Planar Configurations; How Do You Design The Multiverse?

[Olive]

I use a pretty undefined homebrewed set of planes that is roughly based off of the 3e FR arrangement. Essentially the inner planes work roughly as intended and then there is a chain of upper and lower planes with the Prime in the middle. The key idea is that Hell protects the Prime from the Abyss and in return the good gods allow the devils and the evil gods to try to steal the souls of mortals. To be honest, in the current set up the only real planar involvement has been some devils and a brief trip to the elemental plane of air.

 

[Coroc]

You should have made a poll out of it, but here is my Approach:

I Detail those things only for campaigns where it is needed, and if needed i reduce it to the stuff used / useful / good fluff

So in my Ravenloft campaign there was prime (FR as a start and end Point of the campaign but could have been any other vanilla world)
and then the Domains. Since the Players were caught in the mists from session 1 onward and there is no easy escape to any other plane and not much local faith i did not pay any thoughts on this one.

In my GH campaign it is different i Need the abyss because Iuz, i used elemental plane of fire as fluff in one adventure, and i need homeplanes for various gods, especially those the Players revere. But i do not need much detail on these planes other than that they exist, in how this is common knowledge.

The only "planeshift" so far that the PCs themselves had unwillingly undertaken was an Adaption of the masque of the red death in the from the ravenloft Terror in the 1890s box.

If the Player land in one of the abyssal planes by whatever circumstances, then i Detail that out upfront but not at this Point in the campaign.
If they die they get soem fluff from their gods homeplane , no big effort on that i can do that on the fly by reading up the gods Portfolio, no mechanics needed then.

 

[generic]

You should have made a poll out of it, but here is my Approach:

I Detail those things only for campaigns where it is needed, and if needed i reduce it to the stuff used / useful / good fluff

So in my Ravenloft campaign there was prime (FR as a start and end Point of the campaign but could have been any other vanilla world)
and then the Domains. Since the Players were caught in the mists from session 1 onward and there is no easy escape to any other plane and not much local faith i did not pay any thoughts on this one.

In my GH campaign it is different i Need the abyss because Iuz, i used elemental plane of fire as fluff in one adventure, and i need homeplanes for various gods, especially those the Players revere. But i do not need much detail on these planes other than that they exist, in how this is common knowledge.

The only "planeshift" so far that the PCs themselves had unwillingly undertaken was an Adaption of the masque of the red death in the from the ravenloft Terror in the 1890s box.

If the Player land in one of the abyssal planes by whatever circumstances, then i Detail that out upfront but not at this Point in the campaign.
If they die they get soem fluff from their gods homeplane , no big effort on that i can do that on the fly by reading up the gods Portfolio, no mechanics needed then.

I disagree about the poll part, as I certainly could not have provided enough options to gain the information I wanted. I think, in addition, that you are missing the point of this thread. I wanted to know what, if it was something you cared about, your planar arrangement was, not why you don't detail one.

 

[Blue]

As the title says, I want to know how others organize their planes. Do you use The Great Wheel, are all of your planes alternate versions of the Prime Material, do you have other planes? I wish to know what you have done.

I'll customize it to the setting, though with the thought that if it's not important don't bother with it.

For example, I ran two campaigns in the same setting, 80 years apart. One big part of the setting was why were there all these diverse intelligent races? So I came up with planar bubbles - material planes that bobbed through the elemental planes. Mind you, any material plane would float in the Elemental plane of Fire, and along three separate axis bob along in the Elemental plane of Water, and so on. So it could be moving one way in one and with a different vector in another (though there were currents in the elemental planes, swirling everything, nto friction-less billiard balls.). So when two Material Planes got close, you could cross between them via the appropriate elemental plane.

The Material Plane the campaign was set in had "thin walls" to the elemental planes - it was easy to get through and may deities over the millennium had used it as a refuge to lead their chosen people to. The original inhabitants of the world were underground halfling predecessors, who eventually became the goblinoid races and surface halflings.

The most recent humans had fled a great war against the elves in 13 Great Ships, on a several year journey and most of them landed here. The knowledge that it was planar travel had been suppressed, it was assumed to be another continent.

One of the ships that was lost on the voyage, ended up getting beech here a century earlier then the others (yea different velocities of time), but without any infrastructure or leadership. They ended up losing civilization and eventually formed barbarian tribes with legends of being born (or coming from) the sea.

Dwarves got here through the Earth, massive earthquakes and their whole mountain chain was shifted from one to another. Various other races same type of thing.

I was doing a feywild before it was called feywild (this started when 3.0 came out and ran for 12 years), with the elves having lots of small material demiplanes that wandered. They came through the Air, which was also associated with West in their language so everyone else just assumed they "came from the west". They were the only who did this voluntarily and knew. The ones here were ones left when their demiplane lost conjunction, and it was several centuries (and into the second campaign) when another fey demiplane came into conjunction.

I had a shadow plane that overlay everything, but warped. A bit like the Upside Down from Stranger Things, though well before that. It did most of the duty for ethereal plane for various spells and undead. (Again, 3.x - that was a thing.)

There was no direct version of the Astral plane.

God didn't have physical planes seperated where they lived. There were uncountable gods in the various bubbles and they all needed worship - so gods were ascended but were still attached to the individual material planes. They had demiplanes that were attached to it.

(Quote from the second campaign, where a forest and river were red said to be from the body of a dead god under them. "What was the god's name?" "You think that if there was even a single person left who remembered it, that the god would be dead?")

 

[Coroc]

[MENTION=6923088]Aebir-Toril[/MENTION] #63 My normal planar configuration is the great wheel.

If i would DM in Eberron i would use the altered planes though.

I stay quite true to official canon but i use the 2nd Edition point in the official timeline of e.g. for things like who rules which layer in the nine hells.

As a simplified planar configuration i am sometimes also tempted to use a minimalistic plane configuration like suggested in the DMG

So just heaven - prime -hell maybe add in shadow / fey / elemental or so

But up to now i did not use that and i cannot make it fit easily than on a total homebrew universe.

 

[TwoSix]

If i would DM in Eberron i would use the altered planes though.

Eberron's are definitely the best out of published versions. They're different dimensions, rather than an afterlife.

 

[oreofox]

I use a modified Great Wheel. Though my "feywild" and "shadowfell" are changed into elemental planes. Where the Feywild is located, it is replaced by a plane of light, and the Shadowfell is just the plane of shadow. The positive and negative energy planes are also elemental planes, and are called the pane of life and death, respectively. The plane of life is something like a mix between the Feywild and Warcraft's Emerald Dream, only it isn't populated with fey creatures. The fey creatures are denizens of the Chaotic Neutral plane (which isn't the roiling chaotic randomness of Limbo).

I have the Ethereal and Astral planes as well. They basically function like normal, except the Ethereal is where the souls go for judgment, and then sent off to the respective afterlifes dependant on their actions in life.

 

[flametitan]

I'm actually planning on the "conflicting theories" model, with Great Wheel and World Axis being the predominantly accepted. Lagging behind them is the World Tree (though I need figure out how I want to arrange that,) as well as the Five Spheres of BECMI Immortal. I may add an opposing sphere to entropy, so that my idea of the Shadowfell being a material Plane with nothing to counteract entropy and the Feywild being growth without entropy makes sense. That or the Feywild is where the four spheres "meet" without meeting Entropy, the Material Plane is the border where Entropy meets the other spheres, and the Shadowfell is "deep" Entropy but still within the domain of the other spheres.

(And yes, I know the Spheres of BECMI aren't supposed to be literal locations, but seeing the world as a Celestial Venn Diagram is cool to me.)

 

[Imaculata]

I have some conflicting theories in my setting as well. Among the barbarian tribes, there is the belief that the great sea serpent Barbas once swallowed the sun, causing many years of darkness. That is until the Great Bear cut open its stomach, after which the Wise Owl placed the sun back into the sky.

Oddly enough, there were indeed about 40 years of total darkness in my setting, but this is not the true reason.

 

[Rotipher]

I use a system in which the "planes" aren't actually different places, but different modes of existence within the same plane. The "Material Plane" is simply the way that organic, living, mortal beings happen to perceive and participate in that reality. The different modes/"planes" are loosely grouped into "Strata", based on how they relate to the Material mode of existence.

The Elemental Continuum is how reality is experienced by elementals, which aren't "otherworldly beings" so much as sentient vibrations. A flame's flickering, a gusting breeze, water rippling or tremors shaking the ground are all the result of elementals, living out their own lives and feuding among themselves. PCs who "travel" to the Elemental Continuum don't cross a barrier between universes, they become one with the element whose type they are "visiting" and experience reality like the corresponding elementals do. Magics that summon or manipulate elementals or the elements work by facilitating communication and control between the Elemental and Material Continua, which normally perceive each other as inert obstacles. Because it constitutes the "foundation" for the Material Plane's tangible matter and structure, the Elemental Continuum is also known as the "Strata Beneath".

While the E.C. is a materialistic mode, the "Strata Between" are more esoteric. These are the "planes" reachable via natural transitions or changes in consciousness: the Spirit World, the Gulfs of Dreaming, and Erebus, Land of the Unquiet Dead. The Spirit World is the realm of life force, communion with nature, insight and prophecy. It's attainable through ritual trances, vision quests, and shamanic teachings; I don't use the Astral (too boring IMO), but some of the Astral-based spells I've reskinned to work via this plane. The Gulfs are home to dreamscapes, entities that embody or feed upon emotions (feyrs, rakshasas), and the heights of imagination and dread. Everyone who sleeps visits it in their dreams, and illusionists' shadow magic draws from the Gulfs rather than Shadow IMC. Erebus is the realm of ghosts and lost souls who haven't yet won through to Eternity, serving the role of an Ethereal Plane and parts of the Shadowfell. Necromantic magics tend to muck with Erebus (e.g. a lost soul whose corpse is Animated winds up suffering seizures there as they jerkily mimic their skeleton/zombie body's movements), and adventurers who are waiting to be raised from death may find themselves having a solo adventure there while they wait.

The Strata Above are the "planes" of the gods, aka Eternity. They're less a "place" than a state of perfect harmony/misery/oneness/freedom/grace that falls upon a soul after death, although they *perceive* it as a realm they can wander about in until they adjust to their new status. The known Strata Above are divvied up by pantheon, not by alignment. There *used* to be an additional realm for Good and one for Evil, but these two realms withdrew from contact with the Material Plane millennia ago. Lingering connections remain with the margins of these two realms (Paradiso & Inferno), allowing arcanists to Summon minor celestial or fiendish beings and so on, but the actual realms (now called the Strata Beyond, i.e. beyond reach) don't want anything to do with flawed/wishy-washy mortals anymore.

The last of the Strata are the Strata Betwixt, so called because they're what you get when two Strata Between interact *without* either the grounding Elemental Continuum, or the third of the realms Between. What you get in the absence of a connection to the E.C. is a morphic plane that derives its nature from the most dominant personality present. (That's why the Strata Above are subject to their resident deities' whims. The Strata Between are subject to their own Guardians - the Seer, the Dreamer, the Hound - that keep them stable.) As the Strata Betwixt all have their own living inhabitants, they're sectioned off into "domains", a la the old Ravenloft setting. In fact, one of the three Strata Betwixt (Erebus & Gulfs) *is* the Land of Mists. Lacking a connection to the Spirit World, it's a plane where lack of insight confines its dominant personalities within a prison of their own subconscious guilt. The second (Gulfs & Spirit World) is Faerie, which serves the purpose of the Feywild IMC but with a domains-with-lords structure. Lacking ties to Erebus, it's the natural habitat for ageless fey. The third realm Betwixt, Stalkbriar (Erebus & Spirit World), is the primal realm: Nature red in tooth and claw, dominated by the strongest of predators or most dominant of herd leaders among the wild beasts. Without ties to the Gulfs, Stalkbriar is inimical to thought and ideas, such that sentient beings who linger there long will degenerate into a savage state. Bugbears derive from goblins that just barely escaped from there, and many non-sentient monsters - dire animals, magical beasts, killer plants, etc - that couldn't possibly maintain stable populations in my campaign's region could crop up suddenly if Stalkbriar - like Ravenloft or the Feywild - happens to drop some off.

Incidentally, because this "Strata" motif doesn't allow for planes/states of being that are *completely* alien to the rest, I don't have a Far Realm as a plane. Instead, aberrations that derive from there in other cosmologies are left over from the "First Creation", a previous era of intelligence and civilization that rose and fell within the game-planet's equivalent of the Cambrian explosion.