D&D 5E Need ideas for a city straddling two planes!

[Ovinomancer]

Here is an idea -- a gate that opens horizontally, OUTSIDE of the city, because it is actually located underwater on the other side. Water floods up from the swamp side of the gate and on the arid side the gate sits open at the bottom of a very small lake that is used for crop irrigation. Travel through the gate is possible but inconvenient, as you have to swim down a short distance and get soaking wet.

If this is actually going to be a source of a lot of trade or travel, I bet you the enterprising residents of both sides with access to building materials and maybe even magic, have a lovely and roomy bridge and ramp built that would avoid the nasty wetness and facilitate trade.

Honestly, while this is a cool visual, it adds complication of access to something that you'd probably be happier using as a story element rather than something you have to play out any time the party is transitioning. And, again, the benefits of trade would be such that the City, being on both sides and relying on gate traffic, would expend a lot of effort and civil engineering to ease.

Now, a smaller settlement than a city, maybe two very different towns on each side, with occasional trade through the challenging gate would make an more interesting and explainable setting. Although, I have to say, the huge metropolis -- on side with aqueducts and adobe and sandstone buildings with a desert view and the other on stilts with few stone buildings and essentially built on top of itself over and over again as sections keep sinking, but easily traversed by a central gate... I like that better. Your game, though, but I'm stealing that idea and it's going in the maybe future game setting book. Theft now with sound effects:

Yoink.

 

[cbwjm]

Have both planes have distinct architecture and then smash them together so that around the portals there is some bleed through from the other plane.

 

[Quickleaf]

Ideas:

• Stilts support wooden walkways over the marshy areas of the city on Swamp World, and where they cross through the portals they are stone slabs traversing treacherous silt sinkholes or quicksand.
• Sa'id Kambahiir is an artificer (originally of the Desert World) who devised a means of using the hot air passing through a portal from the Desert World into the Swamp World to serve as a modest energy source, mainly for convective-type ovens and similar technology.
• Brisk markets in the Desert World sell rafts fashioned from a volcanic pumice-like stone that is buoyant. These rafts are especially valued on the Swamp World, where mineral resources & quarries are rare, but the government on the Desert World imposes stiff tariffs to any Swamp Worlders who try to buy these "stone rafts" in bulk; thus, a black market flourishes. Here may also be found rare poisons harvested from giant scorpions and adders, as well as enchanted sands which serve as enhanced spell components.

Questions for you:

• Who are the PCs? Merchants who travel back and forth between the two planes? Police let in on the secret of a doppelganger conspiracy? Diplomats seeking to prevent brewing war? Mercenaries/spies for one side ("good guys") undertaking covert action on the other side ("bad guys")? Belong to displaced/marginalized people who have no true home on either plane? Adventurers who discover something extraordinary about the portals or other planar passages?
• What sort of environmental effects are caused by the portals? Do they exist in isolation or do they have an effect on their surroundings (like a gate-town), allowing bits of the other plane to seep through?
• What are politics like between the two planes? Who are the movers and shakers? Does knowing there's a whole other world out there bring out the best in people, driving them to be better "world citizens" and thinking of the big picture? Or does it exacerbate tribal tendencies and superstition?

 

[Werebat]

Good questions, Quickleaf.

First, let me tell Ovinomancer that I totally agree with him - that dual city with the gate in its center(s) is definitely going to be used. I was thinking of another city -- maybe just a town as you proposed, whose gate is submerged at the bottom of a lake and maybe doesn't even lead near to any populated areas on the other side (in a mangrove forest, for example). Or perhaps there is a village of inhuman things (Grippli?) living up in the trees nearby, but not anything huge.

Now, Quickleaf:

1. This is an impromptu campaign so I have no real ideas for the PCs being anything other than wandering adventurers ATM. I was envisioning kind of a sandbox campaign where I used swamp and arid terrain adventures.

2. Water can pass through the gates and will tend to move to stabilize pressure between them, meaning that a gate at the bottom of a lake will push out enough water to keep the water pressure on it roughly equal in both worlds. Note also that active spells can penetrate the barrier between worlds - I was thinking of making a 3rd or 4th level spell that could enable travelers to go from one of these specific worlds to the other, on its analogous point on the map (yes, this would mean that fortresses would need magical barriers or other things in order to account for this).

3. I'd imagine the arid world folk might consider themselves to be a bit more civilized and cultured than the "swampers" on the other side, and the "swampers" might think of their neighbors as somewhat uppity and sterile. The arid world would have easier access to mining resources like metal and stone, while the swamp world would have a relative abundance of food (and disease, etc). Have not really considered any nations as of yet, although you might see a situation closer to Dark Sun's city states, where most of the land on both worlds is relatively undesireable other than where there is a permanent juncture between planes.

 

[Werebat]

Any other concepts for cities, towns, villages? I am just sitting down to generate the maps of the two worlds with Hexographer, and would like some rough thumbnail ideas for cities before I finalize anything. I'm looking in particular for quirky areas besides the standard "big city-state and trade center" that I'd imagine most of the portal cities to be.

For example:

* Dryside is a fortified town on an arid plain, where goatherds tend their flocks in the surrounding scrublands and some enterprising farmers grow corn and squash. There is a portal inside the town that leads to what is essentially a logging camp on the other side, which is in one of the drier areas of the Swampside world, in the middle of a forest. Wood and timber is scarce on the Dryside, so there is a good market for this resource and loads of lumber are regularly hauled through the portal.

* An isolated fishing village in the middle of the swamp, with a nearby ancient portal leading to the crumbling ruins of a city in the middle of the desert. No one lives on the Dryside, and the local swampers don't regularly use the portal, but every now and then a group of foolhardy youths will brave the ruins in search of adventure. Sometimes they come back with an exciting find; other times, they don't come back at all. What is not commonly known is that a small cult is based in the village, working secretly in the ruins on the other side in service to SOMETHING buried in the ruins...

* Dryside town is located near an arroyo area that is fairly arable on its own; the water and nutrient rich muck from Swampside makes it even better. Unfortunately, Swampside (a "dead forest" that has been drowned by water) is in the middle of the domain of an ancient black dragon, who demands tribute from the town on the other side of the portal in exchange for being allowed to operate in his territory. The town has managed uncomfortably under the dragon's yoke for generations; its citizens would love it if someone would drive off or kill the dragon, but they greatly fear its wrath should an attempt to do so fail.

Any other ideas?

And also - any ideas on what to name these two worlds?

 

[mellored]

The gates are not permanent and the gods have not stopped fighting. Each continues to try and take territory from the other. New gates are formed every 100 or so years when one god sends armies and spys across. They slowly shrink over many years.

People on both sides are constantly looking to stay in the middle ground, without getting caught in the crossfire. As soon as word is recived, you get a rush of people trying to make it rich looting the fallen armies, while other places are slowly dying and thier gate closes, leaving each side littered with destroyed buildings.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I only sort of skimmed through the replies, so I hope I am not just repeating anyone, but if you want a real world example, just look back at East and West Berlin before the wall fell and East and West Germany merged back together. The freedom of the West and the oppression of the East separated only by the wall (and machine guns and land mines and barbed wire on the Eastern side), with only a couple of official border crossing points.

 

[Ancalagon]

It may not be what you want at all, but check out "The City and The City" by China Mieville. It's a police procedural set in two cities that occupy the same physical space but whose inhabitants are not allowed to move between the two (except via an official border at the centre) or acknowledge the inhabitants of the other without attracting the immediate, possibly terminal attention of a (possibly supernatural) secret police-type agency called Breach. It's intentionally left ambiguous whether this is just a bizarre social convention or not but I've always wondered about basing a campaign on it with explicit planar travel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_&_the_City

(Disclaimer: I've probably made that sound terrible but that's entirely my fault)

It's a great read and not a massive brick (about 300 pages). Definitely recommend, esp considering the topic of the thread

Sent from my [device_name] using EN World mobile app

 

[Grumbleputty]

You could inject some tension by having the portals not be accessible to all- in my own campaign world I've been playing with a large port city where the wealthy work in an elevated, mostly walled-off ward by day, running businesses that siphon off the profits of the dock workers and sailors living in squalor beyond the walls. At night the elites disappear through an array of well-guarded portals which transport them to their villas and estates hidden all over the multiverse. The poor inhabitants of the lower city almost never rub shoulders with the wealthy, who they view almost as an occupying force- while the elites feel no cultural affinity for the city or it's inhabitants.

 

[jasper]

Oh I forgot the Hell's Gate series by David Weber, Linda Evans, and Joelie Presby may help.
The natural gates may open to different terrain. Think Florida Everglades open to Vegas. One group uses tech, the other uses magic. As you get farther away for your home plane your power goes down.