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View Full Version : Petitioner, Outsiders, And Other Things That Beg More Description



Jestir256
2008-05-10, 01:57 PM
I'm running a Neo-Planescape campaign this summer, and I'm looking for some suggestions on how to make my cosmology a little more likely and consistent. I'm using a pretty standard alignment-based Outer Planes/Outlands/Sigil cosmology, and there are a few places where the RAW is a little thin:

1. In my cosmology, the souls of the dead from the prime material plane(s) travel through the astral after death and arrive on the plane most nearly matching their alignment. I am not sure what then befalls them; I want some consistent (and hopefully simple) set of rules to indicate whether they reconstitute as Petitioners (who then seek the attention of their patron deity), become part of the plane itself, or undergo some other fate that I haven't thought of. Please suggest.

2. What exactly happens when an outsider is slain in the outlands or in one of the outer planes? Can they be raised? Are they gone for good? I have heard many conflicting answers to this question.

3. Where exactly are the battlefields of the Blood War?

4. What should happen if a character falls in the Styx? I want it to be nasty but not strictly fatal.

Pronounceable
2008-05-10, 02:45 PM
Bit foggy myself but:

1) Depends on alignment. Evil souls pop up as larvae that will either work its way up or be devoured, while good souls become petitioners. TNs reincarnate as animals in Outlands. Don't know LN or CN. Deity only enters into it if it's a particularly pious soul.

2) If a petitioner (all outsider types are petitioners) dies in its homeplane, it's absorbed into the plane. But I'm not certain what happens on other planes. Probably they pop back home. And outsiders can't be raised.

3) Everywhere.

4) A single drop of it completely erases last few years (but this was from a fanfic, albeit an awesome one, which may not be exactly canon). A full soak will probably erase the entire memory.

SurlySeraph
2008-05-10, 02:57 PM
3. Mainly Hades (The Grey Wastes), but also Acheron and Gehenna, and sometimes Baator and the Abyss when one side manages to temporarily push the other back pretty far.

Gray5656
2008-05-10, 04:20 PM
4. The rules for immersion in the river Styx are in the Fiendish Codex 2, page 39, suffice to say, it causes temporary amnesia lasting 3d6 days, with varying DC's for percent of immersion.

KillianHawkeye
2008-05-11, 10:30 PM
Who, on an individual basis, becomes a petitioner depends on the cosmology. In some cosmologies, everyone who has died is embodied in the afterlife. In others, only those chosen by the deities are so favored, with the remainder of the dead's energies scattered among the Outer Planes. In yet others, souls are remade into celestial, fiendish, axiomatic, and anarchic creatures.

Still other cosmologies embrace parts of all these: Spirits become petitioners for as long as there are those in the Material Plane who remember them. Once they are forgotten, these petitioners fade back into the stuff of the plane itself to be remade as planar beings. You may embrace any of these options for your own campaign.

I hope that helps.