D&D General Outside the Box: Planes for other creature types

[Minigiant]

Would the Plane of Plants be a Dinosaur world with giant plants, smart treants, and dumb dinos everywhere?

Treants: Stupid Dinos. Always eating our brothers.
Grimlock: Why you think Grimlock stupid. Me Grimlock smartest dinobot of them all.

 

[Faolyn]

@Minigiant, @vincegetorix, love those planes. Except I'd probably go for something like the Outlands for humanoids, and keep the gate towns (adapting them to this new cosmology), since humanoids are far more often "touched' by parts of the other planes.

Although the Plants should be half Arborea/whatever and half Zuggtmoy's/Psilofyr's realms, because D&D insists on having fungi as a type of plant.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Although the Plants should be half Arborea/whatever and half Zuggtmoy's/Psilofyr's realms, because D&D insists on having fungi as a type of plant.

Dont forget, each plane has its own ''underdark''.

So Arborea has the Darken Roots, the realm of evil fungus!
Feywild has the Feydark
Shadowfell has the Felldark (Shadowdark sounds dumb)
Io's Dream has the Chromatic Aerie (Upside down floating mountains, so the cavers are kinda in the sky)
Far Plane has Pluton
Beastland has the Hunting Grounds
Mechanus has Sunachem
Jotunheim has Musspelheim
Elemental Chaos has the Corrupted Planes (Acid/Magma/Cinder/Storm)
Carceri has the Lost Gaol (Monstrous Prison Break meets Jurassic Park!)
Abyss has the Obyrith's Delve
Mount Celestia has Asylum (Prison for Fallen Celestial)
Swamp of Oblivion has the Ectoplasmic Mangrove (Ghostly Forest inhabited by psionic oozes)

 

[Faolyn]

Just for fun, I looked up "Sunachem D&D" and the first result was a .xyz domain site written in what might be Bengali with the question, in English, "Where can I find swingers with herpes?"

I am clearly going to have to include something like this in Under-Mechanus. Constructs that have become diseased in some fashion and have been "reprogrammed" to want to spread that disease.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Just for fun, I looked up "Sunachem D&D" and the first result was a .xyz domain site written in what might be Bengali with the question, in English, "Where can I find swingers with herpes?"

I am clearly going to have to include something like this in Under-Mechanus. Constructs that have become diseased in some fashion and have been "reprogrammed" to want to spread that disease.

You just made my week.

Splendid.

 

[Stormonu]

I prefer The First World to Io's Dream.

A place where in most worlds the land came first and was populated beings, in the First World, the dragons came first and the dragons became the lands - are the lands. Places such as the Furnace Aerie of the Reds, to the Thrumming Palace of Sand of the Blues, The Silent Caves of the Whites, The Rustling Woods and Fortress of Spikes held by the Green, to the Moorisle of the Blacks. The chomatics hold such places as the Bronze Docks against the Seabluffs of Ieridi, The Golden Palace in the Quiet Valley, The Stonefaced Hills and the Copper Plated Maze, the Brass Tower in the Great Wadi, and the Glittering Spire of Silver in the Eternal City of Dragons.

The only mar in the plane is the Blasted Heath of Tiamat, where Bahumat confronted Tiamat and their fight tore open a hole to the planes beyond. Io bound Tiamat to Avernus for role in the fight, and banished Bahumat to wander the planes ever after - never to return to the first world.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Fey get their own plane in the Feywild and fiends get to choose one of 3-4 hells..

What would be the plane of D&D giants be? If hill, stone, frost, fire, cloud and storm giants were shunted off to their own plane, how would the D&D version of it look? Straight out of Norse mythology? Like the Material plane but everything bigger? Resource poorer to encourage extraplanar raiding? An outer plane, inner plane, or parallel plane?

Chthonic. Giants have their own rules, ancient and mysterious. Their home is steeped in deep, dark magic, and they, its rulers, are both powerful and a little bit alien--but not so alien as to be too far away. Think of it as...sort of "perpendicular" to the Feywild/Shadowfell divide, pushing along a different axis, one that draws more on vast, unknowable things: not fairy-rings, but the Forest Primeval; not graveyards, but the Standing Stones and the Treacherous Moorlands and the Mountains Eternal. Neither dark nor light, but rather the bones of the world risen (or raised) up.

Draw in more Norse myth--things like their plane being the repurposed body of some ancient progenitor-giant, having siblings that are huge monsters, chthonic rituals and blood-sacrifice to keep the world alive. Perhaps draw in some bits of other mythology that courts this kind of thing too, like Maya or Aztec, where the world itself may be a Lovecraftian horror that must be fed or it will awaken.

(And, as an aside, the logical opposite of Giants also fit in: Dragons. Where Giants come from the chthonian darkness, Dragons come from Olympian heaven, having the power of flight. Each side is elemental, but in radically different ways. Tiamat, in this conception, may have done her great evil not by fighting Bahamut, but by trying to take absolute power through an "unholy" alliance with the Giants--or perhaps that was her Start of Darkness, and she consorted with steadily more wicked powers after her Giant allies failed her.)

What about a plane of beasts? A plane dominated by animal instincts and habitats. What magicall effects would be there? Which gods would move to the plane that has infinite puppies? Is that were the druids get all the summoned animals from?

I...have a much harder time with this prompt. "Beasts" is a bit too generic, particularly with the Feywild already in play, and the above covering most of the "megafauna" possibilities. I'd really need to sit down and think about what a "beast-plane" would center on.

Is Oozeland just a plane of jelly and jam with different levels of corrosiveness and sweetness?

I'd go with an idea I've seen elsewhere, and basically treat oozes as a manifestation of the Far Realm bubbling up through the Deep Underearth. They have no discernible biology because they're literally living by an actually alien physics to "our reality" (the mortal plane or planes)--which is also why they never get to the surface, because that's too far from their "home," and their nature can't handle that much of "normality." Things that mimic true sunlight are thus, in a sense, forcibly making the Deep Underearth more like the "normal" world--it's not that UV light kills them, it's that forcing them to exist in the rules of "our world" means...they don't get to exist anymore.

Is Mechanus the plane of constructs?

Mechanus is the plane of Order In Motion. It is not static and unmoving, an ossified husk, like some would have you believe Total Order would be. To be static is to invite chaos, because you cannot restore things to their place if disturbed. So Mechanus is a place of gears and timing, of the beauty of perfect symmetry, of laws that admit no exceptions because no exceptions are needed. Its denizens, then, are representatives of Order In Motion, beings that move with unnaturalness that transcends into something "more" natural (what the Japanese would call yugen.) None of this weird clickety-clackety rickety silliness (except for things that have gotten too much Chaos in them); modrons and inevitables are well-known, but they should include geometers, astronomers, philologists, lawyers--a caste that is more priestly because it is more scientific and more scientific because it is priestly. And even non-sapients should be brought in. Social insects are one obvious option, but so are migratory creatures like birds and butterflies, trees that follow neat and clean seasonal cycles, things like shellfish that slowly and steadily grow greater shells.

Mechanus is the Druid's worst nightmare given life: a world where Order-In-Motion is totally, and obviously, unnatural....and yet woven through every leaf that falls and every eye that sees.

As noted above, I'd want a plane for Dragons. It would need to be super gorram metal, but I haven't thought about it in enough detail to specify exactly how yet. It should be scary and dangerous but full of power--the kind of place that trees that grow for a thousand years and produce one magical fruit a century grow, where wuxia antics are ordinary combat and the differences between "skill," "power," "magic," and "awe" are exclusively pedantry.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I prefer The First World to Io's Dream.

A place where in most worlds the land came first and was populated beings, in the First World, the dragons came first and the dragons became the lands - are the lands. Places such as the Furnace Aerie of the Reds, to the Thrumming Palace of Sand of the Blues, The Silent Caves of the Whites, The Rustling Woods and Fortress of Spikes held by the Green, to the Moorisle of the Blacks. The chomatics hold such places as the Bronze Docks against the Seabluffs of Ieridi, The Golden Palace in the Quiet Valley, The Stonefaced Hills and the Copper Plated Maze, the Brass Tower in the Great Wadi, and the Glittering Spire of Silver in the Eternal City of Dragons.

The only mar in the plane is the Blasted Heath of Tiamat, where Bahumat confronted Tiamat and their fight tore open a hole to the planes beyond. Io bound Tiamat to Avernus for role in the fight, and banished Bahumat to wander the planes ever after - never to return to the first world.

The thing I dont like about the First World in this excercise (I've thought about it) its that it makes 1 particular place more important than the others by making it the progenitor of the other ones. Not a big thing, I agree.

I have in mind an endless sky made of metal (like the sky from Abeir in 4e adventures, the one where the dragons are gods) with all the geographical elements you give me as floating dots is the skies.

 

[Stormonu]

The thing I dont like about the First World in this excercise (I've thought about it) its that it makes 1 particular place more important than the others by making it the progenitor of the other ones. Not a big thing, I agree.

I have in mind an endless sky made of metal (like the sky from Abeir in 4e adventures, the one where the dragons are gods) with all the geographical elements you give me as floating dots is the skies.

View attachment 141537View attachment 141538

Not necessarily - dragons are arrogant creatures and in my mind it is only "First" in that it is the First world the dragons knew. Their experience with other worlds was after their creation of the First World, so all other must be lesser in stature in their minds.

As for the images, isn't that just Bytopia?

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Not necessarily - dragons are arrogant creatures and in my mind it is only "First" in that it is the First world the dragons knew. Their experience with other worlds was after their creation of the First World, so all other must be lesser in stature in their minds.

As for the images, isn't that just Bytopia?

Yep, I stole its esthetic and appearance and filled it with dragons