[OSSR]Factol's Manifesto

[CatharzGodfoot]

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.

If you take the Algebraist as a model, the elemental planes basically write themselves. The ersatz plane of air is a gas giant (which is way more interesting), the ersatz plane of water is a water world (again, more interesting), and the ersatz plane of fire is either Mercury or the Sun. Avernus is in a giant asteroid belt.


But in a fantasy game, you don't really need anything nearly so elaborate. Just take the ancient view that "The World" is the place where you live, with the land of the dead being reachable if you walk far enough west or dig deep enough, the City of Brass just over that mountain range and through the desert, and so forth. The open pit mine of hell does not need its own planet. Air elementals can be summoned from the upper atmosphere; they don't need some kind of special other place made of air.
Then connect it all together with 'ley lines' and 'nexuses' that people can use to gate around with (among other things).

[virgil]

Finality

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

Speaking of Finality, are we removing Finality's timeless trait? What about the Byzantine laws that force you to stay for only a few days each month? How is the anti-fighting rule maintained? Do we have an order of militant pacifists keeping the peace, sanctuary magic blanketing the city, police whose sole purpose is to be snitches to hit squads of cornugons?

[Ted the Flayer]

I'm stealing these ideas for my homebrew campaign setting. I'm keeping the elemental planes because they're written in my world and are considered important, I'm chucking all the outer planes and making the more interesting/less stupid ones planets. Baator and the Abyssal Hegemony could work as rival racially integrated empires, Acheron could be a series of Borg cubes, Sigil could be a ringworld near the galactic core (maybe at the end of one the the radiation plumes that shoot out of the central black hole).

I think I can make this work for my world.

EDIT: Also, I'm going to make Elysium a world, because furries are sexy, so very sexy something that players just expect there to be in a fantasy/sci-fi game.

[Username17]

Finality

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

Speaking of Finality, are we removing Finality's timeless trait? What about the Byzantine laws that force you to stay for only a few days each month? How is the anti-fighting rule maintained? Do we have an order of militant pacifists keeping the peace, sanctuary magic blanketing the city, police whose sole purpose is to be snitches to hit squads of cornugons?

With access to 3e-style open planeshift, planar metropolises need a shtick to get you to go there at all. Sigil is the planar metropolis you go when you are low level and you want to be able to adventure in other planes (because it bans all high level activities and has lots of portals). Union is the place you go when you want to conduct very large transactions involving epic currency. The City of Brass is where you go to barter in Wishes. Finality is where you go to barter in Souls. Shra'kt'lor you almost never go to, but it's the place you go for information and weapons to fight Aberrations. Malsheem is just a backdrop for the final boss fight. Hestavar and Grenpoli are not places that anyone ever goes to. And that's a shame.

In a Gatejammer setting, that problem instantly vanishes. The different planar metropolises are in different places on the portal nexus, so the cities don't have to specialize so much to get players to go to them. The players will go to Grenpoli because it happens to be a short number of jumps if you start at a travel bog in the Bane Mires. The players will go to Hestavar because it happens to be easily reachable through Arvendor. So the cities no longer need or even want exclusive gimics to entire players to go there. Now the cities just want to be culturally and architecturally distinct, so that it "feels different" if the players go to trade in Ashbringer than it does when the players go to trade in Tu'narath.

So right away, Finality is going to stop being a city of "Trade Souls and GTFO". It's going to keep the soul trade, and the Dungeon of the Dying Deity is still in the city limits. But the players are going to want to go there to take advantage of the portal network and to do normal big city adventures, so it should take up those functions.

As for the Lawful Trait: heck no. That has to go, because the Lawful Trait has to go. Law and Chaos are stupid and bad for the game, and moving forward you'd want to chuck them. Like infinite planes themselves, the alignment traits should be phased out completely. Timelessness is more complicated. The Timeless Trait hasn't done the same thing in any two editions of the game. It has been everything from a way to Rip Van Winkle yourself to a way to stay forever young to a "no resting to regain spells" challenge. At the very least, the city should have the special Acheronian preservative trait, because the fact that you can eat four month old apples is neat flavor text, and the fact that thousand year old weapons and diaries can be found in abandoned attics and still be usable creates a lot more potential adventures than it obviates.

[hyzmarca]

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.

Stargate Universe didn't really have a ship though. Destiny might as well have been a prison planet for all the control they had over it. Ships imply the ability to go where you want to go. They also imply naval logistics.

[rasmuswagner]

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.

Stargate Universe didn't really have a ship though. Destiny might as well have been a prison planet for all the control they had over it. Ships imply the ability to go where you want to go. They also imply naval logistics.

All in all, we're really not talking about Universe when we're talking Stargate. Whiny Emo Bitch and her not-boyfriend, the Amazing Liuetenant Insubordination, was not a great show.

[sabs]

But Rumplestiltskin was FREAKING AWESOME.

[virgil]

Finality

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

Speaking of Finality, are we removing Finality's timeless trait? What about the Byzantine laws that force you to stay for only a few days each month? How is the anti-fighting rule maintained? Do we have an order of militant pacifists keeping the peace, sanctuary magic blanketing the city, police whose sole purpose is to be snitches to hit squads of cornugons?

With access to 3e-style open planeshift, planar metropolises need a shtick to get you to go there at all. Sigil is the planar metropolis you go when you are low level and you want to be able to adventure in other planes (because it bans all high level activities and has lots of portals). Union is the place you go when you want to conduct very large transactions involving epic currency. The City of Brass is where you go to barter in Wishes. Finality is where you go to barter in Souls. Shra'kt'lor you almost never go to, but it's the place you go for information and weapons to fight Aberrations. Malsheem is just a backdrop for the final boss fight. Hestavar and Grenpoli are not places that anyone ever goes to. And that's a shame.

Are we just going to fully excise plane shift & greater teleport (likely gate and astral projection as well) as available spells in this setting? How does this function with calling magic for that matter?

As important as gates are, we need to decide on logistics. How big are the gates? Are they large enough for a wagon to go through


Are they closer to geographical features between the two places? Perhaps there is a mix?


How are they made? How easily can they be destroyed or even replaced? Is a single portal tied to one other, or can they be rotated to multiple others (ala Stargate coordinates)? If they're on the smaller side, can they be moved? Can they be closed, or are they constantly open?

EDIT: While we're at it, we need to decide how many factions of importance there are in Finality. Do we want them to be philosophically oriented as a shout-out to Sigil's factions, or do we want them to just be job-related guilds with a color scheme at best (the portal guild likes collapsible weapons or something)? Since basic plot hooks are still present, I think having goals and motivations above and beyond the faction's civil role would be the way to go.

[Chamomile]

Spitballing concerning gate specifics, the method often used for these sorts of things is that they were created by the Ancient Mysterious Precursors who Mysteriously Vanished leaving their Inscrutable Artifacts around for us to use. In order for there to be an economy for us to use, the gates have to be large enough for a wagon to pass through, preferably multiple wagons at once. It'd be cool if the River Styx and the River Oceania were still around in the form of rivers being linked to one another via various portals such that you can start out on one lower plane and then ride through the gates along the river one after another until you end up having gone from Acheron to Pandemonium. Or vice versa. In fact, since you'd want to be able to send trade both ways, they'd probably have two separate rivers linking them, so that you can always follow the flow to reach your destination plane. Each of these planes has got to have at least two rivers on it.

Focusing on specific factions for the planar metropolii is probably a mistake. Since we've left the Great Wheel behind, there is no one grand hub, but rather a number of different hubs. Finality isn't replacing Sigil, it's in addition to Sigil and the City of Brass and Union and those other ones I can't even remember the name of because no one cares about them. Unless we actually plan on filling up all of these different cities with their own local factions, it's probably better to focus on planar factions.

If it is possible to create or destroy gates at all, it shouldn't be easy. Otherwise, it would be wisest for planes to maintain gates to all other planes they aren't actively at war with and we end up with less of a star chart-y looking map and more of a graph listing connections, with most planes connected to most other planes.

[virgil]

It was my impression that the project was going to be an equivalent of a Finality sourcebook with Gatejammer introduction, rather than a Gatejammer Campaign that happened to have Finality on a list of other planar metropolises. And speaking of Gatejammer, what form will intra-system travel take, for the worlds that can be reached without having to use a gate? Shall we use full-on Spelljammers, where people carry air pockets with them when entering space? Or should we do something like mini-gates that can be made by mortals to enter the something akin to the Plane of Shadow, where you can walk to nearby worlds (the Gates are still needed for separate systems).

[K]

There is no reason to have a single kind of gate, or even a single kind of gate-builder. Most of everything in Stargate eventually was contradicted just so they could keep telling stories, and a RPG is going to have that problem in spades.

There is also no reason to have single gates per planet. There could be known gates that are controlled by mostly-friendly forces who defend and/or toll use of a gate and unknown ones that form both adventure hooks and a form of treasure.

I could even see a real-world map carried by players that they would update every time they found a new gate. Then they could plot out jumps through their own network of gates and every gaming group would have a unique set of portal networks.

[Username17]

First of all, the spells like Planeshift should totally exist. Sooner or later the players are going to want to get powerful enough to take control over their own destiny. However, the entire premise of a Gatejammer setting is that even though players have planar travel, "distance" still matters. So planeshifting should shift you a certain distance on the star chart to another world. But portals still take you to wherever they go.

The key idea is that you want travel times to happen and for there to be adventuring to do on the way from one place to another place. And that means straight off no using Planeshift to cross the entire multiverse in one go. Further, it means that you want people to not simple rapid fire planeshifts to cross the multiverse in several six second intervals. Also you don't want people to go through a gate and then immediately teleport to the next gate and jump through that. In either case, the clear answer is planar travel cool-down times. Having used planar travel, you can't travel again via portals or shifting for some amount of time. Generally speaking it should be at least long enough to have an adventuring day. You could have it be an actual day, but that seems gamey, so you'd probably want it to be something weird like 17 hours or something magical sounding like "next sun rise" (which is probably a bad choice because of how many worlds don't have suns or at least don't have visible suns).

Meanwhile you also have what I'm going to call "planar travel roads". That's where you physically travel in a specific direction from a specific place and you end up on another plane of existence. The River Styx, the Road to Amber, and that forest in Narnia all work like that. Those don't need a cooldown timer, because potential pirate encounters is already built in to the experience.

Next, you have Banishment. That doesn't need a cooldown timer either, because it sends you backwards on whatever planar travel path you last took.

And once we have it taking several days to serially plane jump via spell from where you are to where you want to be, then we can keep portal networks mattering at high level by having them not be limited that way. A two-way portal simply connects whatever happens to have each end of the portal set up. And if those are far away from each other on the star map, that is OK. It just means that you end up drawing various red and blue lines criss crossing your planar map as you find new gateways set up by various smugglers, empires, and mad wizards. And that is cool.

So Finality is in the Acheron gate cluster, which means that you can not only world-jump to Nishrek, you can also jump to the haunting asteroid belts or the mining world of Marsellin around the star Thuldanin. Or you could go to Wreychtmirk. Or any of the other worlds in the Acheron gate cluster. And since it's on one edge of the Acheron Gate Cluster, you can also plane shift to a couple of worlds that are not in the Acheron Gate Cluster. Like maybe Hammergrim, Banehold, or Hyetal. But Finality is also a trade city and when you go to the Portal Pentagon, there are gateways set up that go to a lot of different worlds that are potentially many jumps away if you just have spells to cast.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

One way to make planeshift work is if all of the "prime material" planets are located within relatively close proximity - a galactic core where the distance between systems is relatively small. The "outer" planes/planets then could actually be distant on a cosmic scale, requiring either gate-hopping, spacejamming, traveling to a peripheral planet that is close enough to planeshift to it, or some combination of the above.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, for Teleport, how does something like, "until you've attuned to this plane (generally by passing a pair of mystically significant events, that generally happen once a "day"), you can't Teleport on it. If you miss (one? both?) of those events (in a row, in the case of both), you lose attunement," sound?

[Username17]

So, for Teleport, how does something like, "until you've attuned to this plane (generally by passing a pair of mystically significant events, that generally happen once a "day"), you can't Teleport on it. If you miss (one? both?) of those events (in a row, in the case of both), you lose attunement," sound?

Doesn't sound necessary. If you have a time delay before you can planeshift or portal jump off of a new world, then it doesn't much matter if you teleport to "the end". 17 hours (or whatever) to wait for plane shifting to be possible again is plenty enough to force you to have a little Sliders style mini-adventure.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

You could rule that teleport only works on an intraplanar scale, i.e. you can teleport anywhere on the current planet (and possibly nearby moons), but to get to the next planet you need a gate or plane shift.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Tying cooldowns to a single rotation on your planet's axis would work as long as you were on a planet. And if you end up warping into a smaller planetoid with a single encounter on it, you'd get out faster.

The only problem is asteroid fields or other "worlds" that can't be easily seen as one piece.

[RadiantPhoenix]

You could rule that teleport only works on an intraplanar scale, i.e. you can teleport anywhere on the current planet (and possibly nearby moons), but to get to the next planet you need a gate or plane shift.

No, the concern was:

1. Step through portal
2. Teleport to next portal
3. Repeat

[fectin]

You could also do the Stargate thing, where once you build a gate, it's easy for some jackass to link you into the heart of a star. So all gates are very, very tightly guarded. They're useful for fast transit, but the security overhead makes them too costly for moving bulk goods.
That gives you both gates and world hopping adventures, and also drives spelljammer spaceships.

[zeruslord]

I don't really like that plan. Gates being linked into the hearts of stars doesn't feel like a D&D problem, and you're begging for the Union issue where there's a bunch of world-wrecking badasses sitting around as glorified town guards. I think gates should be paired and not swappable, to maintain the limitations of the portal network on travel times.

[Ancient History]

You could impose some limiting factors; D&D3 had that whole planar bleed thing where each side of the portal would start to take on characteristics of the other side. If you had a sufficient density of portals (nexus towns, basically) that could lead to some really weird physics interactions.

[Prak]

So, if I decided to use straight D&D plus houserules for my Gonzo Gang Warfare Heartbreaker (ie, Saints Row) game, how well would planescape/sigil work for that? With some revision, the factions seem like they could work as rival gangs and city officials. The Lady of Pain I would just make a high level character who looks like Summer Glau (not sure how Burt Reynolds would play in my audience) who could 've allied with if facestabbed as appropriate.

[LR]

17 hours (or whatever) to wait for plane shifting to be possible again is plenty enough to force you to have a little Sliders style mini-adventure.

-Username17

Would it be acceptable to put the cooldown on a table and set it up as a recurring window?

[virgil]

17 hours (or whatever) to wait for plane shifting to be possible again is plenty enough to force you to have a little Sliders style mini-adventure.

-Username17

Would it be acceptable to put the cooldown on a table and set it up as a recurring window?

Tables are too much for supplanting the definition of a day for purposes of plane hopping. Better to just have Planar Society go by a different unit of time than an Earth Solar Day, and have the cooldown be defined by that; something close-ish to 24 hours so that it's not too alien. Maybe graybeards measured it, and determined that in the time it takes for someone to hop planes, three hamatulas would be unconscious from a hustle-speed relay race.

[Prak]

Why not just tie it to circadian rhythms? Rather than try to make personal powers or abilities tie into an external measure, make them tie to internal measures, and everything just happens to have a 24 hour rhythm for the purposes of what would normally be "per day" abilities.