The Digital Antiquarian - 08 Jun 2026

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The photographer's model for the visage of The Nameless One on the now-iconic Planescape: Torment box was actually Guido Henkel, the game's producer, who was enlisted at the last minute when the planned professional model had a "scheduling conflict."

This article tells part of the story of Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop and on computers.

Usually if you choose the longest dialog option, that's the best option.

- Chris Avellone

Quite some years ago now, I briefly interviewed Brian Fargo about Interplay's 1988 adaptation of the William Gibson novel Neuromancer. He was plainly busy and a little distracted with more modern game-development matters - this was in the midst of the Kickstarter-funded Wasteland revivals - but he was helpful and friendly enough during the half-hour or so that I spoke to him. Toward the end of our conversation, he mentioned that he had a box full of papers from his Interplay days gathering dust in a filing cabinet in his home office. Upon hearing this, I leapt immediately to make a pitch for my archivist friends at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. And lo and behold, a Brian Fargo collection showed up at the Strong within a year or so. I don't know whether these two events are related, but I like to think that they are.

Regardless, the next time I made it up to the Strong, I naturally made it a point to go through the collection. And it was there, amidst a mishmash of other documents spanning the nearly twenty years that Fargo spent running Interplay, that I first stumbled upon the original pitch document for Planescape: Torment, the one that crossed his desk in June of 1997 and led to the project being formally green-lit. I found this document rather shocking at the time, in that its tone was so totally out of keeping with the hallowed reputation which the game had long enjoyed even then as the most credible claimant to the status of true Interactive Art that the CRPG genre has ever produced. Much of this pitch, by contrast, seemed to have been written by Joe Lieberman's most stereotypical nightmare: by a sadistic, DOOM-addled teenager who turned it out in between dry-humping everything around him with an even vaguely feminine shape.

No more using boring swords, daggers, or bows to carve bloody swaths through opponents. Plunge scalpels into foes' eyes, lace their food with poisonous embalming fluid, push them into man-eating pockets of ooze, sic them with sarcastic biting skulls, hurl them into razorvines, conjure burrowing rot grubs within a victim's brain, cast spells that make them bleed from every orifice, or change a person's scent so they attract packs of hungry rats. Deliver punishment in ways that will bring a smile to your face.

"Fireball" can go hide in the fucking corner when you unleash your arsenal. Jam your hand into an opponent's body, rip out his soul, and tell it to kill its owner. Make a gesture and summon a blanket of crawling, biting insects to turn your enemy into a Happy Meal. Send your foes on a field trip to Hell without a permission slip. Taunt someone to death. Summon your darkest shadows from across existence and send them into battle to feed on your opponent's physical strength. Your succubus ally can kiss your opponents to death - they die with a smile on their face.

This game will have lots of babes that make the player go wow. There will be fiendish babes, human babes, angelic babes, Asian babes, and even undead babes. Think babes. Then think more babes.

To which one can only reply, whoa... whoa. Settle down there, Beavis, before you rub that thing raw.

This document, which has long since surfaced publicly and made the rounds of the Internet, has become something of a problem for Planescape: Torment's cult fandom, being so markedly at odds with what they wish the game to be. Some have gone so far as to claim that the juvenile profanity was nothing more than an elaborate ruse to get Brian Fargo and his marketing cronies to sign off on such an uncompromising piece of art, or that this is the only corporate pitch document in the history of the world to inhabit the category of satire. But personally, I'm not buying these pat explanations. I think that the finished Planescape: Torment that we know is a blending of the adolescent and the rarefied, the commercial and the idealistic. It's not that the higher concepts and grander themes don't exist. It's just that they're embedded into a licensed and branded Dungeons & Dragons computer game - made by, let's face it, a bunch of nerdy twenty-something American men with the same predilections and blind spots as their peers elsewhere in the industry. We probably shouldn't allow ourselves to get quite as precious about it as we often do.

For what's worth, I suspect that Chris Avellone himself might more or less agree with this assessment deep down in his heart of hearts. In every interview I've seen him give on the subject of Planescape: Torment, he's been distinctly reluctant to take on the persona of the auteur creating timeless art for the ages. He tends to speak more in the terms of a creative professional who was given a job to do: "Like just about every game I've worked on in my career, the franchise or premise was mandated, and then I worked within the parameters given." He prefers to frame the protagonist's journey to self-knowledge more as a way of flattering the typical gamer's sensibilities than a conscious artistic masterstroke.

It is a very selfish game. After about ten years of game-mastering players... that's really all they care about. They want the entire adventure to revolve around them. Players want to hear people talking about them. It's the ultimate ego stroke.

Again, this is not to say that Planescape: Torment doesn't resonate in certain places with the proverbial human condition. It's merely to say that it's a complicated, piebald beast. Is it art? Maybe, depending on how you define such things, since art is always in the eye of the beholder. Is it a penetrating work of moral philosophy? Maybe, to some extent, but maybe not quite so much as some folks want it to be. Is it well-written? Intermittently, although seldom on a sentence-by-sentence level. Is it brave and groundbreaking in the context of its time and circumstances? Absolutely. Is it a great game, full stop? Eh...

Building the perfect box-cover beast...

Fair warning: a considerable number of Planescape: Torment spoilers follow!

Baldur's Gate, the only Infinity Engine game to precede Planescape: Torment, attempts very explicitly to recreate the pleasures of playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons with your friends. The companions whom you collect around you could easily be the avatars of said friends. Each of them is an archetype - fighter, magic user, cleric, thief - which constitutes one part of a Gary Gygax-approved well-balanced adventuring party. The game employs the classic "a group of adventurers met in a bar and went questing" setup. There's an overarching plot, but it's really just an excuse to explore more terrain, fight more monsters, and grow steadily stronger. If you want, you can even play Baldur's Gate together with your real-life friends, with each of you taking control of one character (although it's rather clunky in practice, being subject to the technological limitations of the late 1990s).

Whatever else it happens to be, Planescape: Torment is nothing like that. It's the very specific story of one very specific character, presented it a way that would never have worked with a gang of others sitting around the tabletop. Companions do arrive to accompany him, but they are always peripheral to his central psychodrama. There is no multi-player mode here. Having one would make no sense.

The protagonist of Planescape: Torment is the appropriately named Nameless One, a zombified shamble of flesh and bone who wakes up at the beginning of the game on a mortuary slab in Sigil, the city of inter-planar doors, with no idea who he is or how he got there. So, he sets off to try to find out. Along the way, he meets the aforementioned companions who join him on his journey. One or two of them he even meets in a bar, but these are not your typical happy-go-lucky adventurers with mercenary stars in their eyes. The fact is that each of their stories has long ago become interwoven with that of the Nameless One himself, generally to their detriment, and even though he can't remember any of it. His own backstory will prove to be far longer and stranger than you or he might ever have thought possible, encompassing hundreds of lifetimes lived out all over the planes of existence, during which he has been good and evil and everything in between. His true quest, it will gradually become clear, is not merely to find out who he really is. Doing so is just a prerequisite to stopping the cycle of rebirths, owning his sins, and finally bringing his story to an end.

Planescape: Torment demonstrates the flexibility of the Infinity Engine. In keeping with the more personal focus of the story, the team at Interplay moved the camera in closer to show the characters on the screen better, condensed the interface down to a single bar at the bottom of the screen, and reworked the controls to make use of a popup, adventure-game-style radial verb menu.

Not only does Planescape: Torment subvert the traditional plot outline of a CRPG by turning a triumphalist power fantasy into a tragic journey of self-discovery, but it subverts many of the standard CRPG mechanics to serve its agenda. The Nameless One is immortal, which means that defeat and "death" in combat is a minor inconvenience at worst; he will always wake up once again on his mortuary slab, with all of his inventory, companions, and experience points intact. (In some places, he is even required to "die" in order to advance the plot.) With physical threats being thus robbed of their menace, a clever dialog response is almost always worth more experience points than defeating the same interlocutor in battle. Swords, armor, and most of the other usual trappings of heroic adventure are seldom seen, replaced by stranger concoctions, like a floating skull who can upgrade his attack by acquiring sharper teeth. Planescape: Torment is not your parents' CRPG.

To wit: if you come to this game expecting a plane-skipping roller-coaster ride through a wide variety of environments, I'm afraid you're destined to be disappointed. Most of it takes place within Sigil. You start out in the slums and eventually make your way to slightly posher districts of the city, but the general atmosphere remains one of futility and decay from first to last. I'm frankly not sure how to respond to this. My wide-eyed inner child, the one who used to consume pulpy sci-fi novels by the dozen, thinks it's false advertising to promise us a city of doors to infinite possibility and then deliver only this sad-sack assemblage of run-down mundanities. My more mature incarnation, the one who studied (or in some cases suffered through) the literary classics at university, thinks it might be an admirable case of a game sticking to its guns. But even he begins to feel crushed under the sheer weight of misery on display here, begins to wonder what pathetic excuse for a multiverse this is that has such a squalid, nihilistic centerpiece.

Planescape: Torment has its share of interface issues, but the quest log at least is far more usable than the one in Baldur's Gate.

In practice, much of your time in Planescape: Torment will be spent wandering through each new district of Sigil as it opens up, clicking on every character who has a name or otherwise non-generic description in order to initiate conversation. Make no mistake. These people like to talk... oh, my God, do they like to talk. A minority of them have information or assistance to offer that pertains to the main quest, or at least to one of the many side-quests. Most of them, however, just "rattle their bone-box," as the Sigil lingo goes, for the sake of hearing it rattle, telling you all about their hardscrabble lives in paragraph after paragraph of text. I find that it becomes numbing after a while, a symphony of despair that just keeps hammering away on the same relentlessly grim note. It's Down and Out in Paris and London, except an order of magnitude longer in a different dimension.

The Cant - the Cockney-inspired lingo of Sigil - is striking, even if it is lifted from TSR's Planescape boxed set rather than being an innovation of this development team. All the same, the writing has a rough-draft quality to it that includes but is by no means limited to the typos and minor grammatical errors that are strewn fairly liberally throughout, the well-nigh inevitable result of laying down so very much text in a relatively short span of time. It's enough to make you long for the days when computers were primitive enough that even text was expensive, such that developers had to choose their words with care, had to make sure that every single one of them counted. Failing that, we might wish that someone in Interplay's marketing department had insisted that the whole game be voice-acted, which would have served the same purpose of forcing the developers to include only those words that really matter. (As it is, only the occasional line or two is voiced.)

Editing, in any sense of the word, was clearly not a priority here. Back in the 1980s, Infocom employed a full-time editor from the book-publishing world to polish and tighten the prose in its games. But alas, such work was far beyond the core competencies of a 1990s studio like Interplay. The only guiding principle here seems to be the more words, the better. Matters reach a kind of absurd climax when you wander into a bar in which the patrons spout verbatim paragraphs from the old TSR Planescape campaign setting, copied and pasted into the computer game. One can easily imagine that the developers must have been paid by the word, the way people like to say that the similarly verbally incontinent Charles Dickens once was. Whether they were or not, talk is way, way too cheap in Planescape: Torment.

At times, you can almost palpably sense Chris Avellone and his friends straining to put words in the mouths of so many superficially indistinguishable characters in ways that might make them stand out. You want to tell them that it's okay, give yourself a break: literary merit is not measured by the kilogram of verbiage. Occasionally the writing surrounding the many bit players of Sigil can surprise you with a clever metaphor or a flash of insight or compassion, but more often it just wallows in the squalor. Many of the grotesques you meet are gross just for the sake of being gross, thus revealing that the sniggering lover of blood and boobs who wrote so much of the pitch document remains a part of the development team's collective unconscious if nothing else.

A man is looking at you with a strange, bug-eyed stare. His eyes are huge... so huge they look ready to pop out of their sockets and roll across the cobblestones. He nods eagerly as you approach, bobbing his head like a bird... and as you near him, you suddenly notice the smell of the urine and feces surrounding him. The man sniffles, wiping his nose on his sleeve, then opens his mouth to reveal blackened, rotted gums...

Reekwind coughs, his eyes almost popping out of his skull as he does so. His cough seems to loosen his bowels, for he breaks wind loudly, as if to accentuate his point...

In a moment of levity, the game has fun with some of the tropes of golden-age CRPGs. "I'll bet ye've all *sorts* o' barmy questions! Greetin's, I have some questions... can ye tell me about this place? Who's the Lady o' Pain? I'm lookin' fer the magic Girdle o' Swank Iron, have ye seen it? Do ye know where a portal ta the 2817th Plane o' the Abyss might be? Do ye know where the Holy Flamin' Frost-Brand Gronk-Slayin' Vorpal Hammer o' Woundin' an' Returnin' an' Shootin'-Lightnin'-Out-Yer-Bum is? I ought ta kick ye in the shins fer even pesterin' a poor ol' woman about it all!"

The companions with whom you hack your way through this forest of words instead of monsters are a mixed bag. Morte the talking skull is your first party member, already at your side when you wake up on the mortuary slab for the first time, already seeking to make up for having betrayed you in one of your earlier lives. His redemption arc aside, he's clearly meant to provide a note of comic relief amidst the cavalcade of misery you encounter, even if in practice his humor misses rather more than it hits; the necrophiliac jokes about every female ghoul and zombie you meet get pretty old pretty quickly.

Your companion Dak'kon belongs to the githzerai, a planar race of ascetics who prize order and harmony over all else. Unfortunately for him, a crisis of faith has led to him being cast out by his own people.

Nordom is not so much cast out as dropped in from what feels like it ought to be a different game entirely. Recruitable only via a lengthy side-quest that's disarmingly easy to miss completely, he's a robot who has evolved into sentience and is trying to figure out what to do next. He's essentially WALL-E nine years before Pixar came up with him; he's even drawn in a cartoon style, a jack-in-the-box with big, sad eyes and way too many gangling limbs.

And then we have the two female companions. They are defined by their gender and sexuality in a way that their male counterparts are not, occupying an uncomfortable liminal space between adolescent wish-fulfillment and earnest character-building. The pitch document tells you most of what you really need to know about them when it promises "to fill the game with deep, meaningful interactions with characters that happen to have swaying, pendulous breasts." Both Fall-from-Grace the reformed succubus and Annah the reforming tiefling thief look like your standard videogame hot chicks. The way they're written, on the other hand, arguably provides less fodder for students of literature or philosophy than it does for psycho-anthropologists who happen to be studying a certain subset of turn-of-the-millennium young men.

Fall-from-Grace runs the embarrassingly named "Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts." This establishment is full of hot chicks just like her, who invite their male customers in to... well, just to talk to them about all the nerdy interests that cause other comely young women to roll their eyes and start sidling toward the nearest exit.

Annah is an apparently jaded girl of the streets who, it will eventually turn out, has never known the touch of a man (because of course she hasn't) and thinks that The Nameless One might be the right one to finally teach her the ways of love (because of course she does).

Fun fact: Annah the tiefling was voiced by Scottish pop singer Sheena Easton. Sadly, The Nameless One never does get to spend a night inside her sugar walls.

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Original: https://www.filfre.net/2026/06/planescape-torment-part-2-to-the-desktop/