On CosmologIES
So, to explain the importance of the Far Realm- and where I deviate from standard (not that there
is much standard with regard to the Far Realm- but... [shrug]), I should delve back into some history here. Specifically, the history of how I came up with the concepts involved here, in the first place.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I had my own rules for dealing with beings above mere deities long before 3rd Edition even existed. In fact, I first started coming up with them after I got the original "gold box" Immortals Rules for original D&D, which was the original "play a PC god" rules set, and came to the note explaining how to become an "Old One" (meaning, the beings who created the multiverse and were greater than gods). The book said, and I quote,
DM's Guide to Immortals said:
This set does not attempt to fully describe the Old Ones. ... And no future volume will provide details on the Old Ones, for their powers transcend the framework of any mere game. To reduce them to game terms would trivialize their power...
My immediate reaction to reading that was "
Bull****!" Nuts to that, I thought. I want to know what these guys can do. So if TSR won't tell me, I'll figure it out for myself! And so I did. I worked out rules for how an "Immortal" (i.e. god) could transcend Immortality itself to become an Old One, and what the society of the Old Ones looked like.
But here there was a problem. The Immortals set tied the society of the Immortals in with the structure of the multiverse itself, in many important ways, and neither one could really exist without the other. Therefore, I reasoned, to know what the Old Ones are like, I have to know what
they live in. And since the Immortals set stated point-blank that the Old Ones retreated into "higher dimensions" after sealing off the multiverse with the "dimensional Barrier," that meant I needed to figure out what was beyond the multiverse.
The scheme I came up with was pretty childishly simple by my present-day standards, but I was pretty proud of it at the time. I decided that there would be a "Voidsphere" that was essentially vacuum, containing two "Opposers" for the two energies (Positive and Negative- essentially these were extramultiversal Energy Planes) and the multiverse drifting in the vacuum between the Opposers. "But wait," it then occurred to me, "if this multiverse thing is an experiment of the Old Ones to see if they can make more of themselves, why wouldn't they make more of them?" And so, the idea was born that there would be
multiple multiverses, all floating in this Voidsphere between the Opposers. Sometime later I decided that it would be cool if they were arranged in a structure, with some of them being closer to one Opposer than the other, with the effect that this would change the properties of those multiverses somehow. The arrangement I settled on was a sort of octahedral grid (that is, the shape of a d8) with 19 total multiverses, with one at each vertex, one for each of the edges, and one last one sitting in the middle- you could also think of them as one closest to the Positive Opposer, a square of four underneath that one, then a 3 x 3 grid of 9 beneath that, then another square of 4 below that, and finally one closest to the Negative. Beyond the Voidsphere would be " the Chaos" that the Old Ones hadn't imposed their will upon.
Finally, and this was important later, I decided that the Old Ones were
not totally sealed off behind the Barrier- some of them remained behind, in their multiverse experiments, watching the inhabitants and occasionally tweaking things to their satisfaction. These would usually be the youngest and least powerful ones, being given a "crap task" by their elders and betters. Those elders and betters busied themselves with running things from on high, like managers and executives, except for the few who were "evil" and just wanted to destroy everything for no apparent reason. And the Immortals set gave me another quote to expand off of, in thinking about all this, the last sentence of the section explaining the Old Ones' scheme- implying that the Old Ones
themselves are being watched over by a being even greater than
them. So I made up still more rules to detail the ones (I called them "Originals") who had set up this whole thing with the Chaos, and the Voidsphere, and the Opposers, before the Old Ones came in and made their little multiverses to play with.
Fast forward about 15 years now, to when I was making a serious effort to translate my old setting into 3rd Edition. I had incorporated Planescape into the old 1E stuff during my college years, and the 2nd Edition campaign I ran in it; I'd also done a lot of reading of D&D novels such as the Avatar Trilogy (where Ao comes into the picture). By this time I was already equating Ao with the Old Ones from my old never-used rules, and furthermore had written in backstory to my "home multiverse" setting to the effect that the machinations of "the only three Overgods left" were integral to the metaplot. So I had the outside-the-multiverse stuff percolating in the back of my mind, as I opened up the 3rd Edition Manual of the Planes to see what I'd have to change to bring my old cosmos into line with the new era.
In the back of the book, they had an appendix containing variant planes you could use. One of those is the Far Realm. And when I read that, and saw the illustration of the then-nameless being in the midst of slimy vines, with slugs swimming by through what passes for air, I knew I wanted it in my game! But how? Where did it fit? And then, my old scheme of the extra multiverses came back to the foreground. I had never thought to describe what was in the Chaos, or why it was called that: it was just a sort of throwaway reference I made because it sounded cool. But now, with this Far Realm place, I realized in a flash that here was the description I had never thought to make! Here was what existed beyond all sane or structured realities! It was perfect.
And so, the Far Realm became something other than a plane to me- it became more like a sort of "Astral Plane for multiverses-" a "Transitive Plane" one uses to cross from one multiverse to another. Later still, after I discarded the idea of the Voidsphere as being unnecessary, the Far Realm became something else- more like bits of detritus that were left behind after the Overgods took what they wanted to form the structured multiverses. The Far Realm was insane because, quite literally, "sanity" was what the Old Ones took
out of it in making the multiverses. So now, I had the idea that these other multiverses were off somewhere, floating in the Far Realm, along with the Opposers. Also, because the Far Realm was in fact Outside the multiverse, that could only mean that spells designed for travel
within the multiverse could have no hope of getting you there- you had to use Epic magic to open a Far Realm portal. This in turn meant that I could safely let the idea lie there, since only Epic characters could be capable of trafficking with the Far Realm.
Fast forward
again now... to my games approaching Epic levels. The Far Realm had played a prominent role in my games, from about 8th level on (when I ran one party of PCs through my own conversion of the classic 2E adventure
The Gates of Firestorm Peak, which also happens to be where Bruce Cordell introduced the concept of the Far Realm into D&D in the first place), and the ongoing plot threads indicated strongly that it was going to assume an even bigger role during Epic. By this time I was also thinking seriously about PC godhood and what that would imply for the game. And conveniently, almost as if on cue, some guy using the handle Upper_Krust is getting ready to release a 3E-updated conversion of the Immortals rules, combined (it appeared at the time) with concepts from the Primal Order (which I had used during my 2nd Edition college campaign) and the recent 3rd Edition Deities & Demigods! So naturally, I took a keen interest in his doings.
And I can gloss over the history of that project, because most here reading this already know the relevant parts. Eventually, after long teasing us with hints, UK released the first early drafts of Ascension. And within those pages, I found not only a set of rules for godhood, but
also a set of rules for Overgods and the beings who existed even above them! My long-sleeping ideas of Old Ones and Originals had a new lease on life, because I could now use the IH rules to give it to them. But as my Epic PCs climbed higher and higher up the ladder of levels, I began to recognize that my old scheme of the "octahedron of multiverses" and especially the two Opposers, made little to no sense when placed side-by-side with the IH Dimensions.
So one day, shortly after my second PC had ascended to divinity, I began to seriously thinhk about how to update that old scheme. I eventually took my inspiration from UK's suggestions that the Negative Energy Plane was somehow related closely to the Entropy Dimension. "Aha," I thought, "if this is the case, then I already
have the Entropy Dimension in my greater cosmology- that's what the Negative Opposer is!" But, this left the problem of what it was that the Positive Opposer should be- not to mention, even if I associated the Positive with one of the other five First Ones, what then could I do about the other four? But here, my long education in higher math came to my rescue. In the process of dealing with the problem of the Opposers, I also noticed that for any scheme requiring six dimensions (First One or otherwise), it would be downright silly (if not impossible) for a set of objects like the multiverses to arrange themselves into a merely three-dimensional shape like the octahedron. Clearly that whole structural idea was outmoded and had to go.
It was by bringing the two problems together that I arrived at the solution, and I found it a most elegant and satisfying one: instead of merely
two Opposers, I would instead have the
six First Ones, and between them they would string whole cosmoses like pearls. Each First One would have one cosmos utterly dominated by that being, and there would be "edge" cosmoses connecting the "pure" ones to each other. Finally, in the middle of it all would be one lonely cosmos where
no First one was particularly dominant, where all six would be represented more or less equally- and this central cosmos was of course the home of the PCs. This new scheme gave me what amounted to a six-dimensional pyramid, a 6-D analogue of a d4 in other words, and since it happens that that shape is the simplest geometrical construct you can create in six dimensions, I had a perfect reason ready for why the multiverses had assumed this rather obvious shape. I hit one snag when I realized (to my chagrin) that a pyramid in N dimensions always has one more vertex than the number of dimensions it exists within (for example, a d4 exists in three dimensions, but has 4 points), and this meant that I suddenly needed a seventh "pure" cosmos and First One: but my chagrin quickly evaporated when I realized that Thought is insane. The precise
nature of Thought's insanity is, conveniently, not described in the IH, so I was free to interpret that it could be- for example- Multiple Personality Disorder. And so, Thought became the First One who explored the seventh point, and in the process spawned two minds both thinking they were the "real" Supreme Thought: Madness and Dream.
Since this post is already so long, I'll end it here and give concrete details of the (now 29) multiverses floating within the Far Realm, in my next post.