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  1. - Top - End - #31
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    danielxcutter's Avatar

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    Default Re: What is in YOUR Far Realms ?

    Quote Originally Posted by Segev View Post
    For me, there're a few key points about the Far Realms: they're where Aberrations come from (or at least are largely the cause of them), they have a certain Lovecraftian aesthetic, and they're big on psionics. This sterilized list neatly (and thus probably unsatisfyingly) explains the various horrors that we see extend from the concept.

    Because outer planes and the Great Wheel are all about philosophy and the way minds conceive reality, the nature of the Far Realms juxtaposed to the Great Wheel is important to consider. The possibilities include them breaking all the rules of the Great Wheel, or them having a disconnected but relatable place relative to it. The former sounds satisfying at first, but ultimately means you can't really achieve the coherent Lovecraftian aesthetic that typifies aberrations, and you have to wonder why psionics are a thing with them when a Far Realm that breaks all rules would have no themes at all. So, we're left with the latter.

    There already is a "plane of thought." It's the Silver Sea, the Astral Plane. But that's a vast foggy expanse with its own rules, punctuated by islands of god-corpses. It's not very like the Far Realms at all...or is it?

    It's characterized as a "sea." And while it's often depicted as this sea between the inner planes and the outer wheel, what if the whole of the Great Wheel - inner and outer planes both - are an island within the sea, and the Far Realms are really the distant shores?

    The Outer Planes represent cosmic principles of philosophy that give form to or reflect archetypes of comprehensible thought. They are the boundary of what can be rationally conceived within the rules of reality as the Prime Material Plane knows them. Shapes them. Embodies them.

    The Far Realms as a scattered concept would be other realms with rules where our thought processes, our means of conceiving reality, don't make sense.

    Only imagination - often mad imagination working on rules that aren't rational - can even hope to conceive of, and therefore touch upon, any of the Far Realms. Those realms aren't chaotic Limbo-swirls; they're alien laws and truths that are antithetical to grasping reality as we dwell in it.

    The reason psionics are so much a part of the Far Realms and what comes through is that the ability of an aberration - a thing descended from the Far Realms - to even exist in our reality is the ability of it to conceive of itself in a way that, for its origination Realm, is utterly mad. To bridge the gap requires psionic power because thought and conception is the only thing that can bring into being the surreal and unreal.

    You aren't driven mad by the Far Realms; to get to them, you must already be mad. Magic that lets you get to an outer plane without matching its philosophy is one thing; you can exist there while being unlike it by seeing it as a material place. You can't even use magic to conceive of a Far Realm as a material place while you visit it; it just doesn't work, conceptually, and what you do see in your imperfect attempts will leave you queasy and uncomfortable unless you're insane enough to actually perceive the way it works. And that way is too alien to just be a list of rational rules that are different from where you came from; the rules aren't rational by any standard our minds can conceive.

    Things coming from those Realms are not just thriving on Evil, like a Fiend would; they're unable to process the notion of good or evil. They are mad by their own standards, let alone ours, by the time they can be perceived in the Great Wheel's cosmology.
    Are Far Realms creatures big on psionics, though?

    One of the iconic psionic monsters in D&D is the illithid, the mind flayers... which actually aren't from the Far Realms at all, but from a possible future(according to Lords of Madness, it is implied that said future is not set in stone, and the flayers know this).

    There are templates that indicate that the creature is descended or at least touched by the Far Realms, Pseudonatural(both the weak LoM version and the much stronger ELH version) and Half-Farspawn... but those aren't psionic either. Half-Farspawn at least do get mind-affecting spell-like abilities like touch of idiocy orscintillating pattern, and I imagine you could easily flavor stuff like blur or blink to be relevant to their unnatural progenitors... but all of those still duplicating spells and not psionic powers; aside from concealing amorpha and the telekinetic line there aren't even good psionic equivalents. Heck, not only are Half-Farspawn outsiders instead of aberrations, it's explicitly possible for an aberration to have either of those templates.

    I'd argue that psionics and aberrations aren't as tightly connected as it initially seems. In Elder Evils, Pandorym and Ragnorra are the representatives of such archetypes, but they couldn't be any more different if they tried. Pandorym fills the "ominous psionic creature from outside our known reality" niche, while Ragnorra embodies the "causes grotesque mutations and warps creatures into aberrations" type. (I'd also argue they missed a golden opportunity to tie Pandorym with the quori and Ragnorra with the daeklyr in the Eberron adaption ideas, but oh well.)

    That being said? If you go with the classic "aberrations are from the Far Realm and use psionics a lot"... your explanation would work quite well. It's quite possible that mortal-created aberrations were based off the ones directly descended from the Far Realms... it'd certainly explain why elans are both psionic and aberrations, for example.
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  2. - Top - End - #32
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    Default Re: What is in YOUR Far Realms ?

    I think of them as overlaping realities. Everything is possible there. Among other things, they are populated by multidimensional things, that occupy more than one layer at a time. The more something is translucent the further away from your layer it is. Close layers can be mistaken for your layer.

    Moving between layers needs a succesfull will save (the DC depends on the layer). Magic can also happen as an act of will and consumes no spell slot there, but also has a chance to go teribly wrong (10% chance per spell level). The rules for how magic works is different accross diferent layers.

    Each Layer is also a gateway to an other Universe, and reflects the Universe's general properties and population. One could (theoretically) cast the Gate spell on a layer of an other Universe and go to that universe.

    Literally everything is possible in the Far Realms. The further away you wonder from your realm's Layer, the more Improbable things you'll see. From Advanced civilisations of Tables with pet Chairs, to entirelly allien physiologies of roughly humanoid shaped Dinosaurs that want to conquer the multiverse. Among them, is the Mind Flayer Empire, governed by a Hivemind Network of Elder Brains that is called the Mind of the Elder Horror; Ofcourse, this is only one version of their Empire one may accidentally stumble uppon, with countless counterparts. Some even have communication between them.

    Overall, the Far Realms are realms of Possibility. Most things in there either never happened, or haven't happened yet. So, it is not unusual to meet your future Grand-Grand son or a Brother who was never Born in your own homeworld's layer. But beware; The things that hunt there are aware of those things, and may disguise themselves as such in order to find easy pray.

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  3. - Top - End - #33
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    Default Re: What is in YOUR Far Realms ?

    I’ve actually considered this a few times and for the most part, the far realms are actually mostly empty. Hostile to life, like outer space is to us, where things are as far away as you can get from magic and wonder. It’s not that chaotic, or lawful in nature. It’s not even evil or good. It’s just other.

    The vast majority of the space beyond spaces is just an empty void, maddeningly without anything adventurey for many lightyears of space. No sound, no light, not even pressure or dust. Pretty peaceful, despite the sensory deprivation making you hyperaware of the constant beating of your heartbeat and the burning crackling of whatever magics you have used to survive in this very dead place. Not even undeath is out here.

    And then you get to the tourist areas. The Flumphs are benevolent for the most part, and seek to prevent harm. Others aren’t so nice.

    Much like the material plane, everyone has their preferences. And how do these preferences come about?

    Because the Far Realms touches Dream. The Diaboli know in their daily fending of otherworldly abberations away from the dreamscapes that threaten the dreamheart that the Far Realms was once a meaningless void of non-reality until the sheer potential of the nothing-that-could-become-something became known to the Dreamers. And suddenly, it took on form.

    And so entire worlds are forming. With air! And physics! And living creatures, crude facsimiles of the material, from rabbits on stumps surrounded by tall ocular grasses to mimics and beholders to witness it all until they lose interest, reflecting the observation of the dreamers who sparked the change in the once unmaterial realm. And then, after witnessing it in horrifying visions of the sheer potentiality, mages, clerics decided to go there.
    Land dwelling ones, who see the sea as a somewhat alien space to that which they live in.

    And so the Far Realm, this outer world of imagination bleedout, is incredibly alien but only in a way that those land dwelling people think is alien. It’s not a new kind of alienity like a fractal space where traversal is solely through dying to move forward and being reborn to go back, or you have to constantly change shape to survive in a very solid space or you have to be the literal embodiment of mathematics to get past the tollbooths or… anything weird.

    So it’s a sort of world beyond worlds, the blood splatter of Dream’s wounds scattered into the void.

    The places where maybe, just maybe, the world, the oyster that it was… Is surrounded by a lot of octopi. With sharp psychic rocks to crack it open.
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  4. - Top - End - #34
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    Default Re: What is in YOUR Far Realms ?

    For me, the Far Realm is the primordial soup from which what is known as the universe arose. As it is now, imagine my Great Wheel as a mote of dust inside a soap bubble, which itself is part of an infinite bubblebath of what Material creatures call "Madness", actually just raw Concept, in a way similar to the Astral Plane combined with Limbo. Bathing in this bath are uncountable "creatures", knots of condensed awareness that coalesce bodies of distilled probability and concept drawn from the endless ocean around themselves. Obiyrths are among these, one of the few castes of Outer Entity with any awareness or stake in the goings-on of the Material Plane, mostly a grudge against the "gods" and demonkind. They are a demon's demon, and each and every one is associated with a primal phobia. For example, Dagon for fear of the dark depths of the ocean, and Obox-Ob for fear of vile infestation. They are the, in fact, the direct inspiration for such fears - when connecting to the mortal races, the gods saw the obiyriths and were so shaken and repelled that their fear imprinted on their followers.

    Merely from speaking to a holographic sending-like effect from one of Obox-ob's lieutenants, one of my players' characters has contracted severe entomophobia.

    However, the more I think about it, the more I feel like a sufficiently powerful/clever entity (equivalent to an anarch for limbo, and likely something beyond or at least wholly apart from traditional divinity) could probably use the raw soup of the Far Realm to create...anything. At all. It is raw creation, after all.
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  5. - Top - End - #35
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    Default Re: What is in YOUR Far Realms ?

    Quote Originally Posted by Puke View Post
    SO, your turn, how are your Far Realms ?
    A nasty sundae with a horrible cherry on top. For starters, most forms of magic (especially clerical) don't work there but psionics does/can for reasons I'll explain. The rule of threes doesn't exist, nor do conventional elements unless you or more likely a much stronger entity want them to. Instead there is only Mind and Flesh, and both are infinitely mutable in the worst possible ways, so psionics works because its a much smaller expression of a Mind in an existence filled with it.

    In terms of its denizens: the Elder Evils in the LoM sense. Sentient psionic swarms of thousands of purple tentacles with a single eye at the end, which spray digestive fluid and absorb liquified prey through their skins. The base creatures of some of the Elder Evils (which are in no way pushovers in their own right). Abominations and protofiends that dropped out of existence willingly because they found time and other forms of order too revolting to tolerate.

  6. - Top - End - #36
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    Default Re: What is in YOUR Far Realms ?

    On psionics it kinda makes sense since most depictions of psionics in d&d run off your internal reserves. Normal magic draws off your local environment, psionics is just you. So if you’re so far outside normal realms that you’re in the fantasy equivalent of truly deep space where even light may struggle to reach it and physics might be weird, psionics is the magic equivalent of running off your own battery energy rather than solar panels and extracting fuel and such.
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