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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 5049654" data-attributes="member: 11697">WotC's handling of the Far Realms has IMO suffered from severe overexposure over the past several years (I adore Cordell's late 2e work, and find it seriously inspiring, but I swear he hasn't written about anything without tentacles for years now).That said, the material all too often seems to fail at being any different from the Abyss with slime and tentacles and Lovecraftian pastiche. You need to differentiate from what the Far Realms represents versus what the Abyss represents. The Abyss is the physical manifestation of Malignant Chaos. The Abyss is pointless carnage and destruction for its own sake. The Far Realms is none of that.Possibly influenced by some of Rip van Wormer's thoughts on the topic here, but I prefer to think of the Far Realms as another multiverse entirely. It has its own physical laws, its own set of organizing principles, and they're largely incomprehensible to our own. It isn't organized by Good and Evil, Law and Chaos, nor Elements and Energies. It organizes along different ideas, some or all of which people from the 'normal' multiverse (normal from our perspective) are entirely incomprehensible.And the reverse is true.Entities from the Far Realms view our multiverse as being just as abhorrent and unfathomable as we do theirs. Different, mutually exclusive realities, and when they mix, horrible things happen for all involved.One of Rip's ideas I liked, was that anytime we find a creature from the Far Realms within our own reality, too often they try to eat and kill not because that's their nature, but because they're in agony by exposure to our (in their view) horrific reality. They're confused, they're blind with physical pain, they're terrified but what they see and what it might be doing to them the longer they stay in our world.In canon material even there's a touch of that notion, with the entity Bolothamogg of the Far Realms (worshipped by Aboleths) focused on preventing interaction between the Great Wheel and the Far Realms, because of the damage possible to both realities when such interactions occur.And the Great Wheel and the Far Realms aren't the only mutually exclusive realities to have been mentioned in the material out there. The Keepers (2e and 3e versions anyway) were from another reality/multiverse of their own, trapped within the Great Wheel. And the ether gaps within the Deep Ethereal were strongly hinted at being doorways to similar such distinct realities (all of them being like self-contained bubbles of froth drifting on the surface of the Deep Ethereal). I think I'm responsible for either that froth imagery or perpetuating it in some stuff of mine in Dragon.</blockquote>

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