[OSSR]Factol's Manifesto

[Mistborn]

I actually think the Pit of Baator is cool enough imagery that it should look more like this:

So like old Pyrexia then

[hyzmarca]

One problem is that many of the worlds in the D&D cosmology, especially the upper planes and inner planes, don't have enough stuff in them to fill a continent, let alone an infinite plane. The 4th edition Manual of the Planes shoved all of the Seven Mountain Heavens of Celestia into a small but high mountain range stuffed into an area half the size of Washington State (all 4e maps for some reason are based on Western Washington), and they really didn't have to prune anything to do that. The Efreet Sultanate and the Princedom of Imix don't really need whole planets dedicated to them. If the Efreet Sultanate was ten times as large as the Caliphate was at its height, it still wouldn't cover the whole world and there would be plenty of space for the Temple of Ultimate Consumption and the Palace of Surtr to have their own truly massive empires.

That's only because writers have no sense of scale. You could easily declare that the City of Brass has 10^100 citizens and that there are 10^100^100 Devils living in Dis. The only problem is that such huge numbers make it kind of difficult to conquer the place.

There is also the problem of detail, of course. This is what really mars the scale of the planes. If Dis is so huge, it is literally impossible to describe it. There aren't enough atoms in the universe to many a representation of such a place. It's just impossible to make up enough unique stuff to fill such insanely huge spaces.

[Username17]

So like old Phyrexia then

Yes. But without mechanical comedy layers. Also with a giant borehole in the side of the planet that goes through all the layers.

I'm even OK if you reuse some of the Phyrexia art. I mean this:



Could be a picture of these:



But shit like this:



Is right fucking out. It's too "clockwork stupid".

-Username17

[Ancient History]

We go too far in this direction and we're headed toward Stargate. Which isn't the worst way you could play D&D.

[PoliteNewb]

While the idea of Hell as a planet where you dig down deeper towards the molten core is a cool idea, I'm now thinking of a thing where the "Nine Hells" are moons that orbit the Elemental Plane of Fire...and the worst are the ones that are closest to that burning orb.

[Avoraciopoctules]

@Ancient History

With possibly a hint of Super Mario Galaxy? I am imagining that short-range portals could look sort of like Warp Stars. A boss fight against some uvuudam in the scattered mini-planetoids of the Far Realm could be pretty sweet if you were literally jumping around between several different landmasses.

I am totally sold on planes-as-planets if we just say that the Elemental Plane of Water is a couple linked ocean worlds in the same system. Your adventure landscape looks less like a boring "swim for hours without seeing anything" and more like Aquaria or Naboo in Star Wars Episode I

[Username17]

We go too far in this direction and we're headed toward Stargate. Which isn't the worst way you could play D&D.

There are many worse ways to play D&D.

But I'll grant you that the standard Star Gate scenario has a lot of problems. The first is the problem that Star Gate itself has, where once you've been to the world of bottomless cheddar mines, it's hard to justify any cheese shortages later in the series. D&D actually has an available answer to that, in that in that the portals that go to different places aren't all on the same portal network, and might be quite far apart from one another. Like Stargate Universe but even more so in that hopping to the next world in the line isn't a matter of simply waiting for the portal you walked in to cool down, you actually have to cover some ground to get to the next one (unless you have planeshift, in which case it is exactly like SGU).

The next problem is one of scale. Stargate really doesn't have a great answer for why these various galactic powers didn't mass driver our civilization out of existence when we started developing rocketry. D&D has a number of answers to that one, mostly having to do with the fact that even multiplanet empires don't have actual FTL space ships, they have mongol hordes and portals that connect planets to march their mongols through.

But the episodic nature of things like Sliders and Stargate is certainly a problem. You could tell a whole campaign where the players never left Sigil - or any other planar metropolis like Malsheem, Finality, or Unity. But in a plane hopping adventure series, you're likely to really only get to interact with a couple NPCs and see a few colored backgrounds while you're there. As such, there isn't inherently much reason for you to be in Finality today instead of Dis or The City of Brass. There are parts of the City of Brass that are not on fire, and there are parts of Malsheem that are, and you could probably fairly easily scrub some serial numbers off of any particular NPC you're planning on using and use them in one of the other ones.

And certainly for 3e D&D, that's painfully true. There's no pressing need to planeshift to Tu'narath when you can planeshift to Hestavar. No reason to planeshift to Sigil when you can planeshift to Union. And so on. But if we're going the "limited connectivity" model of Spelljammer, that stops being true. Now Finality has an important difference from Shra'kt'lor - it's 3 jumps away instead of 4.

-Username17

[virgil]

Turning the planes into planets is definitely a concern of too much sci-fi. I want there to be pocket worlds reminiscent of the Trill village in Rice Boy.


I'm all for having the layer of Dis be larger than just the city, with proto-architecture in the landscape itself, but still smaller than most of the inner layers of Baator; because this is dimension-sprawling magic after all.

[Avoraciopoctules]

If we are going to have multiple hubs with limited connectivity between worlds, do we want some kind of special organization to them or just a galactic cluster full of solar systems and the occasional free-roaming world?

[Ancient History]

I like to think D&DGate takes place in an older universe. You have various habitable planets, rocks, and other weirder locations occupied by hundreds of sentient races, and they generally get from place to place using gates, some of which are ancient and some of which any mage of sufficient level and knowledge can create (whether all magic is sufficiently advanced tech or not is up to you, but let's stick with D&D mechanics for the moment).

The thing about having gate networks in societies that have regressed (or never had) other interstellar transport tech is that it discourages the development of alternate means of transport; very few people will invest in space shuttles when you can hop in the gate or do a short-range teleport through hyperspace the Astral Plane. So Spelljammer would be limited, and most of the universe would have gates; those with spelljamming ships would have a comparative advantage in being able to go new places to build gates, but gates are still faster and cheaper.

Societies can become so dependent on gates for interplaner/planar contact that it becomes possible for gates to get broken, lost, or hidden so that it becomes feasible that some planets can get knocked or locked out of interplanet trade, perhaps for centuries - until a working gate is discovered, or reverse-engineered, or a starjammer drops by with the invasion portal. That allows Eclipse Phase/Stargate style exploration to go on as your world sends you off to figure out what's on the other side of the gate.

The thing about the Elemental Planes/Nine Hells/&c. is that while your home-sweet-shithole may be the backwoods of the universe, some places have never lost gate technology, and have thus been centers of interplanar trade for hundreds or thousands of years - which explains why they consider you a boring yokel when you finally catch up, and your world ripe for plucking/trading/join us against the eternal enemy.

Gods in this setting could be Ascended or just Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, maybe survivors of the races that originally developed gate technologies (among other things); it's a big universe so the same tech could have been discovered more than once, meaning different mythologies are true. Consider the Spelljammer/Kara Tur setting - a god-like Celestial Bureaucracy cruises around a system, each habitable planet or moon of which may hold a terrestrial bureaucracy with a local emperor propped up by hand-me-down magitech and the threat of a fleet of spelljammer ships coming to put boot to ass if any of the rebels upset the flow of spice (or whatever other resource the planet provides).

Sigil could even be an artificially constructed hub (Ringworld!) for the gate network.

In the case of cheese mining versus cheese shortage - I think it comes down to the relative rarity of gatetech. In a world with a good number of gates and access to the right places, you might transition into a post-scarcity economy while still in the Middle Ages; on a world where gates are rarer, they can be the foundation of local monopolies.

So I think the basic idea has some legs to it, though I'm not the one to write it.

[John Magnum]

I'm reading The Algebraist now and it works a lot like that, except basically everybody can make wormholes. The thing is you still have to drag them around at lightspeed to set them up, so if you have a wormhole spanning four hundred light-years and one end gets blown up, it takes you four hundred years to get it back up and running even if you can build a new wormhole instantly.

[norms29]

Sigil is her cage and the magic that holds it together only works so long as she's there to imprison. Killing her, thus, is something that would completely destroy Sigil and no one wants that. Thus, she's mostly a figurehead. She's treated with respect and there is an unofficial rule against taking shots at her (everyone will dogpile you if you try) but her authority is purely moral and has no legal weight. She's a figurehead, basically. She spends most of the time slinging booze at her bar and grill, occasionally giving out advice to really drunk people who probably won't remember it in the morning.

I only noticed this because I just went on Roman empire binge, but if destroying here will destroy the city, and consequently they have a "rule against taking shots at her (everyone will dogpile you if you try)" then that ties pretty exactly to the plebian tribunes of the roman republic.
For those of us not interested in reading the wikipedia page their principle power of office was that they were "Sacrosanct" and any harm to their person was a capital offense. their other powers of office were at least nominally considered to stem from this. Specifically they had veto power over any action taken by magistrates or the senate within the city-limits of Romes; specifically based on the theoretical-possibility/legal-fiction that the they could physically interfere with whatever they were vetoing and stopping them would be risking execution. I could definitly see a High-level adventurer who noone will risk killing doing at least that

[fbmf]

Why not have Dis be a moon in geosynchronous orbit over the pit that descends through all the layers?

Or even a floating city at the top of the pit?

I have no dog in this fight, but it came to mind when I started reading the proposed description and the problem of "Dis isn't that big!"

Game On,
fbmf

[virgil]

I'll get behind that direction, but it's no longer a revision to Planescape, but one of Spelljammer. With that in mind, we definitely need a Dyson Sphere

[virgil]

If you have relatively rapid travel (or even full-on PC teleports) within a system, handwaving the habitability zone to allow for multiple planets, and a network of gates that connect different system; you should be able to get both 'plane' hopping and a draw for repeat business at the portal hub city that lets you get places in 2 or 3 jumps instead of 4+

Have we essentially abandoned the planar metropolis idea in favor of a revised Spelljammer?

[Username17]

Why not have Dis be a moon in geosynchronous orbit over the pit that descends through all the layers?

Or even a floating city at the top of the pit?

I have no dog in this fight, but it came to mind when I started reading the proposed description and the problem of "Dis isn't that big!"

Game On,
fbmf

Dante's nine circles of hell are:

• Limbo
• The Windswept Pandemonium of Lust
• The Fetid Wormswamps of Gluttony
• The Sisyphusian Torment of Greed
• The Stygian City of Dis - (Anger)
• The Flaming Tombs of Heresy
• The Fiery Circles of Phlegethon (Violence)
• The Tortuous Gorge of Malebolge (Fraud)
• The Frozen Lake of Cocytus (Betrayal)

D&D's Nine Hells of Baator are:

• The Charred Wasteland of Avernus
• The Iron City of Dis
• The Vile Bog of Minauros
• The Fiery Wasteland of Phlegethos
• The Frozen Ocean of Stygia
• The Crushing Lands of Malbolge
• The Treacherous Ruins of Maladomini
• The Glacial Wasteland of Cania
• The Great Pit of Nessus

Now honestly, very few of those things describe a geographical feature that could plausibly take up an entire planet. Let alone an infinite plane of existence. But the D&D version has some pretty pimp names, and I don't see any pressing reason to reorder them.

-Username17

[Sigil]

Just a comment about the elemental planet-planes being sucky in D&DGate, you could have each of the elements be more like an interstallar wind (originating from somewhere outside the galaxy) that flows, winds, and branches throughout the universe. Sometimes they'd envelop planets for short periods of time, or even suck them into the flow of the stream.

That way you could have the "plane" of fire, with the various fire related places being planets caught in its flow.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Have we essentially abandoned the planar metropolis idea in favor of a revised Spelljammer?

You can have a planar metropolis in this kind of setting. It's just situated between several interesting planets rather than being at the center of everything going on in the setting.

If we are explicitly ripping off spelljammer, I would totally insist on building an interplanetary conveyance shaped like my PCs head and flying around in my shiny new faceship. But I don't think "there are planets" is enough to make this draw more from that than the planes we are actually using for ideas.

[virgil]

Unless you have interplanar travel go through methods other than gates and planeshift, then their is no difference between making them planets or making them planes; except that it takes more work to fit them into celestial bodies. With the headspace dedicated to making them planets, you might as well go full-hog to validate them by throwing in Spelljammers.

[Username17]

Unless you have interplanar travel go through methods other than gates and planeshift, then their is no difference between making them planets or making them planes; except that it takes more work to fit them into celestial bodies. With the headspace dedicated to making them planets, you might as well go full-hog to validate them by throwing in Spelljammers.

There's a huge difference. A planet has five hundred million square kilometers of land area. A plane of existence has infinity square kilometers of of land area. The first is very large and hard to comprehend. The latter is just retarded.

-Username17

[fectin]

If you're looking at Spelljammer, I'll plug Aether & Flux as a worthy knockoff. (I dont have any connection to the book, but got it and liked it).

Like everyone else (apparently) I have a half finished setting; mine is baroque space empires. It would be cool if there were a way to have elemental poles which I could drop directly into that setting (cool for me, obviously, but also cool for anyone else doing something similar. Pre-written snippets are great). For example, if the plane of fire is a Dyson sphere, that makes it almost arbitrarily large, generates it's own adventure hooks, let's it drop seamlessly into any space setting, etc. If the plane of fire is a galactic wind, that's still cool, but also largely defines the setting.

[virgil]

Not every plane is infinite. Even so, not that many people care about defining an exact size of the Dimension of Pain, so going out of your way to do so is a waste of effort if you're not going to go ahead and have means of interplanetary travel outside of gates.

The planes are established and don't require extra work to incorporate into a setting. It allows you to have more esoteric dimensions like hollow worlds, the ethereal, places where the Sun actually lands to sleep for the night before traversing the sky again, etc. To top it off, having your soul travel to another planet upon death only has traction with Mormons, last I checked.

[hyzmarca]

Have we essentially abandoned the planar metropolis idea in favor of a revised Spelljammer?

You can have a planar metropolis in this kind of setting. It's just situated between several interesting planets rather than being at the center of everything going on in the setting.

If we are explicitly ripping off spelljammer, I would totally insist on building an interplanetary conveyance shaped like my PCs head and flying around in my shiny new faceship. But I don't think "there are planets" is enough to make this draw more from that than the planes we are actually using for ideas.

Stargate stated sucking when they got ships. This is because a crack modern military team traveling through a magic plot generator and meeting ancient civilizations is more interesting than crack military team solves everything using techno-babel.

[Username17]

I don't think that you'd have to suck when you got ships. Stargate Universe started sucking in season 2, but that was because everyone put on the idiot hat in order to keep the evil and incompetent colonel in charge of things and allow known assassins to wander around unsupervised while they assassinated people they said they were going to assassinate. While they were still doing Alpha Centauri style philosophical ranting and fixing a broken ship and exploring planets, that was pretty cool.

Any, here's what I'm talking about with a planar metropolis in a Gatejammer setting:

---

Finality

"The End of your journey. But perhaps the beginning of Another."

Finality is a planar metropolis, a massive city on the world of Clangor. The distant blue sun around which Clangor revolves is called Avalas, and it is in the Acheron gate cluster. The city of Finality sits in the middle of a barren wasteland and subsists on trade. It is an important planar metropolis for people of the material world because it is relatively easy to reach, and also because the merchants of Finality are very interested in buying what the people of the Primes have to sell. They want the turnips, they want the gold, and they want the people themselves – both their bodies and souls.

And so it is that people come through the portals night and day with carts laden with goods. And they leave through those same portals day and night with carts laden with different goods. And the city lives and eats because each cart that leaves has just a little bit less on it than when it came in, and sometimes a person doesn't come back at all. But these costs of business are nothing to the people from far away compared to the tantalizing chance to acquire goods from other worlds. Things that command prices back home that are unbelievable and easily worth the prices and taxes demanded by the merchants of Finality.

Finality's famed Portal Nexus has gateways both numerous and large that connect to many worlds. And they are in near constant operation. Finality is in many ways closer to a dozen cities on a dozen worlds than it is to any other settlement on Clangor. Over a hundred million tonnes of freight enters and leaves through its portals every year. While some of that freight has Finality as its true final destination, the considerable majority is destined to be resold to caravans headed for worlds where the demand for such “exotics” is high enough that the taxes of Finality are considered a small price.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

The ideas I'm seeing about elemental planes sound like they were remotely inspired by IGTN's Tome of Elements, which might be a good reference for the elemental sections of this project. For example, it had elemental sources and sinks that acted to keep the quantities of raw elements well-balanced, plus mechanics for letting those seep through to other planes where they could start causing problems. It also manages to make the elemental planes not boring; I particularly like the Negative Energy Plane, where zombies rain from the sky, and the Positive Energy Plane, which is basically cancer.