What is Xoriat?

[Blind_Prophet]

My players have gone and bungled into the Xoriat and I was wondering if I could get the gist of the play setting, I know the general idea but I want to make sure I follow the setting pretty well (mostly just so I have a guide since I'm fairly new to DMing) and could use some ideas of what to do with it so I figured I'd ask here.

Oh and feel free to share stories of Xoriat Games you've DMed or played I just need a general idea how it's run.

[vasharanpaladin]

Xoriat is madness. Everything that is, was, will be, isn't, wasn't and won't exists and doesn't exist simultaneously. Logic fails, insanity reigns, except when they don't, and the only constant is that you will not leave with your sanity completely intact.

Long and short of it? Think of the screwiest settings and characters you can think of and shove them into a blender with the trippiest drugs you can think of and genuine moon dust, add a few dollops of "WTF is this!?" and blend it til it swirls.

[Blind_Prophet]

Xoriat is madness. Everything that is, was, will be, isn't, wasn't and won't exists and doesn't exist simultaneously. Logic fails, insanity reigns, except when they don't, and the only constant is that you will not leave with your sanity completely intact.

Long and short of it? Think of the screwiest settings and characters you can think of and shove them into a blender with the trippiest drugs you can think of and genuine moon dust, add a few dollops of "WTF is this!?" and blend it til it swirls.

Any suggestions?

[vasharanpaladin]

...I'm rather fond of using it like the Warp, in fact. Players go in, come out centuries later or sometimes earlier than they entered. Formless, sanity-blasting abominations drift lazily in the void, their mere presence enough to render a man into hysterics.

One of the best tricks the Warp caused is having a ship destroy itself answering its own distress signal. Similar can be used for the PCs... a group of twisted monstrosities appear near a village, and are put down by the party... that same party wanders into the Xoriat and appears near a very familiar village...

The point of it all is, if you enter the Xoriat (or the Far Realm, they're interchangeable), your mind is forfeit. :smallamused:

[Mandrake]

Depends on your players, as always.

I had my own lost in something as homey as Shadowfell when compared to Xoriat, and even then I pushed them far. I made them roll skill dice to get out of a marsh but they ended up passing by the same damn tree three times, but only one of the players thought it was the same, while others were given information that it doesn't seem like that (not very original, I know, but quite effective), and that is only if your players get frustrated with the situation not with you.

So
a making them feel desperate, lost, ineffective, powerless, frustrated, angry, jumpy, overconfident or whatnot (not all at the same time) is a way to go
b give them different information, even openly, tell one they see a threat and tell the other they see help, they will be sure of nothing
c hide rolls, and yes, their rolls; nothing brings them down like such uncertainty; sometimes even better is to let them roll, have a table up front from where the next roll "starts" (e.g. 17 is 1), and then watch their eyes widen with anticipation of events to come
d crazy, yet unnecessary - make stuff up that make no sense, or worldly usage whatsoever; even more, make it important for NPCs, monsters and the like (if it somehow addresses the PCs, even better: "No, no, no this is all badoogle," said the Whimpy Count and started changing the knot on Ranger's bootlaces)
e crazy, yet disturbing - make the menace something chilling and gross, and something that would usually seem highly unmotivated or uncalled for (the baddies rip off finger nails from real-world children they kidnapped and later covered in snot and returned home, just to put those fingernails on their statues of a 100-tentacled monster, or then eat them, then slay half of them for a ritual, then the room turns upside down, then is 10 minutes before)

I ain't too good at this, perhaps, but I hope it helped. Ask away, if you got any. Cheers!

[supermonkeyjoe]

When my players ended up in Xoriat they started in a large hollow sphere made of dirt with an opening at the top, after noticing the flock of inside-out rabbits at the top they figured they could just walk up the "walls" of the sphere and onto the "roof". The mage cast detect magic on the dirt which detected that the dirt was Chaotic neutral, and a bit depressed.

When they emerged from the dirt-ball they were exposed to a massive chaos-scape, things were happening completely at random;

A huge ball of water careened across the landscape, destroying all in its path until it collided harmlessly with the forehead of one of the characters, the sun

A tiny spindle flew into a small hole by the characters and emerged 100 feet long somewhere else.

A chrome ball the size of a city collided with a much larger six-foot tall drill-head and shattered into a swarm of bats made of teeth which attacked the players as they floated upwards/downwards/sideways towards a rose made of brains which they found contained a mind-flayer whose armour detached and scuttled away once it was killed.

Game mechanics wise the PCs had to contend with no gravity and wild magic effects on all spells cast.

[The_Snark]

I've never much cared for the completely-random approach to Xoriat. It's the Realm of Madness, not Chaos or Wacky Randomness. (That would be Limbo, or Kythyri if you're in Eberron.) So yes, strangeness and trippy drug-induced scenes are appropriate, but it should feel like there's some logic governing the place, even if you don't know what it is. That's a tricky thing to convey, especially if you (the DM) don't quite know what the logic is either. (Coming up with good ineffable-horror logic is hard, arguably even impossible.) Some starting points:

Xoriat has rules and laws that govern its behavior;
These rules are fundamentally alien to the human psyche;
These rules are fundamentally hostile to the human psyche.

What this means is that Xoriat will try to break down your party's minds until they can understand it. See, those rules go both ways; your PCs are alien and hostile to Xoriat, too. Imagine that Xoriat is a living organism with a hostile immune response to foreign intruders - because in this scenario, your PCs are the hostile extraplanar invaders. You know how daelkyr and other natives of Xoriat tend to warp the world around them when they end up in Eberron, making it more like their home? Your PCs do that. Their attempts to comprehend and interact with the plane are harmful to Xoriat, in some fashion. They are hitting the plane and the plane will try to hit back. It attacks the mind and senses.

(I ascribe here a level of agency to the plane that it may or may not actually possess. Xoriat could be anything from an inanimate place to a semi-living thing to a malign sentience; use whichever you prefer.)

Anyway. Xoriat is hostile and frightening and bizarre, but the longer you survive there, the more it starts to make sense. You have to twist your mind in strange ways just to function, and eventually you get used to doing so. The world becomes less frightening and hostile; not normal, exactly, not unless you've been warped so far you can't even remember what being human was like, and at that point you're probably not a PC anymore. But it makes getting by in Xoriat a little easier.

That's the real risk. If you start feeling at ease there, you may find that—when you return to your home plane—it no longer feels quite normal either. You've gotten so used to thinking in Xoriat-logic that you can't stop: maybe you have trouble judging distance in only three dimensions now, or you have trouble recognizing people straight because your facial perception is keyed to things that don't exist in this world. Apophenia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia), seeing patterns and meaning where there aren't any. Phobias, delusions, recurring nightmares. Things like that. Psychological horror is the order of the day.

I'm afraid this is mostly inspiration rather than practical advice—I've never tried to portray anything like this from a DM's point of view. Hopefully some of it is helpful?

If you want to play up the "everything-works-differently-here" theme, you might change the way dice rolls work; come up with a table that replaces dice rolls, like so:

{table=head]Original roll|Replacement
1|12
2|20
3|3
4|19
5|16
6|15
7|6
8|13
9|5
10|17
11|7
12|18
13|14
14|9
15|4
16|2
17|10
18|8
19|1
20|11[/table]

This means that whenever someone rolls a d20, you replace their roll with the number indicated on the table; a 1 is in fact a 12, a natural 20 is an 11, an 11 is a 5, and so on. For maximum confusion, don't tell your players what's going on.

You can leave other dice as they are, or make up a table for each sort, or even use this table for all dice—though that will produce unusual results, and may affect game balance. (It's not normally possible to roll a 19 on damage for a dagger or magic missile, for instance.)
Or switch to the bell curve (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/bellCurveRolls.htm) system temporarily, if you want a less extreme change. It's a little gimmicky either way, but it might be fun.

[Blind_Prophet]

hey guys/gals thanks for all the ideas so far...the D20 roll replacement for example is devilish I love it :D

[supermonkeyjoe]

hey guys/gals thanks for all the ideas so far...the D20 roll replacement for example is devilish I love it :D

Just remembered the other thing I did, we usually play on a grid, Xoriat was played on hexes, that probably messed up the players more than anything :smallbiggrin:

[vasharanpaladin]

I've never much cared for the completely-random approach to Xoriat. It's the Realm of Madness, not Chaos or Wacky Randomness. (That would be Limbo, or Kythyri if you're in Eberron.) So yes, strangeness and trippy drug-induced scenes are appropriate, but it should feel like there's some logic governing the place, even if you don't know what it is. That's a tricky thing to convey, especially if you (the DM) don't quite know what the logic is either. (Coming up with good ineffable-horror logic is hard, arguably even impossible.)

Lack of logic or common sense is a form of madness, and in fact one that's commonly played for laughs in the media. And a completely-random approach gives the idea that someone other than the DM set the place up.

My logic, or lack thereof, is that Xoriat/the Far Realm represent Thought... and madness because it happens to be everyone's thoughts, all the time, with no rhyme, reason or consistency. It's a realm where anything conceivable is possible and the idea of inconceivable is the most terrifying thing in existence. It's a realm of which Limbo is but a pale shadow. :smallamused:

[Blind_Prophet]

hmmm using hexes sounds like fun...using the randomness it would also be fun to use random dungeon tiles and just slap em together...maybe even have the players randomly chose a few out of a bag

[Surrealistik]

It's basically DnD's answer to the WH40k Warp.

[Adoendithas]

This hasn't yet happened, but I'm planning it for later in the campaign. ROT13'd to prevent spoilers for my players.

(If you play in my group, don't read this!)

Gurve cbjref ner fjnccrq jvguva gur cnegl. Nf va, jura gur jvmneq hfrf uvf svsgu-yriry qnvyl, vg npgf nf gur jneybpx'f svsgu-yriry qnvyl vafgrnq, ba gur fnzr gnetrg be nern (ertneqyrff bs nal enatr qvssrerapr).

[Angel Bob]

Wow, these are some pretty amazing ideas. Problem is, now I feel like dumping my players into the Far Realm! XD

[Blind_Prophet]

Nothing Wrong with that :D

[KillianHawkeye]

Problem is, now I feel like dumping my players into the Far Realm! XD

Perhaps you should start with their characters before attempting to open any transdimensional gateways in real life? :smallwink::smallamused:

[Adoendithas]

Perhaps you should start with their characters before attempting to open any transdimensional gateways in real life? :smallwink::smallamused:

Characters tend to complain too much about railroading, though.

[Angel Bob]

Yeah, best not to railroad anyone. I'll just profane the secrets of magic and perform an obscene ritual calling to Mak Thuum Ngatha, thanks. :smallsmile: