Through the tobacco stand

 As I may have mentioned previously, found a bunch of my old D&D novels recently, and got a wild hair and decided to try rereading J. Robert King's Blood Hostages, the first book in the Blood Wars trilogy, which is set in the Planescape setting. Let me preface this with saying while I at one point had a bunch of D&D boxed sets, I rarely if never actually played with any of them. I hate being a DM, and during the era, all anyone who wanted to game would play was Forgotten Realms. Planescape was cool, expanded a bunch on a supplement I loved, and basically really solidified an idea we're seeing a bunch of again in several fictional universes, The Multiverse.

Anyway, this particular novel either wants the reader to be as clueless as the main characters (cousins Nina and Aereas) or just assumes anyone picking it up has read the boxed set in the past 6 months. While some of it was still familiar to me, a heck of a lot of it had me checking different fan wikis trying to refresh my memory. 

Anyway...

Aereas and Nina live with her father/his uncle on a non-supplement detailed world. Artus, gives his journal on his travels over to Aereas at the outset, saying he's old enough to appreciate it now. A few pages later, Artus is being dragged through a portal in his tobacco stand by gargoyles, with Nina and Aereas jumping in behind them a few hours later. (Which, when they arrive in the city of Sigil, turns out to be a week later.)

We meet a gnome named Boffo, who in turn leads the pair through the city of Sigil first to the spirit of a Dead God, and then a Tiefling who knew Artus. (For the record: Sigil is/was the starting city for the setting. Basically a city that's an enclosed ring at the center of everything. Kind of like a pumpkin roll where the filling has buildings.) We find out Artus worked as a spy for the nominal ruler of Sigil, The Lady of Pain. And then, we follow the kidnappers through a fight in a foundry, which ends up with everyone falling through a portal into the 665th layer of the Abyss, which it seems is a bottomless hole.

Eventually, they wind up in Gehenna at the palace of Sung Chiang, who is the Power behind the kidnapping in the first place. Seems Artus had keys to all the portals to the planes from Sigil, and he's now on sale. Which brings in the Baatezu and Tanar'ri, two of the major factions fighting the not really defined in this volume Blood War. (If I remember the lore correctly, it was something about Demons on one plane fighting devils on another plane.) This again leads to another chase, where the wind up on the corpus of the dead Power they met early on. And then the tiefling and Nina wind up in the Abyss again, while Artus and Aereas wind up back in Sigil. 

While the settings are fun, the characters are all kind of flat, beyond Sung Chiang (who as a God of thievery has a bunch of stuff to do) and Jandau (the tiefling, who is playing his own game.) We get lots of Aereas trying to justify incest with his cousin (who may not actually be his cousin, but still, EWWWWWWW), Nina falling for the shady Tiefling, and in what may be the best supporting character in here, Krim, the Wizard with the body of a hovering Manta Ray. 

I'm hoping the next two volumes improve a bit on this, leaving us a bit less confused as to what is actually going on.