Planar Adventures

[trix]

Someone brought up a reference to the different planes... prime material, inner, outer, ethereal, etc.

I'm wondering what types of adventures DMs have put together that use the different planes.

Any ideas ?

For some reason i'd think its a bit cheesy to go into the elemental plane of air and rescue some princess that was captured by some Efreet prince as ransom for some scepter of power.

Okay, maybe that might be intresting... bad example.

How about going into the elemental plane of earth to recover the ... oh wait... u died... couldnt breath air... none of that stuff in the EPoE.

-Tim

 

[Furn_Darkside]

For some reason i'd think its a bit cheesy to go into the elemental plane of air and rescue some princess that was captured by some Efreet prince as ransom for some scepter of power.

Yeah, it would be cheesy.

Especially since the the Efreet live on the plane of fire.

FD

 

[Furn_Darkside]

Salutations,

Ok, a serious answer-

When the other player in the group was dm'ng, his campeign (from what I could figure out) was a war between two dopple planes spilling into the pc's plane.

I don't do many planar adventures- there is enough to do on the prime.

FD

 

[MeepoTheMighty]

Re: Re: Planar Adventures

Yeah, it would be cheesy.

Especially since the the Efreet live on the plane of fire.

FD

Dammit, you beat me to it.

 

[MeepoTheMighty]

I also don't do all that many planar adventures. I do, however, involve a lot of things coming IN from the planes. Githyanki, demons, yugoloths, elementals, crazy cultists summoning all sorts of stuff.

Sometimes the only way to stop the influx of baddies is to, naturally, go through the gate yourself and seal it from the other side.

I did run that 2nd ed adventure that involved rescuing Waukeen from the Abyss, but I had a lot of trouble with it. I just wasn't able to believably describe an Abyssal city.

 

[Zappo]

Since there's a whole very successful setting based on planar adventuring, I think we can say that there's a lot[7i] of stuff you can do on the planes.

Take a look at any Planescape adventure for that.

For adventurers based on the Prime who make an occasional trip to another plane, instead, the perspective is fairly different. There are still billions of possible adventures, though.

 

[trix]

Efreet!!! Haha.

Lol!!

Efreet in the EP of Air.

My bad.

---

Zappo, you're right. I just, as a DM, cant seem to get across the magnitude of some specific scenes.

I dont like to read a page long reference to players to put across a description.

...and... "you're now in the plane of fire" just doesnt cut it.

-Tim

 

[LcKedovan]

Sweet! I beat all the other Planewalkers here!

Well trix, Planescape manages to convey the feeling quite well, the adventures tend to be quite gritty and tacking what it means to be good and evil on quite a philosophical level in a number of cases. You might want to skim the old www.planewalker.com site for adventure Hooks or the www.ps3e.com site for 3e conversions and other such ideas.

Beyond that use simple imagery and other such techniques to make the characters feel like specks of dust. You don't need a huge description to wig out some characters visiting Baator when you describe a ant like carpet moving in the distance and then they realize it is actually a huge horde of nasty Outsiders scuttling across the horrid barren landscape.

-Will

EdiT: I couldn't resist. "Besides... Trix are for kids!"

 

[Horacio]

And, of course, if you can read Spanish, go to Planewalker-es, Spanish version of www.planewalker.com

 

[FungiMuncher]

I started my campaign based on the idea alternate material planes. The primary plane (Terra) is a pseudo-historical earth, with the cities of Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Alexandria, etc, with the typical cultures. All the fantasy creatures come from the alternate planes: Arcadia for the fey (including elves and gnomes), Draconia for the drangons (and other reptilains) and Permagnia for the giants (including orcs, who would be considered like halflings there). The shadow plane is the means to travel between the planes.

For the most part, the environments are similar. In ages past, the various creatures migrated across the planes through sparsely located, "naturally" occuring portals to the shadow realm. However, the further away you get from a link to Terra, the weirder things get. For example, travel long enough in Arcadia, and your magic starts to get a life of its own.

I have run several adventures on these planes. The current party is at 5th level, and they just entered the shadow realm two sessions ago. Last session (yesterday), they fought a band of shadow goblins (goblins with the shadow creature template). The encounter was rather tough, but they got through it. In the future, they'll be looking for a base of operations set up by snakemen worshipers of Apep, and trying to figure out why the shadow denizens speak Greek.

I like this cosmology pretty well. I wanted a little of the plane traveling experience, but felt the usual offerings were a bit more extreme than what I wanted. In this situation, they party can travel to the other planes at lower levels without worrying too much about the environment or the rulers of the plane. There's no critical ability, magic item or permission that must be gained before traveling, which (perhaps) allows less of a railroading effect for the players.

FM