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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 8076398" data-attributes="member: 63">First, how dare you remind me that I forgot to name the planet?Second, the canon answer to 'what is on the other side' is uninteresting until the Ob fiddle with things in adventure 9. This can be explained by the timeline below. But after that, the PCs could go yeah. By that point, the portal links got scrambled, and the ziggurat in Crisillyir points somewhere else. As mentioned in adventure 10, the ziggurat in Risur's Antwalk Thicket starts to point to Jiese.(The scrambling wasn't part of the plan, but I think Thurston wanted to use salamanders in adventure 10, so we sort of B.S'ed an excuse for that ziggurat to be in Risur.)Ancient History1. A world gets created in a sort of planar nursery, and it's highly malleable with easy connection to other planes. Maybe a god creates it. Maybe it's spontaneously generated. I know the answer but I won't say in case I decide to change it. Over centuries different beings gradually stumble across it from other worlds, and eventually word makes its way to several powerful extraplanar entities that there is a lush world that is undefended. Three extraplanar  forces create portal from some of their interdimensional beachheads to vie for control of the planet (which really ought to have a name).2. The Ancient orcs have some big damn heroes who fight these beings. They collect a lot of gold trophies from the legions of Egal the Shimmering, who are sailing through Mavisha. They come to understand the flow of energy between worlds from the Gidim. There are also other nasties, like a bunch of demons coming through Nem, but they're not narratively that prominent.3. The orc druid Toteth devises a ritual to seal the world off from a specific plane (and another secret ritual). The big damn heroes go fight the forces at the portals of three different planes (Apet, Mavisha, and Nem). They perform the ritual, which blocks the portal (though technically it's still there), and then they get a bunch of stone age mofos to build ziggurats full of traps to protect the portals.3a. They also inexplicably build ziggurats around sealed portals to five other planes (Jiese, Avilona, Av, Urim, and Reida).4. The devils, demons, and gidim shrug, find other beachhead planes, and then from those planes they open new portals to this (frikkin' unnamed) planet. They laugh at the dumb orcs, whom they assume did not understand they could do this.5. Toteth performs his big secret ritual, which uses the power of those ziggurats and of a big multi-ringed ritual circle in the middle of orc territory, and links this world to the eight planes the orcs had previously sealed off. The specific planes the orcs had chosen provide some useful perks. Apet moves the whole system somewhere else, and Urim (combined with the tons of gold the orcs had collected) suppressed new portals in from outside the system, though short-term summoning still worked. Nem destroyed anyone who somehow managed to bypass the seal. Reida pre-ordained that the seal would open again in, um, let's say 2012 years, to ensure that the world wouldn't be locked in stagnation in case people changed their mind.There were unforeseen consequences, though. Mavisha (which makes islands mysterious) cracked the region around the ritual into an archipelago. Av created a whole pair of crazy parallel planes.(Avilona and Jiese were actually pretty mellow. There were civilizations there that the orcs were friendly with.)6. Amidst the immense disruption of their civilization caused by the whole continent cracking, the orcs decided it was safe to open up the sealed portals in the ziggurats. The rest of the multiverse was sealed off, but they had great aspirations of having a multiplanetary society.7. But the Gidim had figured out the orc's scheme. They had hidden an invasion force on Apet, and when the portal opened, they began to pour through that ziggurat, confident that they'd be able to secure the whole system before reconnecting to the homeworld. The orcs contacted Toteth, architect of the Axis Seal ritual, and he did a quick and dirty change to the ritual. Basically he intensified the power of Apet and Urim, and prevented portals between worlds even in the same system.This manifested by sort of creating a pocket plane on the other side of each of the sealed portals. So at the point of the AP, if you go to any ziggurat and open the portal, you only get a few hundred feet worth of that plane, rather than the whole place.8. Over time, the civilizations in Jiese and Avilona shifted and collapsed, and we never really get a glimpse of them.---All that said, if you want the PCs to be able to go to Jiese before adventure 9, maybe the seal is failing due to Ob tinkering, or as a consequence of what Sijhen did at the end of adventure 3. If so, here's a brief write-up of Jiese from the upcoming setting book. The context is that it's what is known about the planetary system 20 years after the Great Eclipse.Also, right now I'm just using The Waking, but there's still time for another name if you think of one. I briefly considered Jaamuran (Jiese, Avilona, Av, Mavisha, Urim, Reida, Apet, Nem), which is amusingly close to the name of a continent from Magic: the Gathering. But nah, nothing really has struck me.</blockquote>

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