Why do the Far Realms exist?

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

<offtopic>Anyone buy that Cthulhu plushie?</offtopic>

I have the Cthulhu handpuppet on my TV, slippers where he devours your soul via the feet in one corner of the room, and Hawaiian Cthulhu here on my desk with me.

 

[Ahzad]

I have the Cthulhu handpuppet on my TV, slippers where he devours your soul via the feet in one corner of the room, and Hawaiian Cthulhu here on my desk with me.

I also have the handpuppet, the large plush, the mini plush, the slippers and the plastic action figure, as well as the old miniature by new name is Ironwind, used to be another name which escapes me.

 

[Magonus]

holy sh*t Ahzad and Ankh-Morpork Guard, you guys have cthulhu slippers? please, where did you get them? i must find them!

/is ridiculously excited by the existence of this object

 

[frankthedm]

Limbo is chaos sanitized and counterbalanced by a sane multiverse shaped by mortal beliefs.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

holy sh*t Ahzad and Ankh-Morpork Guard, you guys have cthulhu slippers? please, where did you get them? i must find them!

/is ridiculously excited by the existence of this object

My old FLGS up in the Atlanta area had them...couldn't pass them up. You can probably find them online if you look around enoguh.

 

[Arrgh! Mark!]

Not randomness.


Not up is down and down is up.

Not twisted versions of our reality.

Instead, something that the human mind was never intended to comprehend. If magic draws this realm closer, it can certainly explain why most sorcerers are crazy. Nothing in the Far Realm is understandable to a sane mind.

It's not even criminal insanity. It's just something that your mind shudders away from wanting to know.



Note that most lovecraftian protagonists don't go bonkers unless they are half way there already. Its the fact they don't try to escape their madness - instead, they are curious and revel in it.

 

[D-rock]

I treat Limbo as the realm of chaos, as in the opposite of Law and part of the forces that make up the multiverse and perhaps even hold it together.

The Far Realm is something that I consider to be on the very edge of reality, space, and time where the the laws of reality start to break down. It exist and dosn't at the same time, and its not really chaos as much as its starting to go outside the structure of existance.

 

[Psychotic Jim]

Other people have said it better, but I'll throw in my two gps. The Far Realm is something that exists outside of our perceived reality. It was based on H.P. Lovecraft's works describing (not in a real coherent, multiversal sense) a worldview where all of our laws of reality and distinctions are purely filters to protect us from what really might be out there. As such, I don't personally like labaling a place like the Far Realm with an alignment (like how Eberron labels its Far Realm Equivalent as evil) because that makes the Far Realm familiar, when all you can really say about the Far Realm is that it is unfamiliar. It is frightening because it exists outside of a normal D&D framework of "reality" and alignment. But then again, the Far Realm defies any means to use language to define it or categorize it right, even labeling it as unfamiliar...

 

[Kelleris]

As such, I don't personally like labelling a place like the Far Realm with an alignment (like how Eberron labels its Far Realm Equivalent as evil) because that makes the Far Realm familiar, when all you can really say about the Far Realm is that it is unfamiliar...

This is a good point. One of the more interesting treatments of the Far Realms is in Inner Circle's Legends of Avadnu. Their preview for it (here) presents some good-aligned, even lawful-good-aligned, Far Realm natives.

But they're still going to kill you and/or drive you insane. They just aren't right by mortal standards, or even the standards of this universe at all. Their actions are incomprehensible, even when taken for the greater good, because we just can't take up their viewpoint 95 percent of the time. I'd probably even go so far as to say that they haven't really got an alignment in the way that most creatures (including Limbo-based ones like Slaadi) have an alignment.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

I also have the handpuppet, the large plush, the mini plush, the slippers and the plastic action figure, as well as the old miniature by new name is Ironwind, used to be another name which escapes me.

Got the hawaiian shirt day Cthulhu, and the Cthulhu hand-puppet myself. Hoping to pick up the Santa Cthulhu one of these days.

Back on topic, to expand on what some others have said (notably Psion), I think that Limbo is essentially Chaos as understood by the (limited?) minds of gods and mortals, while the Far Realm represents concepts far removed from anything that is known and can be understood by them.