Companion Analysis: Morte

Morte is the first Planescape: Torment character introduced, a good herald for both what to expect, establishes the tone of the game, and most importantly introduces the heavily dialogue focused and narrative element of this experience, which can be argued to be more of a visual novel, or game of speech than a swords and sorcery dungeon crawler.

Morte is abrasive, crass, amusing and an oddity. A floating skull is not a typical creature or class you find in typical fantasy, or the Dungeons and Dragons setting, but Planescape has always been a dusty, mechanical, and a little bizarre sandbox for players to become immersed in. Planescape: Torment however as a game really isn’t that beholden to the source material, it’s all about character. And the genius of the story really is within the justified malleability of your amnesiac immortal protagonist, going quite far to recruit a cadre of companions.

Morte is the first companion for your party, acting to explain with the confidence of someone born and bred in a large city. You’ve woken up, and The Nameless One starts this life from the slab, listening to Morte and figuring a way out of the Mortuary, then blinking up at the impossible geometry of the city in the centre of the multiverse.

The idea of doom I think is a kind of keystone to many characters, perhaps more subtly than ideas of contradiction. This applies especially to Morte as well as The Nameless One, and this is part of Morte being there from the very start and being someone you know right from the opening.

It’s a chilling fact to read “Don’t trust the skull” tattooed onto the skin of your back, something Morte hides and casts natural doubt, and the player goes through quite a lot of emotions finding a back tattoo giving exposition expressly hidden from you, one of many word puzzles and challenges of perspective in a setting where if one thinks or espouses an idea enough, the idea becomes tangibility. Confusion, curiosity, doubt, then when realising your own quite brutalistic and callous past, tragic.

Morte can be found, can even be left inside a hellish torment of the Tower of Skulls, one of the many Hells of the setting and a place we can see was the ultimate destiny of one of the more fascinating characters in the story, Pharod, the king of rags whose impressive quest led to the permanent punishment of a fate he attempted so much to avoid, except to change his soul. We enter themes of forgiveness, mediation and moral relativism witnessing Morte stuck there, a companion who has fought beside you and the growing party, who makes lewd jokes and wields no apparent malice whatsoever that would warrant such a fate, and this we can free him from, wrenching him out, and at this later point of the story where Sigil gives way to the Lower Planes of literally evil composition, there’s also a shift in removing what we have become familiar and accustomed to, many wanting Morte back as that character support from the introduction.

From comedy relief, Morte is integral to the themes and flavour of Planescape: Torment in that by the end, with all context added to the mystery, this abrasive leering jackass was chained to you and ‘you’ as the gestalt archetypes of so many lives, bound by a sense of guilt that was self-created, and is your companion out of a sense of genuine loyalty, altruistic really beyond any other character in the story. One can be irritated with him, infuriated, accepting, ultimately leave him to one of the many things beyond and worse than a human death. In the insanity of the setting giving way to introducing the notion of an afterlife and immortality being a very real curse, from life to life Morte is there from starting the game, and it fits very well for Morte continuing full circle. His appearance shows a notion where after so much time and in such a dusty and gaunt setting, we are but bones carrying on, memories, a few quick witticisms, and we go along in little and large quests with individuals who share our company, each with their own manner, beliefs, secrets, and to their own eventual end and self-judgement.

Reference:

Planescape: Torment. Black Isle Studios. 1999.