I need help with a planar crossover setting

[Stonker]

I have an idea for an offshoot of a shared setting with 2 other GMs in my group. At the moment its a bit of a mess and doesn't quite hang together and I'd really appreciate some input on what would work. (As it's shared I can't just do whatever I want, it has to follow canon.)

A lost human empire was taken over by the yuan ti and managed to destroy itself in a series of cataclysms. They were tinkering with magical technology that could tap into the elemental planes. One city is now just a plateau, sheered flat by an effect similar to a colossal sphere of annhiliation.

What I'm proposing is a region where they also managed to hit the negative plane but rather than the same thing happening here it ripped through all the physical planes and meshed them together. Creating a patchwork region that is part prime, part elemental, part feywild and part shadowfell. In addition the positive and negative planes have also leaked into this area, to the extent there could be a major rift to one or both.

It's the presence of the rift/rifts that's causing me the biggest issues. I'm not sure how big a deal to make of it/them.

At one end of the scale theyre just portals. Mages tap into these planes all the time, like when they make a Sphere of Annihilation. There might even be a number of rifts in this area.

At the other end of the scale the negative rift is potentially a multi planar black hole that could suck in everything – prime, the feywild, the shadowfell and all levels of the elemental planes. Potentially the positive rift could be its opposite, a magical white hole that's just as dangerous.

The initial big trip hazard in my reasoning is, just how big a threat could the rift be? Could a multi planar black hole actually exist and how much could it actually destroy? Just prime or the elemental planes too? Is Sigil under threat? Are the gods? What would they or could they do about it if they were? (When we talk about prime we are only really talking about one planet as D&D tends not to factor in outer space - though I could be wrong about that).

Even if they weren't directly at risk the gods wouldn't want prime destroyed, that's where their worshippers are. Without believers they would literally cease to exist (wouldnt they??). Even the really evil chaotic gods might not want this (I guess some might ofc).

As for Sigil, could it survive this? Would the Lady take action? Probably not directly but wheels would go into motion somehow.

Perhaps the gods/the Lady (if able to) would try and contain this and make it a pocket realm. For numerous reasons doing this as a pocket realm makes a lot of sense. If only as I'm not sure where to place this area physically in relation to the other GMs campaigns.

Then there's other factors to consider, like the yuan ti & their gods (who are all about total destruction). There's also the far realm who might be the puppet masters of the yuan ti gods and maybe see the rift as a way in. The human empire once worshipped more benevolent gods before the yuan ti took over, perhaps those gods have some influence in everything.

It doesnt change what is an oddball region where I can go wild with wacky ideas, necrotic fey, 'positive' undead, weird crossover creatures, jinn and their elemental/genasi minions from the quasi planes, maybe even ones from the void. So perhaps there's enough there without making a big deal about the rifts. Perhaps this area is a pocket realm simply because you cant fit an 80 mile area of each plane in the same 80 mile space without something having to give.

But the rift/s present such a good potential big bad thing that must be stopped at the heart of all the crazy. Even if it isn't a full blown black hole at present certain factions (like the void jinn or yuan ti gods) might be working to that end. I feel it needs to be represented somehow.

So, any thoughts?

[Tiadoppler]

I have an idea for an offshoot of a shared setting with 2 other GMs in my group. At the moment its a bit of a mess and doesn't quite hang together and I'd really appreciate some input on what would work. (As it's shared I can't just do whatever I want, it has to follow canon.)

By "canon" do you mean the rules of your shared setting, or overarching D&D canon?




What I'm proposing is a region where they also managed to hit the negative plane but rather than the same thing happening here it ripped through all the physical planes and meshed them together. Creating a patchwork region that is part prime, part elemental, part feywild and part shadowfell. In addition the positive and negative planes have also leaked into this area, to the extent there could be a major rift to one or both.

Sounds like fun! I like wild/chaotic magic locales. Make some weird templates for common creatures that the PCs encounter. This does sound like it'd be a pocket realm or section of reality that's larger on the inside. A 10 mile diameter sphere that warps light like a giant glass marble - as you get closer, you can keep walking a hundred miles and be only halfway through. Bend space-time for fun and profit!




Perhaps the gods/the Lady (if able to) would try and contain this and make it a pocket realm. For numerous reasons doing this as a pocket realm makes a lot of sense. If only as I'm not sure where to place this area physically in relation to the other GMs campaigns.

Having it be a pocket realm solves some problems:
The deities can't directly solve this interplanar rift problem because their power is focused on keeping it away from Prime. They decide to send a powerful team of heroes in to end the threat once and for all. Meanwhile, apocalypse cults across the realms close in, attempting to weaken the deities and bring about the end of reality.
Pocket realms can be weird/chaotic/bizarre without affecting Prime. They can be populated by whoever got pulled in when the rift started and trapped by the deities' power.
It can be accessed by a plane shift from anywhere, but requires a specific "address", so you can have your party start anywhere in the world.

[Stonker]

I meant D&D canon as obviously nobody here knows all the details of the shared setting.

I was going to compile a list of positive/negative, necrotic/protonic(?)/fey and elemental powers as 'plug ins' to adapt existing creatures and races.

Quite how this region is structured is hard to say, it could be a sphere, or possibly a tube, but would seem flat to anyone inside. As for actual size, well as a pocket realm the edges could go on forever but I did want a 'stable' geography of sorts with certain notable places dotted around. I was considering that a civilisation of sorts has been able to establish itself, develop communities and a trade network, at least among the surviving yuan ti. There will be some remaining ruins of the civilisation that existed here too and it's road and rail network (they had one, even a subway system).

The players will get here through a teleport 'accident'. (They had a network of those too) It's possible that a god or a collective of gods helped them along. I was sort of reluctant to have the full pantheon of gods that involved. But I guess if this could screw up the prime they would want to be. It just felt the power behind this (if there was one) should be something of a higher agency, like the Lady. Gods are just 'imaginary friends' after all and she doesnt want them in Sigil. Perhaps they arent allowed in here for similar reasons. Would that higher agency want the gods even knowing about this? Even if they are shut out lesser beings that serve them could get in I guess. This region could be a stalemate between the yuan ti gods and the gods they usurped, with them as the only gods having any presence whatsoever.

As for Sigil, assuming this place could be a threat somehow, I think the Lady would try an 'infinite monkeys' method to solve it. Dumping enough of the right sort of people here and letting them deal with it. Any cults that have got in here originated in Sigil. This place isnt known about on prime, the lands this empire existed on are part of a newly discovered continent. Anyone else that has made it in, that wasn't in the area of a plane that got sucked in initially, is a planar traveller/raider that 'fell in'.

[Falcon X]

My vision of what is happening based on planar lore:

1. Boundary crossing bubble - These guys made a planar bubble that is able to cross the boundaries of material, shadow, feywild, and ethereal. This might create an interesting border region where things can easily cross over.
2. Vaccum - The planar bubble is directly to the plane of Vaccum, so it is constantly sucking in everything around it. (It could be a place in between Vaccum and Negative Energy, but then it would be a true black hole and you wouldn’t have space for the cool intermingling of elements).
3. Temporal Prime - part of the magic of this bubble’s crossing boundaries that normally don’t cross also breaks into the Temporal Prime. Now, it is breaking things down into their components from their earliest points in history. A human sucked in breaks down into its original linked elements of positive energy, water, earth, etc.
Each of these elements is temporally linked to their home plane creating tiny notes of Vaccum in those places, so all the elemental planes are now slowly being sucked in by millions of tiny holes in their plane.
(The Chronomancers should be freaking out at this point.)
4. Expansion - Lots of stuff is appearing in the material planes. The Vaccum ball itself doesn’t even have to expand. The whole place is just constantly sucking in the elemental planes, so we Essentially have a single, chaotic, elemental ball that is growing infinitely.
5. Chaos plane - this should resemble the chaos plane of Limbo, which is a soupy mix of all the elements. However, it isn’t actually chaotically aligned unless the Yuan-Ti made it so.
6. The gods - Indeed, gods are maintained by the belief of the mortals from the material planes. Thus, as planets get wiped out, gods are going to start dying. It may not happen in an instant. Those gods’ power might just become finite and will start deteriorating. They will be desperate.
7. Sigil- Hard to say. The nature of Sigil was always left purposely ambiguous. I think that if all else dies from this, Sigil remains as the last place in the universe. The Lady has worked hard for belief not to influence Sigil and this is her reward.
8. The outer planes- Meanwhile, all the outer planes will have their gods start dying.
Either they will stay intact, or they will start to deteriorate. Your choice. Depends on if material plane Belief was merely creating the planes or maintaining them.
Regardless, they will get no New petitioners.
Maybe without steady resupply, the fiends will all kill each other allowing the archons to finally swoop in and defeat them. Now all the outer planes will be coming closer to the same in alignment and will all merge into one.
Have fun theory crafting.

Does much of that make sense. It draws heavily from Planescape, 2e, and 3e lore as it’s basis so ask if it needs explaining.

[Stonker]

Thanks for the reply, sorry to take so long to get back, havent had a proper chance to look at this all week.

I think the new Mordenkainen book will answer a lot of my questions, but to take your points

1 - Interesting, though I'm leaning to this being more of a prison, either by accident or design. It's quite important this area doesn't really intrude in the other GMs campaigns.

2 - A portal to negative wouldn't necessarily work like a black hole would it? I felt it should touch on all the quasi planes so vacuum and the other border elemental planes would have equal effect. The void jinn and the jinn from the quasi planes, with their minions I had figured were the same faction. At least here, even if they may normally be hostile to each other under normal circumstances.

3 - Temporal Prime is a new one on me. Messing with time kind of breaks a 5th wall, it's a cool idea but that creates massive complications regarding the gods, Sigil etc. This region will definitely cause mutation and I guess the nearer to THE RIFT or A rift you are (assuming this place is riddled with them) the more likely it is that'll happen. Kind of like STALKER anomolies. The idea of damage in the real world outside the bubble is cool but it creates issues with messing up the other GMs campaigns. Plus it's to prevent that happening is probably the main reason the gods or some higher agency is keeping this area sealed.

One thing I was considering is that time is slowed down here and it hasnt actually been that long since the cataclysm. So this hasn't really given the bad guys enough time to get really organised and set their plans in motion.

4 - Cool but that's way too disruptive for the other campaigns. The Annihilinn (that's what I'm calling the void jinn and their allies) are possibly working to that end but I figured the plot would be more about the PCs trying to stop that rather than it being what's happening right now.

5 - I didnt realise Limbo was like that. Looks like I need to read up on it. I hadn't pictured this place as being in chaos, though I guess it might be nearer the rift/s and there would be pockets where different energies are in a stat of flux. I saw it more as a patchwork region with everything kind of locked into position. The cataclysm basically took an equal sized area from each plane and meshed them into the same space which has effectively locked them all into the etheral plane as they just cant all fit into each other on one plane. It's only by untangling the layers you can revert things back and it's going to take some sort of colossal magic/magical technology to do that.

The yuan ti, if they had a plan, was just chaos and destruction, because that's their end goal. They were possibly a bit bemused to have survived and not received whatever reward their gods had promised them. Now they are just bickering and infighting in a post apocalyptic scenario. One faction of them may be working with the Annihilin. Looking for a means to take over of course as they dont like being second fiddle to anyone.

6 - Something that's being a threat to prime being of concern to them is useful to know though still not sure where to go with that one. As this place is a threat rather than a process currently in motion I'm still unsure to what extent the gods would be involved. Assuming there is an agency higher than the gods (Sigil implies there is) then it might not want them interfering at all. If gods are the ones that made it a prison then not all the gods would be supporting that. There woud be conflict from some gods that I think ultimately would produce end results where it has to impact on the other GMs campaigns.

7 - Even if Sigil would survive the destruction of *everything* it does rely on cross planar trade and it does serve a mechanical function as the axis of all things which implies it needs there to be everything else to give meaning to its existence. You say the Lady is rewarded, which implies there is some higher agency. (Perhaps I need to read a bit more about that.) Which is a concept I like. This higher agency, (with the Lady possibly being it's 'mortal' avatar), will do *something* but it would probably be whatever is the easiest solution. In this case locking the damaged region off away from everything else.

Possibly by being locked off this way the area isn't ay longer a threat. Or it's easier to fix the logic puzzle that it is by putting it out of reach of other influences. I figured the region had a gravity of sorts and it was possible people planar travelling in the ethereal could get pulled in. This being a way to solve the puzzle in the infinite monkeys way I mentioned before leaving it up to planar 'adventurers' to fix it. As that's what adventurers usually do.

I figured one cool faction could be Sigil refugees and planar raiders that have formed numerous sub-factions. All are scrapping around desperately trying to get back out, cannibalising the remnants of the technology left here and whatever they brought in. There'd be a lawful group trying to police the others and fight against the big bads (Fraternity of Order, Harmonium, Mercykillers would probably band together) and form something a bit like the DUTY faction in the STALKER PC game. There'd be the doom cult ones probably helping the annhilinn and other groups just out for themselves.

8 - Pretty much like 6. Cool ideas but too much of an impact on the world outisde the 'bubble'.

Thanks for the suggestions and yeh I think youve given me some direction to where I'm going.

[Throne12]

Ok here is what I invision. These scaly B******'s where trying some magic hoobla. And had key points in diffrenet towns creating a giant magical circle. Each point is were the rifts to the diffrenet planes are. The gods have pulled there powers together to create a protective bubble over the country. To keep the planes spilling further into prime. The pc's are tasked with finding the rifts and closing them. Each plane has changed the land scape and have brought monsters with it.

[Stonker]

Nice idea but that isn't going to work here. There's several reasons why, I think ive covered most of those already. What you describe doesnt give me much scope for all the mixing up of different planar energies I wanted to do. Besides the yuan ti ruled this land once, but theyre gone, their empire was destroyed in a series of cataclysms. The other GMs already left evidence of what may have caused those and I'm using all that as the start point for my idea.

I've been too focused on the negative rift/black hole idea to see clearly there was a better way of doing this. The forces that ripped through the planes, stripping out a chunk of each, didnt just hit the negative plane, it hit the positive plane too. This could have created a kind of loop with the 2 rifts at either end and everything else in between, all knotted together. This happened too quickly for anything outside of it to know what was going on so the gods have no idea about this place at all. The Lady might do, as she represents a higher agency (in my opinion) but she isn't doing much about it, visibly at least.

The positive/negative opposition makes for a more interesting conflict. You have two opposing forces, one that wants to destroy and the other to create. Neither are good or evil and both are equally as dangerous. In between is whatever got thrown into this blender slowly being consumed at one end and renewed from the other. There are forces on both sides that want theirs to be dominant and are doing their best to see that the process is accelerated for their chosen side. In the middle are those fighting to keep balance. All factions in this conflict, good or evil, lawful or chaotic may have a reason to prefer one over the others. It's going to make for some interesting alliances.

Even though the pantheons are oblivious to this there are 2 deities, or more accurately, demi gods with some power here. One is effectively the ghost of a dead abandoned god, the one worhsipped before the yuan ti took over. Her devotees are the dead of a city that was purged by the yaun ti when it rebelled and refused to cow down to the new overlords. The positive plane energy has breathed life into this place and there's a constant loop between the inhabitants and this god, they give her 'life' and she gives it back in return. The other god is an aspect/remnant of the yuan ti god Dendar. It's almost a dream of a god, though as Dendar is the god of nightmare dream is probably not the best word.

So yeh, starting to get the big cogs into place, just to need to figure some of the smaller ones now before I'm ready to feed some PCs into the machine and see where it takes them.