ADnD/4e Planescape innerplanes

[oxinabox]

So i'm DMing the ADnD style PlaneScape setting
under 4e.
'Cos 4e's Planar cosmolorgy sucks, real bad, really really bad!
who though to get rid of the innerplanes and instead just have one massive plane of elemental chaos?

However I'm not to happy with the ordering of the innerplanes.
I see the symmetry, but...
I would have steam going from Fire to Water, also linking with air (if you go in any direction other than firewards or waterwards you come out in the plane of Air. on one of it's other sides.


I also don't care for sicking to the normal 3D topology.
My planes can have more than N sides.
for any N element of Real...

I'ld put water->posive as the Plane of life= plane of ooze:
basically this is the basic organic soup:Positive energy temper'd by the cooling of water, to create life.
Mostly Bactiria/ algraes so this in effect is the plane of Ooze.
toward the positive engergy side would lurk things that Should Be Dead, but are sustain by a reduced version of the healing of the positive energy plane

The plain of ooze (water-> earth) becomes the plane of Mud: home of free mud golems escaped their masters, some how blessed with inteligence (i'll work this out properly...)
Mud golems as in erfworld style crappomaster.
And some sort of filter feeding fish.

What's the problems/downsides of his idea?

[KIDS]

I think it's a good idea. While I like it how the planes were rearranged, your changes make sense too, and it's your world. Just make sure that there is some info on those available to the players so that they can actually hear about these attributes in game (a tree that falls alone in the forest doesn't make a sound etc. etc.).

[oxinabox]

I'm going to type these our and have them a free excepts from some plane traveling author.

[Haven]

Makes sense. Are you going to make an equivalent plane for Air and Earth too? Or is it just Fire and Water produced a Steam paraelemental plane, but Air and Earth don't and that's one of the many unknown mysteries of the setting?

BTW, let us know how it goes. I love Planescape, but always thought that 2e's rules were a little limiting for it since there wasn't much a whole lot of customization involved.

[oxinabox]

it would make some sense for that to be an unkowable thing of the setting.
In that of all the paraelemental/quaisielemental planes, only steam has border with air, aswell as it's constituents.

(all borders are infinite distance from any point on the plane as the planes are infinite - zeno's paradox)

I need to takeout my maps, and N dimentional mapping paper...


Ok,
Well Negative energy ->earth making and dust doesn't make much sense.
about equal with steam being for positive enregy water.

So iI'll steal Dust and put that on the Earth -> air line.
The relam consists of larges dustdevils, and also some wirlwinds (wily wily's we call them in australia).

Now i need a new negitive energy/earth.
I'm thinking maybe graves - death.
A place full of undead, because the plane of negitive energy is too intense for undead, just like the plane of positive erergy is too intense for the living.
The plane of graves is the opposite of the plane of ooze (=plain of life - bactrial).
And near the border with the negitive energy plane, will dwell things that shouldn't be undead (... umm i don't know how this works but i'll sort something out)


And i'm killing of salt and replacing it with the plane of Ice.
Which is like the plane of earth, only with more large caverns, some so large that people living there think that is the whole world.
and the sky is blue cos it's frozen. and the sun is a blessing from their god (who may or maynot be real)

But as you move towards the negitive energy plain it gets more and more cold, like absurdly cold, such that weopons break on hitting anything, of course normally there's nothing to hit, as it's all frozen to death and so are you.
It gets so cold that even ICe elemental wear coats at the lower depths.
and at the very bottom it kills even them.

Because negitive enrgy is more cold than it is dehydrating.


Ooph but look i've stolen ice from the Air water border.
oh well it diodn't make much sense there anyway.
I'll replace that with mist


Tempted to do away with the positive energy -> frie =radiance but what would i put in it's place?
It does match nicely with air-> psoitive = lightning/storm.

THe energy planes to screw with things some but it's no fun without them

[oxinabox]

Heres a table (any suggestions on how to format it right?)
{TABLE]
Fire Water Earth Air Negative Positive
Fire - Steam Magma Smoke Ash Radiance
Water Steam - Mud Mist Ice Life (ooze)
Earth Magma Mud - Dust Grave Lighting
Air Smoke Mist Dust - Vacuum Mineral
Negative Ash Ice Grave Vacuum - ?
Positive Radiance Life (ooze) Mineral Lighting ? -

[/TABLE]

Not too sure about Ash.

[kamikasei]

{table] |Fire|Water|Earth|Air|Negative|Positive
Fire| |Steam|Magma|Smoke|Ash|Radiance
Water|Steam| |Mud|Mist|Ice|Life (ooze)
Earth|Magma|Mud| |Dust|Grave|Mineral
Air|Smoke|Mist|Dust| |Vacuum|Lightning
Negative|Ash|Ice|Grave|Vacuum| |?
Positive|Radiance|Life (ooze)|Mineral|Lightning|?|
[/table]

Just quote that to see the code so you can make your own edits.

[oxinabox]

{table] |Fire|Water|Earth|Air|Negative|Positive
Fire| |Steam|Magma|Smoke|Ash|Radiance
Water|Steam| |Mud|Mist|Ice|Life (ooze)
Earth|Magma|Mud| |Dust|Grave|Mineral
Air|Smoke|Mist|Dust| |Vacuum|Lightning
Negative|Ash|Ice|Grave|Vacuum| |?
Positive|Radiance|Life (ooze)|Mineral|Lightning|?|
[/table]

Just quote that to see the code so you can make your own edits.

You get 17 love and adoration points.
directly exchangeable for 1 standardized DM kudos

[oxinabox]

I'm going to need to Redo all the borders too.
Ice used to bead Air water.
Air above, water bellow
And salt and negitive energy forun laterally in one direction
But salt isn't a plane anymore

And my ice is mopre like the plane of earth.
Full of tunnels and caverns.

As compaird to planescapes ice, which is boobing on water

[erikun]

Ah, I've been looking into making a 4e Planescape recently. Mainly because it seems unlikely we'll see an official one. Well, moving on....

Water/Earth = Acid is my recommendation. Consider it a swampy plane composed of sludge, pockets of corrosive liquid, and acidic vapors filling the air.

Water/Positive = Biolife is interesting. It would certainly explain why the Plane of Water is so full of living things, despite every other inner plane holding only elementals.

Earth/Negative = Rot. Imagine an Earth Elemental, except composed of dirt, falling apart. Rot is psudo-undead, so to speak - Rot Elementals would cause disease, disjunction, and stuff to just start falling apart.

I was planning on using the Feywild/Shadowfell when dealing with the Positive and Negative Energy Planes. If you consider the Positive-Negative a stream that flows between the two (and through the Prime, keeping life going) then the Feywild is "upstream" while the Shadowfell is "downstream." Hence why the Feywild is so vibrant and active, where trees will literally get up and walk around, and where magic is unrestrained - and why the Shadowfell is so dystopian and, well, dead.

[oxinabox]

Water/Earth = Acid is my recommendation. Consider it a swampy plane composed of sludge, pockets of corrosive liquid, and acidic vapors filling the air.

Water/Positive = Biolife is interesting. It would certainly explain why the Plane of Water is so full of living things, despite every other inner plane holding only elementals.

Earth/Negative = Rot. Imagine an Earth Elemental, except composed of dirt, falling apart. Rot is psudo-undead, so to speak - Rot Elementals would cause disease, disjunction, and stuff to just start falling apart.

Rot is roughly what i had in mind for grave.

Water/Earth = Acid.
Gets more acidic once you head towards the negitive energy side.
more muddy away from that side.
How ever, a plane made of water and earth isn't going to have any air.
It's going to be sludge filled hell.

THe plane of rot, well, it'll have maybe void above it.

Your thoughts on the feywild are interesting.
I still haven't descided werether to deny my eleadrin the feywild teleportaion when out of the prime.
Currently i'm thinking, that you try ot step through the fey wild, but instead you catch a breif glips of the etheral, and it has the same teliportaion effect.
Teleportiopn via the asral won't work here.
there for teleportation via etherial (=fey but off plane) shoudn't work in the outer.
How ever that would nerf onme of my players no end, since teleporting is all he does.
He relised he didn't actaully select any attack powers.

BNoth teleportations work in sigel, as it'[s a cross over between the planes like thPM...?

[Haven]

Oh, right, that reminds me: If you're playing 4e Planescape, with the eladrin as an elf-like PC race, than what are the CG celestials native to Arborea called?

[erikun]

I always considered planes to be the cross-over between the Astral and the Ethereal. That is, all planes (Prime, inner, outer) are coterminous to both the Astral and Ethereal - only the Astral is not coterminous to the Ethereal, and vice versa. It would allow teleportation anywhere but the Astral, and give you a "technical" reason for the creation (and possible destruction) of planes.

I also used the Ethereal for dead spirits to pass onto the outer planes. If you think about this, it kind of makes sense - there are already ghosts and spirits in the Ethereal already, but not really anything similar to a "ghost" in the Astral. Of course, this does question what happens when you die in the Astral...

[RTGoodman]

Oh, right, that reminds me: If you're playing 4e Planescape, with the eladrin as an elf-like PC race, than what are the CG celestials native to Arborea called?

I'd just change the 4E to "High Elf" or something. That's basically what they are anyway.

[oxinabox]

i'm calling them just angels, or maybe celestials.
The PC's have encountered both.

or eleadrin, and the high elves just stoled the name. i like that best

Or maybe in my setting there is a myth that abroria is the true birth place of the elves, and so the beings found there are the true unsulied elves, called eledrin also

[Ninetail]

So i'm DMing the ADnD style PlaneScape setting
under 4e.
'Cos 4e's Planar cosmolorgy sucks, real bad, really really bad!

The main problem I see is the same reason I disagree with the above statement:

In theory, the setup of all of those elemental planes is nice, but in practice, what good are they for adventuring?

Has anyone ever really used, say, the quasi-elemental plane (or was it para-elemental) of dust? How do you adventure there? I'm not asking about mechanics (I have the 1e Manual of the Planes for that), but rationally... what sorts of adventures do you have in that landscape? How is it compelling?

Similarly for many of the major planes. Plane of Earth? I've seen it as a huge dungeon crawl or as a "everyone better invest in magic items that make them intangible for the next couple of sessions" zone, and one or two other ways, but I've never seen any really creative settings come out of it. Plane of Water? Just one big undersea adventure, except there's no surface.

Elemental Chaos, though? I like that much better. I can visualize it in interesting ways. Sort of like Limbo or Pandemonium.

To me, it's just far more compelling as an adventure setting than the old planes. (The one exception is the Plane of Fire -- mostly because of the City of Brass. But hey, that's now in the Elemental Chaos!)

[Skorj]

Any real cosmology has a Plane of Muskrats. At the border with the plane of Fire you get deadly waves of Flaming Muskrats. 'Ware the Flaming Muskrats!

[oxinabox]

To me, it's just far more compelling as an adventure setting than the old planes. (The one exception is the Plane of Fire -- mostly because of the City of Brass. But hey, that's now in the Elemental Chaos!)

What about the city of glass?

And i like symetry.

and also i have the tygate trade guild.
They WILL viste all the planes!

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The main problem I see is the same reason I disagree with the above statement:

In theory, the setup of all of those elemental planes is nice, but in practice, what good are they for adventuring?

Speaking as someone who just ran a campaign heavily focused on the planes, I can say that there are more adventure hooks in the Inner Planes than they're often given credit for. The Plane of Dust I haven't personally used yet, but in my last campaign the PCs were chased through the Plane of Earth by earth-gliding elementals because they ticked off a dao emir by, ah, liberating some gems from him. It was a nice high-speed chase in 3D, where the PCs never knew when another enemy was going to pop out of the wall.

If you think of the Plane of Earth as "just a big dungeon" and the Plane of Water as "just a big ocean," then of course you're going to think dungeons and underwater adventures are the only option--from that perspective, the Abyss is "just a big pit full of demons" and Limbo is "just space filled with random islands of elements," yet there seem to be few people who have problems coming up with adventure ideas there. Keep in mind that the Inner Planes are the building blocks of the Prime; if you do have a dungeon on the Plane of Earth, it'll be larger, older, more dangerous, and populated by creatures who ignore such trivial things as doors, so it's not "just another dungeon" but rather a Prime dungeon kicked up to 11. The creatures on the planes need to be taken into account, as well as the hazards (red tides on the Plane of Water can be the source of as many adventures as ether cyclones in the Ethereal), the alternate laws of physics, and the many portals.

[erikun]

Elemental Chaos, though? I like that much better. I can visualize it in interesting ways. Sort of like Limbo or Pandemonium.

Well, true. For 4E cosmology, I was thinking of changing the Elemental Planes into Elemental Vortices - malestorms of raw energy which dump into the Elemental Chaos. There are also Elemental Nodes budding off the Chaos, which act as elemental demiplanes of "pure" matter - the Plane of Ice, Plane of Acid, and the Great Planar Ocean. (because I did like the Plane of Water, dangit!)

On the other hand, if someone wants to use (or redesign) the old inner planes, I'm not going to stop them.

As for the Paraelemental Plane of Mist, what is it like? Clouds, rainbows, with the occasional wandering hurricane? Is it kind of like a Plane of Storms? It's nice to name the various planes, but if you don't have an idea of what they're like, they aren't too interesting to visit.

[Ninetail]

Speaking as someone who just ran a campaign heavily focused on the planes, I can say that there are more adventure hooks in the Inner Planes than they're often given credit for.

I don't know about that.

I mean, a good GM can come up with good adventures involving just about anything, but I think there's a lot less inspiration to be found in the old inner planes than there is in the Elemental Chaos. They're just too uniform for my tastes.

The outer planes got a lot more love because they offered a lot more to "see". You can visit any of them a hundred times, and the experience will be completely different (well, except maybe for Concordant Opposition). But every visit to the plane of dust is going to be pretty much the same -- you'll have to deal with the "earth"-ness and the life-draining/decay effect, and you'll find... well, not much. I don't think it was ever even mentioned outside the MotP, and it got, what, two paragraphs there?

Then look at something like the Abyss, where, say, the Demonweb alone offered dozens more possibilities than that entire infinite plane...

The Chaos is a little similar to the old Limbo, but that works for me. It just feels much easier to come up with interesting locations when you have all of the elements to work with in proximity.

[erikun]

Then look at something like the Abyss, where, say, the Demonweb alone offered dozens more possibilities than that entire infinite plane...

I'm not quite sure about that. I mean, I've designed an adventure on the Paraelemental Plane of Ice. It had a cult of humans trying to colonize it, complete with animals, snowgrass (magical grass which grew in cold) and heat crystals. To the north, across the fields of a constant blizzard, Ice Devils were working with Frost Giants and Cryonax to corrupt the entire plane. Good elementals and Immoths were allied with the cultists, but connections were tense because the snowgrass was spreading across the southern "continent" and causing problems for the natives.

Conversely, what does the Demonweb have? Drow, and spiders, and spider-drow, and drow-spiders, and spider-demons and demon-drow, and demons who look like drow but are spiders....

I think the point is that the level of "interesting things" depends largely on how much time the DM puts into designing the encounters.

I like the Elemental Chaos, not because it's some Inner Plane soup, but because you can still run all those Inner Plane adventures in one location now. You can still delve down into some large chunk of elemental earth, it just now has lava streams, and veins of ice melting to create passageways, and pools of acid corroding away the rock to reveal large deposits of crystal - all without invoking a half-dozen extraplanar portals to do so.

[Tiki Snakes]

I'm not quite sure about that. I mean, I've designed an adventure on the Paraelemental Plane of Ice. It had a cult of humans trying to colonize it, complete with animals, snowgrass (magical grass which grew in cold) and heat crystals. To the north, across the fields of a constant blizzard, Ice Devils were working with Frost Giants and Cryonax to corrupt the entire plane. Good elementals and Immoths were allied with the cultists, but connections were tense because the snowgrass was spreading across the southern "continent" and causing problems for the natives.

Conversely, what does the Demonweb have? Drow, and spiders, and spider-drow, and drow-spiders, and spider-demons and demon-drow, and demons who look like drow but are spiders....

I think the point is that the level of "interesting things" depends largely on how much time the DM puts into designing the encounters.

I like the Elemental Chaos, not because it's some Inner Plane soup, but because you can still run all those Inner Plane adventures in one location now. You can still delve down into some large chunk of elemental earth, it just now has lava streams, and veins of ice melting to create passageways, and pools of acid corroding away the rock to reveal large deposits of crystal - all without invoking a half-dozen extraplanar portals to do so.

The original point was more along the lines of the following comparison;

With work, you've turned what by default is safe to assume as a potentially empty wasteland of ice, into a setting with a couple of cultures (that could happily exist entirely unchanged in the north of a normal planet or matirial plane) and a decent conflict to set up a campaign or at least sub-arc around.
Without any work at all the Demonwebs already have Lolth, Drow, Spiders and Driders all doing their thing. It'd take a lot less effort to build a campaign as compelling as that in the Plane of Ice(and grass?) above.

I agree with you all over the place about the elemental chaos though. Just seems more convenient in a reeses kind of way.

[oxinabox]

As for the Paraelemental Plane of Mist, what is it like? Clouds, rainbows, with the occasional wandering hurricane? Is it kind of like a Plane of Storms? It's nice to name the various planes, but if you don't have an idea of what they're like, they aren't too interesting to visit.

The Plane of Mist is neat I like the concept i have for it.

It has gravery, well at least near the border of water.
The graverty gets lesser when your away from the plane, until at apoint it is as directionless as the plane of air.

nonairborn races/veicheal sail upon the the water/mist border.
through massed fogs.
It's very umm, stylised...
Imagin the great sailing ships, sailing the milling fogs.

Near the border with the plane of lightning (also known as the plain of storm, paraplane between positive and air) it is stormy.

Where there are 'pockets' of positive energy, there are fantastic rainbows.


...
I have to rewrite all the complete border's again...
eg smoke ans steam and mist and air share a border

[PairO'Dice Lost]

With work, you've turned what by default is safe to assume as a potentially empty wasteland of ice,

Aha. Here's the disconnect.

If you look at the Planescape material, the interesting thing about the Outer Planes is what the plane is, while the interesting things about the Inner Planes are what the planes have. With the Outer Planes, yeah there are some interesting places like Jangling Hiter in the Hells or Twelvetrees in the Abyss, but the whole plane is the focus; in contrast, the Inner Planes are fire, fire everywhere or water all over the place...but you have the City of Brass or other fantastic locations as the focus of everything. The various Dustmen citadels on the Plane of Dust provide several hooks; on the Plane of Salt you have Citadel Sealt (one of the four citadels of the Doomguard, ruled by Greater Doomlord Roth), Tor Salinus (the lair of a brine drake who rules much of the plane), and Ecstasy's Death (a psionic artifact stolen by an illithid psion, hidden away somewhere on the plane, guarded by a huge number of enthralled natives under the illithid's control).

Think of it like Dark Sun or Dragonlance vs. Ravenloft or Eberron. On Athas you can go to the cities and the gladiator games and such, but a big focus of the setting is hiding from the Dragon Kings on the Silt Sea, searching out signs of life and druid groves, and otherwise taking in the world; in Dragonlance, there's a war on, so you're constantly on the move and seeing new things, and any individual city is a minor side note. In contrast, in Ravenloft the Land of the Mists is just that--a lot of random countryside you end up in after the mist takes you--but the real excitement is in the Domains of Dread; in Eberron you can travel the countryside, but apart from the Mournland there's not much on Khorvaire outside civilization, so Sharn and the other major cities hold all the excitement.


On a side note, I found a similar thread on the WotC boards, and someone there had the following to say:

Well, this brings us to the other issue on the planar changes, ie that alignment has become a toothless dog. It has gone from being a very real thing, that people would fight cosmic wars over, to being something that is purely flavour. In planescape you really could have a flag saying "we fight for lawful neutral" and go marching off to slap those who didnt agree. It wasnt just a state of mind, it was a physical thing and you could reach out and touch evil, good, law and chaos as elemental forces.

It's still a change that people are struggling with. The boards are littered with dm's whose players are finding themselves "free" of alignment "restrictions" only to find that they forget about being paladins and go on murderous, selfish rampages. Alignment wasnt a prison, it was a support and now there are players whose roleplaying is going to pieces because they arent given any form of downside for what are otherwise terrible actions.

The planes were meant to be alien places and the alignments were meant to do strange things to the people who lived there. Mechanus for example was order personified, to the point of being pretty crazy, but at least it made sense. It suited some people to live there and people would fight for its banner. Modrons themselves were very cool creatures. The alignment gave the place its flavour.

The planes now seem to have been "humanised". People in this topic are demanding that every plane is somewhere you can visit and interact with easily, otherwise, apparently, it isnt worth having in the game setting. Alignment has become similarly humanised, to the point where human choices are now more important than cosmic poles of significance. You can tell your god to get stuffed and still get your spells, you can pretty much do as you please and the gods or planes are now second to player whim.

The planes were once scary, wierd, alien places that didnt play by the usual rules. Now they seem to be "tamed" and that makes them very boring to a great many people.

I felt this was an interesting take on things. Thoughts?

[Yakk]

You could steal a page out of Exalted.

Elemental Poles. There is the Elemental Pole of Fire, the Elemental Pole of Earth, the Elemental Pole of Air, the Elemental Pole of Water.

A Plane of Fire (not the Plane of Fire, but a Plane of Fire) is a Plane which mainly exists under the influence of the Elemental Pole of Fire. Each such Plane also has influence from the other Poles.

A Plane of Magma would then be a Plane in which Earth and Fire both have strong influence.

The topology (way things are connected) of the Elemental Planes is nearly arbitrary. You can walk from one Plane to another quite often, but attempting to make a 2 or 3 dimensional large-scale map with distances matching is impossible.

A given Plane can be small, large or anywhere in between in extent. In fact, where one Plane starts and another ends is sometimes quite negotiable -- and other times, quite obvious.

In the Elemental Planes, there are Ley Lines and Ley Crossroads. Ley Lines are also known as "strait paths". Along these lines power flows, as do many cross-planar travellers. Crossroads are particularly dangerous.

Travelling between planes without a prepared destination is hard. It is much easier if you travel along Ley Lines as they cross the planes. Arriving at a Crossroad makes long-distance, or Ley-Line free, travel easier as well. This is one of the reasons why Crossroads are dangerous -- you never know what might drop in.

Now, while the above is true in general, in specific there is a The Plane of Fire. It is a domain that crosses many 'actual' planes and joins them up -- almost all strongly influenced by the Pole of Fire. It is, however, more of a political than physical phenomena. Political boundaries often end up shadowing physical ones -- such as the tendency for real-life nations and provinces to end at rivers, as it was hard to justify and project power to the other side -- so many of the barriers of something like The Plane of Fire do align with relatively thin connections.

---

The above is a mixture of the 4e Elemental Chaos, and the pre-4e Inner Planes. You get areas that can be called "the Plane of Magma" (or whatever weird combination you want), but at the same time it is easy to justify a region in The Plane of Fire with walkable ground and breathable air -- and even a giant ice mountain in the middle of a magma field.

If you assume that Ley Lines tend to 'radiate out' from the Elemental Poles, and that similar Planes are more likely to be connected that dissimilar ones, you also get some neat DM and Player-understandable topology to these more-chaotic Elemental Planes -- you have a reason to be in one spot, and not another, as the easiest way to (say) invade the sanctum of the Quasit you need to have a word with (who lives in a Plane of Magma) involves advancing along a particular Ley Line.

The idea of 'prepared destinations' brings to mind 4e teleportation circles, and general fantasy "summoning circles". Knowing the magical signature of a particular Crossroads lets you drop in at a particular spot in a plane (but not at any particular spot, making adventures easier to deal with) if it is needed. Naturally, doing this near a heavy elemental civilisation will result in you dropping in on an inwardly-facing fortress (which leads to finding secret Crossroads and the like, or having to travel along Ley Lines, or getting a team in to build a summoning/teleportation circle to get around an elemental demise's fortifications).

Because I left in "The Plane of Fire" as a political organisation, and allowed for arbitrary planes, fluff from Planescape can be put into the world. There is a Plane of Magma, Dust, Steam, Mud, Fire, Earth, Gems, Water, Ice... anything you, as the DM, wants.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The above is a mixture of the 4e Elemental Chaos, and the pre-4e Inner Planes. You get areas that can be called "the Plane of Magma" (or whatever weird combination you want), but at the same time it is easy to justify a region in The Plane of Fire with walkable ground and breathable air -- and even a giant ice mountain in the middle of a magma field.

[...]

Because I left in "The Plane of Fire" as a political organisation, and allowed for arbitrary planes, fluff from Planescape can be put into the world. There is a Plane of Magma, Dust, Steam, Mud, Fire, Earth, Gems, Water, Ice... anything you, as the DM, wants.

Very interesting. The basic idea comes from Exalted, you say? I keep seeing cool ideas from there; I really need to give that a look at some point.

[Yakk]

Very interesting. The basic idea comes from Exalted, you say? I keep seeing cool ideas from there; I really need to give that a look at some point.

Via Exalted: Exalted has 5 elemental poles in creation. As you approach each elemental pole, things get 'more that element' and 'less real'. Earth is at the center (and doesn't get less real -- the Pole of Earth is a mountain that goes up and up and up and up...).

The rest is a mish-mash of 4e Elemental Chaos, the Ley Line fantasy trope, and pre-4e D&D elemental cosmology, and some of the ideas posted by the OP in this thread (the Planes having many sides, etc). Instead of giving Planes sides, I had them be adjacent to each other (in an arbitrary way -- you could imagine walking into a cave in a Plane of Magma, and ending up in some Plane of Earth).

Teleportation and similar magics might work only within the same Plane -- or to keep it ambiguous what a Plane is, they might work less well as you "cross more Planes". So you would be able to teleport from some parts of a Magma Plane to nearby parts of an Earth Plane, and from some parts of a Fire Plane to some parts of a Magma Plane, but not be able to do it from Fire directly to Earth.

Unless, of course, you teleported from a Ley Line that led from Fire to a nearby Crossroads in Earth.

[HamsterOfTheGod]

@oxinabox

Good ideas. So good in fact, they were done before

There was a really old Dragon article with something similar. The geometry was a cube with positive and negative as opposite sides. And the 4 elements the other sides. This prevented "opposite" planes from meeting. The prime was the "inside" of the cube.

But there is nothing at all wrong with having "opposite" planes meeting and if you want to think of an appropriate geometry, I'm sure there is one in higher than 3 dimensions. If I remember one, I'll let you know. Edit: Not that you need a geometric model, but if you want one, just take the regular cube described above with positive and negative on opposite sides and the 4 elements as the rest of the faces. Make the opposing elements opposing faces, ir Air-Earth, Water-Fire. Make a hole in each face. Then simply connect the opposite faces with a tube. The tubes are where the opposite faces intersect. The tubes themselves may or may not intersect as you wish. If you want more sillyness, you could even have designations where any three planes meet, eg positive + air + fire = radiance + smoke + lightning = plasma.

By the way, where positive and negative, you could make that the Plane of Shadow. And if you that, you could still have the Plane of Shadow be a transitive plane between the inner planes alone or alos transitive to the outer planes.

[Tiki Snakes]

Aha. Here's the disconnect.-snip-

That's quite an interesting take on things, and what you say makes a lot of sense.

I'm not sure I agree with the implied conclusion though, because all of that stuff still has a place whether it's in 'the plane of dust' or a huge, dust-choked section of the elemental chaos.

The implications of the old planes as places to be and explore are, indeed, interesting in certain ways, but the simple fact of them being in some weird way symmetrical, almost symbolically arranged but essentially seperate shards of reality was never really the relevant part.

As for the quoted bit, also an intruiging opinion. I agree with it not at all, of course. ^_^
Firstly, I'm glad alignment has been neutered, it's a crutch at best in my experience, (I've personally noted that to a large degree, my own nebulous community of RPers tend to actually Roleplay much more genuinely in systems without 'alignment'.) If people are no longer capable of remembering who their character is without the old system, they can just write down the old notation in the alignment bit and get on with it. At the end of the day though, breaking character is the problem, and not really anything to do with whether or not the universe recognises that they have.

Also, I'm pretty sure the alignment is the least interesting element of Mechanus. It's an entire plane filled with impossibly vast clockwork machinary doing god alone knows what, populated by weird little pseudo-robotic weirdos. I don't know a hell of a lot about it, but whether it gives a bonus or penalty to spells with certain keywords really does mean diddlysquat to me and my interest in it, in comparison. :)