Weird other dimensions and planes

[S@tanicoaldo]

Dimensional travel has always been my favorite possibility in fantasy.

Too bad most of the time those other planes just look like earth with something more magical like floating islands.

I'm talking about really weird, alien and outwardly places, like the dimensions Doctor strange goes.

Any ideas on how to translate that to games? The weirdness on those places is mostly visual, how to make a place feel like another dimensions entirely.

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[TheYell]

Fly or Swim check to move around?

[Darth Ultron]

Well, most editions Manual of the Planes, contain rules for this sort of thing. And while most places follow the Hollywood Bland ''oh it's just like Earth'', the rules for wacky stuff is there.

2E had lots of zero gravity type rules for other planes, and lots of other rules that made a lot of planes very hazardous for folk like humans to visit. 3E really toned the planes down to ''just like Earth'', and I don't know much about 4/5E, but I'm sure it has only gotten worse and more normal.

Visual is a lot in the description. You just need to describe things all weird.

[Millstone85]

Start with a demiplane, like the room with no outside that is created by the spell of the same name.

Then make a plane out of a lot of such demiplanes, which appear to be not so much next to each other as they are phasing through each other.

When one demiplane has no gravity, another does and a third has gravity that is at an angle from that of the second. Other aspects of the environment are similarly all over the place.

Strange creatures move from one demiplane to another.

The demiplanes themselves appear to be growing like plants, moving like animals, or both. New demiplanes are birthed while others are devoured.

[Eldan]

Well, most editions Manual of the Planes, contain rules for this sort of thing. And while most places follow the Hollywood Bland ''oh it's just like Earth'', the rules for wacky stuff is there.

2E had lots of zero gravity type rules for other planes, and lots of other rules that made a lot of planes very hazardous for folk like humans to visit. 3E really toned the planes down to ''just like Earth'', and I don't know much about 4/5E, but I'm sure it has only gotten worse and more normal.

Visual is a lot in the description. You just need to describe things all weird.

For D&D, you want Planescape. An entire setting about taking the strangest parts of the Manual of the Planes and running with them. It produces some gloriously weird stuff.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

A world like that last picture in the OP, except the fabric of the universe consists entirely of ladders, just crisscrossing everywhere. Small ladders, big ladders, houses build on ladder out of materials mined from ladders. Gravity tends to fluctuate, generally pulling to the largest ladder in the vicinity. So it works like our gravity basically, but stronger for a smaller mass/more localized. The plane is inhabited, wildlife wise, by snakes, lots and lots of snakes. Huge monstrous snakes that roam some of the less densely laddered areas, tiny snakes that get everywhere, boots, cups, noses of sleeping people, you name it. And everything in between. O, and there is a local variation on Samual L Jackson.

Yes, that last one is where this idea started.

[Khedrac]

Another weird one is the Immortals (gold box) D&D set astral plane...

The plane is 5 dimensional, most mortals are 3 dimensional occupying dimensions 1 to 3 (a few come from 3 to 5).
Immortals are 4D (so 1 to 4).
The few native inhabitants are occupy dimensions 2 to 4.

In the plane everyone's perception is shifted by one step, but their physical form is not.
This means that fellow mortals all look two-dimensional (and targetting AoE spells is very tricky).
Actual astral plane natives look normal (as do immortals).

[Shamash]

Make another dimension that is noothing but a dark void full of doors, make sure that the doors are all of different colors and materials and that they should always use the red wooden door.

Inside the first red door there is 100 more doors, after that 1000 after that 10000 after that 100000 and so on...

After they get to the place they need to go and got what they need to get, they have to go back, but they just relize now that the red doors they used were not red wooden doors in the way out, and they have no idea of how to get back.

That's weird.

[Jay R]

I suggest that you read Larry Niven's Ringworld, Heinlein's "And He Built a Crooked House", Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar series for ideas.

Or read any fantasy novel not based on D&D rules, and magic works like that on that plane.

The weirdest plane of all? One where people aren't defined as Good or Evil separate from their actions, and there is no such thing as a Lawful or Chaotic being. Alignment Detection and Protection spells would have no meaning, and good and evil actions are good and evil, just like (gasp!) here.

[Mechalich]

Keep in mind that in a game, you have to represent anything you create with rules, and additionally, your characters have to be able to survive in whatever environment you ultimately create. 2e Planescape had all sorts of impossibly weird locations, particularly in the Inner Planes and in some of the more obscure Outer Planar layers (lower layers of Acheron and Pandemonium for example). The problem was that they tended to be almost impossibly deadly with the requirement that you needed multiple 4th level or higher spells just to survive for a few minutes.

You also, with weird dimensions and odd realities, need to provide a reason for the players to go there. This was also a problem that Planescape had, in that Sigil got so much attention compared to the rest of the setting people were inclined to just do all their adventuring in Sigil and not bothering voyaging to obscure locations full of nasty hazards with few rewards provided. So any crazy reality you create needs to offer some kind of boon to PCs who visit it.

[Perch]

I used some in my games:

-Fractal dimension.
Inspired by this bit of Rick and Morty and bit of sint seya where Hyoga is trapped in another dimensions and see his mirror self been multiplied that really stuck with me since my childhood, they explored a “floating inlands in the void” kin d of dimension, but the point is that each time they used magic they divided the reality, so it got to the point where we were having six different groups doing different things at the same place.
In the end when they all left, all six versions, they all remembered six different versions of events.

-Dream bubble.
This one is inspired by the dream bubbles in homestuck. The entire dimension is inside a spherical structure floating on the astral sea.

-Vortex world.
Inspired by SMT: Nocturne, the world is inside a hollow sphere, the sun is in the center of it and you walk around the interior surface, it’s a really neat concept, that is hard to put in worlds.

Spoiler: illustration

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[GungHo]

I use Stephen King, David Lynch, Lewis Carroll, Neil Gaiman, HR Geiger, Max Ernst, and MC Escher for dimensional weirdness inspiration. I would emphasize having a theme or understanding why something is weird before just throwing stuff in there, or you'll end up just distracting everyone.

[Bohandas]

Non euclidean map. Possibly the simplest wat to do this, on a square grid, is to introduce a 90 degree angular defect into the floorplan. This means, simply, that you cut one quadrant off of your map and then act as if the (now-exposed) edges of the adjoining quadrants were joined to each other

EDIT:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/qu...ngular-deficit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_defect

[S@tanicoaldo]

Non euclidean map. Possibly the simplest wat to do this, on a square grid, is to introduce a 90 degree angular defect into the floorplan. This means, simply, that you cut one quadrant off of your map and then act as if the (now-exposed) edges of the adjoining quadrants were joined to each other

EDIT:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/qu...ngular-deficit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_defect

I know all that, but again that's visual, how do I make it feel weird by describing it?

[Bohandas]

If you have a player following along making their own map they're gonna realize that something's up but probably won't be able to pinpoint exactly what

[TeChameleon]

I know all that, but again that's visual, how do I make it feel weird by describing it?

Depending on your narrative style and your players, you may not have to put in a lot of effort into that; if you manage to make the plane weird mechanically, just tell the players that they feel something 'off' and then enforce the bizarre mechanics completely matter-of-factly. Pretty much every time, things that the players figure out themselves have more 'punch' than just something you described.

Basically a gamer variant on 'show, don't tell'.

[Jay R]

Non euclidean map. Possibly the simplest wat to do this, on a square grid, is to introduce a 90 degree angular defect into the floorplan. This means, simply, that you cut one quadrant off of your map and then act as if the (now-exposed) edges of the adjoining quadrants were joined to each other.

I once created a dungeon that was originally the castle of the Mathemagician. One level was a Klein bottle. Another was a torus.

One long corridor was a Möbius strip. Go down it once and you'd come out left-handed.

Five levels in a row were the surfaces of the five Platonic solids.

I know all that, but again that's visual, how do I make it feel weird by describing it?

If they aren't drawing a map, that would be hard to do. I did it in the 1970s, when every player brought, and used, graph paper.

[Chronos]

An angle deficit will just put the plane onto the surface of a cube-- Most players will probably figure that out pretty quickly. Instead, give them an angle surplus, with five square rooms arranged around each vertex. And yes, make them make their own maps.

For best effect, make all of the rooms squares of the same size, so they'll be confident in their maps, and won't think that things are just not to scale due to poor art skills.

[Eldan]

Harbinger House does something a bit like that.

It's an old Planescape adventure. It's set in an asylum for people who were about to ascend to godhood, but were driven mad by the process. It also has a lot of rooms that connect to each other in impossible ways.

[Bohandas]

An angle deficit will just put the plane onto the surface of a cube-- Most players will probably figure that out pretty quickly. Instead, give them an angle surplus, with five square rooms arranged around each vertex. And yes, make them make their own maps.

For best effect, make all of the rooms squares of the same size, so they'll be confident in their maps, and won't think that things are just not to scale due to poor art skills.

Wouldn't it be a cone?

[Jay R]

An angle deficit will just put the plane onto the surface of a cube-- Most players will probably figure that out pretty quickly. Instead, give them an angle surplus, with five square rooms arranged around each vertex. And yes, make them make their own maps.

For best effect, make all of the rooms squares of the same size, so they'll be confident in their maps, and won't think that things are just not to scale due to poor art skills.

As Doc Brown said, "You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally." They are squares, and if you go around four of them, you're back where you started - but one level down.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Another weird one is the Immortals (gold box) D&D set astral plane...

The plane is 5 dimensional, most mortals are 3 dimensional occupying dimensions 1 to 3 (a few come from 3 to 5).
Immortals are 4D (so 1 to 4).
The few native inhabitants are occupy dimensions 2 to 4.

In the plane everyone's perception is shifted by one step, but their physical form is not.
This means that fellow mortals all look two-dimensional (and targetting AoE spells is very tricky).
Actual astral plane natives look normal (as do immortals).

The Gold Box Immortal D&D has the best weird dimensional / planar freakiness - and all explained in a dry, pseudo-factual style, like an encyclopaedia.
I was just starting out in 'A' Level Physics class (senior high school) when I read it for the first time - and I think I was only able to make any sense out of what I was reading because of that class!

[Bohandas]

Wait. Do you mean "Gold Box" like the line of D&D computer games?

[GungHo]

Wait. Do you mean "Gold Box" like the line of D&D computer games?

In this case, no. The gold box was also one of the D&D boxed sets, Immortals. Basic (Mentzer, 1983) D&D level progression was separated by strata... Basic (1-3, red), Expert (4-14, blue), Companion (15-25, green), Master (26-36, black), Immortal (epic. gold).

[Beneath]

Wouldn't it be a cone?

Not if every vertex is like that.

Then you have something not entirely unlike a hyperbolic plane, but on a hyperbolic plane a point is surrounded by 360 degrees (just like in euclidean space) so a point surrounded by five regular quadrilaterals would have regular quadrilaterals of corner angle 72 degrees (and a net angular defect of 72 degrees and so an area of 4pi/10 times the square of the characteristic length of the plane) and here the vertices are surrounded by 450 degrees while every other point in the space play-acts at being euclidean

[FreddyNoNose]

Dimensional travel has always been my favorite possibility in fantasy.

Too bad most of the time those other planes just look like earth with something more magical like floating islands.

I'm talking about really weird, alien and outwardly places, like the dimensions Doctor strange goes.

Any ideas on how to translate that to games? The weirdness on those places is mostly visual, how to make a place feel like another dimensions entirely.

Spoiler

Show

Well one way I did elemental planes was using different colors for different things. Example, suppose the elemental plane were represented as different densities of materials from that plane. I would use different colors for the density and symbols if you would to represent materials types (rock, stone, metal, base-material and such). Imagine graph paper with each square like this.

Now characters had "elemental earth number" (EEN) which represented a number which could be compared to the density and allowed movement (vision/hear/smell/etc) based upon rules. IIRC, dwarf were closer to earth (mountains/mining) and got a bonus and elf got a penalty. If your EEN was higher than the density you could move through it, if it was higher by some amount I can't recall, you could see through (sense through it if you will). Material type made a difference too but my memory is failing me at this moment what the specifics were.

So you could get a situation where a some characters could pass but others couldn't through a given square. Oh, what will the party do? The EEN, could also be affected by spells, items, and other fancy stuff. There was some spell modification going on as well.

This was done back in 79-81 time frame. If I were to do the above today, the maps would be digital and would experiment printing different versions of the maps each based on a density number for faster DMing. ex: Here is the sheet for the 60 density characters and the 80 character ones and enough to cover various spells and such.

IIRC, the air and water planes had movement (ex: blowing wind, currents) that could push characters around.

[Chronos]

Oh, and the Astral Plane is at least nine dimensional, not five (since it connects to other planes which are three dimensional, and which lie displaced from each other in at least six different orthogonal directions). My ruling is generally that creatures native to the plane consider that perfectly normal, creatures with innate planar travel abilities that would enable them to visit the Astral find it weird but are able to tolerate it, spells (etc.) like Astral Projection and Astral Caravan generally feed the subject a sanitized 3-dimensional version that they're able to comprehend, and anyone who ends up on the Astral Plane without the benefit of an ongoing spell like that is at risk of insanity from trying to comprehend it