Questions about travel between the planes

[Albions_Angel]

Hi all

So, I cant seem to find anything on permanent gates and passages between planes. I dont know if its there and I am not finding it, or if its just not there, but the DMG and the Planar Handbook dont seem to mention spots where you can push through. The closest I can get is severe breaches, with a 20% change to get through if they try (20% blind chance, or 100% with a knowledge planes check). Thats ALMOST what I want, but there is the stupid bleedthrough of planar traits thing that just gets in the way.

Basically, I am looking to create routes into my various Fey planes and demiplanes that can be found by accident. One minute you are walking in the forest, the next you are in the Feywilds. Am I just reading severe breaches wrong? Can I have them without the bleedthrough effect (by RAW)? Its doing my head in.

[Fizban]

Planar Handbook is rather terrible for planar info, Manual of the Planes is the main book but I'm pretty sure that effect should be on at least one of the DMG planes. What you're describing requires no mechanics, there are already some planes that function like that (you can sail through planes along the rivers Oceanus or Styx for example, get to the elemental planes by walking through Shadow) but you can add those sorts of planar boundaries wherever you want. You don't need RAW permission to do that as DM, unless for some reason you've absolutely sworn that nothing can ever happen unless it has specific RAW mechanics attached (which would be dumb).

So read over the Astral, Ethereal, and Shadow in the DMG, then make up whatever mechanics you want. Assuming you want this stuff to happen by accident, simply state that any time spent lost (see Getting Lost under Wilderness Terrain) counts as if you were actively searching for place.

[Ruethgar]

For the fey wilds in particular I'm pretty sure it just melds into natural areas. However if you want RAW, there could be portals dotted in random places. If you make them part of wondrous architecture they can even move and they don't have to be noticeable if you customize their design(such as the span between two trees, a cave entrance, just below the surface of a pool, behind a waterfall, woven between two bushes with dense foliage inbetween). They have to have been created unless you just hand wave it, but it is an option.

[Extra Anchovies]

Planar Handbook is rather terrible for planar info, Manual of the Planes is the main book but I'm pretty sure that effect should be on at least one of the DMG planes.

I wouldn't dismiss either of them offhand. Manual of the Planes is definitely the better of the two for information about the planes themselves, and the Planar Handbook has a definite focus on resources for characters who seek to travel the planes in some way or another. MotP and PlanHan could be described respectively as the GM's and players' guides to the planes, but there's good resources for anyone in both. As a pair they're some of my favorite 3.5 content.

As for OP's question... hm. The first thing that comes to mind for permanent links between planes is Create Portal (FRCS), but that doesn't cover naturally formed rifts.

That being said, I think breaches would work pretty well for this. The planar trait bleedthrough might not have readily visible effects; perhaps the only physical sign of its presence is the growth of certain forms of plant life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_ring). I also think the lack of a point-specific portal is thematically fitting for a faerie plane. Maybe to cross the breach, characters need to close their eyes and try to take a (literal) step into the fey-wild.

If you want your game to spend some time in the feywild, you'll probably want to decide on some custom planar traits, because the Manual of the Planes gives the plane of Faerie (the Feywild in all but name, really) some pretty hefty stuff: enhanced magic (arcane spells empowered, extended, maximized) and flowing time (one day on Faerie is one week on the PMP, plus returning to a normal-time plane ages you for the time you "missed").

If you want to expand the Feywild cosmology a bit, perhaps the plane of shadow could be home to the Unseelie fey (who may have moved there after splitting from the Seelie Court); there's already at least some fey connected to the plane (like the Shadar-kai), and expanding on that while thematically linking the Feywild and plane of Shadow could be pretty interesting.

Tangent: a way to potentially avoid Faerie's instant-aging effect is to leave Faerie by way of a different abnormal-time plane (e.g. Astral), because it only hits "Non-natives who spend time on the Plane of Faerie and then return to a plane with the normal time trait". The text isn't exactly clear on the matter, but it seems that making a stop somewhere temporally-weird but in a friendlier way can avoid the starvation, death, or overdue library books that spending time on Faerie can otherwise lead to.

[BowStreetRunner]

One minute you are walking in the forest, the next you are in the Feywilds.

I do recommend against just dumping your PCs in another planar region with no warning whatsoever. Even if you make the warnings very subtle, it's worth giving them a chance to decide whether they actually want to go investigate something out of the ordinary or pull back. In one game I ran there was an order of rangers whose responsibilities included maintaining a set of warning markers near such locations - something like totem poles but with the different 'totems' actually representing the types of fey that were present. There were occasionally crossover points that lacked the markers - either the rangers were not aware of the location or something had happened to the markers - and sometimes the PCs missed the markers with low spot checks. But it was very rare that they just accidentally wound up on another plane.

[Albions_Angel]

Ok, thanks all. Thought I would clear some stuff up.

First up, thanks for the MoP ref. I havnt heard of it before. Its 3.0 right? Is there much to convert? Was it ever updated?

So, my Feywild. Its not the classic Feywild. Its a custom plane, the plane on which my gods reside, really a collection of overlapping planes and demiplanes. Some areas (usually the demiplanes) have fixed entrances. These are the summer court, the winter palace, the field of judgement, and the homes of the 9 gods, as well as a few other choice places.

The other places are things like sacred trees, fairy mounds, etc. The idea being that if you KNOW how to use them (lets say, walk around this set of trees in exactly the right way, indicated by a Knowledge Planes check) you can get through every time. But there is a chance for you to accidentally do the right thing to get there.

Now I never expect my party to be in a situation where I would force that on them. More likely, someone goes missing in the woods and is suspected of getting lost in the faerie plane. THe party is sent to investigate. Now maybe only one of them has Know Planes and so plans to get them all there himself, but perhaps they also stumble into it earlier than they thought. I dont like intentionally splitting the party in open world settings like that (in a dungeon, sure thing), nor do I like forcing things on them, but having them enter when they wernt expecting it could lead to some fun adventures.

For those that have read the Iron Druid chronicles, my Feywild is Tir na nOg. And most of my touchstone sites will be permanent entry places if you know what to do.

As for the plane itself, like I said, its a series of interconnecting planes. You can walk from one to the other easily from the Fey side, not so much from the Material side. The vast, open areas of Tir na nOg will have time surges (because those are fun!) and either enhanced or wild magic (I want wild, but wild kinda sucks in 3.5), while some of the more important places have near normal characteristics. This means entering and exiting through a known place either has no consequence or a known consequence (so the healing springs of Mag Mel are fast time. One week there is one day in the real world. The Summer Palace is the opposite). But entering though the open areas can do some nasty things.

[BowStreetRunner]

First up, thanks for the MoP ref. I havnt heard of it before. Its 3.0 right? Is there much to convert? Was it ever updated?

There is an official Manual of the Planes update (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/20030718a).

[Necroticplague]

Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting has rules for portals, which can work both within a plane, and across them. They're explicitly invisible, though the observant can notice the frame that makes up the portal. If you want them to only be able to travel through under certain conditions, you can use Keyed Portals to achieve that effect.

[Calthropstu]

I remember there being access points to all of the planes on the Astral Plane, and somewhere there was a giant gate hub.

Ravenloft adventures have the specific effect you are looking for, but leaving is... problematic.
As for accidentally walking into another plane, "a wizard did it" is literally the thing.

A wizard cast gate to get to plane xxxx and left it up for a while so he could get back, not thinking anyone would come by. Cuz it's in the middle of nowhere.

[Albions_Angel]

In that case, a question about Coexistant planes. The Material plane is coexistant with the Ethereal, Shadow and Astral planes, correct? And the Astral is coexistant with all other planes. Now the example of coexistant is that of the material and the ethereal. Force can pass from the material to the ethereal, while beings and forces can pass back the other way. No gate needed.

Now the Astral seems to hold counter to that. You cant just pop across there. You have to actively break through with something like gate or banish or prismatic spray. Is the Ethereal just special?

And then you have the outer planes, which are NOT coexistant with the material plane. But its no harder to get there than the astral. Is that because the astral acts like a planar satellite between two isolated radio towers? When you cast gate to an outer plane, really you are casting it to the astral plane, where some cosmic operator connects you to the area code you require?

The more I read how the planes work, the less I understand, not because they are difficult concepts (they arnt) but because they dont seem very self consistent. Its almost like Shadow and Ethereal need another category, like Parasitic, rather than Separate, Coexistant or Coterminous (which i at least understand).

As to my problem, keyed portals seem the right way to go for the permanent places, and modified severe breaches for the transient places.

[Bullet06320]

Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting has rules for portals, which can work both within a plane, and across them. They're explicitly invisible, though the observant can notice the frame that makes up the portal. If you want them to only be able to travel through under certain conditions, you can use Keyed Portals to achieve that effect.

http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/archfr/pg

here's a lot portals and stuff to go with them

FR has a lot of portals to lots of places