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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rotipher" data-source="post: 7443600" data-attributes="member: 56531">I use a system in which the "planes" aren't actually different places, but different modes of existence within the same plane.  The "Material Plane" is simply the way that organic, living, mortal beings happen to perceive and participate in that reality.  The different modes/"planes" are loosely grouped into "Strata", based on how they relate to the Material mode of existence.The Elemental Continuum is how reality is experienced by elementals, which aren't "otherworldly beings" so much as sentient vibrations.  A flame's flickering, a gusting breeze, water rippling or tremors shaking the ground are all the result of elementals, living out their own lives and feuding among themselves.  PCs who "travel" to the Elemental Continuum don't cross a barrier between universes, they become one with the element whose type they are "visiting" and experience reality like the corresponding elementals do.  Magics that summon or manipulate elementals or the elements work by facilitating communication and control between the Elemental and Material Continua, which normally perceive each other as inert obstacles.  Because it constitutes the "foundation" for the Material Plane's tangible matter and structure, the Elemental Continuum is also known as the "Strata Beneath".While the E.C. is a materialistic mode, the "Strata Between" are more esoteric.  These are the "planes" reachable via natural transitions or changes in consciousness: the Spirit World, the Gulfs of Dreaming, and Erebus, Land of the Unquiet Dead.  The Spirit World is the realm of life force, communion with nature, insight and prophecy.  It's attainable through ritual trances, vision quests, and shamanic teachings; I don't use the Astral (too boring IMO), but some of the Astral-based spells I've reskinned to work via this plane.  The Gulfs are home to dreamscapes, entities that embody or feed upon emotions (feyrs, rakshasas), and the heights of imagination and dread.  Everyone who sleeps visits it in their dreams, and illusionists' shadow magic draws from the Gulfs rather than Shadow IMC.  Erebus is the realm of ghosts and lost souls who haven't yet won through to Eternity, serving the role of an Ethereal Plane and parts of the Shadowfell.  Necromantic magics tend to muck with Erebus (e.g. a lost soul whose corpse is Animated winds up suffering seizures there as they jerkily mimic their skeleton/zombie body's movements), and adventurers who are waiting to be raised from death may find themselves having a solo adventure there while they wait.The Strata Above are the "planes" of the gods, aka Eternity.  They're less a "place" than a state of perfect harmony/misery/oneness/freedom/grace that falls upon a soul after death, although they *perceive* it as a realm they can wander about in until they adjust to their new status.  The known Strata Above are divvied up by pantheon, not by alignment.  There *used* to be an additional realm for Good and one for Evil, but these two realms withdrew from contact with the Material Plane millennia ago.  Lingering connections remain with the margins of these two realms (Paradiso & Inferno), allowing arcanists to Summon minor celestial or fiendish beings and so on, but the actual realms (now called the Strata Beyond, i.e. beyond reach) don't want anything to do with flawed/wishy-washy mortals anymore.The last of the Strata are the Strata Betwixt, so called because they're what you get when two Strata Between interact *without* either the grounding Elemental Continuum, or the third of the realms Between.  What you get in the absence of a connection to the E.C. is a morphic plane that derives its nature from the most dominant personality present.   (That's why the Strata Above are subject to their resident deities' whims.  The Strata Between are subject to their own Guardians - the Seer, the Dreamer, the Hound - that keep them stable.)  As the Strata Betwixt all have their own living inhabitants, they're sectioned off into "domains", a la the old Ravenloft setting.  In fact, one of the three Strata Betwixt (Erebus & Gulfs) *is* the Land of Mists.  Lacking a connection to the Spirit World, it's a plane where lack of insight confines its dominant personalities within a prison of their own subconscious guilt.  The second (Gulfs & Spirit World) is Faerie, which serves the purpose of the Feywild IMC but with a domains-with-lords structure.  Lacking ties to Erebus, it's the natural habitat for ageless fey.  The third realm Betwixt, Stalkbriar (Erebus & Spirit World), is the primal realm: Nature red in tooth and claw, dominated by the strongest of predators or most dominant of herd leaders among the wild beasts.  Without ties to the Gulfs, Stalkbriar is inimical to thought and ideas, such that sentient beings who linger there long will degenerate into a savage state.  Bugbears derive from goblins that just barely escaped from there, and many non-sentient monsters - dire animals, magical beasts, killer plants, etc - that couldn't possibly maintain stable populations in my campaign's region could crop up suddenly if Stalkbriar - like Ravenloft or the Feywild - happens to drop some off.Incidentally, because this "Strata" motif doesn't allow for planes/states of being that are *completely* alien to the rest, I don't have a Far Realm as a plane.  Instead, aberrations that derive from there in other cosmologies are left over from the "First Creation", a previous era of intelligence and civilization that rose and fell within the game-planet's equivalent of the Cambrian explosion.</blockquote>

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