary (a term Riggs uses here in jest – he doesn’t buy into the whitewashing of Gygax’s reputation) or maximise the role of Dave Arneson. (Riggs takes the position, which I think is the most reasonable one, that OD&D was the sort of thing which needed Arneson to come up with the seed idea in the first place, but Gygax to turn it into a product that could actually be sold to an audience and give them a faint hope of replicating something approximating similar gameplay.) Other, general histories like Shannon Appelcine’s Designers & Dragons have given broad overviews but haven’t gone into depth.

Slaying the Dragon, on the other hand, takes a much different approach. It dispatches the Gygax-helmed era in some 61 pages, and spends over 200 subsequent pages going into a deep dive on the next phase of TSR – the era which would see its critical and artistic zenith, its decline and fall, the purchase of TSR by Wizards of the Coast, and the initial phase of repairing burned bridges which Peter Adkison and Lisa Stevens of Wizards had to undertake.

In other words, this is the first deep dive into the Lorraine Williams era of TSR we’ve seen.

The Arcane Top 50 – Where Are They Now?

Arcane, a short-lived British tabletop gaming magazine from Future Publishing which ran from December 1995 to June 1997, is a name to conjure by for many gamers of around my age. I came to the hobby after White Dwarf had become a Games Workshop in-house advertising platform, and just as Dragon was on the verge of dropping its coverage of non-TSR RPGs altogether; that meant I got a brief taster of TSR having a broader scope of coverage, and missed out on the golden age of White Dwarf altogether.

With other RPG-focused gaming magazines available in the UK either consisting of patchy US imports or a few local magazines published on a decidedly variable basis (whatever did happen to ol’ Valkyrie?), the arrival of Arcane was immensely welcome. Sure, even by this early stage the Internet was already becoming an incomparable source of both homebrewed material and cutting-edge RPG news, but much of that was in the form of Usenet and forum discussions of variable quality or ASCII text files. To get something which was informative, read well, and looked nice, print media was still just about where it was at.

Truth be told, taking a look back at Arcane in more recent years I’m less impressed than I was at the time. It took largely the same approach to its own subject matter (primarily RPGs, with some secondary consideration to CCGs – because they were so hot at the time they really couldn’t be ignored – and perhaps a light sniff of board game content) that Future’s videogame magazines took to theirs, particularly the lighter-hearted PC Gamer/Amiga Power side of things rather than the likes of, say, Edge. That meant it focused more on brief news snippets, reviews, and fairly entry-level articles on subjects than it did on offering much in the way of in-depth treatment of matters.

Castles Forlorn, Module’s Smedman’s

Hailing from 1993, Castles Forlorn‘s original form was as a boxed set adventure supplement for Ravenloft. In fact, it was one of the last products of the game line’s earliest version – making reference not to the 1994 revised boxed set, but to the original Realm of Terror box from 1990 and the 1992 Forbidden Lore box which expanded it somewhat. The other products extensively referenced therein are the Monstrous Compendium volumes (generally the core ones and the Ravenloft appendices) and Van Richten’s Guide to Ghosts.

Indeed, to a certain extent the adventure is a worked example of how you apply the Guide to Ghosts, since the castle which gives the module its title is absolutely stuffed with ghosts given extra depth using techniques and ideas along the lines of that book’s suggestions. Wait, though, isn’t the title Castles Forlorn? Why, yes it is -for the castle at the heart of the broken realm of Forlorn is three in one, existing as it does in three time periods at the same time, so characters venturing therein may, through their experiences in those time periods, have a shot at unpicking the terrible story underlying the fall of the realm to the Dark Powers.

What Music They Make!

Some recent discussions on the Discord channel had prompted me to take a second look at Ravenloft, and as luck would have it I had a chance to pick up Children of the Night: Vampires at a very reasonable price. This was the first of the Children of the Night series, conceived as a sort of companion to the popular Van Richten’s Guides.

Indeed, the credits include a dedication to the late Nigel Findley, who wrote the classic Van Richten’s Guide to Vampires, both setting the format for the rest of a series and providing a classic examination of how to take a generic monster manual entry and extrapolate an interesting villain for it. The Children of the Night supplements carry that idea forwards by providing sets of “worked examples”, if you will, of distinctive characters of the relevant type, fleshed out into fully-developed NPCs. In a nice touch, each NPC writeup also has a mini-adventure associated with it, providing an instant hook for getting the character in question involved in your campaign. Whilst optimised for Ravenloft, as with Van Richten’s Guides themselves it’s no big burden to adapt the material here to other campaign settings, which was an aspect of the Ravenloft support line which I always thought TSR didn’t make enough of.

Multiplanar Monster Mash

For the purposes of filling out coverage of the Planescape line, I’ll just briefly cover here the various monster-oriented supplements put out for the line. Most 2nd edition settings got a bunch of these, but those for Planescape might have had the biggest job of any outside Ravenloft. Whilst Ravenloft‘s monster material needed to create creatures which could be viable gothic adversaries, rather than mere “slay me and take my treasure” gribblies, Planescape needed to provide suites of monsters to suit the schticks of each of the dozens of planes involved in the game.

The first Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix was largely there to do two jobs: replace the long out of print Outer Planes Monstrous Compendium Appendix, and put all the devils and demons (and modrons and slaad!) back into AD&D which the more controversy-averse approach by TSR management had caused to be left on the shelf in preparing 2E. It’s pretty solid, not least because a lot of the creatures outlined here are tried and true iconic entities from 1E. The second appendix concentrates on filling out the Outer Planes roster, including a stab at detailing the Rilmani, who are to the true Neutral Outlands what celestial are to the good planes or fiends to the evil planes or modrons to Mechanus or Slaad to limbo. This was an easy enough job to do because ultimately the Outer Planes are the fun, characterful ones.

The third Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix was put together by Monte Cook, and my heart goes out to the guy because he had the thankless task of trying to make the monsters of the Inner Planes (plus some Astral and Ethereal critters) interesting. (To that extent, it parallels the long slog he had to do on the official Inner Planes supplement.) To be fair, with the vast numbers of paraelemental and quasielemental planes cluttering things up, he had a better pallete to work with than just “fire stuff”, “water stuff”, “air stuff” and “earth stuff”, and he makes some headway with the idea of “Parallelism” (the concept that anything on one elemental plane will tend to have its equivalents on the other), and most of the individual monster entries are decent, but it’s a bit of a samey concept for a supplement and I suspect few Planescape games spend enough time in the Inner Planes to use most of these anyway.

Another monster-focused book from the line is Colin McComb’s Faces of Evil: the Fiends. This is a sort of extended meditation on the organisation and social structure of the fiends, presented as a collection of in-character essays (and, annoyingly, assumes a particular outcome to one of the adventures in Hellbound: the Blood War as canon – fuck off, metaplots, nobody likes you). It isn’t quite a Van Richten’s Guide to Fiends – notably because the Ravenloft line already did one – but it’s very helpful for fleshing out the internal structure of the infernal realms and could therefore also be very useful for any non-Planescape campaign in which the machinations of demons and devils and their cousins are significant elements.

The Overlooked Planes

Though the Outer Planes enjoyed a lavish boxed set presentation in the Planescape setting, the Inner Planes (and the planar highways of the Ethereal and Astral) had to settle for being detailed in more conventional books. Part of this probably comes from the fact that the relevant supplements came from later on in the game line’s lifespan – when TSR’s financial woes were biting or after the Wizards of the Coast buyout enforced a more grounded approach. But part of it also comes from the fact that the Outer Planes are, simply put, more interesting – especially from the perspective of the purported “philosophers with clubs” approach of Planescape.

The Outer Planes are planes of ideology, the Inner Planes are planes of materialism; as such, the Outer Planes fit Planescape‘s declared aims much better than the Outer Planes do. In some respect, even the Prime Material Plane feels like it can back up the ideas of the setting better than the Inner Planes; you can have a sort of “as above, so below” thing going on in which developments in the Outer Planes have subtle and pervasive effect on Prime Material worlds. It doesn’t quite feel possible to do that in a universe made entirely of water. I know for a fact that every Planescape campaign I have participated in gave way more attention to the Outer Planes than the Inner, and to be honest it feels like the core setting was written with the Outer Planes very much in mind and support for the Inner being nothing more than a mere afterthought.

However, the idea of such guides isn’t entirely useless. Even if they are sidelined in Planescape, they’re still part of the Dungeons & Dragons cosmology, and as such the line would feel incomplete without detailing them. On top of that, support for these planes is of at least some use to non-Planescape campaigns, provided they’re at a level where characters are making significant extraplanar excursions or if the referee wants to have an incursion from the Planes in question hit their campaign world.

A Guide to the Astral Plane

Monte Cook’s approach to the Astral Plane, which underlies the philosophically-driven Outer Planes plus the Prime Material, is to take the idea of it as a place of abstract mental concepts and run with it, pushing the idea that it’s not so much a plane as a Platonic realm of ideas, a nonplanar nonspace that exists in the conceptual gaps between things that’s only called a “Plane” because that’s a convenient way to think of it, inaccurate though it is.

In particular, I really like the way Cook talks it up as a backstage area which people were never meant to peep into, and which was largely uninhabited until people went exploring there – that both ties into the concept of interplanar conduits and portals passing through there and into the idea that it’s where dead gods are to be found. (The gods, of course, do not need a physical form – but they certainly represent enormous intellectual concepts, thus their corpses litter the Astral Plane as giant floating conceptual islands.)

A big advantage Cook has as far as filling out the page count goes is the fact that the Astral Plane is home to the Githyanki, who’ve consistently been one of the most entertaining and interesting monster races in Dungeons & Dragons ever since their introduction in the 1E Fiend Folio. Somehow, despite occasionally unfortunate tendencies in the artwork towards making them look like racist caricatures of Chinese people rather than the withered clearly-not-any-sort-of-human weirdos their better depictions make them out to be, their essential awesomeness has never been diluted. The likes of the drow have had to deal with femdom fetishists, Drizzt fans, and a depiction bordering on blackface over the years, but somehow there’s something about “Interplanar badasses who live on the Astral, are ruled by a lich queen and fight genocidal wars against the illithids who once enslaved them and the Githzerai who split from them during their revolution against the mind flayers” which proves impossible to screw up. Cook’s take on them is no exception.

A Guide to the Ethereal Plane

Bruce R. Cordell tackles the Ethereal Plane which connects the Prime to the Inner Planes here. For the most part he struggles because he doesn’t quite have as strong a hook to hang it on as Monte has with the Astral, but the fact that the Ethereal is the home to the Demiplanes is of some help. The diverse nature of them (you’ve got the Demiplane of Dread where Ravenloft happens, the Demiplane of Time, various realms of dream and so on and so forth) does mean that the Ethereal ends up being a bit of a conceptual dustbin, but at least allows Cordell to fill the page count.

I am altogether unconvinced that there’s a meaningful conceptual difference between the Astral and the Ethereal Planes; certainly, in the various folkloric and fictional sources drawn on in devising the planar cosmology of D&D, “the astral plane” and “the ethereal plane” would seem to me to have been basically synonymous. Cordell does a decent job here of filling a book about the Ethereal, but it’s mostly clarifications of material already known plus some notes on things like the monsters that can be encountered there and some sample locales.

The Inner Planes

Monte Cook and William W. Connors have the truly thankless task here of making the various elemental, energy, paraelemental and quasielemental planes interesting. Here they have the advantage that the absurd number of paraelemental and quasielemental planes means they can fill the page count of the book without necessarily having to develop any of these specific planes very much – whilst the core elemental planes get fairly chunky writeups, the paraelemental and quasielemental planes only get 4-6 pages each, which means that once Cook and Connors cover the very basics they’ve already covered most of the space allocated.

The basic problem here is that in a campaign setting whose elevator pitch is “philosophers with clubs”, the Inner Planes don’t really lend themselves to philosophy very much at all, since each one just consists of a particular type of matter dominating the realm in question. The book more or less acknowledges this; whilst it talks about some ideas underpinning its treatment of the Inner Planes – like “Parallelism”, the idea that things which arise on one Inner Plane will tend to have their equivalents on the other Inner Planes, it still has to admit that there just isn’t much grist for the philosophical mill here.

This is largely a consequence of the legacy Planescape inherited from older treatments of the planes, but The Inner Planes, whilst it does offer a few interesting places in the elemental realms to visit, still ultimately doesn’t do much to change the fact that it’s the Outer Planes which tend to be where much of the action is. As A Guide to the Astral Plane established, you can do some interesting philosophical stuff with the Astral too, and A Guide to the Ethereal Plane, whilst it didn’t find an interesting philosophy to hang the Ethereal Plane on, at least established it as an interesting sandbox to cook up demiplanes and the like. The Inner Planes, though, leaves the elemental realms as being decidedly secondary in the wider action of Planescape, perhaps inevitably.

The Sourcebook That Never Was

The one sourcebook which I think the original Planescape line most needed, and yet never received, is one for the Prime Material Plane(s). Whilst, of course, any non-Planescape and non-Ravenloft D&D setting (or any setting suitable for adaptation on the fly to D&D) can be found there, at the same time it would have been nice to have a supplement offering tools for coming up with especially bizarre parallel material planes, perhaps with a suitable set of worked examples. It would also have been a good chance to have the philosophical struggles of the Planescape setting reflected interestingly in the lives of the Primes. Let’s say the Athar get the upper hand in the cross-multiverse struggle… what does that mean for Anytown, Faerun?

Planar Boxes

The massive proliferation of boxed sets from TSR in the mid-1990s might not be the primary contributor to their financial downfall, but they certainly posed dilemmas for shops and customers alike. From a consumer perspective – particularly for those of us who were too young to really have much discretionary income at the time – such products were incredibly visually tempting but also rather expensive to keep up with, and it didn’t help that in some product lines there seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to which boxes were truly important which were not.

Nonetheless, there’s no question that the best TSR boxed sets are absolutely gorgeous items, TSR using its status as industry leader to produce some downright beautiful work. The real question comes in as to how much of it actually represented useful, game-worthy material. To that extent, the major boxed sets around which the Planescape line was built stand at the head of the pack. I’ve previously covered the core box, but now it’s time to take a look at the rest of the rabble.

Planes of Chaos

The first boxed set supplement sets the pattern for the rest of the Planes of… series. You have a booklet of player-facing information, you have a DM-facing description of the planes in question (in this case the five Outer Planes whose natures range from Chaotic Good to Chaotic Evil on the Great Wheel), you have a set of adventure ideas, some additional monsters, and some really beautiful poster maps.

This time around the DM information is offered in a single thick booklet, and by and large does a good job of injecting extra depth and flavour and detail and adventure-worthy stuff into each of the planes in question. The player’s guide offers decent pointers on how to go and do adventures in the planes in question, and also usefully introduces the concept of “sects” – planar groups powerful enough to be of note, especially in the planes especially compatible with their philosophy, and who may even have a presence in Sigil, but who do not have enough influence there to be a full-blown faction controlling some aspect of Sigil’s governance.

The introduction of this feature to the setting is a great help in ensuring that Sigil politics does not become too ossified; not only can a great campaign be played around the elevation of a sect to faction status (most probably coinciding with the fall of an existing faction to sect status), but it also points to a way you can customise Sigil to your own taste by swapping out factions that don’t work for your campaign with sects that are a better fit.

The adventures booklet is actually much more useful than I remember it being; rather than presenting a fully-developed adventure or two, it instead offers a series of substantial one-page adventure notes – one set for each plane in the box – each giving you plenty of scope to adapt it to your campaign and not overwriting it to the extent that it becomes a railroad but giving you enough support and pointers that it’s more helpful than a mere adventure seed.

Developed by Lester Smith and Wolfgang Baur, Planes of Chaos adds important flesh to the bones of Planescape, and whilst it may have been more economical to present it as a single book, the poster maps and other aspects of the boxed set presentation are gorgeous enough that I am inclined to forgive that.

Planes of Law

The second box in the series gives a similar treatment to the Lawfully-inclined planes, with the major difference in presentation being that rather than having a single thick GM book, you instead get a sheath of little booklets, one for each plane. Whilst this does make for gorgeous presentation (the more of that super-1990s Sandman-style cover art I see the better as far as I’m concerned), it also makes the boxed set rather more cluttered – and I can’t help but suspect it probably drove up the manufacturing cost substantially.

Beyond that, I really don’t have much to say about it – it sticks close enough to the Planes of Chaos game plan that if you liked that, you’d probably want this too.

Planes of Conflict

The third box in the trilogy tackles the Neutrally-inclined planes except for the Outlands, which are detailed perfectly well in the core Planescape set. Hence the title – for whereas the other boxes each respectively detailed a set of planes that formed a continuous arc on the Great Wheel, the six planes here consist of three Neutral Good sorts and three Neutral Evil sorts, and as such are radically opposed to each other.

Once again the presentation of Dungeon Master-focused information is tweaked – as a compromise position between the “one thick book” approach of Planes of Chaos and “every plane gets a booklet!” one of Planes of Law, there are two separate booklets here – one for the good-aligned planes, one for the evil-aligned one.

Unfortunately, the presented adventures shift from the useful adventure seeds from the previous two boxes into more developed efforts. This is a problem for two reasons: the first is that the adventures are developed just a shade past the point where it’s trivially easy to repurpose them, necessitating more work to make them fit the action of your campaign and the approach of your player characters than the briefer seeds of the previous boxes.

The second is that, because they take up more space, there simply isn’t space for an adventure corresponding to each of the planes detailed, which I think is a huge mistake: part of the point of these boxed sets is to establish the planes as viable locales for adventure, and the fact that the developers don’t seem to have been able to think up an adventure for each and every plane covered here sends precisely the wrong message. Whilst it is nice that the trilogy of boxes was completed, it’s a shame that they didn’t take the same adventure seed approach across all three.

Hellbound: the Blood War

Written primarily by Colin McComb and Monte Cook, this final major boxed set for Planescape doesn’t describe the planes as such – instead, it details the most prominent interplanar conflict in the game, the Blood War between the demons and devils.

To be honest, this is the point where TSR should really have stepped back and considered whether it would be best to just put this stuff out as a single book. You have your player booklet, your DM booklet (which proposes an interesting “truth” behind the Blood War for those who feel like it particularly needs one), and an adventure booklet of three reasonably developed adventures; beyond that you don’t get a whole lot to justify making this a boxed set. There’s no poster maps or anything like that; there’s a brief comic book, The Bargain, written by Jeff Grubb and stuffed with gorgeous Tony DiTerlizzi art, but the story is nothing to get too excited about and it feels like an excuse to stuff in more DiTerlizzi art, as is Visions of War, a booklet of illustrations you are supposed to show your players at certain points in the prewritten adventures. To be honest, it feels like at this stage they were grasping at straws to justify making this a boxed set.

Still, the actual information here is really good. The player booklet offers just enough to justify why player characters may want to stick their nose in this infernal business in the first place, whilst the DM booklet really helps unpack why the Blood War is not merely the fiends’ business but is in effect a microcosm of the wider multiverse-wide conflict of Law and Chaos: precisely because the fiends are such bad neighbours and nobody wants the the wrong flavour of fiend to win, you have stuff like the major powers of Mechanus and Limbo using it as a proxy war, and the various flavours of angel trying to keep the fiends fighting each other as much as possible and keeping innocents out of harm’s way to the extent that they can. It’s therefore a conflict which could conceivably have ramifications anywhere, which is really useful because it helps stop the setting feel as static as it can do if you just look over the prior boxed sets. The developed adventures I might not run as written, but they seem to be reasonably open to wildly variant outcomes, and there’s a good spread offered between mercenary errand work and stuff that could extensively change the direction of the War. The “all evil all the time” backdrop of the lower planes can tend to get wearing, but on the whole Hellbound is a great addition to Planescape lore.