The Anarch, The Vile, The Axion, and The Exalt

[Sydonai]

The Paragons, the first beings to have anything that could be described as an alignment.

The Axiom came into existance first and the Anarch came into existance before the Axiom......yeah, they have a complicated relationship.

They are now "dead", as much as personified concepts can be at any rate. The Anarch's corpse formed the Ethereal Plane.
The Axiom's corpse formed the Astral Plane.
The Exalt's corpse formed the Positive Energy Plane and The Vile's corpse formed the Negative Energy Plane.

I say "corpse", but beings like these can't really die, so what if they started acting "alive" again.



(Just a homebrew idea for my next campaign, tell me what you think, am I crazy or what?)

[Eldan]

Well, to be honest, I don't really like the idea that you take the four most unaligned planes in DnD and make them the corpses of aligned creatures.
The Positive and Negative Energy planes are the forces of life and death, growth and decay, but not good and evil.
The Astral is the plane of thoughts and dreams. It is the non-space behind the cracks and curtains of all realities, the non-time outside the normal planes. It is, however, not lawful.
The ethereal is raw potential, the plane were things not are, but may yet come to be, where the raw essence of the elemental planes is spun and woven into matter. Now, while this may sound a little like chaos' creative aspect, it is also unaligned.

Alignment, on the other hand, is very much a thing of the outer planes, neither the transitive nor the elemental. Of course, you can just throw that overboard if you want, it's your world, after all, but I think that it would require a lot of changes to the established planes to do so.

Perhaps it would be simpler to just use the existing alignment planes? The deepest vortex of Limbo, where all the chaotic matter springs forth, where form and function are barely existent at all and merely transitory. The furthest cogs and wheels of Mechanus, where structure becomes so rigid that time is starting to stand still. Far down on Elysium, between the forgotten tombs and prisons of ancient evils and dangers and the abodes of greatest good. And the most depraved holes of the Grey Waste, where hopes and fears drain away, where even evil loses all it's passion and becomes a senseless grind, where evil springs forth not from ambition but from apathy...

[Zeta Kai]

The Paragons, the first beings to have anything that could be described as an alignment.

This is good.

The Axiom came into existance first and the Anarch came into existance before the Axiom......yeah, they have a complicated relationship.

This is very good. It's mythic without getting complex; a simple oxymoronic dichotomy that sets the opposed beings apart from later beings & each other. More of this would be a Good Thing.

They are now "dead", as much as personified concepts can be at any rate. The Anarch's corpse formed the Ethereal Plane.
The Axiom's corpse formed the Astral Plane.
The Exalt's corpse formed the Positive Energy Plane and The Vile's corpse formed the Negative Energy Plane.

Here's where it goes off the rails. I'm with Eldan on this one; leave the alignments to the Outer Planes, if at all possible. Demiplanes within the Inner Planes are fine, but the main planes themselves should be neutral ground, unless you have a great explanation. Earth, Air, Fire, & Water have no affiliations, & neither should Life, Death, Dreams, & Reality.

I say "corpse", but beings like these can't really die, so what if they started acting "alive" again.

This is back to good. Go with that.

(Just a homebrew idea for my next campaign, tell me what you think, am I crazy or what?)

Or what.

[The Mentalist]

I have to agree with Zeta. Great premise other than the alignment. I love the Anarch/Axiom bit.

And you're crazy, but good crazy.

[Sydonai]

These aren't just "Aligned beings", they are the reason alignments exist.

I wanted them to be unaligned planes, thats why I picked them. They aren't around anymore, so why should they have any effect on their corpses? The outer planes have an alignment, the elemental planes have an element, but the ohters......don't have anything. I chose the Positive Energy plane to give a reason to good clerics channeling positive energy beyond "I'm good so I heal stuff", the Negative Energy Plane is it's opposite so.....

The Astral Plane is related strongly to psions and psions are required to have a strictly ordered mind, they used to be Lawful-only. Then I tryed to think of the plane that was least like the Astral, it was either the Ethereal or the Shadow........

I wanted to show fading connections, these beings used to be the end-all be-all of their alignments and now they are hardly recognizable, I wanted an effect similar to culture-shock. I wanted to contemplate how they would react to the changes around them if they regained conciousness.

......Guess I failed.

[arguskos]

Actually, Sydonai, you didn't fail, you just missed something key: you picked the wrong planes.

See, Planescape hinted at this already. In the AD&D Planescape setting, alignment was a significantly more tangible thing. The Neutral planes you are looking for here would be Mechanus, Limbo, Hades, and Arboria or Elysium (never recall which one is the NG ideal). I mean, Planescape practically did this FOR you.

I think that avoiding the Outer Planes is a bad idea, given that they ARE the Alignment Planes! Your idea is excellent and novel, but you just misaimed with your planar choice, I think.

As for giving the Transitive Planes something... uh... well, given that there's only three, it's sorta tricky. Personally, I'd just call the Ethereal and Shadow Planes a consequence of the existence of the Prime and other Material Planes, and call the Astral the result of all the other planes interacting physically. That energy has to GO somewhere, and it bled off over time and created the Astral. Note that this paragraph is not canon anywhere, I just made it up cause it sounded cool.

[Eldan]

Well, I'd just think that the reason alignments exist would also be found on the aligned planes, no? These would be creatures that are older than the Progenitors of good, the Wind Dukes, the Obyrith or Baernoloth.
I'd imagine that if these beings don't really die they would, similarly to the still sorta-living corpses of the gods on the astral, "bleed" an aura of their alignment which would influence the territory around them. Why is Elysium good? Because the very essence of the plane is a once-living good creature. Quasi-living planes are not unknown either: the abyssal layers were speculated to have a kind of sentience.

Now, if you want these creatures to be transitive planes, which of course is also a very interesting idea, perhaps you could tie them more to concepts than alignments? Make them also the forces of life vs. death, and the reason those two are often connected with good and evil even though they aren't, and creation vs. the structured mind (or something... the astral doesn't *really* fit, even though it's a good opposite for the ethereal.)

Basically, while I think your idea is very interesting, my problem is that I don't really see the connection between these abstract, unaligned concepts and the alignments. If that connection can be created, you have a potentially great campaign on your hand.

What you should also think about: what are the cosmological effects of planes waking up, especially the transitives?
The minds of most creatures tie into the astral, dreams and thoughts resonate there, and teleportation and travel and trade between the outer planes go through it. If the astral develops a lawful consciousness, would it still let chaotic creatures travel through it? If not, that would have a huge influence on the blood war across the ring. If demons can not be summoned any longer, their recruitment of souls will suffer greatly.
Similarly for the ethereal and chaos: all matter must move through the ethereal before it can reach the material plane. The other planes will be less affected by that, since they don't have matter in the strict sense, only the spiritual equivalent. On the material, however, the effects of a sudden, chaotic imbalance of the elemental energies can be devastating.
Finally: evil creatures still have a life force and soul based on positive energy. If positive energy itself turns good, what happens to them? Plants need positive energy from the suns to grow. All death and decay stems from the negative. Do evil creatures not die any longer because the vile supports them? Or is just just the case that it doesn't care?


Another thing to think about: these creatures would be far above the scale of even epic player characters... how will the players interact with them? After all, the best story premise doesn't lead anywhere if the players can't do anything to influence it.