Psion! Help! River of Worlds

[Desdichado]

Hey, Psion (and anyone else!) looking for some help here. As a sequel to a campaign I've run in the past, I've thought about getting a new group of PCs to start travelling to different worlds (i.e., planes) early in the campaign. However, I don't use a cosmology that's Great Wheel like, I have a world similar to the Plane of Shadow that is the gateway to the rest of the worlds, and then a number of other planes cluster around it like soap bubbles. Some of them you have to pass through several other planes to get to. Anyway, I think it's much more similar to the River of Worlds idea than to the Great Wheel.

The kicker is--the fiends and other evil creatures have essentially won and sealed off all access to any plane that's even remotely good or helpful to the PCs. That's why the gateway plane has gradually turned into something like the plane of Shadow--influence of evil.

A few other things--I don't much care about the law/chaos axis, so there's nothing like the demon/devil feud, blood war, etc. to muck about in the campaign. Characters like demon princes, archdevils, slaad lords, efreet sultans, etc. all scheme, plot, and make and break alliances with each other with impunity regardless of type.

Anyway, that's the "high concept" of the campaign--but now I'm looking for ideas for what the PCs would actually be doing--what kinds of adventures, what kinds of planes to visit, etc. Any ideas?

 

[Kestrel]

The idea that struck me is that they could start out working for one of the evil overlords in thier schemes, as they gained power, they could move towards freelancing among the overlords, with an eventual goal of gaining enough power to break down the gates to the good realms.

You could have them planehop on various "Shadowruns" to gain artifacts/information and while they do so, they could find out about the locked planes. They would probably know nothing of goodness because they grew up under the evil ones, but as they go on various missions, they could discover that something better used to exist.

 

[Joshua Randall]

(1) PCs start out on one of the sealed-off good planes, but through Plot Device Mojo (tm) are transported to the evil transitional plane. And it was a one-way trip, so the PCs have to find a way to undo the sealing-off if they ever want to get back to Kansas.

(2) For a slight variation, instead of just trying to get back home, the PCs were specifically sent on a one-way trip as a kind of suicide mission: they have to find a way to undo the sealing-off before the good aligned planes die or implode or whatever. The PCs are the last, desperate hope of Good... etc.

(3) For another variation, PCs are kidnapped from good aligned planes by some Evil Guy. He wants the PCs to undo the sealing-off so that he can spread more evil to the good aligned planes. In other words, the Evil Guy is so evil that he's not satisfied with already having "won" the battle of the planes -- he wants to break down the seals and bring the pain to the good aligned planes. In this scenario, the PCs may or may not know what the Evil Guy plans. The PCs may be duped into thinking they are operating under scenario #1 or #2, above.

 

[Nifft]

Here's something from my setting. Maybe not quite as bleak as you want, but has some nice dark implications. It requires that there are multiple consistent views of the Cosmos.

Here are the multiple views that I use:
- River of Worlds
- Tree of Life


The River Oceanus and the River Styx are the same river. From Celestia's ocean, the river flows through (... good realms ...) to Ysgard, and from there into Faerie (which is what I use for CN). After leaving Faerie, the river ventures underground, through dark and windy caverns, until it reaches a poisoned plain of menhirs, pockmarked with gaping pits and fissures that lead into the various layers of the Abyss. From there, it travels on through (evil planes), finally ending in the Pit of the Adversary.

What's so dark about that? The river always flows "down", from LG to CN to CE to LE. (LE is "worse" that CE in my game.) So it's easy to get into a bad place, and hard to get out, if you travel by river.

You could also think of the River as the flow of cosmic energy in some way. The "flow" is actually the Adversary gaining power through the evil of Mankind, or whatever, if you like the outer planes being created by philosophy.


The Great Tree, Yggdrasil. At the center of the Elemental Planes there is the Plane of Wood. It's not widely known to be the center, but all know that it "touches" all four of the typical Elemental planes. In fact, the heart of Yggdrasil touches all places. (This is why Druids have access to plane shift in my game.)

The foul creatures of the Hells nibble at the great tree's roots, and poison its sap. This is why Paladins must venture into Hell: to trim back the parasites on the foundations of reality. This is also why so many oracles are found in the Hells: ancient non-evil creatures have always made their homes among the foundations. Only the ignorant call these oracles "fallen".

Why is this dark? Because Evil has the roots, and therefore has the universe by its short hairs. Evil actions in Hell could have effects on any number of Prime worlds.

Why is this cool? Because PCs finding secluded natural gates (far from civilization by definition) and then walking across giant tree limbs is cool.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Psion]

Hey, look! Planar coolness!

And hey, look! Joshua Randall, the guy that joined my PbP then disappeared after Christmas!

Hey, Psion (and anyone else!) looking for some help here. As a sequel to a campaign I've run in the past, I've thought about getting a new group of PCs to start travelling to different worlds (i.e., planes) early in the campaign. However, I don't use a cosmology that's Great Wheel like, I have a world similar to the Plane of Shadow that is the gateway to the rest of the worlds, and then a number of other planes cluster around it like soap bubbles. Some of them you have to pass through several other planes to get to. Anyway, I think it's much more similar to the River of Worlds idea than to the Great Wheel.

The kicker is--the fiends and other evil creatures have essentially won and sealed off all access to any plane that's even remotely good or helpful to the PCs. That's why the gateway plane has gradually turned into something like the plane of Shadow--influence of evil.

Cool. Actually, I sort of have something like that in my own cosmology:
[sblock=IMC notes]There are three paths to the outer planes, and each has a celestial waterway associated with it

The spirit world runs from the infinite primes to the upper planes, and runs parallel to the river oceanus.

The plane of shadow runs from the infinite primes to the lower planes/netherworlds, and parallels the river styx.

And the river of worlds itself runs parallel to the astral.[/sblock]

Yours sounds like what would happen if there was a subset of worlds touched by shadow, but blocked from the spirit world and river of worlds. If someone very bad and very powerful did this intentionally, it could become either a moody backdrop detail or something to uncover the secrets of and possibly undo, depending on how your campaign runs.

A few other things--I don't much care about the law/chaos axis, so there's nothing like the demon/devil feud, blood war, etc. to muck about in the campaign. Characters like demon princes, archdevils, slaad lords, efreet sultans, etc. all scheme, plot, and make and break alliances with each other with impunity regardless of type.

Anyway, that's the "high concept" of the campaign--but now I'm looking for ideas for what the PCs would actually be doing--what kinds of adventures, what kinds of planes to visit, etc. Any ideas?

Do you own Complete Book of Eldritch Might and Beyond Countless doorways? Those were my staple for a "serendipitous campaign" of this sort. And they also fit the concept of "no law or chaos". The Nine Courts of Hell in Beyond Countless Doorways, for example, mixes demons and devils with impunity. All of those have good plot hooks for getting involved with the particular plane.

(Palpatur, on the other hand, is an example of a setting that does recognize the bloodwar... a living world that is the remnant of an ancient battle that spilled out into the plane... and left the world behind dying. But you could easily remodel the demons and devils as warring factions of fiends of your own making.)

But as for an over-arching plot... mine with the river of world was that the players followed directions that led them to the River of Worlds and got stuck there. They also had a long term goal of chase down some inperplanar yuan-ti slavers and recovering the scion of a noble house that they worked for. I expected the players to lose sight of this goal once it became clear that they were stuck on the planes, but somehow they never did and finally completed the task.

Another possibility I was angling towards and still may do someday is simply this: the PCs are fugitives, and someone is hunting them. Wherever they going, someone shows up hunting them, sure they know something. In the meantime, the PCs must gather allies and information while they try to get out of their predicament. In short, I was thinking of modeling my game after Farscape.

Perhaps there's something in there you can use. (shrug)

 

[Seeten]

*whaps Psion* you shoulda run the River of Worlds chat based game, I still havent gotten to play my pirate =P

 

[Desdichado]

Cool ideas! I do own both of those books you mention, Psion--although I haven't read them entirely, since actually reading pdfs is always more difficult for me than I anticipate. I should at least pull up that chapter in Beyond Countless Doorways--I've read a few of them and liked them very much---enough so that I've seriously considering breaking down and buying it in hard copy format.

What's so dark about that? The river always flows "down", from LG to CN to CE to LE. (LE is "worse" that CE in my game.) So it's easy to get into a bad place, and hard to get out, if you travel by river.

Very cool idea. Joshua Randall---I like your ideas too, but they probably won't work for me. I had hoped to avoid typing up reams of background info, but I think maybe a bit more may be called for here after all.

Yours sounds like what would happen if there was a subset of worlds touched by shadow, but blocked from the spirit world and river of worlds. If someone very bad and very powerful did this intentionally, it could become either a moody backdrop detail or something to uncover the secrets of and possibly undo, depending on how your campaign runs.

The latter is what I'm thinking. See, here's the deal. I ran a (IMO) very successful campaign in my favorite homebrew Dark•Heritage which is a world not unlike any other prime material plane world in most respects. For those who've been following my posts for a number of years, you may be familiar with it; it's not exactly D&D per se---more like a fantasy X-files, where the PC's were exposed to "the occult" while the general populace was not.

I also borrowed a fair bit of politics from Warhammer 40k; the PC's were in, if not exactly part of, a very oppressive Empire, and they were lucky enough to land a gig freelancing as investigators for an understaffed and overworked Inquisitor Lord in a major metropolis on the frontier of the Empire. They did get involved in thwarting and having problems with a great deal of the machinations of the local court, including a number of apparent fiendish bargains.

Sadly, one guy in the group moved away, another started evening law school, and we fell below critical mass to maintain the game. Another guy in our group's other group had also had similar issues, and he ended up brokering a merger of our two groups by starting up an Age of Worms campaign that he's been running for some time now, so this campaign was left unfinished. I do occasionally have calls to run more there, so I've always got thoughts in the back of my head for what else to do, which is what's been prompting this thread. Since our Age of Worms is scheduled to end in a few months, I want to have a concept ready to propose to the group as something I may run. I'd like to take this same concept and do something even more with it; i.e., take it to the realms of the demons and whatnot.

What the PCs did not get far enough to discover the first time around is that the Emperor himself had made a deal with demons eons ago to free humanity from slavery to a race that no longer exists (as far as they know...) However, the Emperor then took up Necromancy in an attempt to cheat the demons and make sure his soul never ended up in their claws. What the PC's didn't know was that there was a proviso in the Emperor's original fiendish pact that if he ever died, the demons would have an anchor that would allow them to enter the mortal world much more easily and wreak havoc thereon. My thoughts back in the day were originally that that is exactly what would happen, and the PCs would have to deal with a fiendish invasion.

However, like I said, I never quite got that far. Then while the campaign was sitting in idle, I started giving some thought to fleshing out it's cosmology a bit, and came up with the material in the original post, which explains why there's all kinds of deals with fiends, but no record of any dealings with celestials, etc. I had some further thoughts that the Emperor probably has a super secret branch of the Inquisition that is actually trained and equipped to leave their homeworld and actually take the fight to the fiends on their own turf in surgical missions, etc.

Anyway, I got pretty excited about that concept, but that's still just high concept. I'm not sure exactly what the PC's would do in the fiendish homeworlds, other than wander around killing fiends. That seemed like a pretty weak impetus for adventure, so I was hoping I could get some ideas.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Ah, I remember your Dark Heritage stuff, J-Dawg. (I also remember when you had the same first name as me. Heh.)

You should definitely read Beyond Countless Doorways (and thanks to Psion for turning me on to that). In addition to the many chapters detailing various planes, there are a bunch of sidebars at the beginning of each chapter briefly describing which other planes the main plane is in conjunction with. Sometimes these one sentence descriptions are enough to build adventures around; other times they are just cool, weird places the PCs could visit.

As for what the PCs should do in the planes... whatever they want to. Do you want lots of tactical combat? Let them fight their way across the planes. Do you want political intrigue? Let them travel the planes gathering allies (and making enemies) so they can overthrow the emperor.

Here's a random idea I just had. Maybe it's not that no one does remember the emperor's demonic bargain; maybe it's that no one can remember it. Steal a page from Sagiro's story hour, and have all knowledge pertaining to that bargain be masked... except of course for the few people for whom the masking doesn't work.

This could be some cadre of evil bad guys who are exploiting the knowledge for their own purposes (blackmail the emperor maybe?), or it could be the PCs who have the knowledge but can't get anyone to believe them ("You say the emperor made a deal with demons ages ago? Yeah, right, kid. Go back to moisture farming and killing womp rats.").

Or, maybe the emperor hires the PCs are part of his special Inquisatorial strike force and sends them on missions to kill demons and disrupt demonic activity. Why? Because the emperor is tired of living in fear of dying and having his soul sucked into the Abyss. He's decided that if he can kill all the demons, or destroy the Demonic Soul-Sucking Plot Device (tm), or capture the chief demon and force him to undo the bargain, then all will be well.

Of course the PCs are expendable pawns in this plan... but knowing the PCs, they'll likely get themselves raised and then be expendable again and again and again.

 

[Desdichado]

Ah! Cool! Now there's some darn-tootin' good plot nuggets in there!

Here's a random idea I just had. Maybe it's not that no one does remember the emperor's demonic bargain; maybe it's that no one can remember it. Steal a page from Sagiro's story hour, and have all knowledge pertaining to that bargain be masked... except of course for the few people for whom the masking doesn't work.

Yeah--that's my thought. The Emporer is merely the last of a secret group many aeons ago that brokered this fiendish bargain. Naturally, they decided that their heroic efforts in freeing enslaved humanity would be seen with a bit more jaundiced eye if it were known that they had actually engineered the revolution with fiendish agents and that after all of that original cabal had died and gone to Hell, so to speak, that a regular tithe of souls was built into the contract. In other words, to some extent, they had sold future generations of humanity down the river to free them at that time. Traded one form of enslavement for another, worse one, actually.

Only since the Emperor had found the secret of prolonging his life indefinately, the worst conditions of the bargain never came to pass, much to the fiends' chagrin. I really like the idea that---as evil and unlikeble as a ruler as the Emperor is---the PC's pretty much have to end up protecting and supporting him because the alternative is much worse. In a sense, he's conquered the world (or at least a portion of it) to save it from an even worse fate.

Or, maybe the emperor hires the PCs are part of his special Inquisatorial strike force and sends them on missions to kill demons and disrupt demonic activity. Why? Because the emperor is tired of living in fear of dying and having his soul sucked into the Abyss. He's decided that if he can kill all the demons, or destroy the Demonic Soul-Sucking Plot Device (tm), or capture the chief demon and force him to undo the bargain, then all will be well.

Of course the PCs are expendable pawns in this plan.

Quite right. That's where I need the most help. Demonic Soul-sucking Plot Device has some merit. Perhaps trying to rescue and restore some of the entrapped souls of the Emperor's former collegues who brokered the fiendish deal in the first place? I'm not sure. Still trying to imagine other potential missions the PC's could be sent on.

 

[DaveyJones]

don't forget Rifts. last year they did a new edition.