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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ripzerai" data-source="post: 3196305" data-attributes="member: 38324">Take Glorium, for example.Glorium is the gate-town to Ysgard. It's a rural place with a few hundred people, no more. It's the primary gateway between two major planes of existence, but there's not a lot there.What if Glorium saw thousands or millions of visitors a year, but those visitors never saw one another? What if some property of the town made it so that you never encounter anyone but the few hundred natives and your own party?Embrace paradox and weirdness. Play up the mysterious nature of the planes - unthinkably vast and ancient intelligences just beneath the surface of everything. Everything is alive and sapient in some way. Everything is more meaning than substance. When you fight a slaad, you're fighting the idea of Chaos more than you're fighting a physical creature. There is at once one slaad and many; the creature can't be accurately counted or even clearly seen, although it can be banished from this world if you hit it enough with a sword. Chaos is apart from numbers. Everything's a spirit, a ghost, a minor god. Your sword is the idea of cutting made manifest, forged from the fevered thoughts of a githyanki imprisoned in Limbo. The buildings of your town are angry and jealous and desperately in love with you, when they're not pining for the moon. The stars have feuds and battles with one another. The sun falls from the sky, shot in the heart by the arrows of the primeval forest, and the PCs must find the sun's child to replace it.The towns and people they visit are spirits, concepts. They are infinitely vast, even if they seem to be very small. You can explore them forever and never see the same building twice. And yet if the belief behind them changes, they can change as well - be shifted to another plane, or be destroyed entirely. They represent limitless power and are at the same time very fragile.In the markets of the planes, one can buy cloth woven from bits of sky and frozen sorrow.The Outer Planes are made of myths and stories. The PCs' clothing and equipment change to match the myths they're in, and they may have to wait until the myth ends before they can leave the realm. Only when they resurrect Osiris can they leave Heliopolis. Only when they kill the Hydra can they leave Olympus. Time has no real meaning. The same stories repeat endlessly, each time slightly different depending on how mortals interact with them and remember them. Portals may lead to any time, so that the PCs may end up in some place decades before they were there last, or millennia after.Planar beings have no fixed forms. A deva may resemble a winged human to one viewer, a winged dwarf to another, and a spinning tower of flaming two-dimensional geometric forms to a third. It has the same game statistics either way, conveniently enough. A city may be rows of Cyclopean monoliths to one party member, but be a mess of well-kept cottages to another, and a primeval forest to yet another. It may be an inverted mountain made of water to a fourth viewer.The gods have many faces. They are many and one. It's not clear where one god begins and the other ends. Different aspects of the powers may not know about one another. They may exist on many planes simultaneously. The planes have no fixed boundaries. You can sometimes move from one to another by simply changing your perspective. They aren't fixed places. Planar relationships are a matter of opinion. Some say the outer planes are a wheel of 17 universes, but others say they are a tree, or a mountain, or a river, or a series of infinite bubbles, or a single undifferentiated mass, and they are right too.The PCs have great power. Their thoughts can change, destroy, or recreate the multiverse, especially as they increase in power and influence. But so can everyone else's, and there are beings who are so ancient and fundamental that they might as well be immortal - reoccurring archetypes that may appear in different form each time they are encountered. They are the cards in an endlessly shuffling deck, but how they are configured, encountered, and dealt with is up to the PCs.</blockquote>

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