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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2187400" data-attributes="member: 4937">You are partially off.  I deliberately presented the scenario in as ambiguous and as confusing of a way as possible.  I gave you as much information as the PC's get when the first go, 'Whoa.  What in Limbo is going on?"  Would it help if I told you that the Judge of the court was a Slaad, and that PC's needed to find a way to safely traverse the court in order to entire the domain of a Slaad lord?  By trying to figure out the perverse logic of the court, which does have a method to its madness however backwards, the PC's have plenty of oppurtunity to interact (and yes if they fail to fight).  And I could come back to that plain time and again and run adventurers for days on that sea of asteroid impacted junk before someone figured out that the entire landscape was made of discarded and forgotten dreams, if I so desired to do that.  The Plain of Forgotten Dreams is one of the most singularly lethal things I've ever imagined (and I've come up with some meat grinders before), and there are more than enough strange things wandering around looking for something they've lost to keep people occupied for a very long time.  I had more ideas for 'random' encounters than I ever could or would use.So yes, 'worthy' material exists.  But it's one of those things where I feel if you use the material, you destroy it.  Once it all starts to become comprehensible, and you start realizing that its really not all that fantastic at all, I think that the veil gets torn away and you find that its nothing more than a man behind a curtain pretending to know cosmic and mysterious magic.The closest maybe I can explain it with is by another analogy.  Back in the early seasons of the X Files, it was possible (if you didn't pay too much attention) to imagine that the truth was really out there.   That there really was some secret behind all the mystery and that eventually the secret would be revealed.  But, eventually everyone had to come to the realization that there was no fantastic secret.   That the writers didn't have a big secret.  They were just pretending that there was some big secret so that they could maintain a perptual aura of numinous mystery.   I think that by definition the planes are place of numinous mystery.  If I take the PC's there too often, the numinous of the place goes away no matter how good of a DM I am.For me, the X Files ruined themselves early on because I figured out the big secret - there was no secret.  Without that, I didn't see a point in watching.  For others, they could suspend thier disbelief and keep up with the increasingly silly and internally inconsistant fun.Or, maybe an even better analogy that I just thought of is 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.  Adams keeps dangling the secret of the question of 'The Life, The Universe, and Everything' in front of the reader like a carrot.  Now, at some intellectual level you know that Mr. Adams doesn't actually know the meaning of it all, but so along as he's clever and creative enough, you can half convince yourself that if you just keep reading eventually the big secret will be revealed to you and you'll know what 42 means.   But, of course you don't.In order to play the planes right, IMO, you've got to carefully keep that 42 hanging there and never ever let the players find out what the question is.Because you - the DM - just don't know.</blockquote>

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