A plane a day - updated 7/20 with the Sun.

[RangerWickett]

In my homebrew campaign, the planes are arranged like planets in a solar system.

In order from center to outer orbit, the planes are:

• The sun.
• The plane of fire.
• The plane of air.
• The plane of life, orbitted by a large moon that is the plane of dreams.
• The plane of water.
• The plane of earth.
• The plane of space, orbitted by a ring that is the plane of time.
• The plane of death, orbitted by a sister planet that is the plane of ruins.

I'm going to discuss one plane a day, exploring how it fits into this cosmology, and telling some stories of how the plane featured in my games.


Trema, the plane of life
I’ll start with the main world of the setting, which was of course always intended to fit into this complicated planar system, so there’s absolutely no contradiction. Y’know, the way that many songs start out as singles before they become part of great rock albums.

Trema is a world not dissimilar from earth at first glance, but in truth it is composed of layers upon layers of interwoven elements of the other planes in the system, which act as a frame that supports hundreds of cultures and countless billions of lifeforms. Because, as you know, in fantasy settings, biology makes no f***ing sense.

Over its history, civilizations have fallen, races have been wiped from the face of the world, but in its own way, everything survives. Each creature tells a tale as it is born, lives, and eventually perishes. The energy that mortals know as magic takes many forms, because there are many different sources for this energy, drawn from life, from death, from the other planes, from history and hopes and dreams.

Whatever sort of story appeals to you, that will be your magic. Those awed by storms may discover they have the power to control winds and lightning, those with faith and devotion may be blessed by a loving god, and those who dwell in their own insecurities may plead to a wicked stepmother of a goddess. Sometimes a person will love stories of heroism, but he will not believe himself able to control magic, yet he still accomplishes remarkable deeds.

Sometimes magic is subtle.

Geographically, Trema has three main continents – Connerlot, Jahangerris, and Lanjyr. Connerlot was the original home of the jenelesti, the elves we all know and loathe today. Lanjyr was the home of humanity and related races, but they decided Connerlot was more awesome, so they invaded and nearly wiped out the elves. Jahangerris is a wild continent, and nobody lives there yet because they haven’t discovered that chocolate grows there. Not cocoa, chocolate. This is my world, so it comes in fruit form.

Over the ages the people of the world have shaped its surface and its essence. They have killed icons of arcane power, casting one sea and one desert into a morass of antimagic. They have made foolish wishes, like for all the gold in the world (currency tends to devalue when anyone can just hike to a giant mountain of gold and chip some off). They have carved empires with pure will and pride, nearly tearing the world asunder. It is a world shaped by an unfair portion of tragedy, and often an unwanted quantity of comedy.

It is Life, and things are never boring there.


Most of the most dramatic places in this world are closely tied to one or more of the other planes, so I’ll mention them when they come up. Tune in tomorrow for the Plane of Dreams.

 

[RangerWickett]

Avril, the plane of dreams
Avril is the moon of Trema, visible from the ground just like the earth’s moon, but Avril is not a tangible place once can simply travel to, even with the most powerful magic. Avril is unincarnated dream, floating within one’s awareness, but impossible to touch or claim, and if one were to try to make her real, one would find she was not there at all.

Metaphysically, Avril is distantly coexistent with Trema. Anyone’s mind can travel to her while asleep, and many mages find ways to tap her power by leaving part of their minds in a perpetual dream state, but Avril has no physical substance. Indeed, attempting to give physical form to mana from Avril or to Avril herself is fruitless, because Avril’s essence is that of change and possibility. It is easy to change something’s form with magic from Avril, or even to change its very nature, but such magic is difficult, dangerous, and seldom understood. To all but the most devoted scholars of dream magic, however, there is little difference between using dream magic to reshape reality and using dream magic to create entirely new matter.

Ultimately, it is hard to say much specific about what Avril is. It is much easier to explain what roles she has played in the world.

Sentient creatures have regular interaction with Avril every night in their dreams. Here lies one of the strange contradictions of dream magic. While it is impossible to create anything physical from dream magic, when one’s mind travels to Avril, one perceives the world as wholly real and tangible. As the two worlds are coexistent despite their apparent physical separation, the dreamscapes of Avril often closely resemble the physical world of Trema, and it is not surprising that sleeping travelers can encounter people they know, enacting elaborate and impossible possibilities. Most creature’s don’t easily dream, however, and so their memories of these journeys are vague, and mostly harmless.

Sometimes, however, mana from Avril becomes tainted, and the changes it wreaks on Trema are horrifying, nightmarish. From ancient history comes the tale of Mazokan, a man who sought to bring his dead wife back to life. He used a kidnapped woman as a template, and infused her with mana from Avril, hoping his dream would be fulfilled and his wife would return to him. Instead she became a monster, roaming unleashed across the world, said by the superstitious to be the cause of nightmares today.

Similarly, in more recent years, a young dragon named Trilla who possessed psionic abilities – powers known to be tied closely with the realm of dream – was tortured and experimented upon by dark elf diabolists, infusing her with demon essence. Her dreams began to manifest in the world, transforming inert matter into psychically compelled constructs that lashed out violently in their savage infancy. An attempt was made to infuse Trilla with angel essence to cure her, but this instead had the effect of empowering her dreams, strengthening them so they could survive long enough to grow into sentience. Eventually her own incarnated nightmares took her hostage and dragged her into unseen depths of the world.

Psychics tap into the realm of dreams, using it as a conduit into the minds of others, or to see how the future might change, or how the past has already changed. This method is easier to learn than true temporal divination, but the results foggier. The most feared psion of history was the master of the Temple of Echoed Souls, a man who became so embittered with his life that he used dream essence to consciously reshape his soul into the darkest, most evil form possible. He then used his powers to reach into the souls of others and twist them as he had his own.

As you can see, Avril has been the source of many monsters, and it seems every month on the black moon some new creature arises in response to the uncontrolled dark desires of the frightened and the weak. However, Avril is also the source of many great blessings, and unexpected boons often manifest in the world on the nights of the full moon. Always desperate to find good luck, many people use the full moon as an excuse to try out their oddest fantasies, hoping that perhaps Lady Avril will favor them. The first magic of the world is said to have come from the unpredictable weal of Trema’s moon, and – nightmarish abominations resulting from failed resurrections excepted – she is cherished by lovers around the world.

It is said that if one travels deep enough into the caves beneath Trema’s surface, one will find the world is a hollow shell, and that its core is the physical body of Avril. There it lays sleeping, a giant goddess of incomprehensible vastness, waiting for the day it will emerge from possibility into reality.


For the few of you who recognize the name, I finally found a place for my old friend the goddess. Check in tomorrow for the Sun, which is more than just a mass of incandescent gas.

 

[RangerWickett]

The Sun
To the ancient elves, time was a strange thing. They did not change, but the world around them did. They liked to believe that they had mastery of magic and of nature, and that they understood the cycle of time. Occasionally, however, they would be confronted with something they had not experienced before. Because to them time was cyclical, it became necessary to rationalize how something new could ever appear.

Their answer reflected the racism and pride inherent to elves. They determined that everything had always existed, hiding in the metaphysical shadows outside of their knowledge, only revealed whenever a fortunate elf discovered them. They proclaimed the sun to be their chief god, Vona, and then set about 'discovering' more gods and goddesses whenever they were needed.

Then mankind showed up and started driving certain creatures to extinction, and eventually the elves came out of their temporal delusions and started dealing with life from day to day. The period in history when the first major contact between humans and elves occured, however, coincided with a unique event involving the Sun.

Since primordial times, teleportation magic had been difficult. It is said that in the old days, before the world was claimed by the sentient races, every teleportation tore a hole in the fabric of the world, opening portals to demon realms, threatening to destroy Trema completely. In response to this threat, the Council of Pleian was convened, summoning the greatest heroes of mankind and elvenkind. Together they performed a powerful ritual to seal the world off from outside influences, aligning the planes that exist today from their original wild drifting and forming them into a giant series of orbitting wards, with the Sun as their center.

The elves claimed their god had discovered the spell, and told it to them.

Henceforth, teleportation was limited to within the planar system they had created, with only a few exceedingly rare exceptions. Even then, due to the construction of the spell, as the system was anchored around the Sun, all teleportation passed, if ever so briefly, through the sun itself, meaning it was not a type of travel that could be undertaken lightly. Most who had become used to teleporting wherever they went simply died, never having a chance to figure out a way around the danger. Only those who had created the Pleian Ban in the first place were aware of how to safely teleport, and they worked to safeguard this secret, understanding how great a threat instantaneous travel posed.

Eventually the secret was exposed, but by then the descendants of the Council of Pleian had succeeded in stealing or destroying most texts pertaining to teleportation. For this, they are cursed by many elves, who believe they had done something profane -- using the power of the sun to conceal, rather than discover.


For the three people who are reading this thread, tune in tomorrow for the plane of fire.