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Whats so special about the Far Realm?
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<blockquote data-quote="Hactarcomp" data-source="post: 5632496" data-attributes="member: 6680000"><p>So I actually just registered my account to comment in this thread. </p><p></p><p>My view of contact between the Far Realm and the everyday world is that it is similar to the Torque in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. One of the characters is showing pictures of torque damage to another- they look at a picture of a think that was once a goat, but had a carapace and even after being dead, the horns in its stomach attacked the biologist dissecting it. When the team that had taken the pictures returns from the torque damaged area, one of the men has barbed tentacles where his eyes should have been and pieces of the scientist have just started disappearing. No blood, no mess, not fuss, just a hole through her the next day, a chunk of her arm the day after.</p><p></p><p>It is mutations gone mad. The aberrations are not from the Far Realm, as the Far Realm is too alien. Instead, they are what has survived contact with the Far Realm, the shape that normal, everyday things have been twisted into. The gibbering beast is the easiest example of this, but I apply it to aboleths as well. </p><p></p><p>Mieville also gives a decent view of a alien viewpoint that is just slightly incomprehensible to humans- the Weaver. It views everything simply in terms of aesthetics. Beauty is truth is goodness. Of course, what is beautiful changes depending on your point of view. Wars could be fought over whether to plant one type or another flower in a garden, while the decision to remove the left pinky finger from every other person in a room could be made in an eyeblink if it improved the aesthetics of the situation. Beauty is subjective, and what would beauty look like to an Aboleth?</p><p></p><p>(TVTropes has a page on this: Blue and Orange Morality. Warning, it is TVTropes, don't go in unless you have time to kill.)</p><p></p><p>I'm currently running a 4e game and assuming that I can get my players to stick with me until the paragon tier, I plan on throwing them into some Far Realm influenced dungeons. Non-Euclidean spaces, where the rooms appear normal, but when they walk along the corridors, it takes five 90 degree turns for them to come back to the same room. A dungeon on a mobius strip (this one I am definitely going to do, with the rooms reversed but filled with new monsters but also the corpses they left behind when they complete their loop). Gravity changing as they enter a room. Aberrations don't just have to happen to organic creatures, they can happen to inorganic stuff as well. A room in which the only non-slick surface is the ice, where the only surface that doesn't suck the PCs slowly in is the rock-solid surface of the pool of water that still ripples with the movement of the fish within it.</p><p></p><p>I'm not sure how I see psionics, as none of my players currently has a character playing one, but perhaps they could be seen as the ripples coming out of these unexpected reality excursions caused by the Far Realm.</p><p></p><p>I see the Far Realm as an opportunity to truly mess with the laws of reality within the system. Stuff that could be achieved through magic, sure, but that would not occur to any normal magic user and even would be considered an odd idea from the insane ones. Cosmologically, I view it as another universe with natural laws and morality completely alien to ours.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Hactarcomp, post: 5632496, member: 6680000"] So I actually just registered my account to comment in this thread. My view of contact between the Far Realm and the everyday world is that it is similar to the Torque in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. One of the characters is showing pictures of torque damage to another- they look at a picture of a think that was once a goat, but had a carapace and even after being dead, the horns in its stomach attacked the biologist dissecting it. When the team that had taken the pictures returns from the torque damaged area, one of the men has barbed tentacles where his eyes should have been and pieces of the scientist have just started disappearing. No blood, no mess, not fuss, just a hole through her the next day, a chunk of her arm the day after. It is mutations gone mad. The aberrations are not from the Far Realm, as the Far Realm is too alien. Instead, they are what has survived contact with the Far Realm, the shape that normal, everyday things have been twisted into. The gibbering beast is the easiest example of this, but I apply it to aboleths as well. Mieville also gives a decent view of a alien viewpoint that is just slightly incomprehensible to humans- the Weaver. It views everything simply in terms of aesthetics. Beauty is truth is goodness. Of course, what is beautiful changes depending on your point of view. Wars could be fought over whether to plant one type or another flower in a garden, while the decision to remove the left pinky finger from every other person in a room could be made in an eyeblink if it improved the aesthetics of the situation. Beauty is subjective, and what would beauty look like to an Aboleth? (TVTropes has a page on this: Blue and Orange Morality. Warning, it is TVTropes, don't go in unless you have time to kill.) I'm currently running a 4e game and assuming that I can get my players to stick with me until the paragon tier, I plan on throwing them into some Far Realm influenced dungeons. Non-Euclidean spaces, where the rooms appear normal, but when they walk along the corridors, it takes five 90 degree turns for them to come back to the same room. A dungeon on a mobius strip (this one I am definitely going to do, with the rooms reversed but filled with new monsters but also the corpses they left behind when they complete their loop). Gravity changing as they enter a room. Aberrations don't just have to happen to organic creatures, they can happen to inorganic stuff as well. A room in which the only non-slick surface is the ice, where the only surface that doesn't suck the PCs slowly in is the rock-solid surface of the pool of water that still ripples with the movement of the fish within it. I'm not sure how I see psionics, as none of my players currently has a character playing one, but perhaps they could be seen as the ripples coming out of these unexpected reality excursions caused by the Far Realm. I see the Far Realm as an opportunity to truly mess with the laws of reality within the system. Stuff that could be achieved through magic, sure, but that would not occur to any normal magic user and even would be considered an odd idea from the insane ones. Cosmologically, I view it as another universe with natural laws and morality completely alien to ours. [/QUOTE]
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