Why do the Far Realms exist?

[glass]

I have an idea for a setting where arcane magic is shaped chaos and every time it is used, the planar walls weaken...

But I really need to decide which chaos plane to use before I start any real development.

You don't have to use either of them necesarily. If you are creating your own campaign with planar themed magic, you can make up you own cosmology (and possibly, should make up you own cosmology). Just pick the features you like from Limbo, the Far Realm, and any other plane that strikes your fancy and say that is what magic draws on.

If you are familiar with WFRP, that setting's 'The Warp' sounds like it'd be a good fit too, so that might be worth checking out (especially as it has a new edition just out).


glass.

 

[DMH]

I think I will have to do that (make up my own)- Limbo is not total chaos (otherwise it wouldn't have life or the ability to support it) and the Far Realms are not exactly what I am looking for.

Thanks all for the replies.

 

[Gez]

Why do the Far Realm exist?

Well, it doesn't. It doesn't exist. That's the problem. The whole problem.


Because it does anyway.

 

[wingsandsword]

The way I see it, Limbo is mathematical pure chaos, the part of the outer planes representing a total loss of Order. Imagine rolling dice for absolutely everything, everything is totally random, uncaring probability, the rules only exist if they coincidentally happen to, until they don't. A primal soup of chance and disorder and chaos. If you had godlike, remarkable intuition or truly advanced chaos mathematics you might be able to understand it.

The Far Realm is something beyond everything else, a place outside the normal cosmology, beyond the Outer Planes and unreachable by normal means. Normal Plane Shifts won't get you there, Miracles asking to go there will get almost any God to deny it, Wishes to go there are ripe for perversion, and only specially created rituals or very powerful spells appealing to unspeakable entities or rending the very fabric of the multiverse asunder could reach it. Even if you do reach it, you'll find that it's utterly, totally incomprehensible. Imagine a world made by the most stark raving mad person you could imagine, utterly and totally insane, and give that person total godlike power over that world, nothing he says or does, and no rule he makes is in any way intuitive or reasonable to anybody else, with strange and illogical features and unpredictable natures, but to him it makes complete sense. If you ever happen to figure out what's happening there, your mind has slid so far out of percieving our reality that to everyone else here you are also utterly insane.

 

[Dakkareth]

Imagine rolling dice for absolutely everything ...

"In Limbo you roll a die (d6) twenty-thousand times and by chance it turns up as a 1s every time ... because it's possible. In the Far Realm you roll the same dice and get the standard even spread between all numbers. Except for the one time, where the die turns up showing a seven."

Or so someone said; I don't remember who it was, though ...


Anyway, I see the Far Realm as that, which is truly outside of all. The Multiverse we know is a bubble in the ocean of the Outside, in which laws of nature exist and are fixed. The Bound Cosmos as Mostin would say. Outside anything is, was or will be. Outside no rules apply to anything unless you can force them to.