Welcome
This is a website dedicated to the Planescape setting of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Planescape lets players explore distant and exotic realms where belief is as important as knowledge, where an idea can be more powerful than a strong sword arm, and where a quick tongue is as persuasive as an enchantment. It’s an explosion of philosophies, a glorious crash of different mythologies, and a mighty fun game to boot.
My name’s Jon Winter-Holt, and I was responsible for the intriguing mess that was mimir.net, the de facto spiritual internet home of Planescape in the late 1990s. The site was based around the concept of the mimir, a magical construct designed to provide information (and a fabulously fun and occasionally cheesy official CD to boot). Well cutters, with the D&D 5e reboot of Planescape I thought it was about time to drag the old site out of its Astral dead-book and reanimate it. Right now I’m in rebuilding mode, refreshing the content from mimir.net v2 [archived] and adding all the original Geocities mimir v1 [archived] content that still makes sense to the new format. There’s also a ton of brand new material; I’ve been busy fleshing out Lunia and some of the lowest-numbered Abyssal layers. See what you think, I’d love some feedback. And watch this space for much, much, much more.
The Legal Bit: Mimir. net is unofficial fan content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. It is not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. © Wizards of the Coast LLC.
With that out of the way, I guess it’s time to hand you over to the narrator and owner of the mimirs…
Lady’s Grace, cutter!
They call me Voilá!. That’s my name, berk, though cutters who’re friends tend to drop the ! Seeing as we’re getting acquainted (or at least, you’re getting to know me a little) you can call me Voilá.
No, I ain’t a mimir too, but I ain’t actually here right now either. See, mimirs are nothing more than recording devices on which I use to store my information. Out here on the Planes, knowing the right dark is valuable, see, and I’m not one to let jink slip through my fingers. Well, I’ve done some travelling in my time, and all that time I’ve been sharing my innermost thoughts with these here mimirs. They’re mighty good listeners, are mimirs.
Well, I’ll let you carry on playing with the Mimirs
That’s what they’re here for, after all: To answer your questions about the planes. Just go right ahead: there’s all sorts of darks stashed away inside those barmy metal skulls. Not all of ’em mine, neither…most of these mimirs’ve had many previous owners. That’s a story for another time, though; I’ll leave you in peace. If you need anything, just ask. You don’t learn nothing by staying quiet, right?
What’s that? You’re still here?
I suppose you’re interested in the website and what on earth I’ve been doing not updating mimir.net for the last 23 years. Can I blame the Millenium bug? Probably blame the PhD, dropping out of playing AD&D for an age, and then D&D 3e coming along and it all being Too Much to jump back into. Fast forward to 2019, a new city, new gaming group, and a new set of rules – hello Pathfinder, and yikes!
All the meantime I’ve been squirrelling away ideas, paying for hosting the old mimir site, and fixing the odd bug/virus/server issue so it kept on floating freely in the Astral. And then finally, I found the motivation to do something with the thousands of pages of notes I’ve collected over the years, fantastic bits of writing I was sent back in the late 90s and never got round to publishing, and the even bigger job of looking back at all the material that’s been put out while I was hibernating… 3e, 3,5e, Pathfinder 1, 4e, 5e, Pathfinder 2. Yikes again. And now the new rebooted Planescape. I’m still waiting for my alternative cover version…not long to go now!
Ever the completist, I wanted to find a way to integrate the best bits of lore from all of the above settings, revamp my old mimir material, mix in a ridiculous amount of extra goodies. I also wanted to make a site that didn’t feel look like it was born at the dawn of the world wide web. I mean, I didn’t use flashing text but, almost. I would like to point out however, that mimir.net is older than dust Google. Just saying…
As I went about trying to properly reference the folks who’d done so much for Planescape in the olden days when it was in print, I realised to my dismay that mimir.net was one of the last sites still standing. So many other great resources seem to have been swallowed up when Geocities plane shifted into the Negative Energy Plane that is Yahoo and then imploded. Fortunately my packrat habit meant I had a lot of things saved on my own drive, and I’ve become adept at plumbing the depths of the Wayback Machine, Oocities and Reocities to rescue old material. I’ve excavated goodies from dead-booked sites like Alex Robert’s Tiefling’s Exultation, Ken Lipka’s Wings of Mephits, and many more: Rasgon, Randir, Belarius, MC Gianni… If you are any of those people, or remember the PSML, drop me a message! It’s been too long.
And finally, I thought I’d give the new-fangled AI tools a go and see whether they were all they were cracked up to be. Colour me impressed with Midjourney. I’ve resolved to create as many illustrations as I can (as I’m a spectacularly un-visual person I find it really helpful). I’ve also been dabbling with chatGPT which has been quite helpful at bringing together my piecemeal notes and bits of interweb lore written by multiple sources, turning it into something coherent, and leaving me to edit, fact-check, add extra flavour, cant and a sprinkling of sarcasm, correct all the spelling to the English versions <winky face> and bake in the air fryer until done.
Hopefully you like the new site format as much as I’ve enjoyed learning web 2.0 (5.0?) One of my peeves with the old site was it was really hard to find anything, and when the search function broke that made things even worse. I resisted the temptation to make mimir.net v3 a wiki, as frankly there are plenty of great ones already like rilmani.org and Forgotten Realms fandom which have been super useful in getting up to date with what’s changed since 2e. Instead I’ve picked WordPress, and a blog-like posting format. Extensive use of categories and tagging means you can carve up the content in endlessly different ways, and hopefully that means it’s now really easy to find things!
My plan is to continue working my way through reformatting old mimir material from v1 Geocities Mimir including plenty that never made it to v2 Mimir.net, everything from the former Mimir.net (although some parts will take longer than others), as well as dusting off previously unseen content, integrating material from Pathfinder where it fits, and dead-booked planescape sites of yore, more recent material I’ve come across or sites that have great content that deserve more attention. I want to thoroughly index the Outer Planes. Having just finished Lunia, I now realise what a mammoth task I’m setting myself. There’s so much more content available in 2023 than in the 90s! I’ll be crediting authors and sources where at all possible – but as many folks have moved on from their old email addresses, I’m going to adopt an ‘ask forgiveness not permission’ approach where I’ll reuse, recycle, reformat things I really like, credit the originator…and then remove if that offends anyone. Drop me a line on the page in question, there are contact forms all over the place.
I’m trying to be as well-behaved as possible otherwise – I’m not planning on reproducing material from official books, posting links to dubious PDFs, nicking artwork from D&D books or other sites. Berk, I even paid for a license to use the Exocet font this time around!
In terms of rule systems, I’m planning on keeping that as true neutral as possible. The Mimir is all about in character exploration of places, people and ideas. I’ll leave the stats vague so DMs can adapt to the game they’re playing, deciding on levels and D&D/Pathfinder editions themselves… And of course, you can just change or ignore anything you like! I’ll link to published stats where possible – if you spot anything I’ve missed please do drop me a message. And if you’re one of those wonderful people who enjoys writing up stats then please hit me up, I’d love to update a bunch of monsters to 5e and Pathfinder rules but I know I’ll never get round to doing it myself.
Anyway, that’s quite enough rattling of this old bone box. It’s grand to be back, and I hope you find something to your liking here.
If you fancy doing something to support the site then please consider:
- Telling your friends / gaming group / social media groups / mailing list about the site
- Letting me know if you have anything you’d like to contribute / correct / convert
- Consider supporting the hosting / bandwidth / domain name / midjourney subscription / font costs of the site by subscribing to the mimir.net patreon.
Watch the Spire!
Jon – October 2023
Please feel free to use the ‘reply’ form below to leave a public message on this page, or my contact form if you’d like to send a message that the yugoloths probably* can’t see.
This site stay without changes more time, than i live in this world, but it was still one of my favorite sites about the best setting for TTG, despite the anarchic twenty century design and my low level in English.)
Thank you for this and wish a good future for this project, that gave me much interesting hours of reading!
No, i just too young 😄
About planescape 2023 in the the net i saw, that this books have a perfect art and good information about Sigil, but also people write about lack of information about other plane. This look like a truth?
The new 5e books cover Sigil in decent detail, and the gate towns each get a page. The rest of the Outlands is pretty short however, and the other planes aren’t covered at all. If you think back to the original PS boxed set from the 90s, the space was limited there too and everything was given quite a cursory coverage. Hopefully there are more books in the pipeline! I was pleased to see though that the 5e books don’t contradict anything in the previous material so it should all fit together pretty nicely.
Welcome back from being Out-of-Touch for so long Voilá! This spore-jangled tanar’ri has been eagerly awaiting the reopening of the shifting portal to the Cage that I was so ungraciously hipped through to some a Prime backwater after that unpleasant Squaring the Circle incident with the Maeldur (if you catch my dark). It’s good to be a planewalker once more.
You can’t imagine how happy I was to see Xib still in this wonderful repository of knowledge – and that I was credited! I wish you the best of luck with your efforts to update and expand the site, I love the look and the new art. If you’re looking for contributions or anything, I’m happy to help where I can!
Hey Phill, great to hear from you! I’m pleased you approve of Xib’s glow up, the Cage Rattlers are one of my favourite sections of the site. I’m definitely up for any submissions, I’ve been working on Bytopia, Outlands and the negative Quasi-Elemental plane stuff recently if you have any ideas for that. Faction writeups would be very useful. Or anything that fits with any of the sections I’ve added so far. 🙂
Hey, Voilá! I am pretty new to the Planescape setting but have been researching old websites like Tielfling’s Exultation. Hence, I have a few questions:
1 – Is the Planescape information in this magazine meant to be canon? As in, for instance, are the Dustmen really meant to be the D&D Existentialist movement? https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_177.pdf
2 – Is the information from Mimir and other official Planescape sites meant to be canon? I mean, for the current version, not the original one.
3 – Is there an official site or some such that indicates the real-life equivalents of the Planescape sects?
Hey there Exodd. Great questions—here’s my take:
1. I loved that article on Planescape Torment, I hadn’t seen it before (on pages 62-66 if anyone else follows the link and is puzzled like I was). It does a good job on guessing what the faction philosophies might have been inspired by. It’s not canon though as it wasn’t written by the TSR team.
2. No, the material on this site also isn’t canon, I’m just a long time fan of the setting and not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast. Well, at least the new stuff. At the bottom of each page I’ve listed the ‘canonical sources’ that I used to inspire each piece—those are canon but any extrapolation from those is unofficial. Feel free to incorporate or ignore as fits your own vision of the setting.
3. No I don’t believe there is – many of the factions are based on extreme interpretations of ‘real world’ philosophies, or combinations of ideas from more than one school of thought, with a bit of fantasy magic sprinkled on top. For my own research I’ve done a lot of reading of beginner-level philosophy books to understand some of the more obscure ones and get inspiration for characters and philosophies. For example, IMO Jean-Paul Sartre and the Existentialists also have a lot in common with the (now defunct) Xaositects too as well as the Dustmen. I will add a page with inspirational content at some point, I promise.
Cheers!
Jon
Thank you very much for answering my questions, Voilá! Following the rule of three once more, however,
1 – Does that mean that even Cage’s Mush, Tielfling’s Exultation, and certain sects exclusive to those sites (Legislate, Xaoticians, Society of Pain) are also non-canon?
2 – Is the official TSR and WOTC websites canon? What about Planewalker?
3 – Do you think that 5th edition retconned a lot from the original game, follows from the events of Faction War or is simply a reboot of the setting?
Hi again, love the use of rule of threes there 🙂
1) Yep, all non-canon. If it’s not printed in a TSR/WotC book or magazine then it’s non-canon. And even if it is, you can always say something is optional if you dont like it. [cough] Faction War [cough].
2) TSR & WOTC websites, yes, if it’s an article they’ve posted. Planewalker… tricky one. They were the ‘official’ Planescape website for a while (as was the Mimir before that for a short time) but no I don’t think they count.
3) Actually I think the 5e version of Planescape is quite a faithful reproduction. They’ve made a few changes to some of the factions but the old factions still get a mention. So not so much a reboot, more of a way to familiarise a new generation of players with an old favourite. There are plenty of new sites in Sigil for example, but also a lot that have been retained. I was very pleased to see very little so far in the 5e book that contradicts anything on the mimir, for example. Let me know if you do though!
Way ahead of you! Ignus was never a Wreaker in Torment. The Bleak Cabal did embody optimistic nihilism, but also worse variations. And, the worst of all, no alignment limitations for the factions. I get it, it’s not like we are still in the 90’s. Not everything needs to be as restrictive as it was. But the factions are all about conflicting beliefs. Sometimes it does make sense for a faction to welcome everyone. But to say that the Fraternity of Order welcomes chaotic cutters and that the Bleak Cabal has no issue with lawful bashers? That is nonsense!
PS: I think I am the sole fan of faction war in the entire fandom. Thankfully both Dragon Magazine and all official D&D merchandise acknowledges it! How dare you doubt its quality!
Can I make a confession? I think Faction War came out just about the time I stopped playing AD&D completely, and I barely skim-read it. I remember seeing an absolute storm of indignation towards it on the Planescape mailing list, and filed it away mentally as ‘read some time later’… then never went back to it again. However, in refreshing Brix’s Guide to Sigil recently I’ve come to realise that there’s a lot of lore in there as well as the adventure and I really need to delve back in and check it out. So I’ll reserve judgement.
Chaotic folks in the Fraternity of Order does sound….unusual…however.
Hi Voilá! I discovered the old mimic site a month or so ago and imagine my surprise when I followed the links here from a Lady of Pain image! What you’re doing here is so cool, Voilá! I was wondering if you’re going to update everything to 5e, or 3e, or 3.5e? Would the cosmology change in a major way like some old content disappearing? Or would everything be kept up in reference? Oh and I was asking permission to use some of your content in a fanfiction I’m righting through the old email, did that make it through? Sorry if that’s too many questions in a row, good luck with this new demiplane!
Hi Ananda, for the sake of getting all the old content back online as quickly as possible, I’m leaving it all in AD&D 2e format (I’ve also learned that some cutters still use those rules). I am interesting in linking in 3e, 5e and Pathfinder conversions of rules and adventures too though… my own group plays Pathfinder but I’m agnostic about rule sets. I reckon the vast majority of mimir content will be ideas and background that should slot into any rule set if the DM likes it.
As for the fan fiction, please feel free to make use of whatever you like! Good luck with it, please let me know when it’s done!
The old email address is broken now since I moved the server last week. But tbh it was so full of spam that I rarely got any messages through it. But you’ve reminded me I need to fix it and make a better way to contact me… watch this space!
Jonmimir
Loved the og mimir site, so glad to see you still enjoying the hobby of TTRPGS after a hiatus. Thanks for all your hard work and glad you can find a way to fund the site and keep it up and running through patreon, certainly going to look into subscribing when I get the chance.
I am currently running Planescape campaign for my friends, and couple of weeks ago I’ve discovered mimir.net and loved every second of being on it. So yeah, I now feel like I’m witnessing Phoenix being reborn from the ashes. I just want to say as someone younger than this site, as someone who barely has any experience with DnD — this worldbuilding fills me with wonder, and I would definitely consider most of the things said here a canon in my games
Hi Jon,
really really happy to see you around again!
I wish you a good job replenishing the reborn fleshed-out Mimir with old and new content. If I have to say that, you’re not wrong to put yourself on the safe side, using AI to avoid unpredictable but totally possible headshots from WOTC.
A question out of curiosity (not to pull down the work you’re doing): Are you helping yourself with AI also for the writing?
Well anyway, I’m glad I can put back mimir.net from “archive” friend site to “active” one among planescape.it friendlinks!
Wish the best,
Mathujoke, webmaster on planescape.it
Hi Mathujoke,
It’s great to be back! After reading the WotC fan content policy it looks like it’s okay to use their artwork too, so maybe I will do that occasionally if I can’t get a result I like!
As for using AI for the writing, I’ve been experimenting and it has its uses, but needs a lot of editing afterwards. I’ve found it most useful when I’ve got notes from 3-4 sources and want to make sense of them quickly – GPT then summarises the important points, and I can take that as a starting point. It’s also great at coming up with lists of things, and brainstorming. It’s thrown out some quite cool ideas which I’ve then built on… this is where the hallucination part can come in handy. But it’s also suggested some stinkers, and made some basic errors! I also think it’s still fairly easy to tell when something is GPT and when it’s human. And while I have limited drawing ability, I actually enjoy the writing part, so the vast majority of that is me, or material from the old mimir site 🙂
And also, thanks … I think I used some of the Abyss stuff on your site, translated back thanks to google, to compile the Abyssal concordance on here 🙂
Cheers
Jon
I love that you’re revamping the site, and love the level of thought and detail put into your description on this page. Keep up the excellent work revitalizing one of the best and most-loved Planescape resources out there. (And please keep the links to v1 and v2 up if possible – love revisiting those 90s aesthetics.)
Lady’s grace, yourself! I’m a new (well, relatively new) Planescape fan. I caught the bug in early 2021 and found this site along with others that I crawled through the Internet Archive for. I was going to show a friend part of Mapping Infinity today, and I was quite surprised to find this site got an update! I must say, the new art is gorgeous and right on tone.
One more thing, please please include the Great Great Ring Theory in the new Mapping the Infinite section, it and the theory of the Ordial one of my favorite pieces of chant here.
Thanks for the feedback, and a belated welcome to Planescape! I’m pleased you’re enjoying the update! You caught me halfway through updating that section, the rest should follow in the next few days I hope… 🙂
It’s great to see this site being resurrected (and with https)! Sadly, the new format doesn’t work well with my old computer. :/
How much did you manage to save from On the Wings of Mephits? The Archived version on the Wayback Machine is missing the Mephit Planar Tours except the landing page. I suspect the Carceri overview with diagrams that I remember was on there.
There is a wealth of good material over on planewalker.com as well, hopefully still alive and kicking. I haven’t been there in a while.
I’m sorry to hear you’re having problems with the website – what seems to be the issue? I can report it to the creatures of the theme I’m using (is it related to animation of the page titles or something more significant?) I wasn’t aware that OtWoM had a planar tour section, that sounds fun, I shall have to investigate. I am getting around to Carceri myself soon though… I grabbed all the fiction from OtWoM though. I also have quite a bit of rescued Planewalker material, my plan was to finish porting the old Mimir site stuff (before the previous server expires this summer) and then start getting in touch with folks about repurposing things from other places. Although getting in touch might be tricky give this is basically internet archaeology. I’m thinking, since it was all published for free in the first place, and I’m not profiting from it, if I credit the authors then hopefully people would be pleased rather than annoyed if I republished things that are hard to find…?
This website gives me problems when I try to comment, sometimes I can’t even see the human verification. It is not friendly to Firefox, and it slows down/freezes Chrome sometimes.
Is the server expiration going to wipe out the Planewalker forums and homebrew?? D: Can the forums be ported over here?
Sorry you’ve been having problems. The human verification is supposed to be semi-intelligent, it won’t appear if it already thinks you’re not a construct. I have no idea how it can tell though! Is there any page in particular that causes issues?
Planewalker.com is not my site, so that won’t be affected by anything I do 😉 Although I think it broke over a decade ago and a lot of material was lost. The old mimir.net site that will vanish in a few months is this one: https://cpanel25.primary001.net/~mimir/ … although I still have local copies of everything so even if I haven;t ported everything, it won’t be gone for good
One way a site may see if you’re a bot is by analyzing the cursor’s behavior. If it moves randomly, as if held by a human hand, it may choose to skip the verification step.
There is a bot detector but it still lets through a lot. I also installed a spam filter which analyses messages sent to thousands of other sites and rejects them based on that too, it’s doing a super job… rejecting almost all of the spam comments now and so far no false positives either.
I have a request: Please clearly indicate what is canon and what is not. It’s very hard to follow because things are only arranged by general topic like a blog, but then there’s just a big multi-page list of links to articles.
Hi there! Thanks for your comment, it’s something I’ve been thinking about how to do for a while. Each page has notes at the bottom listing the canonical source of information, where you can see where to look for more info. If there’s no canonical source listed it’s safe to assume it’s homebrew.
So far so simple. But what if it’s a canonical location, like the realm of a power, but On Hallowed Ground only gives the name of the realm and no detail at all? In that case I’ve scoured the internet for any details and if I find nothing, I’ve just made it up.
Then you’ve got the question of which canon? The 2e Planescape books have Egyptian and Chinese powers, and so on. The 5e book goes out of its way to avoid including any gods from real world pantheons. Or gods from Greyhawk setting (presumably for ownership reasons). So… is Thoth still canon? Or canon if you’re playing 2e only and no longer for 5e? What about things that have changed from 2e to 5e? It all gets messy.
But I take your point, I will try and add more discussion at the end of articles to explain what’s from books and what I’ve just plucked from my brain (or the internet 😉 Take a look at some of the gate towns for an example of what that might look like. Is that the sort of thing you’re after?
That’s really too bad about Planewalker. 🙁
Yes, I really do appreciate the references. When an article is a mix of canon and homebrew, or a mix of different editions, I personally prefer to know (roughly) which parts are which. In the divine realm example you gave, you could just have a footnote saying “Named in On Hallowed Ground. Details by [contributor].” Some 3E material uses Planescape cosmology, some wildly contradicts it, and 4E threw out everything so… it would be helpful to know which edition is which.
I don’t think that a new PS edition should erase/retcon/invalidate everything made before. Not mentioning something doesn’t mean it deserves to be retconned, and when it has been explicitly contradicted I would personally prefer to know that it changed between editions. 3E, 4E, and 5E have all made changes to the cosmology, sometimes very drastic. Most of that was in non-Planescape publications, and I don’t think Forgotten Realms, World Axis, Magic: The Gathering, etc. should trump Planescape canon on a Planescape site. 5E is now avoiding real-world religions, but hopefully only in cautious reaction to the cases of derogatory misrepresentation, not because they’re all bad. This is all IMHO, of course.
The article on Kyuss mentions the author changed something from canon, in a footnote. IMO that’s a great way to do it.
As an aside, you have no idea how badly I want to share/dump/throw my own homebrew writing and ideas at you, but I don’t because I know you’re still very hard at work porting older material. I’m really grateful for all your work keeping this material online.
I got spooked when I didn’t see that black background with some skulls pngs! Happy to know the Mimir still has the same spirit, and we still have that repository of sigil cant.
Thanks for your service
Hi! Just want to say thank you for building this site. I’ve enjoyed reading through some of the posts here, and I really like the modern blog-like design of the website. I mean, it’s kind of easier to navigate than a wiki. Recently I’ve been writing some fan fiction of PS:T and this site is very helpful for building a consistent setting.
Oh, apparently I’m too young to experience mailing list, BBS and forum, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of discussions about PS on popular sites like Reddit. So I wonder where people primarily discuss nowadays.
I’m pleased you’re enjoying the site! Fan fiction of Torment sounds cool — have you discovered the Torment podcast by RevocerGM yet? (it’s on the links page).
As for discussion sites, there are a few Facebook groups for Planescape, but the most vibrant place I’ve found is Discord. I’m not sure if you can search and invite yourself to servers or if you need an invite — let me know if I can help!
hello mimir! i’m a relatively new fan of the Planescape setting (got into it around 2020 with the game), and came across the new and improved mimir.net not too long ago. You’re doing an invaluable service, and I can’t wait for every new post you make : ) keep it up!
I’m so sad at all the AI all over the place. This used to be one of the most aesthetically striking websites on the net, oozing with all that beautiful old school Planescape style. Now it’s all sterile and that mush of machine generated nonsense that has no style or aesthetic to it at all.
I hope one day that it goes back to a more original style with actual art and style to it. Please look into the harm that AI does to both the environment and to the artists who worked so hard to create the beautiful world of Planescape, and that aesthetic we all fell in love with in the first place.
I’m sorry you’re not a fan of the art, I assume that’s what you’re referring to? I actually put in a surprising amount of work to get what, I believe, is an aesthetic somewhat reminiscent of the old school. It’s not going to be identical of course, but that would be worse in a way. I’m a very non-visual person myself (aphantasia) so I find having things to look at really help me bring the multiverse to life in my head. When I rebooted the website I had three choices – keep the largely text-only style of the original website (I which case why bother at all), steal other people’s art from the web or simply re-use the original art from the canon (meaning this would look identical to all the other sites, and what about all the things that never got depicted), or try and make something a little bit different and new.
Stealing other people’s art from Pinterest etc was how I fleshed out all my notes that I have for my personal use, but there are issues with using that on a published website – plagiarism obviously, but also the things I could find were often not really what I wanted, and the styles varied so wildly the inconsistency bothered me. Then along came Midjourney and frankly it’s what inspired me to reboot the site.
Sure, it’s AI generated art, but with a budget of zero I’m hardly turning away queues of human artists clamouring to make stuff for the site for free. Some of the art I’ve used has been based on original (super low-res) gif art from the 1990s mimir but most has been generated with Midjourney. I dabbled with ChatGPT art for a while but I think MJ has a better and more controllable aesthetic, especially in the latest generation.
You might have noticed I also have a strict policy of zero adverts; while AI art might be your personal cold iron, adverts on websites are mine.
Your comment about the environmental impact of AI is fair, each image does cost a few seconds of CPU time to generate.
I appreciate you taking the time to write (and giving me the opportunity to reply), but this is the direction I’m taking the site for the time being. You can always turn off images in your browser if you really dislike them I guess, I think WordPress will handle that gracefully.
Any constructive feedback on particularly egregious images would be gratefully received (although you know I’ll just regenerate them with hopefully better ones 😉 but general “ai=bad” is something we’ll have to agree to disagree on. Using AI tools in my day job too (cancer research) I am well aware of both their benefits and their drawbacks. They’re a tool, a threat and an opportunity all at the same time, just like Photoshop was back in the day, and the interweb itself.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment 🙂
Jon
Hey Voilá,
I wanted to express my appreciation and gratitude for bringing back the Mimir website and for all the effort you put into the project.
There hasn’t been much access to Planescape content after the Planewalker website crashed in 2014 so I am truly
glad to see the mimir back.
I really enjoy your content including the AI generated art and music (A Sinker at the End of the Multiverse is so beautiful and
That’s Tanar’ri is just hilarous). It’s obvious how much work you put into this.
All the best and keep it up!
Ah, thanks! I love reading feedback like this, thank you for writing 🙂
Keep up the good work. Planescape is still one of the best settings and this site is irreplaceable. We’re all grateful for the work you do.
Your contributions to the Planescape community are truly priceless. I can come back after a week of absence and see 7 new posts! How you keep up with it is beyond me. Thank you for all your hard work, I’m sure it’s not easy 🙂
Heh heh, welcome back! I’ve had a busy week for sure–but also some great contributions from Margarita who’s been storming ahead on the plane of Air. Look out for a few more additions this evening… I’m finding excuses not to prep for my Planescape game on Wednesday 😛
Okay I found your site on accident and I fricken love it. I’m developing a campaign that involves a demon lord nicknamed Misha who was dethroned and forced into the Forgotten Realms and into the form of a child so his power is stifled. Been playing as him for a while and want to retire him back to the Abyss, put him back into power in whatever layer he is from. I found this site looking for info on Zzyczesiya as a potential ally, and boy did I stumble on a gold mine. Thank you for this work and you are incredible.
Ah thanks, that’s exactly why I do this 🙂 … Hmm an ally who doesn’t even remember you exist, now that sounds like a recipe for intrigue! Have fun!
Your decision to use ChatGPT is unfortunate. Now I have to figure out where in the texts on this website there are original ideas and where there is filler. It is akin to “A. I.” “image restoration” – you can’t have too many quotation marks there. What that really means is extrapolation. They take a black pixel and a white pixel and calculate a gray pixel in the hole between left by time. But in reality the pixel might have been black, white, any shade of gray – or red. What using “A. I.” does is sprinkle very fine dust of banality over any description or invention, and as for illustrations, it is as though a talented painter left details to his much more ordinary apprentice. And one can’t quite determine where that dust is, it is the whole that ends up poorer. I’m disappointed.
I respectfully disagree, AI is a tool like any other. Sure, it can be used to churn out generic text, but it can also be used to enhance the creative process. I’ve particularly found it good at summarising digesting the original lore and researching related information from across the web — a job I get particularly bored by. With the basics in place I can then do the fun part of writing. Obviously I heavily edit the output, more than with content generated by people. It’s also been useful in translating or fixing text that was written by cutters whose first language isn’t English. As far as it comes to creating new ideas, if anything I’ve found chatGPT to be a bit TOO inventive and weird, I’ve experimented with it, but that’s not its strength.
Dang. I look away from the website for just a few years and come back to this! Nice work! Even if the 2E AD&D purist in me recoils at anything from 5E being included. Thinking about starting a Savage Worlds RPG version of the Planescape setting and this is certainly getting added to the list of sources to absorb.
Congratulations, you have turned me away from visiting this site with your password policy. I get it that you decided to require accounts to stop spammers but the length of the password has nothing to do with user “security.” I use a simple six-letter combination wherever I can. No special characters, no capital letters, but it is a made-up word that nobody will be able to guess. It is not the maiden name of my mother or the beauty’s on the poster behind me. You require at least twelve characters, and there is no way I’m going to cram more of that gobbledygook into my head just so I can comment.
…why not just write the made-up six letter word twice?
Hi Jon,
Awesome! I used to consult the original site in the late 90’s. I think I even submitted a text right before it went dormant (It was so long ago that I don’t remember clearly if I actually pressed ‘send’ or first realized that the site had gone inactive).
I had checked the address a few times over the years to look for signs of lie. So, I was impressed to see what had come out of this 23-year-old chrysalid.
I got to the About page while looking for the artist’s name; as some of it seemed uncannily reminiscent of DiTerlizzi.
While I can sympathetic to the arguments against AI art, they need to be considered on a case by case; and I’d like to support your choice. Since you’re alone doing this, the choice is between AI and nothing (and pillaging), not AI and artists. So, I’m glad you’re taking the time to create these images with Midjourney. They give a great unity and feeling to the site.
I only played for a few years, before the dawn of the internet, but I’ve stayed a Planescape fan ever since. I’m delighted to have again a legit way travel the planes (because the 5e box, while not bad, was definitely underwhelming).
Thanks for commenting, there are quite a few of us old guard still around it seems 🙂
I’ve deliberately tried to make the art as reminiscent as possible as the original DiTerlizzi Planescape art, which I still deeply love. Obviously the AI version is nowhere near as characterful, mischievous or evocative, but yeah, I didn’t just want to re-use art from the original books as you can see that all over the web already, and to me that feels *worse* than at least taking some time to make something in homage. And besides, 75% of things in the original books didn’t have images in the first place…
I get that some people hate AI art – and I’m not a fan of a lot of the highly processed stuff that bing and ChatGPT make either. My rule of thumb is if I think it looks too AI then I’ll keep tweaking it until it doesn’t. I put in quite a lot of extra work with some of these images, post-generation editing etc. and I think I’m getting better at catching and correcting artifacts. I’m going back and re-doing some of the images I made in 2023 to improve them too. One of the nice things about having generated them this way is I’m completely non-precious about any of it, and constructive criticism is very welcome!