http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=5581.0 tinkering with the planes is a righteous pastime! The planar revision topic, linked, is still awesome as a body of work! So instead of dishonoring it , this tacky tack-on has been added here because my notes are but a bastard child born of this ^ thread’s inspiration.
So, the question that got me started was:
“If each dimension was a Cable TV Station, and I was the cable company CEO put in charge of spit-shining the dimensions and repackaging them for sale to interested subscribers…… what would I do to spice up the D&D planes and give them a new brand identity so they’re more appealing and more distinct from one another (less generic)?” (Most of what follows paints over the existing planes instead of trying to fit in with their existing framework).
People seem to object to Elysium’s way of swallowing visitors, so here’s this remedy:
Elysium’s habit of trapping visitors gets switched to Mechanus, which has more of an excuse to behave rudely like that since that realm intrinsically keeps all things Ordered, so when it senses new foreign matter running amok in the form of visitors it doesn’t trust you to be on your own recognizance—the plane tries to absorb and reprogram alien matter into its own Ordered substance, to incorporate you into its grand clockwork design in a way you could never experience while still running around “free”. So be careful, for goodness sakes! Don’t stand rooted to one spot for too long, or you’ll discover that you actually have put down roots and can no longer move from that spot… and you’re slowly sinking. Or, you might experience the tired old Freddy Krueger motif of your body being absorbed into one of mechanus’ walls or metallic moving parts, so that your horrified face is seen pushing out from inside the object’s surface as the plane devours you and digests you and prepares to reincarnate your “harmonized” identity into one of its Inevitables, or something like that. There’d be ways to magically fend off or delay the effect long enough to finish your mission, and there’d be recovery for those who get Mechanized, similar to how you can shake off lycanthropy. Makes more sense than Elysium imprisoning everyone aggressively like this.
And for Elysium, it gets downgraded to a milder version of entrapment—let’s make that plane highly Addictive. Like in the Oddyssey there was that island where the (lotus?) flowers put his crew into a haze and they just wanted to stay there like sloths and wouldn’t leave of their own volition. It’d be like a good-plane version of how eating the food in Hades traps you there, but as with Persephone the trap wouldn’t be absolute. There’d be hope for escape and rescue. You’d hate whoever rescued you until you were done detoxing, though. And then for a while after that you’d still not find any joy in life now that you’ve been pulled out of heaven so rudely (like Buffy season 6) and nothing in the prime material plane is as bright or lovely or fulfilling. But eventually your lust for life would start to return.
For other realms, how about some MERGERS:
Astral Plane + D&D Dream Plane (Because Earth mystics have already been touting these as one in the same forever, so I don’t know why D&D went away from that. Astral body = dream consciousness. I’d keep the part about souls traveling through this plane, and I’d add Holodeck style dreamscapes you could enter into as a living astral traveler—you’d be a foreign entity getting incorporated into the actual dreams of a sleeping class of unseen demigods whose dreams manifest physically on the Astral plane. Using E = MC2, these beings transform Astral’s energy-rich environs into quasi-matter of sorts, solid enough from the visitor’s POV since your astral body would be equally bantam weight.)
Ethereal + Spectral Realm as it appears in Soul Reaver video games. A place of visible souls, monochrome cold-blue landscapes that are an echo of the material world but have undergone psychic warping to reflect the traumatic events that happened in each location historically, and there’s also the apparent cessation of time (its flow slowed down greatly). I’d keep the “deep ethereal” second layer that no longer reflects the material world but has now trailed off “impossibly” into ghost terrain unique to the Ethereal plane (into eternity—timeflow becomes variable in deep ethereal, and centuries can pass without you noticing, especially should you become caught up in your own “haunt,” or feedback loop, as this place is wont to inflict upon the ghost population). Glowing ghostly ecosystems of a most wondrous nature have grown up here “organically”, like spectral moss on a log (the planet), and soul-scavengers or Sluagh are also present. Here, I’d add to deep ethereal the Osiris sort of being, those spectral Lions Tigers and Bears who set up shop and weigh the souls of the dead to judge their worthiness for specific afterlifes based on various cultural mythos. Some of these beings owe their existence here to that culture’s force of belief, like a zeitgeist gods-made-flesh type deal, while other entities are even deeper enigmas who don’t rely on the belief of others, and from which ghosts stampede in panic as from leviathans. Those who pass the tests pass through into astral and are drawn to their afterlife destinations error-free; those who fail to navigate these obstacle courses for the soul as outlined in their holy books are either sent to a punishment afterlife or, as a default, their spirits are simply drawn further down to be spun again in the Wheel of Fate and reincarnate in a new body with a new destiny. Travelers are sometimes mistaken for souls of the dead and forced to participate in the trials.
Shadow Realm + Mirror Plane (so that all the dim light sources from the many mirror gates would shine in from all sides to help explain why so much “shadowy-ness” is present! Makes all kinds of sense, right? White-hat mages would use mirrors to travel to and fro, while darker warlock type mages would use shadow travel spells to enter and traverse the plane more organically without relying on mirrors as a crutch. The murderous mirror-plane dopplegangers that, in D&D lore, form automatically when anyone enters the mirror plane wouldn’t do that so much—only low level magickers who didn’t have complete control over their magics would risk having that happen, or it’d only happen to high level travelers when you’d been specifically targeted by dark magics—in other words someone would have to bring it about through malice, not at random).
Twin Paradises (Bytopia) + an Alternate Timeline scenario using the 2 Layers, borrowing a wrinkle from the Sci-Fi genre. This makes for high-stakes mystery capers in a divine plane, with the plane itself being the biggest mystery of all! It’d be two versions of the same world instead of having one layer be civilized and the other wild, which seems oversimplified and not a good hook. Long ago, mysterious events (the DM decides exactly what) caused the true world to fracture into a two-layered dimension. The two layers were nearly identical mirror images of each other at first, including a second copy of all the inhabitants. But the histories of both layers have been diverging ever since, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes more obviously, all tracing back to some primordial event. In some cases, all you have to do is look straight up to the 2nd world reflected in the sky above to see that its geography is markedly different, such as when one realm has had a forest fire where you’re standing and the other world is still forested on that spot. Other reference points between the two layers are tougher to compare and contrast, such as a betrayal that happened in only one timeline. But tracking these micro-fractures of history (learning when and why the timelines diverged in some new way) is the key to solving the mysteries of the Twin Paradises. That's how one finds clues and follows up on leads. (There's still great divine beauty and plenty of serenity to balance out the plane's oddities, making existence there very worthwhile overall.)
Many of the residents exist on both layers, living a different life in each, so the people of this plane can’t move freely from layer to layer. A strange soul-physics keeps them stuck living on the side they were born on (like how same-sided magnets repel each other). The EXCEPTION to this rule is when the realm’s aurora storms act up—it’s then that inhabitants sometimes wake in the other dimension, their souls having been switched to the alternate timeline by the electrical surges of the storm, where they’re often a stranger to themselves! Like having a waking dream, they then live the life of their soul-twin for a time, sometimes being a good caretaker by bettering that person’s life in the process, or sometimes your twin takes advantage of you by committing crimes while impersonating their other self, etc. You’ve got both of the timelines right there, side by side for easy comparison instead of existing apart in separate realities as is usually the case with alternate timeline science fiction. That’d add the potential for some mind-bending time-travel puzzles and side-switching gate mazes for when your path dead ends in one reality but goes on in the other. To add a sense of urgency, maybe it’s discovered that the realm is going to continue fracturing into more layers at an exponential rate, making it important to understand the cause and stop the chaos now before it gets out of control like the Abyss has. (Eh. Maybe I just liked the universe-jumping season of Fringe a lot?)
Outlands + the constant strife normally associated with Acheron ??? Doesn’t the Outlands strike you as the kind of TRULY high value real estate that’d spark constant attempts to claim that territory? Even gods would get gold fever for that place situated at the center of all things; they’d set up their own divine fiefdoms here and there on that plane to exert influence and gain visibility. Then some of the powers would create a god-banning energy shield to level the playing field again, with gods reduced to looking in on things powerlessly from the heavens, taking the shape of “stars,” which would give extra importance to the study of astrology in that land, as the constellations would move around actively with personality and malign intent, and the portents of their interactions would have real consequences for those living beneath the skywar. For the stars there are actually doing battle overhead instead of just having cutesy names like the ‘hunter’ as a false backstory as do Earth’s constellations. Etc. Prophecies would circulate that whomever held this domain at the moment Armageddon began would have a leg up on every other faction and pantheon. (Own the hub, own the future. It’d allow you to blitz the cosmos!) Multiple species armies would be going at it pretty much nonstop, with only the names of the players changing as they gain and lose territory or get wiped out. The song of strife would remain the same. By the way, I think the gate towns should be timeless relics that aren’t subject to being swallowed by the planes they connect to, because the outer circle of gates are part of the very design of the plane itself. It’s a vast temple complex, these gate cities. The creators made it sturdy enough to last for all time because they had some inscrutable prophetic purpose in mind for this massive undertaking. No greedy dimension is going to be allowed to mess with that long-term purpose by swallowing a gate town, they’d have seen to that. Also, there’d be a wondrous phenomenon to counter all the aggressive chaos: all the warring and bloodshed wouldn’t be able to touch anyone who was “walking the path” properly between gate cities (following the Outland’s time-honored code of conduct, sort of like a samurai meets buddha thing). This way, non-warriors would have a chance of surviving journeys across the plane to a specific gate. It’d be ½ “Follow the yellow brick road” and ½ “behave your way through the gauntlet of death by showing the world you deserve to exist.” (Worthiness tests, as the plane’s gods watched and judged how well each traveler walked the path).
Gehenna (as a Jupiter-ish planet) + Tartarus / Carceri (as Gehenna’s many moons which serve as a networked Dante's Inferno punishment afterlife. This separate offworld prison camp leaves the main planet of Gehenna free for other evil pursuits besides babysitting the damned. There are huge volcanoes which resemble the familiar description of never-ending mountainside terrain, but the plane’s entire surface is NOT steep like that, because that'd be stupid. The huge rock planet’s signature feature is its roaming furnaces in the form of molten hurricanes—not in the sky but underfoot! These storms are the size of Jupiter’s red spot and nearly as eternal. They liquefy the land and add it to their swirling mass wherever they go, and when they leave an area behind it steams, cools, and solidifies again in their wake, bouncing back with whatever strange profusion of (non-green) hellish life exists there, similar to how Hawaii’s volcanic rock becomes home to lush life. It’s a hell dimension, though, so if you should be swallowed and consumed by one of these storms you don’t die—you roast in agony, because the nature of this place is supernaturally punishing. You eventually are thrown clear and pull yourself up on the soft “shore” of land perhaps a day later, or an eon, depending on the eddies of the storm. It’s like the kind of roasting Rick Moranis described demigods being subjected to in Ghostbusters, which, by the way, prompted me to include Slors from their recent video game as inhabitants of Gehenna, along with fire-immune dragons who’ve immigrated to enjoy bathing in the storms. ….This weather system means that most of Gehenna’s civs are nomadic or capable of teleporting away, and Paul Revere types are constantly riding through somewhere to tell people it’s time to pack up and get the hell out of a hell-storm’s path. But the more powerful evil residents have created stable regions around their abodes, protecting the planet’s landmarks and important locales by fending off approaching earth-storms with magically resonating vibrations deep in the earth.
The
Tartarus moons are each dedicated to several classic torture scenarios for the damned, but there is the possibility of “escape”….to the next closest prison moon when it passes by on its orbit. The moons don’t rotate, and there are two gravitic temples on opposite sides of each moon that always face directly toward the overshadowing planet of Gehenna and directly away from it. This way, when a moon passes by on either side, its temple interacts with the one on your current moon, and they enact a Reverse Gravity effect. It’s mild enough that it lifts you up easily, carries you across a space bridge of breathable shared atmosphere, and sets you down gently on the surface of your new home moon, as if the realm cared. (This is like the ancient machinery in Final Fantasy that drew a thick cloud of monsters from the moon to the planet to terrorize everyone, only now it’s for spooky prisoner transfers). This sets up the possibility of a Riddick style escape from Tartarus by racing through the challenges of each moon to get to the other side in time to catch a ride closer to the “freedom” Gehenna represents (it’s still a hell there, but at least there’s not constant guaranteed torture). And there’s another hidden property of the moons—whenever they’re next to each other their orbits can be halted, or locked into place, into synchronous alignment, by the gravitic linkages they share. In other words you can hope to orchestrate a grand alignment of the moons, like when all the planets of our solar system sometimes line up. Once they’re all chained together like that, they become that “string of pearls” made of worlds from the D&D Tartarus/Carceri description. That’s when the shortcut opens up: the floor of each temple opens to reveal a hole that descends straight through the moon’s core to the other temple on the far side, and then your “descent” would continue right on into space until you repeated the process and fell through the next open-up moon in the chain, passing through them all in turn until you’re deposited on the planet. Good luck!
