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Milo v3
2015-01-19, 10:28 PM
I'm currently making a setting where there is no moral/ethical alignment and instead;
The only planes are the inner and coexistent planes.

People are aligned to one element (or paraelement) and one energy.
The only outsiders are ethereal outsiders and elemental plane outsiders, which are all flavoured as spirits of various things (A bear spirit might be an earth elemental, the spirit of a famous blacksmith might be a salamander, and a spirit of beauty might be an ice elemental).
Planar travel can happen through physical travel, in the style of Greek mythology, though mechanics-wise they are locations enchanted with planeshift.


But... I'm not sure what to do with the elemental planes themselves. Since they are the homes of spirits in this setting they should be alien, but I'm not sure how do show alien in an elemental setting. Previous interpretations of the inner planes that I've seen were just Earth is all caves, Fire is like normal but everything is on fire all the time and we have lava instead of water, water is just an ocean. They don't give off a very spiritual vibe.

So, any idea how they could be handled to give off the correct feel?

Grinner
2015-01-19, 10:47 PM
I guess the most basic thing to do would be to define "spiritual". What precisely are you aiming for when you use that term? Philosophical significance? A neat cosmological explanation?

It may also be prudent to bring up Exalted's cosmology. There's the four elemental poles, one at each end of the world, which bind Creation together. That's always been a pretty cool idea.

Honest Tiefling
2015-01-20, 01:38 AM
I'd probably go the lazy route myself. Instead of trying to make the planes coordinate to a neat, orderly system, I'd just say that powerful spirits warp the plane to their liking. If there was a powerful ice spirit obsessed with beauty and song, then more and more ice spirits appear with those traits or powers relating to them, even on the material. Those people born of a certain element/energy? Yeah, they fall under the influence as well. Which might mean that their connection is weakened if the spirit they are connected to gets offed or becomes less powerful.

Milo v3
2015-01-20, 01:38 AM
I guess the most basic thing to do would be to define "spiritual". What precisely are you aiming for when you use that term? Philosophical significance? A neat cosmological explanation?
Alien but not eldritch, with a more mystical natural feel... I'm pretty sure I'm not describing this very accurately.


It may also be prudent to bring up Exalted's cosmology. There's the four elemental poles, one at each end of the world, which bind Creation together. That's always been a pretty cool idea.
I am choosing to not use the elemental poles idea because it appears Exalted did it so well.

EDIT:

I'd probably go the lazy route myself. Instead of trying to make the planes coordinate to a neat, orderly system, I'd just say that powerful spirits warp the plane to their liking. If there was a powerful ice spirit obsessed with beauty and song, then more and more ice spirits appear with those traits or powers relating to them, even on the material. Those people born of a certain element/energy? Yeah, they fall under the influence as well. Which might mean that their connection is weakened if the spirit they are connected to gets offed or becomes less powerful.

That sounds even more complicated than having multiple planes.

aspekt
2015-01-20, 02:56 AM
This sounds neat.

When I am trying to break a creative wall down I often just start off with silly associations. At times this will get me past my preconceptopns or prejudices enough to start making actually interesting connections.

Red Fel
2015-01-20, 10:14 AM
So, any idea how they could be handled to give off the correct feel?

Here's one. The elemental planes don't just represent the physical element. They represent the Platonic ideal of the element.

Are you familiar with the theory of forms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms)? The short version of the concept is that all things we see are merely physical manifestations, lowercase-f forms, mere expressions of an absolute ideal capital-F Form, the concept that embodies the true essence of a thing.

For example, you see many horses; each of these is a lowercase-f form of a horse. Yet all of them are but pale reflections of the capital-f Form of the Horse, the true concept that cannot be expressed physically; a concept embodying a quadruped, yes, but also grace, beauty and agility; loyalty and service; speed and stamina; the wind at your back and the invigorating freedom of flying across the plane at a gallop; all things that are intrinsic to the nature of the Horse. That's the Platonic ideal.

So, back to your concept. The elemental planes are the homes of the Platonic ideal; the place where the Form of an element is given physical form.

For example, what is Fire? It's not just a red thing that eats wood. It is destruction, consumption, greed and neverending fury; it is also light, warmth, nourishment; it is the sun writ small, and ravenous hunger writ large. It is all of these things and more, concepts we can't touch or perceive. In the elemental plane of fire, then, we would live those experiences. Experience them physically.

What is Cold? Cold is stillness, it is death, it is a barren waste; it is tranquility and peace; it is beautiful, serene, and still. Coldness is an absence; no light, no heat, no rage, no noise. It is a void, but one that can be felt tangibly. An elemental plane associated with Cold or Ice would be like that - not merely a glacier, but a physical, palpable sensation of being dead-but-undying. Preserved in a state of near-death.

Get the idea?

Joe the Rat
2015-01-20, 10:43 AM
Short version: Make the spirit / aspects of the plains more central than the material aspects, and make the material aspects weird.


From what I'm getting, the core of this is you want to have elemental planes that are more than just "That element in all directions." I get that being boring. Particularly for earth, because is can be all cool and alien, but you can't see it because there's rock in every direction blocking your view.

Since you're already drawing aspects and traits tied to the elements, those should be the kinds of things you build up. If you have a lot of animal spirits tied to an element, the plane should look like the sort of place to find them. If your bear is (primarily) and earth elemental, then there should be parts of the plane of earth that look something like mountain forest. If a lot of the craft and industry aspects are Fire related, there should be a City of Brass type locale where things are made. This also means you will have to have some of the other elements present in each plane, but the ratio will have a lot to do with what is adjacent vs. opposite.

General thoughts on emphasizing the spiritual: Be fuzzy. colors are off, light is slightly hazy, forms are not quite entirely stable. Maybe that means your spirits are slightly cloudlike. Maybe they're continuously changing in a way that evokes the element. Make things seem natural, yet dreamlike.

Earth is big, and heavy, and not about open spaces. Hence caverns. But you want forests, which is fine, because then the trees fill in much of the space, block line of sight, and create an obscuring canopy. Earth also suggests gravity - so every surface should have its own pull. Doing something with a hollow world feel - where it seems like the entire plain is on the inside of a sphere, or a series of incomplete concentric spheres - could add some interesting geometries.

You could contrast this with air, which is all about open space and movement. We typically have chunks of rock hanging around to provide a place to build things. No planar gravity is easy, but how about rather that the plain makes things want to float away from each other? Instead of just uprooted mountains, you've got chunks of land that just kind of lift off, cloudlike, and trees with roots that strain to hold them to the soil. The whole thing should look like a Yes album cover. Every container has a lid, to keep the contents from drifting away, or you store everything on the ceiling once the pots decide to float themselves.

Fire is hot and dry. So water should be scarce, suggesting a desert-like environment. Emphasize hot with a white-hot sky dominated by multiple suns with visibly fiery coronas. Each of which is essentially a worldlet with its own fire creatures. Use the idea of mirages to have space itself warp around, making long-distance travel unpredictable. Maybe there's a lot of war here as well. Maybe that's what the suns are for (shades of Acheron).

Water... ends up being water everywhere, or there's a surface to evoke the idea of seas. Play with this. Maybe the surface is interchangable - if you flip over in just the right way, the water is now on the other side - an entire second sea sharing a membrane. Or you have the vault of the sky be another ocean, with islands and ships and krakens visible. Maybe the oversea is a Mirror reality, and you can meet your Evil Self With A Goatee if you get close enough. You should also have Ice. Icebergs and Shelves and Towering columns that water continuously cascades up from both sides before it sprays out into a middle layer of clouds that provide the place with weather. Or flying icebergs, and rivers of water that just rise up and flow off somewhere. Mangrove forests that are just sort of there - like a coastal swamp that forgot to include a coast. Water-as-life suggests the place is full of creatures, or the plane has healing properties. Water as purification flows from this as well.

Hope that gives you some ideas to start from.

Milo v3
2015-01-20, 07:37 PM
Here's one. The elemental planes don't just represent the physical element. They represent the Platonic ideal of the element.

Get the idea?
Yeah, I think so. I'll try and think up some more intangible associations for each realm.


Short version: Make the spirit / aspects of the plains more central than the material aspects, and make the material aspects weird.

Good ideas.

aspekt
2015-01-21, 12:21 AM
As a kid first hearing of the planes in DnD I never imagined that the elemental planes were spaces of terrain you could walk across.

But rather, in the case of fire, a seething cauldron of firey expression and activity. Instead of the Fire Mountains or the Burning Sea, or burnt forests and lava lakes, the child I was saw a universe of light, heat, and yes, flame. But it was a space adventurers had to float or swim through. A space where creatures of fire could assume any and all shapes they desired to move through their home.

And it was a space that would abound with the element's primal creativity. Beings moving in and out of visible existence. Choruses would dance and vibrate with harmonic elemental songs. Primal creatures would build upon and with each other in constant living sculptures.

Admittedly at the ripe old age of 10 or so I didn't have the language to express it like I have here. But that's how I saw it.

Milo v3
2015-01-23, 07:01 AM
As a kid first hearing of the planes in DnD I never imagined that the elemental planes were spaces of terrain you could walk across.

But rather, in the case of fire, a seething cauldron of firey expression and activity. Instead of the Fire Mountains or the Burning Sea, or burnt forests and lava lakes, the child I was saw a universe of light, heat, and yes, flame. But it was a space adventurers had to float or swim through. A space where creatures of fire could assume any and all shapes they desired to move through their home.

And it was a space that would abound with the element's primal creativity. Beings moving in and out of visible existence. Choruses would dance and vibrate with harmonic elemental songs. Primal creatures would build upon and with each other in constant living sculptures.

Admittedly at the ripe old age of 10 or so I didn't have the language to express it like I have here. But that's how I saw it.
That sounds very abstract, a swimming through an energetic maelstrom of dripping flame and swirling light would be an interesting experience.

Zale
2015-01-24, 01:39 AM
You could imagine an ecology based on the elemental plane.

All you have to do is assume that they are not perfectly even in how elemental essence is distributed. We tend to just envision, say, the elemental plane of fire as being all fire, with every part being as fiery as every other part.

Let's say instead there's an uneven distribution, and that the elemental planes are not entirely self-contained- they sometimes touch or leak into each other. Giving all planes subjective gravity can also go a long way to making them more alien.

Imagine the Plane of Elemental Fire.

Within it, the purest and most vital expression of Fire in the entire cosmos. There are huge infernos, conflagrations that dwarf the entire material plane there- places of such heat that even fire can't survive, where nothing but raw motion and creation and death exist. Fire is a thing that can create and destroy, after all- it can make red rocks into swords, or turn people into piles of ash.

So the heart of fire is a place where everything is dying and being reborn constantly. In these huge hearts, fire elementals are born in nigh-infinite numbers all the time- but few survive for even a moment, being devoured and destroyed by what gave them life.

The lucky few who survive only do so by fleeing from the great infernal hearts of Fire into something more impure, more survivable.

The world outside of those deadly cradles is a strange place, with a sky made of rolling fire, where seas and rivers of lava twirl their way through the air.

Imagine a place in this inferno touched by the lightest caress of Earth. It is a huge desert that stretches for continents. The terrain rarely conforms to the expectations of the material, looping upwards into apparent sky and plunging downward. Direction is relative.

This desert has not a trace of sand, being made by the constant rain of ash that falls from the sky. The occasional spike or boulder of glassy, steaming obsidian juts out of the white ash ground. The sky above seems nightmarish to mortals, being made of whirling winds of fire, with dancing red lightning and huge clouds of ash. Beyond that there is a vast light so bright that it's impossible to even look at. It burns with colorless heat, feeding the howling winds above. Near the ground, gasps of air send up small clouds of ash. There's scarcely anything a human could breath without dying, if they could survive the oppressive heat that threatens to melt stone.

Occasionally, the ground breaks open and pillars of multicolored flame shoot into the sky. These cracks survive for a time before being buried by ash. Fire rains down in haphazard globs, sometimes scattering across a mound of obsidian, other times leaving craters in the ground itself that slowly fill with ash. Sometimes the fire doesn't simply fall, but begins to move and flow across the ground- newborn fire elementals enjoying their new life.

Naturally, they begin by hunting their smaller fellows, for it is fire's nature to consume. Older elementals sometimes roll across the landscape like lakes of flame, dancing in every color and hue. Some devour the young elementals scattering across the ground. Others ignore them.

Far in the sky, another environment roils along. Huge thunderheads spill across the sky, warping around the fiery winds as multicolored lightning arcs through them. Despite their appearance, they hold not a trace of water- only dust and ash and smoke. Despite their heat, they provide some respite for the fiery inhabitants of this realm. The occasional lightning bolt is far kinder than the chance of being sucked into a more deadly furnace.

Within the cloud fire elementals click and chatter, hunting and socializing with care. They form cliques and tribes and break them just as easily, their incessant thrum only calmed when an elder of their kind rolls or snakes by. They are always watchful, as no place in the elemental plane of fire can be called constant- in time even this place will be devoured and reborn as something new.

There are seas of liquid silver with beaches of black diamond, places where fire grows with all the colors and shapes of flowers, caves that constantly melt and reform.

Everything is made from the essence of fire, but some is touched by earth or air.

Fire is the element of creation and destruction, of hunger and drive, and of energy and transformation. Everything I wrote was made with that in mind.

The other planes would be different not only because of their composition, but also because of their themes.

Food for thought I guess? If nothing else, it could be cannibalized for something amusing.

Milo v3
2015-01-24, 01:48 AM
Zale... Is the Location listed next to your avatar referring to plane of fire?! 'Cause that sounded like a very "poetic" (idk the exact word thingie) type of environment for fire.