Adventuring in the Far Realm

[KittenMagician]

I have my players venturing into the far realm (where aberrations are from) to collect a particular item for a major quest. i was gonna treat it a bit like alice in wonderland and make it so that low rolls are better than high rolls (nat 1s and nat 20s reversed) and you need to roll under ACs and other such topsie turvy rules inversions. i was also thinking of kinda messing with the spells they cast in that they dont necessarily work as intended as the far realm is a place of absurdity.

do you guys have any thoughts or suggestions on how to make it feel crazy, trippy, and/or just plain weird?

[The Glyphstone]

The Far Realm exists outside reality, outside rules, so this should be an excuse to go utterly bonkers. When they make an attack, resolve it with Rock-Paper-Scissors instead of a die roll. Roll randomly sized dice instead of d20's, anything from a D4 to a D100. Have physical attacks target their saving throws and magic spells attack their AC. The color of their shirts gives bonuses or penalties to movement speed. Apply cartoon logic where people die easily, but reappear shortly after like nothing happened, and physics exists solely for the purpose of being broken.

[Naanomi]

I wouldn't recommend trying to adventure in the Far Realm proper... It just isn't a 'place' that lends itself to existing, yet alone adventuring. Places corrupted by the Far Realm, or with portals to the Far Realm, tend to be more functional (but still very strange and largely incomprehensible).

If you really want to go to the Far Realm, make it a place 'corrupted' by the 'normal world' (it responds to us about as well as we respond to it), to lend it a touch of rationality to operate in.

[Millstone85]

The Far Realm is made of countless planar layers, each of which overlaps (in a Border Ethereal fashion) with 1d4 other layers. Creatures, including the PCs, can freely shift from their current layer to any other layer that they can see, provided that they succeed on a DC 10 ability check (roll a d6 to determine which ability).

At times, a layer collapses, expelling its creatures to neighboring layers at random. At other times, a layer duplicates itself, along with every creature within it. Players soon get to control multiple instances of their characters, and see them meet various horrifying deaths or corruptions.

[Khrysaes]

I have my players venturing into the far realm (where aberrations are from) to collect a particular item for a major quest. i was gonna treat it a bit like alice in wonderland and make it so that low rolls are better than high rolls (nat 1s and nat 20s reversed) and you need to roll under ACs and other such topsie turvy rules inversions. i was also thinking of kinda messing with the spells they cast in that they dont necessarily work as intended as the far realm is a place of absurdity.

do you guys have any thoughts or suggestions on how to make it feel crazy, trippy, and/or just plain weird?

Look up xoriat in eberron. There may be some good descriptions of it for you to base the far realm off of.

[Dualight]

If randomness is desired, using dice to determine the DCs for everything might be workable, although I am not certain if that would be fun.
If the altered rules are meant to be weird, but consistent, inverting proficiency(so characters add their PB to only those things they normally do not) could result in strange results.
What kind of party do you have? There is no point in messing with rules that do not see play, after all.
Also, should these oddities be detrimental, beneficial, neutral or variable?


Calling for odd ability scores on ability checks could also add to the weirdness. So a Strength(Perception) check to find if a mountain was hidden under that weightless leaf, for example.

As a rule of thumb, if it feels counter-intuitive, but not necessarily broken/unfair, it might be worth throwing at the party.

This is a fun mental exercise.:smallbiggrin:

[Bobthewizard]

Maybe at the start of combat or other times of stress such as an out of combat skill check, you could have each PC and NPC roll on the wild magic surge table. Or maybe a 10% chance each round.

There are alternate wild magic surge tables. There are pay what you want ones on DMs Guild.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/196211/Fun-Wild-Magic-Surge-Table-Vol-1?term=wild+magic+surge+table+

[Scots Dragon]

Obligatory post on the Far Realm (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=13189541&postcount=15)

To adjudicate adventures in the Far Realms:

Start by showing the players a cubist painting.

Have the players state their actions in writing.

Cut up the sentences and piece together the words in random order to determine what they actually do.

Slowly push your head through the cubist painting while singing nursery rhymes in Farsi.

--

The difficulty with actually going to the far realms is that it's hard for the reality of them to ever be as weird as what you THINK that they should be. IMO, the Far Realms should be inexplicably and inhumanly 'other', and it's hard for any one thing - no matter how shifty and quirky - to remain 'other'.

My favourite thing about your concept is that the far realms stuff you're dealing with could be completely normal things that have just the slightest touch of Far Realms oddness to them - and as a consequence are now bats*** insane and terrifying.

In short, the further offstage and around the corner you keep the far realms stuff, the better.

[PhantomSoul]

Googling has given a few suggestions from the past that I'm now eager to look into:
- Gates of the Firestorm Peak (apparently random mutations being a highlight)
- Dragon Magazine #330, "Enter the Far Realm"
- Dungeon Magazine #134, adventure with the King in Yellow
- Edit: stumbled upon Lovecraft's Rats in the Walls and The Mountains of Madness; Carpenter's The Thing; 3.5's Lords of Madness; Dragon Magazine 366; and Dragon Magazine 152 and 156's The Last Breaths of Ashenport as recommendations for flavour/ideas)

I'd definitely lean into surges and oddity, and while I want consistency for the weirdness I put into the other planes, I feel no such requirement for the Far Realms! Some things from other-plane homebrew that could be good:
- Cardinal directions are non-existent or random, distances are wonky
- Rests take random amounts of time, spell durations are wonky
- As noted by others, random surges (and perhaps spell failure independently of that? In my setting spellcasting not in a creature's psionic aura would fail because there's no Weave, but I don't think you'd want to go so far in this case!)
- Psionics are priviledged over Magic/Spellcasting (likely also to help with Martials not feeling too shafted)
- Inconsistent descriptions; the same thing will vary from being so wondrous it could charm to so horrifying it can frighten
- Perhaps of interest is using something other than Speed for your Speed (e.g. basing it on mental stats)
- Madness as a regular possibility, but probably long-term and permanent madness rather than short-term madness (because of the types of effects)


(... chopping up plans to mix & match ...)

That sounds wild and fantastic! Maybe not for every combat for practical reasons, but wow, could be quite the entertaining thing to come up on a wild surge or something.

[Unoriginal]

I have my players venturing into the far realm (where aberrations are from) to collect a particular item for a major quest. i was gonna treat it a bit like alice in wonderland and make it so that low rolls are better than high rolls (nat 1s and nat 20s reversed) and you need to roll under ACs and other such topsie turvy rules inversions. i was also thinking of kinda messing with the spells they cast in that they dont necessarily work as intended as the far realm is a place of absurdity.

do you guys have any thoughts or suggestions on how to make it feel crazy, trippy, and/or just plain weird?

The Tasha's has a section on environment touched by the Far Realm's influence, it could be a start.

I don't think Alice in Wonderland and topsie turvy rules inversions are quite fitting for the Far Realm, though. It would be fitting for a Fey-dominated area, not for the cosmic your-reality-does-not-matter feel of the space beyond the planes.

[Scots Dragon]

The Tasha's has a section on environment touched by the Far Realm's influence, it could be a start.

I don't think Alice in Wonderland and topsie turvy rules inversions are quite fitting for the Far Realm, though. It would be fitting for a Fey-dominated area, not for the cosmic your-reality-does-not-matter feel of the space beyond the planes.

If you want Alice in Wonderland, that's what Dungeonland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeonland) is for specifically.

[Segev]

The tricky bit is keeping it from being "Limbo, but more." The Far Realms are places of alien rules, not no rules. Their are not dream worlds operating on subjective or narrative logic; they are places where fundamental truths of our reality are paradoxes, and impossibilities in our world are natural.

To run a game in them should feel like the PCs face impossible tasks and barriers, like they are not quite in the same reality as the creatures that dwell there. Fourth and higher-dimensional shapes that only are visible in three dimensional cross-section should change apparent shape as they move around them. Impossibly sharp edges should exist where the PCs' three dimensions exist with only two of them shared with the object that seems two dimensional.

Time might move only when they do, except when they are frozen save when a far realms creature is moving. Or they may be able to try a number of things in a loop as long as they don't move down the time line.

Conversely, trivial things like dropping an object and having it fall might be amazing impossibilities to the denizens of the Far Realms, and be things that the PCs can do as alien horrors that are helpful or terrifying or both that might earn them aid from natives.

[KittenMagician]

- Edit: stumbled upon Lovecraft's Rats in the Walls and The Mountains of Madness; Carpenter's The Thing; 3.5's Lords of Madness; Dragon Magazine 366; and Dragon Magazine 152 and 156's The Last Breaths of Ashenport as recommendations for flavour/ideas)



wow there are a lot of good suggestions here. i actually already used John Carpenter's The Thing as a reference for some creatures that escaped from the Far Realm. it very properly weirded out/freaked out/grossed out my players. They didnt even kill one of them. you guys are great and i have quite a bit to think about. im thinking that since the players are from the material plane they kinda bend the alien rules of the far realm slightly like the are realness anchors, that way the rules arent to insanely alien.

[JLandan]

My first suggestion: Don't make it too complicated, it won't be fun.

Second: Leave the characters as they've been built.

Third: Make it weird, not wacky. Unpredictable.

I ran a short jaunt with my players into a "strange dimension", pre-Far Realm many moons ago. I ran it like swimming in 3e. I left them be most of the time, travelling, etc. But during encounters (combat, exploration or social) I had them make a save based on what they were trying to do. Str or Dex for weapon attacks, caster mod for spells, Cha save for social interactions.

If successful it went without issues. If not, I would adjudicate accordingly. A failed weapon attack might attack another target, a failed spell might change target or even switch to another spell of the same level. Tracking failure is a good way to get lost. Failed Int skills provide incorrect or irrelevant info. The point was to drive them insane. I ruled that actual insanity on the part of a PC made them able to function normally.

And to really bug them out, make advantage/disadvantage 3 dice instead of 2.

[Magikeeper]

Another idea, for creatures that are in/came from such realms, is to come up with an idea of what their "normal" is and have it be quite different from a "normal" world. For example:


- A world filled with never-changing ambient light, where everything is always the same color (unless killed, drained, etc), and these colors hold enhanced importance.
- The creature has never seen a shadow before, and something that changes color depending on difference in lighting is bizarre (as is the idea that light is a thing that comes from something!). It's like watching something continuously die and revive, be half-eaten then not half-eaten, age and de-age.. things don't just change color willy-nilly!
- The creature is blue, and needs to be in the presence of red to breathe properly.
- - Too much red makes it light-headed.
- - Directly touching red in uncomfortable.
- Green burns the creature.
- The creature needs to be in the presence of pink to meet its sustenance needs. Pink things being used to sustain the creature slowly turn silver.
- The creature turns silver when it dies, and (at least initially) assumes all silver things are drained/dead/etc.
- - Silver things should be surrounded by yellow things to get better. This also works for dead members of its race.
- Illusion magic does not exist where its from.
- The creature, if on the material plane, very much wants to go home. Especially if it's trapped somewhere as terrifying as a forest or a lush field of grass.

- The creature cannot interact with sound at all. Its body does not make noise, it is deaf, etc.
- The creature can understand visual thoughts, and is used to communicating telepathically via complex color patterns. If creatures try to think at it, it will try to guess their intentions via the color(s) of whatever they are thinking of.
- The creature's internals are filled with pink-blue sawdust instead of blood. It considers having internal liquids to be weird and unnatural. There is a high chance of it eventually assuming that humans, elves, etc consume the color red (elves probably turn things green after feasting, what terrifying beasts!). It's also likely it will assume some color revives >humans< and the like ("maybe it just takes them a long time", it might think).

"Blue Beast" is pretty close to being a material plane life form, a version arising from deeper within the far realms might be from realm where the life forms ARE colors. This "Sentient Shade of Blue" might not even recognize material plane denizens as separate life forms, viewing them instead as complex interactions between the color-entities they consist of. It might try to converse with / wake up these colors.

Then it goes full eldritch horror when the colors actually start waking up...

-----

Hrm.. the idea of the far realms natives becoming more extreme versions of their "twist" the more you travel in a specific "direction" has some appeal. Like a realm of color beasts that gets increasingly abstract the closer you get to the center dimension of that particular region. Then when you try to push even deeper you start moving through an area that's a cross between the color area and, say, an area that's a 2D stick figure realm (similar to how the color beast area was a cross between your realm and the pure color realm).

I suppose I generally like the idea of the Far Realm being the "In-Between" that connects wildly different realities and the strangeness of it being due to the FR being corrupted by local realities. Proper great old ones might themselves be living realities in the form of creatures (ish), their essence bleeding out a bit into the relatively inert realities they sometimes interact with.

-----

Anyway, random often doesn't come across as being strange enough. Are you familiar with the term "Uncanny Valley"? The Uncanny Valley concept is usually applied to physical looks, but the general idea can be applied to actions and the state of reality as well. Having the actions of aberrations and the way their surroundings work be *slightly off* while still being mostly comprehensible will likely feel the creepiest. Both Blue examples are more strange than creepy, imo, peak creepy would likely need to be more subtle.

[Steven K]

First, mess with space and time. Normally, we live in a world where there are three space-like dimensions and one time-like dimension. We can move however we like in the space-like dimensions (not counting the effects of gravity), but we move on a more or less fixed path through time. Just increase the values arbitrarily. Make it ten space and one time, as per modern string threory, if you like.

The effect of this: each point in space is directly touching (n) other points in space, which are each in turn touching (n) points in space. Normal matter quickly becomes all tentacly and twisting from our perspective, distances don't do what they're supposed to do, angles don't meet up like they're supposed to, things sort of curve around each other in weird ways, even though you could have sworn they were about to intersect. And the longer you're there, the worse it gets. Even your own body begins to wave and undulate slightly, you extend out a little bit into all the different dimensions which not only feels weird in and of itself but also makes you consciously aware of how vulnerable you are. You don't just have to be aware of your surroundings in six directions (forward, back, left, right, up, down), but more generally (n*2) directions, at all times. You are consciously on edge, contantly trying to make sense of it all, constantly trying to watch not just your back but other parts of you that you didn't even know you had until five minutes ago.

That's not even counting the possibility that the far realm is a place where time dilation is manifestly evident. That is, your normal, everyday, senses can detect time slowing and speeding up as you move along any combination of dimensions. You literally experience gravity as the movement away from places where time passes more quickly towards places where time passes more slowly, as is normally only a theoretical concern.

And then you have to consider a light source, or light sources, or the lack thereof, and what effect that they will have in such a world. Light travels in a straight line, but space is wildly curved. Gravitational lensing is mild bending of light's path, due to the curvature of spacetime. Just google that term, look at the images search page for a while, and imagine that turned up to 11.

I haven't even considered hearing, let alone other, more magical senses a d&d character might have without even realising it. Imagine if the ambient magical energy you had grown up with your entire life suddenly just... halved, or doubled, or disappeared entirely, or started smelling like the colour orange. You'd notice, even if up to that moment you'd never even realised you could sense magic at all.

[Segev]

Another idea, for creatures that are in/came from such realms, is to come up with an idea of what their "normal" is and have it be quite different from a "normal" world. For example:


- A world filled with never-changing ambient light, where everything is always the same color (unless killed, drained, etc), and these colors hold enhanced importance.
- The creature has never seen a shadow before, and something that changes color depending on difference in lighting is bizarre (as is the idea that light is a thing that comes from something!). It's like watching something continuously die and revive, be half-eaten then not half-eaten, age and de-age.. things don't just change color willy-nilly!
- The creature is blue, and needs to be in the presence of red to breathe properly.
- - Too much red makes it light-headed.
- - Directly touching red in uncomfortable.
- Green burns the creature.
- The creature needs to be in the presence of pink to meet its sustenance needs. Pink things being used to sustain the creature slowly turn silver.
- The creature turns silver when it dies, and (at least initially) assumes all silver things are drained/dead/etc.
- - Silver things should be surrounded by yellow things to get better. This also works for dead members of its race.
- Illusion magic does not exist where its from.
- The creature, if on the material plane, very much wants to go home. Especially if it's trapped somewhere as terrifying as a forest or a lush field of grass.

- The creature cannot interact with sound at all. Its body does not make noise, it is deaf, etc.
- The creature can understand visual thoughts, and is used to communicating telepathically via complex color patterns. If creatures try to think at it, it will try to guess their intentions via the color(s) of whatever they are thinking of.
- The creature's internals are filled with pink-blue sawdust instead of blood. It considers having internal liquids to be weird and unnatural. There is a high chance of it eventually assuming that humans, elves, etc consume the color red (elves probably turn things green after feasting, what terrifying beasts!). It's also likely it will assume some color revives >humans< and the like ("maybe it just takes them a long time", it might think).

"Blue Beast" is pretty close to being a material plane life form, a version arising from deeper within the far realms might be from realm where the life forms ARE colors. This "Sentient Shade of Blue" might not even recognize material plane denizens as separate life forms, viewing them instead as complex interactions between the color-entities they consist of. It might try to converse with / wake up these colors.

Then it goes full eldritch horror when the colors actually start waking up...
This is a neat approach. Have rules that are truly alien, but cohere in their own context. It's a good way to do this "lightly" enough to keep it playable by humans, but make it alien and surreal.

[Scots Dragon]

On top of most of the above rules, where necessary just raid your local Cthulhu mythos guidelines.

The Far Realm is meant to evoke Lovecraftian cosmic horror ideas. The inhabitants are aberrations such as mind flayers, aboleths, beholders, and carrion crawlers.

[Naanomi]

The Far Realm is meant to evoke Lovecraftian cosmic horror ideas. The inhabitants are aberrations such as mind flayers, aboleths, beholders, and carrion crawlers.
Kind of... None of those things actually live in the Far Realm, they are creatures created in or influenced by the Far Realm but adapted to our reality. Any of them are too... Coherent... To survive in that 'place' in their current state.

In a cosmology with lots of 'mortals cannot comprehend it' places (limbo, the Hinterlands, the deep Ethereal, deep astral, in older editions the shadow plane, etc) the Far Realm is intended to be the one most antithetical to the Great Wheel. It isn't just weird or strange, it is fundamentally incompatible with existence as we know it in any meaningful sense; and any attempt to categorize or comprehend it is at best just completely wrong (and that is a best case scenario)

[subtledoctor]

I have my players venturing into the far realm (where aberrations are from) to collect a particular item for a major quest. i was gonna treat it a bit like alice in wonderland and make it so that low rolls are better than high rolls (nat 1s and nat 20s reversed) and you need to roll under ACs and other such topsie turvy rules inversions.

Ooh! Ooh! Give them a thac0 score!