the printing on this book is great. everything you need to make a character for Planescape.

my only complaint, is the yellowish text is a little difficult to read, on PDF its fine, but in print sometimes it is hard to read.

other than that, a good scan of a great campaign setting!

I'm a huge fan of the print-on-demand 2E versions that have been coming out, but this book is a huge disappointment. The original (and the PDF) are printed on shaded paper with a mildly dark background. The POD version, however, is printed on white paper. Tons and tons of text in the book is unreadable because the original font is a light-greenish-yellow, and printing isn't crisp enough to make it bearable.
Of course, the book itself was and is amazing; one of the finest Planescape offerings. Unfortunately, the print-on-demand version is practically useless to me.

Highly recommend this book for anyone new to planescape. I have a planescape campaign setting box set and this print on demand version is way cheaper and supplies much of the same information. Does have slightly faded text, which is common with planescape, but it's legible, although the tables at the back, specifically the sand/gold coloured non-bold text is very difficult to read.

This book is a great overview of Planescape for both DM and players. It provides important clarifications to the Planescape rules for 2e, so it is pretty nearly essential for a 2e Planescape campaign or even for other editions. It is very well-written and provides good introductory sections for players new to Planescape.

This an exceptional supplement. The writing is excellent and the interior artwork perfectly fits the Planescape tone. The chapters are often written as if advice given to new planewalkers, and the interior art includes helpful (and sometimes humorous) diagrams for the planar concepts. The content is an update and consolidation of the original Planescape campaign setting boxed set. In many respects it does a better job (in my view) of explaining some of the core planar concepts than the boxed set does, e.g., the portals, gates, conduits, vortices, and paths chapter is especially clear.

The scan is good quality. A few minor points about the PDF: The book uses a pale gold for headers and epigraphs which seems to fade or become blurred in smaller and lighter weight fonts on some pages, e.g., the sub-headers are a lighter weight than the main-headers on pages 42-53 and as a result are a little blurry. The OCR is excellent, as well as the table of contents structure, which makes the PDF quickly and easily navigable. It would be nice to include OCR also for the titles of the chapters, e.g., a search for "Traveling the Multiverse" should take me to page 34 where this chapter begins. Instead it takes me to page 68 where the "Traveling the Multiverse" chapter is mentioned in the text itself.

In sum, I highly recommend this book; It should be read alongside the boxed set by both players and DMs.

(2e mechanics are able to be converted to 5e by using Wizards' conversion document available for your home games here: http://media.wizards.com/2015/downloads/dnd/DnD_Conversions_1.0.pdf)

This book covers a lot of information that's already in the Planescape box set but it does a pretty good job of it. It's also handy as a quick reference book if you don't want to go digging through the three books from the main box set. And as the description says, its a good way to help introduce the Planescape setting to players. It contains a lot of game mechanics info which isn't of much use if you're not using the 2nd edition rules but any rule you want to incorporate is fairly easy to modify for a 3.5 campaign. Unlike some people, I think the situational rule changes in Planescape not only make sense but are in fact necessary considering the nature of the setting. You can't go jumping around the planes and not expect physical or magical laws to be the same everywhere. On another Planescape note, a lot of reviewers have complained about cant, the slang of people who live on the various planes. Personally, I think its a great way to immerse players in the world. All of the Planescape books are written as if someone from the game world wrote them, even when describing game mechanics. It helps drive home the point that the world of Planescape is a unique one that has a vibrant life of its own. But I digress...

Format: Acceptable. Direct scan to pdf of a new - quality book. The top - level chapters are bookmarked, but there is no other non - scan information.

Text: Mediocre. The pdf produces acceptable black text, but many of the headings are in light orange and are barely visible in my inkjet printout. On the computer screen, they can be read with difficulty.

Images: Not bad. The original artwork was very good indeed, though the pdf quality blurred them somewhat, they are still clear.

Language: OK. Most of the book is in cant, a dialect spoken in the fictional town of Sigil. If you're planning to use cant, this is an excellent introduction - it is very easy to learn and a cant dictionary is found in the back of the book. Otherwise it is tolerable.

Content: Outstanding. While I would not reccomend basing an entire campaign on just this book, it is all that is needed if you are deciding whether to use it.

The Planescape setting is an incredibly complicated one, and yet the average character living in it would know quite a bit about how it works. Some kind of Player's Guide to Planescape was necessary to give starting PCs an idea of what their world was like -- to fill the role in this setting that a player's own experiences fill in games set in modern-day Earth.

The Planewalker's Handbook is intended to cover basic questions about the planes, almost like a FAQ in narrative form. It describes the planes in a general sort of way (though it does a better job than that silly players' pamphlet that came in the boxed set). It gives you the mechanics of portals and planar spellcasting. It talks a bit about the factions and major NPC races. It provides some kits for the DM to throw out. It outlines, once again, how belief works.

Once you get past the @#!$@$# cant and actually start to read, the book is friendly and conversational, and seems to realize exactly how huge an infodump is required to get new players into the planes. It still feels like a textbook at times (the Priest Level Loss by Plane and Magical Item Bonus Loss by Plane charts at the back are painful to look at) but it's still a good resource.

The question is whether an infodump is the best way to get this information across, or if the Planescape DM might not be better served by requiring all players to start their first characters as primes and teaching them this information gradually. That's something each DM will have to decide for herself.

(Side note: it has nothing to do with this book per se, but am I the only one who finds the "Acheron, plane of combat, is a giant void full of bouncing dice" joke idiotic?)

One of the lower-rung products of the planescape settings. Mostly interesting for people who want to see what can be done with the outsider races.