Whats so special about the Far Realm?

[Stoat]

A year or so ago, somebody analogized the 4E abyss to water circling a drain.

I tend to think of the Far Realm as the drain. There's a whole in reality, the Far Realms are on the other side, and all existence is slowly being pulled in. The Abyss and the demons are corrupted not just by evil, but by the alien madness of the Far Realms.

But I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the cosmology. I prefer to keep things as flexible and undefined as I can.

 

[Ketjak]

Those are beautiful summaries, Rechan. Thank you.

 

[Shemeska]

WotC's handling of the Far Realms has IMO suffered from severe overexposure over the past several years (I adore Cordell's late 2e work, and find it seriously inspiring, but I swear he hasn't written about anything without tentacles for years now).

That said, the material all too often seems to fail at being any different from the Abyss with slime and tentacles and Lovecraftian pastiche. You need to differentiate from what the Far Realms represents versus what the Abyss represents. The Abyss is the physical manifestation of Malignant Chaos. The Abyss is pointless carnage and destruction for its own sake. The Far Realms is none of that.

Possibly influenced by some of Rip van Wormer's thoughts on the topic here, but I prefer to think of the Far Realms as another multiverse entirely. It has its own physical laws, its own set of organizing principles, and they're largely incomprehensible to our own. It isn't organized by Good and Evil, Law and Chaos, nor Elements and Energies. It organizes along different ideas, some or all of which people from the 'normal' multiverse (normal from our perspective) are entirely incomprehensible.

And the reverse is true.

Entities from the Far Realms view our multiverse as being just as abhorrent and unfathomable as we do theirs. Different, mutually exclusive realities, and when they mix, horrible things happen for all involved.

One of Rip's ideas I liked, was that anytime we find a creature from the Far Realms within our own reality, too often they try to eat and kill not because that's their nature, but because they're in agony by exposure to our (in their view) horrific reality. They're confused, they're blind with physical pain, they're terrified but what they see and what it might be doing to them the longer they stay in our world.

In canon material even there's a touch of that notion, with the entity Bolothamogg of the Far Realms (worshipped by Aboleths) focused on preventing interaction between the Great Wheel and the Far Realms, because of the damage possible to both realities when such interactions occur.

And the Great Wheel and the Far Realms aren't the only mutually exclusive realities to have been mentioned in the material out there. The Keepers (2e and 3e versions anyway) were from another reality/multiverse of their own, trapped within the Great Wheel. And the ether gaps within the Deep Ethereal were strongly hinted at being doorways to similar such distinct realities (all of them being like self-contained bubbles of froth drifting on the surface of the Deep Ethereal). I think I'm responsible for either that froth imagery or perpetuating it in some stuff of mine in Dragon.

 

[Dausuul]

WotC's handling of the Far Realms has IMO suffered from severe overexposure over the past several years (I adore Cordell's late 2e work, and find it seriously inspiring, but I swear he hasn't written about anything without tentacles for years now).

That said, the material all too often seems to fail at being any different from the Abyss with slime and tentacles and Lovecraftian pastiche. You need to differentiate from what the Far Realms represents versus what the Abyss represents.

I think the real problem here is that the Far Realm was tacked on after the fact. 3E had the "aberration" creature type, but it wasn't well defined and basically meant "weird stuff with tentacles or excessive numbers of eyes." It did, however, include several iconic D&D monsters such as the mind flayer, beholder, carrion crawler, and aboleth.

So the Far Realm was introduced as a kind of unifying back story for the aberrations, to provide a concrete meaning for the term. Unfortunately, many of those iconic monsters already had a well-established position in the cosmology. Mind flayers especially have an extensively developed culture and play a big role in the politics of the D&D world; they're the chief rivals of the drow for control of the Underdark, as well as being the ancestral nemesis of both the githyanki and the githzerai.

What that meant was that the Far Realm's ability to be unique and distinctive was limited by all this established aberration-lore. Far Realm creatures had to be able to set up comprehensible and functional civilizations in our reality, or mind flayers wouldn't fit. They couldn't be distinguished by their psionic powers, or beholders and carrion crawlers wouldn't fit. The Far Realm had to include some analog to water, or aboleths would make no sense. Et cetera, et cetera. Pretty soon all you could say about the Far Realm to distinguish it from our reality was, "It's really... uh... WEIRD."

This is one of the reasons I prefer to associate aberrations with the Underdark. It's a much better fit IMO, since the one unifying trait of the iconic aberrations is that they were invented back in the day for use in dungeon crawls, which means they're all subterranean. And the hallucinatory, Alice-in-Evil-Wonderland weirdness of the Underdark perfectly matches the nightmarish weirdness of aberrations. Moreover, everything else that lives in the Underdark can be explained as offshoots of surface-dwelling species (e.g., drow) or extraplanar beings (e.g., xorn).

 

[Nahat Anoj]

Creatures from the Far Realm have unfathomable motivations, but the results of those motivations usually are fathomable. For example, an aberration's behavior might result in the destruction of things, but wordly creatures can't know exactly why the aberration did it. Perhaps it's for reasons that can be understood, like revenge or hatred. Or maybe it's for reasons that make no rational sense, like "red is not potato chip." Whatever the underlying reasons, the bottom line is that the results - in this case, destruction - are bad, so worldly creatures should oppose this kind of behavior.

 

[Nahat Anoj]

This is one of the reasons I prefer to associate aberrations with the Underdark. It's a much better fit IMO, since the one unifying trait of the iconic aberrations is that they were invented back in the day for use in dungeon crawls, which means they're all subterranean. And the hallucinatory, Alice-in-Evil-Wonderland weirdness of the Underdark perfectly matches the nightmarish weirdness of aberrations. Moreover, everything else that lives in the Underdark can be explained as offshoots of surface-dwelling species (e.g., drow) or extraplanar beings (e.g., xorn).

I like how, in 4e, the Underdark is an incomplete, flawed construction where the boundaries between planes are weak. It's a neat explanation for why so many aberrant creatures can be found in the depths below - they managed to find their way there through all the cracks in reality.

 

[Desdichado]

That said, the material all too often seems to fail at being any different from the Abyss with slime and tentacles and Lovecraftian pastiche. You need to differentiate from what the Far Realms represents versus what the Abyss represents. The Abyss is the physical manifestation of Malignant Chaos. The Abyss is pointless carnage and destruction for its own sake. The Far Realms is none of that.

I disagree; I think further differentiation and compartmentalization and speciation is exacty what isn't needed, since we've got already got too many things that conceptually overlap and are only distinguished by increasingly esoteric minutia.

In addition, if the Abyss in general is already too Far Realms like in concept, the historical Abyss, with the obyriths and whatnot, is even moreso. (I don't know if 4e still has a place for obyriths or not; I'm not very familiar with the implied cosmology there. I think the Primordials can kinda stand in for Obyrith Lords pretty well, though, right?) One way to fold them together is to make the Far Realms aberrations be the spawn of the obyriths. Or maybe "naturalized" obyriths on the material plane that are no longer outsiders after generations of living away from the Abyss. That way they can still act pretty much as they do; like all Abyssal spawn, their motivation is destruction, entropy, violence, sadism, etc. And you can add a plot point that a further motivation unique to "Far Realmsian" aberrations is a desire to preserve their independence from the "Johnny-Come-Lately" tanar'ri and the current crop of demon lords, who'd like nothing better than to repatriate them all.

 

[pollochicken]

"red is not potato chip."

Wait, red is not potato chip? Great, now I'm feeling this unquenchable urge to go on killing spree.

 

[Rechan]

Another funny thing is that while their motivations may not be fathonable, a human came up with the idea and a human describes the idea, so it's fathomable for the DM.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Personally, I think the D&D cosmology is too fragmented. The Far Realms is more overtly Lovecraftian than any other place, but it still overlaps with the old Limbo and the Abyss a lot... which in turn overlap with each other and other nasty planes too much as well.

I'm in this camp.

While I rather like the Far Realms notionally, I think tacking it onto another cosmology is just too cluttering. If I choose to use the notion of Far Realms, I'll usually use only the Far Realms (or something like it), and present pretty much everything supernatural as some aspect of it: demons & fey, necromancy & wild magic, aboleths & otyughs, animated plants, chaos beasts & oozes and all manner of other weird stuff might originate there-- types & subtypes notwithstanding. It just depends on the campaign.

And while I do agree that the "unfathomableness" of the Far Realms is often poorly executed, I think it's possible to do... but not easily in a standard D&D campaign. For obvious reasons, it fits better in a CoC-styled game, in which PCs are unlikely rush in and hack everything to bits at the first sign of "unfathomableness".