Sindeloke
2017-03-13, 06:09 AM
I've set up a cosmology for my homebrew setting that's far smaller than the standard Great Wheel set-up, with a fairly different feel IMO and a very different system of classification and power for outsiders. But of course a fair number of game mechanics depend on the assumption that you're using the default setting, from the devils and demons who empower warlocks to the transportation spells that move through the Astral and Ethereal planes. So I'd like to solicit the Playground's assistance in taking a pass over this set-up and looking for any problems (and coming up with any solutions) that stand out.
Easiest way to describe it all is probably to show you all the knowledge check charts I made for planar info, which are in three parts plus a bit of related lore for context.
DC 5:
The Material Plane, or Vasarod (Place of Mortals), is home, and Nyarod (Place of Nyaren) is the Mirror Plane, a beautiful but twisted twin of Vasarod where the nyaren live. It is a dangerous place if you're not a native, and invisible doorways between the realms are everywhere; an unlucky child could walk through a sunny clearing in a forest and be lost for days, decades, or even forever in that other world.
DC 10:
Vasarod is the tangible world around us, where chemistry, biology, physics and magic all follow reliable, consistent rules and living things sculpt order out of chaos. Nyarod is a sort of wild echo or reflection of Vasarod where those rules cannot be wholly trusted, a place where the landscape and even the living things are shaped by the dreams, fears and desires of mortals. The two realms are interwoven with each other like threads in a skien of cloth, and many nyaren and mortals cross over, sometimes quite intentionally, to live in each other's worlds for entire lifetimes.
DC 15:
A single person's mind can't affect even the weakest nya, or change the shape or color of the tiniest pebble in Nyarod. It is the collective beliefs of entire cultures that cause nyaren to take the shape they do, seeping through over decades and centuries; mountains in Nyarod are more sheer, darkness darker, forests greener and stars more beautiful because they are what mortals believe and remember and tell stories about, not what mortals see from day to day.
The nyaren are perhaps best understood as the physical embodiment of significant concepts, and they range in complexity from straightforward unthinking animate objects to sophisticated and intelligent mortal-seeming avatars. A fire nya, for example, could be little more than a wandering spark of flame, mindlessly consuming everything in its path. Or it could be Ever-Dancing Jak, lord of the City of Copper, a cunning and powerful ruler who pursues his own inscrutable agenda, who consumes as a mortal does by claiming land and wealth for his own, who can be fickle as a candle flame in offering the warmth of the hearth to travelers one moment and the rage of a bonfire the next, who is a patron of the smith at her forge and the cook at his fire but might punish the slightest misstep with a lasting burn.
And then there are the nyaren of more complex, mortal concepts. The more abstract a concept a nya is an avatar of, the more rare and the more sophisticated that nya will be, but they're out there. Not just dangerous concepts, like nyaren of greed, jealousy, deceit, and resentment, but genuinely evil nyaren who embody abuse, sadism, exploitation and hate. But then, too, there are nyaren of compassion, of generosity, of remorse. Of course, they can be deadly dangerous as well, in their own way; what might a creature of compassion that can't properly understand human suffering do to try to end it?
DC 10:
The Endless Dark and the Burning Light, the Umbral and Aether are opposite realms that sit just alongside our own, and one can step sideways into them with the right magic. From within these realms, you can still see our world, but it's transparent and clouded; in the Umbral, things in the Material or Mirror Plane look like washed-out smoke, fading into an endless black only a few dozen feet away, and in the Aether they're like hypersaturated glass that disappears into a brilliant, blinding white haze. One is the essence of death, cold and dark where long-term exposure begins to rot away at you with necrotic energies and magic struggles and stutters, and the other the essence of life, bright and hot where long term exposure burns with radiant fire and magic becomes powerful and difficult to control.
DC 15:
The Umbral and the Aether are like oil and water in suspension; opposites, filling the same space but forever separate. If you imagine our reality, its three dimensions and countless spinning worlds in space, as the flat surface of a sphere, the Umbral and Aether are the thing that fills it. If you leave the border, travel from the shallow edges to the deep center of that sphere, the Umbral becomes a lethal pitch-black morass where magic chokes and dies, and the Aether becomes a riot of deadly surging energy where weird creatures sustain themselves on the pure uncontrollable magic that suffuses the air.
DC 20:
Every part of the Material World, no matter how distant, how many centuries of light years apart, is the same distance from the center of the Umbral and Aether. If you could survive the trip and not get lost (requirements rather complicated by the impossibility of using magic in the Deep Aether or Umbral), either plane would allow you to cross impossible distances in mere days.
DC 14:
The Screaming Chaos, which is outside the cosmos itself, has no place in a rational and ordered universe. Where it lies, what its relation to the known realms, even what exactly it even is, is not understood and never can be; it is a world beyond sanity, home to monstrosities beyond reason, and to merely touch it is to become irrevocably insane. The only thing that can be definitively said of it is that the Things that live there hate us, passionately and implacably. And if they find a way through to our realms, if they survive the transition, they resolve themselves into grotesque horrors of impossible biology and immediately make every effort to corrupt and destroy the relative order and sanity of our world. Paths to the Screaming Chaos are to be obliterated and creatures that escape it are to be put down without mercy or hesitation. To make an exception to this rule is to declare yourself an enemy of all life.
DC 18:
Wizards are surprisingly willing to declare themselves enemies of all life. Over the years, many practitioners of magic have attempted to capture and study, ally with, or even breed for use the aberrations that can survive our world. A few strains of such creatures have become, over centuries of interference, relatively harmless, true-breeding, functionally native species, though even in the most mindless and impotent of these a deep loathing of order and a limited grasp on even animal sanity still remains.
DC 23:
Because the Screaming Chaos is a place of no logic and no natural laws, bringing a tendril of it into the material world can violate local laws as well. With a lot of practice and the right tools, a sufficiently amoral person can make use of this, opening tiny holes in the universe to bring through the irrational and the impossible and thereby mimic the greatest feats of magic.
Tl;dr, in mechanical terms, you've got the Umbral (necrotic damage, anti-magic) and Aether (radiant damage, wild magic) which combine aspects of the Ethereal, Positive/Negative Energy, and Astral planes; the Screaming Chaos, a Lovecraftian Far Realm that cannot be traveled, period, but provides a source of aberration enemies and, potentially, bizarre and dangerous power; and Nyarod/the Mirror World, as a holistic, Feywild-y Otherworld that contains fae, elementals and celestials/fiends (all of which are the same thing, in this universe).
So warlock patrons aren't a problem, any powerful nya could create a pact (mildly re-fluffing Fiend is probably enough to represent Jak, for example, though folks like the Queen of Roaches may need a new subclass). The setting is agnostic and death permanent, so the lack of divine homes/afterlives is a feature, not a bug. But I see some real problems with spells. If something interacts with the Ethereal Plane, should I use the Umbral? The Aether? Flip a coin every time? Astral projection doesn't particularly work but there isn't anywhere to go anyway, so should I just nix whole concept? Have I just allowed Banishment to work on aberrations, or is it fair to say that the Screaming Chaos is outside the cosmology entirely and therefore planar effects don't interact with it in the same way? And are there other spells or class features that I've forgotten that also need adjustment?
Easiest way to describe it all is probably to show you all the knowledge check charts I made for planar info, which are in three parts plus a bit of related lore for context.
DC 5:
The Material Plane, or Vasarod (Place of Mortals), is home, and Nyarod (Place of Nyaren) is the Mirror Plane, a beautiful but twisted twin of Vasarod where the nyaren live. It is a dangerous place if you're not a native, and invisible doorways between the realms are everywhere; an unlucky child could walk through a sunny clearing in a forest and be lost for days, decades, or even forever in that other world.
DC 10:
Vasarod is the tangible world around us, where chemistry, biology, physics and magic all follow reliable, consistent rules and living things sculpt order out of chaos. Nyarod is a sort of wild echo or reflection of Vasarod where those rules cannot be wholly trusted, a place where the landscape and even the living things are shaped by the dreams, fears and desires of mortals. The two realms are interwoven with each other like threads in a skien of cloth, and many nyaren and mortals cross over, sometimes quite intentionally, to live in each other's worlds for entire lifetimes.
DC 15:
A single person's mind can't affect even the weakest nya, or change the shape or color of the tiniest pebble in Nyarod. It is the collective beliefs of entire cultures that cause nyaren to take the shape they do, seeping through over decades and centuries; mountains in Nyarod are more sheer, darkness darker, forests greener and stars more beautiful because they are what mortals believe and remember and tell stories about, not what mortals see from day to day.
The nyaren are perhaps best understood as the physical embodiment of significant concepts, and they range in complexity from straightforward unthinking animate objects to sophisticated and intelligent mortal-seeming avatars. A fire nya, for example, could be little more than a wandering spark of flame, mindlessly consuming everything in its path. Or it could be Ever-Dancing Jak, lord of the City of Copper, a cunning and powerful ruler who pursues his own inscrutable agenda, who consumes as a mortal does by claiming land and wealth for his own, who can be fickle as a candle flame in offering the warmth of the hearth to travelers one moment and the rage of a bonfire the next, who is a patron of the smith at her forge and the cook at his fire but might punish the slightest misstep with a lasting burn.
And then there are the nyaren of more complex, mortal concepts. The more abstract a concept a nya is an avatar of, the more rare and the more sophisticated that nya will be, but they're out there. Not just dangerous concepts, like nyaren of greed, jealousy, deceit, and resentment, but genuinely evil nyaren who embody abuse, sadism, exploitation and hate. But then, too, there are nyaren of compassion, of generosity, of remorse. Of course, they can be deadly dangerous as well, in their own way; what might a creature of compassion that can't properly understand human suffering do to try to end it?
DC 10:
The Endless Dark and the Burning Light, the Umbral and Aether are opposite realms that sit just alongside our own, and one can step sideways into them with the right magic. From within these realms, you can still see our world, but it's transparent and clouded; in the Umbral, things in the Material or Mirror Plane look like washed-out smoke, fading into an endless black only a few dozen feet away, and in the Aether they're like hypersaturated glass that disappears into a brilliant, blinding white haze. One is the essence of death, cold and dark where long-term exposure begins to rot away at you with necrotic energies and magic struggles and stutters, and the other the essence of life, bright and hot where long term exposure burns with radiant fire and magic becomes powerful and difficult to control.
DC 15:
The Umbral and the Aether are like oil and water in suspension; opposites, filling the same space but forever separate. If you imagine our reality, its three dimensions and countless spinning worlds in space, as the flat surface of a sphere, the Umbral and Aether are the thing that fills it. If you leave the border, travel from the shallow edges to the deep center of that sphere, the Umbral becomes a lethal pitch-black morass where magic chokes and dies, and the Aether becomes a riot of deadly surging energy where weird creatures sustain themselves on the pure uncontrollable magic that suffuses the air.
DC 20:
Every part of the Material World, no matter how distant, how many centuries of light years apart, is the same distance from the center of the Umbral and Aether. If you could survive the trip and not get lost (requirements rather complicated by the impossibility of using magic in the Deep Aether or Umbral), either plane would allow you to cross impossible distances in mere days.
DC 14:
The Screaming Chaos, which is outside the cosmos itself, has no place in a rational and ordered universe. Where it lies, what its relation to the known realms, even what exactly it even is, is not understood and never can be; it is a world beyond sanity, home to monstrosities beyond reason, and to merely touch it is to become irrevocably insane. The only thing that can be definitively said of it is that the Things that live there hate us, passionately and implacably. And if they find a way through to our realms, if they survive the transition, they resolve themselves into grotesque horrors of impossible biology and immediately make every effort to corrupt and destroy the relative order and sanity of our world. Paths to the Screaming Chaos are to be obliterated and creatures that escape it are to be put down without mercy or hesitation. To make an exception to this rule is to declare yourself an enemy of all life.
DC 18:
Wizards are surprisingly willing to declare themselves enemies of all life. Over the years, many practitioners of magic have attempted to capture and study, ally with, or even breed for use the aberrations that can survive our world. A few strains of such creatures have become, over centuries of interference, relatively harmless, true-breeding, functionally native species, though even in the most mindless and impotent of these a deep loathing of order and a limited grasp on even animal sanity still remains.
DC 23:
Because the Screaming Chaos is a place of no logic and no natural laws, bringing a tendril of it into the material world can violate local laws as well. With a lot of practice and the right tools, a sufficiently amoral person can make use of this, opening tiny holes in the universe to bring through the irrational and the impossible and thereby mimic the greatest feats of magic.
Tl;dr, in mechanical terms, you've got the Umbral (necrotic damage, anti-magic) and Aether (radiant damage, wild magic) which combine aspects of the Ethereal, Positive/Negative Energy, and Astral planes; the Screaming Chaos, a Lovecraftian Far Realm that cannot be traveled, period, but provides a source of aberration enemies and, potentially, bizarre and dangerous power; and Nyarod/the Mirror World, as a holistic, Feywild-y Otherworld that contains fae, elementals and celestials/fiends (all of which are the same thing, in this universe).
So warlock patrons aren't a problem, any powerful nya could create a pact (mildly re-fluffing Fiend is probably enough to represent Jak, for example, though folks like the Queen of Roaches may need a new subclass). The setting is agnostic and death permanent, so the lack of divine homes/afterlives is a feature, not a bug. But I see some real problems with spells. If something interacts with the Ethereal Plane, should I use the Umbral? The Aether? Flip a coin every time? Astral projection doesn't particularly work but there isn't anywhere to go anyway, so should I just nix whole concept? Have I just allowed Banishment to work on aberrations, or is it fair to say that the Screaming Chaos is outside the cosmology entirely and therefore planar effects don't interact with it in the same way? And are there other spells or class features that I've forgotten that also need adjustment?