Faction War
The Faction War is a war that features in Planescape.
Contents |
History
The Faction War was a battle between the 15 factions of Sigil that occurred in year 130 of Factol Hashkar's Reign. Engineered by Duke Rowan Darkwood, it destroyed some parts of the City of Doors, but was intended merely to serve as a cover while Darkwood attempted to cast the Sigil Spell (which would give him power over the city itself). Darkwood was sent to the Mazes before he could try to cast the spell, and his aged future self Gifad (who had been sent to the past by a botched escape attempt) was sent back even further into the past.
The urban battlefield rapidly expanded into a chaotic war of attrition as the distinct philosophical factions turned the grand civic structures of Sigil into heavily fortified military bastions. The Mercykillers, acting as the city's absolute judicial enforcers, launched an aggressive, unconstitutional martial law campaign, conducting mass arrests and executing suspected political dissidents in the city streets without due process. This authoritarian escalation drew the immediate, violent retaliation of the Revolutionary League, who orchestrated a series of massive, high-profile bombings that targeted the City Court and the Prison infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Harmonium and the Guvners attempted to maintain a unified legal front, but their forces were quickly pinned down by a massive, multi-directional ground assault led by the fanatical forces of the Bleakniks and the Xaositects. The physical architecture of the city suffered immense structural devastation as high-magic artillery bombardments leveled historic ward borders, turning the crossroads of the multiverse into a paranoid surveillance state filled with burning debris.
The volatile multi-front conflict reached a critical, highly destructive turning point when the Lady of Pain broke her absolute operational silence to intervene directly against the warring philosophical organizations. Realizing that the unchecked geopolitical violence was actively fracturing the metaphysical foundations of Sigil, the Lady deployed her giant, razor-bladed enforcers, the Dabus, to systematically seal off the portal networks connecting the city to the outer planes of existence. This sudden logistical bottleneck trapped thousands of extra-planar mercenary reinforcements inside the city limits, creating an immense resource crisis that pushed the warring factions to the absolute brink of starvation. In a desperate bid to bypass the blockade, Duke Rowan Darkwood attempted a hazardous arcane ritual to channel the divine energy of an imprisoned deity, inadvertently triggering a massive psychic backlash that tore through the minds of his followers and left his primary command citadel in absolute ruins.
After the war ended, the Lady of Pain ordered all the factions to either leave or disband.
Overview
Participants=
- Rowan Darkwood :
Notes
- The Faction War
Appearances
- Planescape:
