Low-level planar travel

[Asmor]

Eltern: Well, you could change the descriptive text a bit. Instead of a book, make it a scroll. Instead of touching a 'glowing, silvery panal', make the scroll contain a window-like picture of the destination plane, which shimmers as if viewed through a layer of water. If you touch the window, the 'water' crawls up you arm and covers you entirely, then retracts into the 'window' taking you with it.

Feel free to be creative.

Asmor: So... what are you going to use? Any ideas yet?

elephant: Remember -- 5th level party. 120,000 gp is a big pile of money -- not something a high-level NPC will entrust to a group of low-levels adventures.

I think I'm going to go with some combination of books with portals and normal Sigil portals. The Librarian can only send them to planes he has books for, and some quests might involve the PCs escorting one of his minions to go and prepare a book for travel to that plane.

 

[wuyanei]

A good combo.

But what about the return trip? How will you arrange for the players return to the Library Plane?

 

[werk]

And I always like to play with time between planes. Nothing like getting back to the library before you leave...or 50 years after.

 

[Warehouse23]

You could just curse the amulet of the planes and not tell the PCs. Have the curse activate if they attempt to sell the amulet.

 

[Asmor]

A good combo.

But what about the return trip? How will you arrange for the players return to the Library Plane?

A book with a portal to the Library, of course!

 

[Asmor]

And I always like to play with time between planes. Nothing like getting back to the library before you leave...or 50 years after.

That had most definitely occurred to me... I'm thinking that they're going to end up stranded somewhere for a couple months on a fast time plane while they wait for something on a normal time plane...

 

[Enkhidu]

Back in the Plansescape heydey, Dragon printed an article about "triggered portals," portals that only worked when a person bearing a particular type of item (say, the bloom of a certain kind of flower) or doing a specific action (like whistling a certain tune) passed through them.

If you wanted to, you could make part of the fun in the trips to and from these portals, or in getting the keys to them (an easy example: a bit of bariur horn might allow a trip to Elysium when carried through a rose covered arch in a hard to reach garden; a complex example: a particular store front goes to Gehenna, and the gate is activated by playing a haunting tune popular in the Hive several years ago on a set of Baatorian pipes).