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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 2340777" data-attributes="member: 2067">Emphasising a Theme: VerticalityDMing is a kind of performance. Using the imaginations of the players, you can create a meaningful experience that can have real emotional and symbolic *weight*. I consider it a feather in my DM cap that I've made players cry at the tragedies I've generated, or made them stand up in rage at a villain, or made them dance with joy. Perhaps I'm lucky enough to have very expressive groups...Anyway, the performance of Carceri is one of backstabbing, suffering, self-interest, paranoia, and punishment. And it is represented by one defining theme: verticality.Drawing from the 2e Planes of Conflict, it tells a planewalker that the portals between Carceri's layers are located at the highest and lowest points on the spheres. The high mountains will lead one closer to freedom, while the low valleys and trenches will lead one away.  Because the PC's are here to escape, this means they will be in a continual vertical passage, always going up, up, and away. So I begin at the bottom....and make sure they know (through their fellow prisoner, Fraz) that up is always the escape. If they go up, sooner or later, they will go out. The first thing to escape is the prison....Because the players aren't too familiar with the planes, I start them in a place that is fairly familiar -- a one-room cell whose doors mysteriously open on the day of liberation. Fraz notes that they are probably underground. To get out, they must go up. At first, it is through simple stairs. But as they go, it changes...See, the idea of this sphere of Carceri is to be HUGE. MASSIVE. WORLD-SIZED. And the PC's were imprisoned near the center. Of course, they don't know this right away, But as they discover how nested their cells were....As they head up different floors, I constantly note (and map out) that there are scads of identical floors just beneath them. When they emerge from their first staircase, they see behind them thousands more like them, leading down into thousands of rooms like theirs, which each leads to hundreds of cells like the ones they were freed from. But only one way up. After the second staircase, there are even more doorways and passageways behind them, trailing away deep into the earth. But only one way up. Only one path to follow...hundreds of ways to fall back, but the path ahead is frought with danger. And every time they think they may be at the exit, they have another stair to climb, and realize that hundreds of thousands of creatures shared their imprisonment.One of the most dramatic examples of this happens after a few hours of climbing stairs...they emerge in a large hangar, about 150 ft. accross. And as they leave the hangar, they notice that the hangar was just one of millions, extending miles in all directions, alongside a great stone wall, all identical. In front of them looms a dark gulf of nothing. Behind them lays prison. Freedom lays in only one direction -- up. More stairs. Up a wall like a honeycomb, stairs connecting each immense hangar. After climbing the stairs for hours (and probably fighting off a riot or monster or two) they come to the next part of their climb. The stairs peter out, and are replaced by a nearly vertical wall...made out of living, breathing, grasping humanoid figures. Naked torsos moan and flail. Feet kick out. But they are motionless, stuck in their position by the press of bodies on all sides of them. They are Carceri's petitioners, too bitter to despair, and for the PC's to get out they have to literally climb over those who have come before. As the wall of people thrashes and kicks and tries to shake them off, and as Fraz's betrayal suddenly comes, the PC's need to climb this press of bodies. Tired. Stressed. Exhausted. Desperate, they climb up and up, over those who are pinned by the weight of the sinners above...It's horrific. But that's Carceri for you...This has the virtue of constantly emphasising the vastness of the planes, the magical, mystical torment of Agathys, and the nature of the vilest prisons in the multiverse. In order to succeed, others must fall beneath you. That is the betrayal of Carcerian deapths....</blockquote>

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