Plane Shift Focus

[BlackSilver]

How common are the foci for Plane Shift in your campaigns and/or how do you (the GM) allow your Player's characters to get them when they need a new one- whether it be for the Plane they call home or a different plane.

I am considering an ABC quest to recover a Plane Shift foci and I want to know how hard I should make it for them to get home.

(Please as little of the campaign as my Players read this forum and I would rather they know nothing of my plans.)

 

[Talon5]

Never given it any thought, just kinda assumed that if you need one and you can cast the spell you would know who to contact to get one.

I guess thou for some Planes getting a proper focus might be a cool campaign hook- "we need to go to X plane to pick up the rune sword Avosha to kill the big bad."

Emm- I would say- home dimension easy to find, talk to your guild or your church and pick one up for a couple of gold.

Kickin' idea for a campaign thou, I can see where this would be a cool idea. Thanks Silver.

 

[hong]

I'd say that the ease of obtaining said focae is directly proportional to how much you plan for the session to be about adventuring on the planes targeted by said focae, as opposed to the process of obtaining said focae. Both approaches can lead to entertaining sessions.

 

[wingsandsword]

The 2e Priest's Spell Compendium (a set of 3 books with all the divine spells from 1e and 2e in it) had a table with suggested rules for obtaining/researching new forks. While it's ambiguous in 3e, I treat the foci as it was in 2e, a tuning fork that works on a very specific frequency, and the frequency is unique to a plane.

Personally, I'd say that any organized faith with Clerics (i.e. that grants Plane Shift) would normally be able to provide (at cost) tuning forks for the Material Plane/World that the Church is on, and a fork for the deities home plane (if the deity didn't mind the occasional traveller). If the deity objected to visitors, or he was a deity of travel, they might provide a fork for any reasonable plane.

Now, the way it was written in the 2e compendium was a little table based on destination. For 3e, I'd make it a Spellcraft check requiring a full sized research library (the same basic rules as for Spell Research). The forks cost anywhere from 100 gp to 400 gp depending on how rare the destination is (demiplanes being most expensive, inner planes and Material Worlds being cheap, and Outer Planes being intermediate. While it's not given, I'd also make transitive plane forks relatively cheap too). The research usually takes anywhere from 1 week to 1 year (again, with more common destinations like transitive planes and the material world being far easier, while demiplanes being pretty much all the stuff beyond a few months) and costs anywhere from 500 gp to around 15,000 gp (get an idea of what was cheaper and more expensive by now?)

You might also treat it that a deity of travel or knowledge could even have all the answers written down and available to priests, just go to the nearest major temple, verify your identity with the faithful to get access to church secrets, and be shown the specifications for the foci you want, and it's a simple matter of paying for the materials or obtaining one from the churches supplies, and being just tuning forks they are relatively cheap and go for pocket change to a ~9th+ level PC (a few GP).

You might be able to sidetrack the whole issue with a Commune spell or other divination, if the deity is inclined to let his priests just go planewalking, spending the XP for a commune to get a specific "note" or other identifier for a specific Plane Shift foci, but these are both the easy ways if you want to make the forks relatively easy to obtain.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I use the winding road cosmology, and plane shift foci to the planes on either side of the campaigns material plane are well known (anyone learning the spell can pick up either of those at the same time). Plane shifting to the parallel elemental or energy planes which surround the winding road is much, much rarer and these would have to be researched independently (or obtained from an individual who has already researched them).

For my purposes it would be a simple but not trivial side-trek.

Cheers

 

[Zappo]

I less or more assume that the focus for any given plane is something very easy to find on that plane. And that Sigil's bazaar sells foci for any possible plane. Up until now, it hasn't been a big plot element.

 

[Thanee]

How common are the foci for Plane Shift in your campaigns and/or how do you (the GM) allow your Player's characters to get them when they need a new one- whether it be for the Plane they call home or a different plane.

We use knowledge (the planes) to make them (well, to know what to make, that is), with the DCs being fairly low (i.e. 10) for your home plane and very common planes (i.e. elemental planes) and going as high as 30 and beyond for the outer planes or other strange planes.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Cheiromancer]

I think the research time is to enable the DM to plan what the characters find when they get to the plane in question. NPCs, monsters, locations, magical effects, etc..

And also to discourage the players from doing it too frequently. You might have the plane of Faerie all ready to go, and so allow the PC to automatically know how to get there. What happens, though, when they want to flit over to the twin paradises? They'll expect to be able to go there immediately, and you as DM might be totally unprepared for that.

But if they have to research the focus, and the focus won't be available until next session, then you are set.

That's what I think, anyway.

 

[DaveStebbins]

In a previous campaign, I would sometimes give one out as a random piece of treasure, found amongst the coins in a chest, for instance. The PCs had a few before they figured out what they were, never bothered to research where they might go and never had the courage to use any of them.

 

[BlackSilver]

Thank you

Thank you all for your input, it was very helpful.