It wasn’t a storyline you would want to play through over a weekend, and lent itself well to plenty of other exploration around Sigil’s environs. Each of Boundary‘s chapters felt huge, at least a session worth in length and possibly much more dependent on what players did.

In the Abyss is split into three chapters just like its predecessor, though the actual content is much less equally divided here. So then, what does a Plansecape dungeon look like, exactly, and what makes it different from one anywhere else? These are the questions In the Abyss sets to answer, and it in fact does a pretty good job within this more limited scope. But sometimes people really do just want a good dungeon crawl, to go out there and bash in monsters heads with all their newfound trinkets and spells. These are the strengths of Planescape, so it’s little surprise that the designers wanted to lean hard on these aspects from the beginning. The game system had a rough time handling this sort of non-combat encounter, but that’s less important than the emphasis this immediately placed on roleplaying, character, and setting. Where so many other adventures at the time were still glorified dungeon crawls, it turned AD&D into a murder mystery investigation, made all the more interesting by the central mystery concerning whether people were ever in fact murdered at all. Planescape’s first standalone adventure, The Eternal Boundary, wasn’t exactly earth-shattering, but it was quite a contrast to typical Dungeons & Dragons stories.

How to survive the abyss 5e