Planescape: Torment co-writer speculates on a potential successor

Colin McComb, one of the key developers of the Planescape setting for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, and co-writer, along with Chris Avellone, of Planescape: Torment, has been musing on his blog about a potential spiritual successor to the 1999 RPG classic. He has reportedly finished his portion of the work on Wasteland 2 , the Kickstarted sequel to another old school RPG franchise. While he doesn't specifically state that he has plans for a Torment follow-up, he does present a wealth of ideas on what one would look like.

"The first step in designing a new Torment story is to ask the primary question," McComb explains. "I'm older than I was when I worked on Torment, and my questions now are different than they were. I have children now, and I look at the world through their eyes and through mine, and that's changed me—in fact, the intervening years have changed me so much that I have new answers for the central story in the original Torment. So now that I know what can change the nature of a man, I ask: What does one life matter? … and does it matter at all?"

McComb doesn't plan on setting a potential Torment continuation in the Planescape setting.

"I'd put it someplace other than Planescape (and I'll explain why in a followup)," he says. "I'd use a system other than D&D, because I'd want to align the player's story axes along different lines than Good/Evil or Law/Chaos to something more subjective. The core of Torment is, after all, a personal story, and while we can be judged by others on the basis of our actions, arbitrarily aligning those actions on an external and eternally fixed line removes some of the agency from the player's game."

Read the full post on McComb's blog .

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Len Hafer is a freelancer and lifelong PC gamer with a specialty in strategy, RPGs, horror, and survival games. A chance encounter with Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness changed her life forever. Today, her favorites include the grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, and thought-provoking, story-rich RPGs like Persona 5 and Disco Elysium. She also loves history, hiking in the mountains of Colorado, and heavy metal music.