Whoa! Surprise Planescape! It wasn't part of the plan, but I managed to find a copy of this rare book for 73 dollars, which is . . . maybe twice what is reasonable to pay but less than half of what it was going for at its peak so . . . I'm a smart shopper who makes responsible decisions?
Sigh. Who am I kidding? That gap on my list was driving me to distraction. If I ever find anything even close to a similar deal on Faction War, I'll probably try for a complete Planescape collection.
I think the reason A Guide to the Astral Plane (Monte Cook) became such a white whale for me is because, despite my occasional posturing, I'm exactly as vulnerable to the grid-filling compulsion as the authors of D&D. This here is a book that only exists because all of the other planes got their own individual or shared books and they couldn't consider the setting "complete" until they did them all. And I only bought it for the exact same reason. So if I ever gave the impression, what with my repeated statements of "Planescape is bad" or merciless mocking of end-page advertisements that claim Planescape is "Fantasy . . . Taken to the Edge", that I was somehow above it all or thought that I was better than you then let me clear it up once and for all: I'm not. I love what you do, and I'm honored to be here with you at the very bottom of the checklist, when you have run out of other things to do and are finally getting to the Astral Plane.
Actually, that's not entirely fair. I looked up the publication order and A Guide to the Ethereal Plane and The Inner Planes both came after this one. And upon reflection, I think those two books, in very different ways, felt more like late-period grid-filling than this one. A Guide to the Ethereal Plane felt like "the line is basically dead, so I might as well throw out all my wildest ideas and see what sticks." The Inner Planes felt like "the line is basically dead, so I might as well get this over with." A Guide to the Astral Plane, by contrast, feels like a book that was written under the assumption that Planescape had a future.
Lest you think I'm being too harsh here, I am absolutely certain that Monte Cook also thought the Astral Plane was a dud location and I have the textual evidence to back it up. The margin quote at the start of the Introduction:
"Boring? Where do you go for an interesting time?" - Someone who has visited the Astral talking to someone who hasn't?
And then, lest you think it was a one-off, a similar sentiment from a margin quote in Chapter One:
"Astral Plane? Oh, yeah, that's the place between us and them. Nothing there but conduits and dead gods. Hardly worth calling a plane." - Someone showing that planars can be as bad as the clueless.
The book never quite gets over this defensiveness. It's conspicuous. Also, hilariously, if you go by the subject matter of the book's chapters, the main shortcoming of the misguided planar in the second quote is that they forgot to mention the Githyanki. Other than that, the assessment is pretty spot on. This book is very much about proving wrong the conventional wisdom that the Astral Plane is boring.
And I guess it kind of succeeds. Like, I'm still of the belief that the only reason to go to the Astral Plane is because you're on your way to somewhere else, but I will concede that a game where the players spend a lot of time on the Astral Plane because they were waylaid on their way to somewhere else wouldn't necessarily be boring. You could be ejected from a damaged Astral Conduit, land on the petrified body of a dead god, and come into martial conflict with the Githyanki. It would be a memorable adventure.
At the risk of sounding impossibly back-handed and arch, I think the perfect encapsulation of this book (and perhaps even Planescape as a whole) comes from the tagline of the advertisement on the last page: "Fantasy . . . Taken to the Edge." That's exactly what Planescape does - it takes you to the edge and then sets up guard rails to make sure you don't actually go over.
For example, consider Anubis' new job, the self-appointed Guardian of Dead Gods. The book gives us an infinite, starry void where the bodies of dead gods float, stirring fitfully in their quiescence, unable to live and unable to truly, permanently die. The strange ichors that seep from their stony remains carry both temptations and dangers for those who would seek their power, but the scavenger mages must tread carefully, for the nightmares of an eternally dying god are themselves monsters of legend. . .
Also, if the Egyptian jackal-headed god of the dead spots you, he'll fucking nuke you from orbit. Not necessarily instantaneously or automatically, but also with no canon limitations that would stop him from doing it instantaneously or automatically. It's such a weird design decision, because it's unclear what you're even supposed to do with him as a DM. His mission is to stop mortals from desecrating and exploiting the corpses of the dead gods, but there's no difficulty dial there. If he doesn't show up, the PCs will get away with it (nightmare monsters notwithstanding) and if he does show up, they won't because he has literal godlike powers. And there's no reasonable way to predict or delay him showing up. He's basically a veto button that lets the DM to shut down any PC shenanigans that threaten to make the dead gods too disruptive to the campaign.
And it's like, yeah, dead gods floating through space, that's the edge of fantasy, at least in terms of D&D's conception of the genre. Planescape takes you right up to it. But in taking you to that edge, it kind of pushes the edge a little farther away and then refuses to take you there. You can raid a Githyanki outpost built on top of a dead god, or buy bootleg potions made from their extracted essences, but you can't break the magic item economy. You can't topple mortal kingdoms by coaxing the gods to dream apocalyptic nightmares. You won't gain mystic knowledge to overthrow the Lady of Pain. Hell, even the Athar citadel is built between the bodies of the dead gods, not touching any of them lest they draw the ire of Anubis.
I suspect that it's this unwillingness to break AD&D that keeps A Guide to the Astral Plane so closely tied to its "no, really, it's not boring, we promise" mission statement. The book doesn't talk enough about the rewards of venturing in the Astral. You can find something as breathtakingly monumental as a dead god, but you can't use the discovery to fuck shit up. It's the realm of pure thought, that transforms even those who enter physically into spiritual forms, but that mostly results in substituting your Intelligence score for your Strength score. You quite explicitly can't shape reality with the power of your mind. "This isn't the plane of wishes. A berk's just mind doesn't have that kind of power over the infinite Astral."
Likewise, time sort of stops for Astral travelers, holding the aging process in abeyance (though the years instantly catch up to you if you ever leave), but with the possible exception of (spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3) the Githyanki lich-queen Vlaakith, nobody seems to take much advantage of it. And despite all the mindstorms and psionic breezes and other weather-like phenomena that will bleed other people's thoughts into your head, there's no apparent way to weaponize or control the Astral plane's connection to individual minds. Basically, there are things to do in the Astral plane, but little reason to choose it as a destination in itself. It never escapes being "the place between us and them."
I guess writing this book was probably always a thankless task. Take the most interesting and original idea in the whole book - the Living Sea. Through some kind of magical nonsense, a permanent conduit to the Astral Plane opened up underneath some prime world's oceans. The result is a massive sphere of water, containing all manner of sea life that is slowly, but uncontrollably growing around the Astral end of the conduit. And because the Astral plane is the realm of thought, the water is now developing its own form of consciousness, as yet unable to communicate with interlopers but still showing troubling signs of becoming something beyond human comprehension.
Now, the tragedy of A Guide to the Astral Plane is that as interesting as this is, it is not half as interesting as the incidental revelation that there's no known way to close the conduit and so the Living Sea will continue to grow until the unknown prime world's oceans are completely drained. Even though it talked for less than a paragraph about the impossibility of going through the conduit backwards to visit the implied material world that would be experiencing this as a terrifying apocalyptic event where their sea levels are rapidly dropping for no apparent reason, just that little bit of speculation was enough to remind us that the Astral plane is vastly less interesting than the worlds it connects. The Astral side of the conduit is a scaled-down version of the Elemental Plane of Water and the Prime side of the conduit is epic cosmic fantasy in a world facing a rapidly-approaching doom.
And I don't want this to sound like I'm down on Mr. Cooke's work. He created both sides of this story. I'm not reaching or inferring like I usually do. He tells us about drained seas, about how no one has yet contacted the prime world through other means, about the cultural implications of the sunken ships that have already been drawn through. I am certain that the thought of viewing this phenomenon from the other side has occurred to him and if it did, he almost certainly came to the same conclusions I did. What I'm saying here is that this dilemma, where interesting things in the Astral imply the existence of more interesting things on the worlds they came from, is probably inevitable. The only way to conceivably make it otherwise is to elevate the Astral Plane's importance, make it a source of power too potent to be ignored. And that would break AD&D, which sort of needs the Astral Plane to just stay "that place that makes the Teleport spell work."
Planescape - Fantasy . . . taken to the edge.
Ukss Contribution: A lot of extremely not boring things to choose from here, which makes my decision to choose something kind of boring especially ironic. You don't need to eat on the Astral plane and you don't get hungry if you don't. But when you leave, all those skipped meals catch up with you, just like your aging. So some enterprising planeswalkers have set up restaurants near the exits of prominent Astral conduits. That sort of cynicism is . . . enchantingly human.
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