Elemental Plane of Air as a Gas Giant?

[Babale]

Has anyone ever played with the idea of the elemental plane of Air having pockets of super dense air which is itself an environmental hazard?

[Eldan]

I'd have to look it up in the old books, but Planescape had a pretty diverse list of hazards and environments for most elemental planes. Gasses, certainly, but I'm not sure about pressure.

[LudicSavant]

Random idea: The cosmologists are wrong, like those who once thought the sun revolved around the earth. The "material plane" is not the center of the cosmos, but just a blip of land floating atop the vastness of the Elemental Plane of Water.

The plane of earth is a rocky planet. The plane of air is a gas giant. The plane of water is just where we already are (it's truly ruled by aboleths and the like, they just don't care about us in our little weird dry corners). The plane of fire is a hothouse planet.

[MrZJunior]

Random idea: The cosmologists are wrong, like those who once thought the sun revolved around the earth. The "material plane" is not the center of the cosmos, but just a blip of land floating atop the vastness of the Elemental Plane of Water.

The plane of earth is a rocky planet. The plane of air is a gas giant. The plane of water is just where we already are (it's truly ruled by aboleths and the like, they just don't care about us in our little weird dry corners). The plane of fire is a hothouse planet.

What if the elemental plane of air was just the atmosphere and extended upwards above the plane of water?

[gkathellar]

You're thinking too small. Traditionally (at least on the Great Wheel), the elemental planes are infinite, which rules out a spherical geometry. One could plausibly find gas giants in the Plane of Air.

That said, it also sort of is one, at least in the sense that matters. Gas giants don't have geography or geology. They have weather.



We think of weather as something transient or even random, but even here on Earth it tends (or has tended) to be cyclical and possible to map in three dimensions. On a gas giant this tendency something else entirely, with weather systems orders of magnitude larger than our planet, which may be anywhere from 350+ to billions of years old. There are parts of the Plane of Air matching that description exactly. So in the from an experiential perspective - "what is it like to be on the Plane of Air" - gas giants seem like a great inspiration, because they operate at a scale which for the purposes of a human explorer might as well be infinite.

What if the elemental plane of air was just the atmosphere and extended upwards above the plane of water?

That's not unlike the way 4E handles it, in which discrete elemental planes are discarded in favor of a single maelstrom.

I once wrote up a flat world where traveling far enough in any direction would lead to an elemental plane. Keep flying up, and you'd eventually find the Plane of Air (digging down would get you to the Plane of Earth).

Random idea: The cosmologists are wrong, like those who once thought the sun revolved around the earth. The "material plane" is not the center of the cosmos,

FWIW, Planescape already eschews that notion. The Material Plane is interesting and it's different, but the Great Wheel has no actual center on account of being infinite in all dimensions.

[MrZJunior]

That's not unlike the way 4E handles it, in which discrete elemental planes are discarded in favor of a single maelstrom.

I once wrote up a flat world where traveling far enough in any direction would lead to an elemental plane. Keep flying up, and you'd eventually find the Plane of Air (digging down would get you to the Plane of Earth).

I played in a game like this once.

[Khedrac]

Random idea: The cosmologists are wrong, like those who once thought the sun revolved around the earth. The "material plane" is not the center of the cosmos, but just a blip of land floating atop the vastness of the Elemental Plane of Water.

Check out Glorantha - the world is a big cube of rock and earth floating in a probably infinite sea/river. Below the sea is the underworld from whence the creature of darkness came, above the air is the sky. So the north it gets colder and colder until one reaches the lands of the ice demons which to the south it gets hotter and hotter until beyond the burning desert are the lands of fire. East things get holy and west is where demigod races live. Just to confuse a hole got punched through the centre of the cube so the middle of the the surface is a vast sea flowing down the huge maelstrom. Of course Glorantha has a different set of elements: Darkness, Water, Earth, Sky/Fire, Air and Moon (Moon is debatable - some people argue it is and other that it is not) and elementals exist for all of them.

[Mechalich]

You're thinking too small. Traditionally (at least on the Great Wheel), the elemental planes are infinite, which rules out a spherical geometry. One could plausibly find gas giants in the Plane of Air.

The Inner Planes were established as having 'pockets' of material where they had been infiltrated by material from other inner planes. Some of these pockets were stable and had sustained boundaries, and some were partially integrated with their host planes. The table for randomly generating these pockets scaled up to something like 10,000 miles in diameter, which is comfortably planet-sized (albiet not gas giant size). A pocket of Smoke, Steam, Dust, Fire or even Lightning could easily have very gas giant like properties at such a scale.

[Clistenes]

In Spelljammer, several of the planets in Oerthspace were gas spheres, water spheres and fire spheres (their sun) whose insides were very similar to the Elemental Planes.