New Frank & K Tome pdf

[Judging__Eagle]

I think... that my current campaign might have the PCs set up camp in the Negative Energy Plane. There's a bunch of undead in the group; and, they're high enough level to get scrolls of Attune Plane.

Placing Earth, in the Negative Energy Plane is interesting. The ideas of Death Worlds is good.

[Lokathor]

So obviously the plane of Earth has no light, and the Positive Energy plane has lots of light. What about the plane of Water and Air?

[Avoraciopoctules]

So obviously the plane of Earth has no light

I expect that adventurers could find arbitrarily glowing fungus, crystals, and lava. Not everywhere, but in enough space to matter.

[NoDot]

I was going to ask if these descriptions considered that spell which creates demiplanes (which seems infinitely superior), but all I can find is Genesis. Was I imagining it?

[Username17]

It's not super important whether the Plane of Earth has light or not, because nothing is very far away, so you can pretty much illuminate your whole world with a Sunrod.

-Username17

[IGTN]

I was going to ask if these descriptions considered that spell which creates demiplanes (which seems infinitely superior), but all I can find is Genesis. Was I imagining it?

There's an Arcane version in the Epic rules.

Frank, if you don't mind, I'm going to yoink a bunch of the stuff on the Negative plane for my project on the Inner Planes.

[NoDot]

I was going to ask if these descriptions considered that spell which creates demiplanes (which seems infinitely superior), but all I can find is Genesis. Was I imagining it?

There's an Arcane version in the Epic rules.

And the spell itself is non-epic. So...

25gp x 9 x 17 = 3,825gp

Wish up one scroll and you have your own demiplane.

[Quantumboost]

The Inner Plane writeups, and really all but the transitive plane writeups, can ignore the existence of genesis, because the demiplanes created by that spell can only be started on the ethereal and are thus not part of the Inner Planes.

[Lokathor]

Demiplane drift can help explain the pockets of non-elemental on the elemental planes, if you feel the need for such an explanation.

[NoDot]

Frank's write-ups of the Plane of Fire and the Negative Energy Plane include fortresses and hideouts that would function better as demiplanes. (Why imprison something on the Plane of Fire when a demiplane would be harder to reach?)

[PhaedrusXY]

Frank's write-ups of the Plane of Fire and the Negative Energy Plane include fortresses and hideouts that would function better as demiplanes. (Why imprison something on the Plane of Fire when a demiplane would be harder to reach?)

I'm not sure it would be harder to reach. Plane Shift can take you to either, and there are plenty of things that have it as a SLA to get around the silly tuning forks.

Going to the demiplane, it is probably impossible to actually be off as much as the spell says, but I think you'd still wind up in the plane. If you plane shift to the plane of fire however, you wind up in some random place and have no easy way to figure out which direction to go to get where you want to be. (Ok... you could cast Find the Path or something, I guess. But it still will be more work than just going to the demiplane.)

[Username17]

Frank, if you don't mind, I'm going to yoink a bunch of the stuff on the Negative plane for my project on the Inner Planes.

Go for it.


High Adventure in... The Plane of Water!

The Elemental Plane of Water is an endless expanse of relatively static water permeated by a soft ambient light. There is only gravity if you want there to be, and the incompressible medium makes gravitational movement slower than walking. But nonetheless, you can move pretty much anything at the rate of about three and a half miles per hour just by "falling" or "rising" with it. Outside of an occasional "pressure zone" the entire plane is pretty much one giant coastal shallows, with a water pressure at any point about that of being under just a meter of water. The Elemental Plane of Water is also the largest place in all of the D&D multiverse in real terms.

Sure, it is "infinite in all spacial dimensions and time" just like all the other Inner Planes, but it is markedly different in that every point in the Plane of Water is also a place. None of it is empty or impassable, it's all just made of water. So you can go and be anywhere, and you won't be "between" things because the place you will be will be an actually stable location in and of itself that you can put stuff down in or give directions to. Every point. And that means that there are more places to be, and by extension more stuff than in any of the other planes. Indeed, like how on Earth about 70% of your body is water, and about 70% of the world's surface is water, about 70% of the creatures and structures in the Inner Planes are on the Elemental Plane of Water. And like the oceans of every Prime World - the Plane of Water still gets less press than the other planes because it is full of water. In general, things on the Elemental Plane of Water stay where they are put, with little in the way of mobility. This means that when there is an air bubble, people can pretty much run around in it without fear that the air will bubble up away from them. Because there is no up. This also means that disposal of bodily waste is "gross." There is nowhere to "bury" anything, so stuff that comes out of you just sits there accusingly. Fortunately, there are a lot of plants and little animals that will come clean that up, but this process is no nicer to watch on the Plane of Water than it is anywhere else. There are areas where, for whatever reason, the ambient water is flowing with some kind of current. Some of these currents are incredibly fast, but as a rule they are not that "large" and full mixing doesn't happen. The fresh parts of the endless sea stay fresh and the salty parts stay salty. The hot parts stay hot and the frozen parts stay frozen.


The Marids are, individually speaking, the most hard core of the Genies. However, the Great Padisha of the Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls is basically just the mayor of a town of one thousand occupants. One thousand occupants where one in five of them can grant frickin wishes, but just a thousand all the same. You could seriously move around the plane your whole life and never come within the demesnes of a Marid. Each Marid considers themselves to be royalty and to rule all they survey - which is basically true but functionally meaningless because you normally can only see about 60 feet on the Plane of Water because there's microbes and sand and stuff in the water pretty much everywhere. This contrasts sharply with the Sahuagin empires, some of which are ten thousand miles across (note: this is bigger than the entire Earth, and we're talking volume rather than surface area, so some of these empires have populations that measure in the tens of billions), but which due entirely to the sheer vastness of the plane and the smallness of any visitor's personal experience of the place (60 feet or so around them and movement as fast as they can sink or swim), it is still entirely likely that you've never heard of any of them.

While the visibility on the plane of water is total crap, the audibility is intense. Water is nearly incompressible and it's nothing but water forever and ever. Sound pretty much follows the rule that any noise is four times as quiet when at twice the distance, with no additional dampening from the atmosphere. Any noise ever propagates with such totality and speed that to the human visitor it is nothing but a constant deafening roar. Indeed, since sound travels so much faster in water than in air, any non-aquatic visitor needs 10 ranks of listen to even have a hope of locating any sound. Even sounds that are loud or close enough to be distinctly made out sound like they are from “everywhere.” This is not a problem that natives have, and indeed a Sahuagin can locate you by the sound of the water against your skin.

Secession is constant in the Plane of Water. Anyone can just pick up their house and leave at a bit over 3 miles an hour. Between this tax day and the next, you could have moved your house about 29,000 miles – which is noticeably more than the circumference of the Earth. And when you factor in the fact that there is no guaranty that anyone will find your house if you move it 100 meters, one can see that you can vanish from a government's radar very easily if you are not actively imprisoned. The standard therefore is to be required to pay taxes to the local authorities at the beginning of the year and subsequently be allowed to provide proof of citizenship to receive services for the following year. Surprisingly, much of the civilization in the Plane of Water is actually more recognizable by connoisseurs of modern nationalism than are the kingdoms of other planes of existence. If you want to live in a “country”, you have a citizenship card and rights and social services and stuff. Anyone who doesn't want those things (or doesn't want to pay for them), just leaves and lives elsewhere in the roaring darkness.

Campaign Seed: Heralds of the Empire: Sound travels fast under water, but news does not. When a new nation takes hold of a region, it can take a long time to even find everyone who lives there. And so it is that any nation state or empire needs to send out groups to patrol their territory. Not just to keep an eye on the citizens and provide whatever services the empire provides to the hinterlands – but also to keep the maps updated. After all, any part of the empire that hasn't been patrolled in the last month could seriously have had someone move a castle from 4000 kilometers away to there in the meantime. As representatives of the state being sent into areas of water that the state either has not been to yet or has not been to recently, the PCs could encounter pretty much anything at all. And they have a built-in plot hook that encourages them to interact with anything they fine. Whether they face level appropriate wandering monsters, social encounters with dubious locathah, or hostile empires coming the other way, the PCs can plausibly encounter level appropriate opposition at any level.

Campaign Seed: Tidal Merchants: The great tidal streams are currents that move with surpassing speed. Those who ride them can get places that are very far away in very short periods of time. And that's saying something in a world where seriously anyone can tie themselves to their cargo and “sink” 80 miles a day just by deciding to. The currents don't just provide fast transport, they also provide a path, a place to go. And so it is no surprise that as one drifts along the tidal stream, one can hear the drums of civilization from all sides just as you can see the glowing lights of fast food joints while driving on a freeway on Earth. Traveling along the tidal streams brings one from one urban development to another with all the vast spaces between literally washed away.

Ten Low Level Adventures in the Plane of Water:
The old Locathah is certainly interested in your proposal. But he says he has other problems...

• Sahuagin raiding has hit several nearby kelp farms.
• Shark attacks are on the rise.
• No one seems to want to buy the sponges he has been growing.
• His daughter has the ick.
• Food supplies are running low.
• The fish are migrating out.
• A local hot spot is attributed to Fire leakage.
• Those who die seem to come back as zombies.
• A siren has been throwing her weight around.
• Pirates have seized the oyster bed.

Ten Mid Level Adventures in the Plane of Water:
The sound of drums has called you to the activities like moths to a flame. When it comes into view, it appears to be:

• A brass sphere, with no immediately obvious entrances.
• An army of skeletons.
• The coral towers of a merfolk city, they look sick.
• An ice factory.
• Angry tritons.
• A giant eel that had been mimicking civilization sounds by slapping rocks together.
• A Sahuagin kelp outpost.
• A family of scrag wreckers.
• A Marid Sattrapi
• Some sort of mechanical vessel shaped like a lobster.

Ten High Level Adventures in the Plane of Water:
You've broken into the massive mechanical manta ship. Inside you find...

• Spongy, organic passageways... this ship is alive.
• The crew are long dead and dust.
• The captain's log mentions you by name.
• Kuo-Toan pirates and their Yugoloth servants.
• Sack after sack of dream dust.
• These look like dragon eggs.
• The spectral pirates who run this thing.
• A cargo hold full of wild eyed prisoners.
• A cargo hold full of non aquatic and fearful prisoners.
• The ship's wizard captain and his crew of blood-indifferent golem pirates.

[Kaelik]

High Adventure in... The Astral!

The Astral is an endless expanse of nothing populated by Wizards and assholes. You can see pretty far before clouds and random debris obscures general sight, and honestly, only that debris is actually important. The Astral plane is actually really really tiny. You can get anywhere you want to go just by thinking about it for a while, and there aren't a lot of places you actually want to be. Everything else is just filler.

The plane is basically deadly, it's just really slowly deadly. Storms will kill you eventually, and the inhabitants will kill you if they run into you, but that won't happen unless you are around the important parts. So the vast majority of the plane is easily skippable nothing, and you really do skip it. If someone says "You should go visit the Cloud Castle of Shangrai, it's made of solid clouds." It takes you a maximum of 20 days to get there from any place at all on the infinite plane to that castle. If you are trying to get back to any other place you've ever been, it takes a maximum of 2 days.

So if all that space is crap, what is there that actually matters? It sorts itself into two categories: big chunks of rock, and glowing pools. The pools are sitting around, and unlike chunks of rock, they can be found without knowing they are there. Pools are often one way, but are still useful for travel, and often used for transit from place to place. But they pretty much don't matter to residents. Rocks on the other hand can be dragged around and made into cool forts. And that's a big deal in the astral, because people can't even teleport on the Astral Plane, so having a wall of even less than 40ft is actually a big fucking deal. Plus you need something to stand on and keep things in, or you can't have a place that other people can find, and you are effectively just lost in space.

And who resides on the Astral? Only two types of people: People in transit from place to place, and people who are in hiding. Because on the Astral, it's impossible to find a place you haven't heard about except by luck, so everyone in the Astral is trying to hide from people. And the Githankyi? Well what do you think? They are the most elaborate network of cowards in existence. The Astral Plane has a bunch of fortresses. Fully 3/4ths of them are Githannkyi. So how are they hiding? Well, they are hiding things not people. You average Gith doesn't matter to anyone except as an object of murder, but the Gith spend all their time traveling the planes and the astral attempting to collect badass items before the Illithids. They just run cosmic interference, and that's really it. So they have thousands of collections of rock staffed with armies told to attack anyone on sight just to make sure that "everyone knows" there's nothing worth having in the Astral. So of course, some of those fortresses have got to be filled with crazy awesome artifacts. And where there is rumor of power, there are some crazy people seeking it.

The Astral plane is not low level friendly though, Storms and Astral Projectors and Githankyi who can't be assed to not kill you... It's not a nice place. But luckily, you can run from just about anything at a speed greater than it can close on you, so that's something. The only way to survive in the Astral is to be so badass you can take it all, or to carefully avoid any high level areas.

EDIT: Okay, you know what, this is prelimary work, but it's actually ass terrible. Anyone with a non shitty write up of the Astral should do that.

[Quantumboost]

Here's my shot at the PEP (ran low on actual adventure seed options):

High Adventure in... The Positive Energy Plane!

Adventuring on the Positive Energy Plane, much like the Plane of Fire or Hades, is generally confined to planar bubbles. This isn't because the plane hates life - indeed, in a very real sense it's composed of the essence of life and will pour itself into any living creatures on the plane and heal them. The problem with spending time on the plane is that much of it has the Major Positive-dominant trait and doesn't actually stop pouring energy into living things at any point. Even after any wounds have healed and living beings are fully restored to health and vigor, the plane keeps pouring in healing energy until its "patients" explode. Also, there's no air, so planar travelers who need to breathe have to bring their air supply with them outside of an Air or Material bubble.

So if your players are here, it's very likely that they either have some sort of special protection from positive energy, continually hack at themselves so they don't overflow, or stick to the portions of the plane which don't make people explode. The minor positive areas aren't the "primary" portions of the plane, but they're nonetheless infinitely large and don't have any adverse effects on living beings; hanging out in these areas isn't actually that bad. Still, there's little reason for anyone to actually live here unless they're an outsider native to the plane.

Due to the nature of the plane, a common tactic for those traveling from one bubble to another is continually digging at their flesh, taxing their bodies' healing ability just enough that they can survive the occasional foray into major positive areas. Natives of the plane who don't have protective magic can often be distinguished by "scars" of newly-regrown flesh, and often gouge their flesh reflexively even when on other planes until they can adjust.

Most communities on the Positive Energy Plane are isolated from each other, both because travel is so dangerous and because it's hard to actually see things on the Positive Energy Plane. Major positive areas are bright enough and emit enough light that seeing anything in their direction - let alone past them - is virtually impossible. And really, they make up most of the plane, so there's a good chance that there's going to be one in front of anything interesting. Other sensory inputs are amplified as well, so overall everything's a lot more loud, hot, and bright than you'd probably enjoy.

As far as natives go, there aren't too many creatures that make their homes here. There are a few sparse colonies from other planes, but the true natives are mostly limited to the xeg-yi, ravids, and glimmerskins, who are basically immune to the adverse effects of the plane and are mostly the only beings you'll find traveling through the depths. Xeg-yi and glimmerskins are unpleasant to deal with in that their natural tendency is to heal living creatures one way or another (which is exactly what you don't want on the Positive Energy Plane), but the Ravids are more problematic in that they actually spread chaos beyond the general problems of the plane. About every six seconds, some object near the Ravid will spontaneously come to "life" and run around attacking things - and the Ravid is rarely smart enough to bother controlling them. Ravids showing up is basically the best way around here to have the players deal with a bunch of enemies that actually have no motivation besides attacking them.

Campaign Seed: Nomads of the Energy Storms: It's a fact of life on the Positive Energy Plane that if you're healthy and hit a major positive area or the energy levels spike, you're almost as good as dead. To avoid this happening, many societies live in places where they know of a few different "safe zones" and air and water bubbles, and use low-level divinations to tell them when to move. But since they need to be sure that the area they want to migrate to is safe to move to, they also employ scouts to periodically check on known bubbles and search for new ones. Sometimes these scouting parties encounter dumb monstrous threats they need to clear out, sometimes they encounter other settlements or squatters which they need to negotiate with (or clear out).

Campaign Seed: Graves of Steel: There is plenty of potentially usable energy on the Positive Energy Plane, and to someone who uses up lots of energy, like an inventor or artificer, that's a ridiculously good deal. You can make a very serviceable engine just by strapping in a Ravid and using its animate objects power or by using the plane's tendency to pour energy into simple lifeforms like oozes (much like the human batteries the robots in The Matrix were using, except it actually works here), and so plenty of inventors will come here to work on various projects that need easily accessible energy. But the plane is a very bad place to stay put for long periods of time, so these inventors will sometimes explode and sometimes abandon their work when a major positive trait decides to express itself. And so there are places where the Positive Energy Plane is littered with a lot of mostly intact machines just laying around.

Every so often, a wandering planar animate effect or curious Ravid will show up in one of these graveyards, so it's also the case that a lot of them have machines that are either still running or recently reactivated. You can then toss in almost any "machines run amok" trope from science fiction you like; these things really do wander off and start terrorizing villages.

Ten Low Level Adventures in The Positive Energy Plane

The nomad leader stands before you, adjusting his breathing apparatus. He says he knows a safe path to your destination, but in exchange he needs...

• Someone to find his son. He was sent to the scrapyards for parts earlier and hasn't returned.
• The path to the nearby well bubble cleared of elemental wolves, it just isn't safe with them around.
• Some squatters on one of the tribe's reserve primebergs handled. They'd prefer no blood, but need the job done either way.
• The animated pump in the center of town fixed. A couple of replacement parts from the nearby scrapyard should do the trick.
• Ravids passed through recently, and there are at least a dozen animated remnants running amok. Do whatever you want with them, as long as they stop harassing the nomads.

Ten Mid Level Adventures in The Positive Energy Plane

The elderly gnome staggers against the wall, the cut in his side slowly growing back. He gasps for air, and then says...

• "Thank goodness you've come, we need to shut down the main reactor."
• "If you're the Fusemaster's minions, you're too late - the nimblewright army is already on their way."
• "There's a Major Trait storm approaching, get out of here before it's too late!"
• "You may have defeated me, but now you must survive my greatest creation!"
• "I don't have the money, the safe I kept it in ran off with a Ravid last week."
• Nothing, before he explodes into a burst of energy.

Ten High Level Adventures in The Positive Energy Plane

The clockwork golem finally lies inactive, and its chest cavity is cracked open. You pull off the cover and inside you find...

• A glimmerskin struggling against its restraints.
• The repeater coil you were looking for - but it's cracked, and the only lead to its creator is the number sequence on the bottom.
• Lightning crackling between the surrounding plane and a circular gate filled with darkness.
• It's not a golem at all... it's a suit of armor. And it's occupied.
• The planar energy control rods aren't suppressing the positive energy. They're focusing it.
• A pair of Ravids. And the construct is starting to move again...

[Judging__Eagle]

Kaelik, finish it, it's interesting enough so far.

You just need a couple of campaign seeds, and about 9 missions out of the max of 30, to make that write up usable for almost anyone.

I'm also liking how you've explained that people hide out in the Astral. I've actually had a PC/NPC who does exactly that.

Describing an average bolt-hole asteroid-base might be something to add as well.

[Dominicius]

Speaking of planes and planar currency...

Has it ever been decided what they do? Raw Chaos? Hope? etc?

Also, I know you can wish up gems to be used to trap souls for creatures below level 15. Do you actually need to quest for the more potent gems?

[schpeelah]

Not really - the "quest" part is getting a soul of something powerful in there, at which point it becomes Wish Economy Currency. The gem itself is mostly irrelevant - there an entire ifinite plane made of them, after all.

[Dominicius]

Elemental plane of Earth. Right, forgot about that.

By this point PCs should have the resources needed to scour it for gems easily.

[schpeelah]

Elemental Mineral/Plane of Gems actually. Positive Quasielemental Earth. Made entirely of precious stones.

[Maxus]

Elemental Mineral/Plane of Gems actually. Positive Quasielemental Earth. Made entirely of precious stones.

Yes, adding all the difficulties of the Plane of Earth (better be able to burrow and breathe rocks, buddy), but also the problems of massive slashing damage.

[IGTN]

Speaking of planes and planar currency...

Has it ever been decided what they do? Raw Chaos? Hope? etc?

I'm in the process of writing a feat that allows you to use Raw Chaos to make either magic items or demiplanes.

[Judging__Eagle]

you can Wish up 25k gp gems.

go nucking futs.

[fbmf]

Aren't there rules for terrain somewhere in the Tomes? As I recall, the rule was something like "Ignore the DMG, use It's Hot/Cold Outside", but I wanted to be sure.

Also...

I'm in the process of writing a feat that allows you to use Raw Chaos to make either magic items or demiplanes.

I'd be interested in seeing that.

Game On,
fbmf

[IGTN]

I'm in the process of writing a feat that allows you to use Raw Chaos to make either magic items or demiplanes.

I'd be interested in seeing that.

Game On,
fbmf

The main problem I've been running into with the Demiplane rules is that even after taking all of the general Create a Demiplane rules and giving them their own section to be called by feats, spells, class features, and so on, the feat still ends up long.

I should probably try to make some of the rules (like trait assignments) more general, so that I can take them out of the feat.

[Judging__Eagle]

Btw, I'm printing this off in 4x4 pages per page, double-sided of the "large" version of the rules.

http://code.google.com/p/awesometome/downloads/list

From there.

It's 83 pages, according to the print window, down from the 332 monstrosity, and 42 when printed double sided.

Perhaps the question is "how many pages does it take to make D&D a fun game for everyone who participates?".

I'm going to print off a few copies for some other people that I know, and who game, as well.

They already know that I play "non-standard" D&D, and that one of the heaviest RPers that they know loves the material. After all, surprise, surprise, rules that don't intentionally give an organic character the shaft is liked by someone who makes organic characters.