afroakuma's Planar Questions Thread! (You ask, I'll answer)

[afroakuma]

Why are they called Primes anyway?

Cause they're from the Prime Material Plane

[Coidzor]

Cause they're from the Prime Material Plane

Why are they called prime material planes rather than material planes, I suppose?

Or does Primes refer to multiple worlds within one single prime material plane?

Or is it just a memetic mutation of fanon not understanding the designation of prime to the main material plane in question during a campaign?

[afroakuma]

Why are they called prime material planes rather than material planes, I suppose?

The most common theory is that there are alternate Material Planes, some of which have slightly or radically different cosmologies linked to them. The one which is known to be the lynchpin of the Great Wheel cosmology is the "Prime."

Of course, the better reasons would be based on planar structure and terminology: in past editions, the Energy Planes were called the Positive & Negative Material Planes, respectively. The "Prime" Material Plane would be that plane which is composed of the ideal balance of Positive and Negative alongside the building blocks of matter.

Finally, as the sum of the Inner Planes and the origin of the Outer Planes, the Material Plane as we know it is the first truly "material" (composite and stable, rather than elemental) plane; while the Outer Planes are also "material," they derive their existence from that of the original Material Plane, which is therefore Prime.

So there you have it. Three theories to play with.

[willpell]

The most common theory is that there are alternate Material Planes, some of which have slightly or radically different cosmologies linked to them. The one which is known to be the lynchpin of the Great Wheel cosmology is the "Prime."

Therefore "Primes" is essentially only useful in referring to multiple cosmologies, correct? Nowhere within any one setting should there be more than one PMP?

[afroakuma]

Therefore "Primes" is essentially only useful in referring to multiple cosmologies, correct? Nowhere within any one setting should there be more than one PMP?

"Primes" is used to refer chiefly to those planewalkers who have come from the Material Plane (see: clueless Primes). "Alternate Primes" would make sense from the standpoint of discovering another Material Plane which links to the cosmology in the same fashion but is separate from the original Prime.

[Xefas]

The answer to this question will determine how much set-up I need for the actual one (a little bit, or none at all).

How much do you know about the White Wolf Exalted setting? Not mechanics or anything, just the setting.

[AuraTwilight]

On that note, the Far Realms and the Wyld are literally the same thing, right? I mean seriously, they are.

[afroakuma]

The answer to this question will determine how much set-up I need for the actual one (a little bit, or none at all).

How much do you know about the White Wolf Exalted setting? Not mechanics or anything, just the setting.

Zzzzzzzzzzzero.

Well, not zero, I gather it involves throwing universes at one another and equally ludicrous feats as a matter of course... but that's about it.

[Xefas]

On that note, the Far Realms and the Wyld are literally the same thing, right? I mean seriously, they are.

Sort of. Close to Creation, the Wyld is more like Limbo. It's weird as all heck, but a human can still sort of almost kinda grasp part of it. And if you're strong enough, you can even fool yourself into thinking you're using your will to meaningfully shape it a bit.

As you get farther out, into the Deep Wyld, you get something like the Far Realm.

[afroakuma]

So, Xefas, what can I do for you?

[silverwolfer]

The realm that fae and such come from The Feywild, is it an extension of the material plane like the shadow and ethereal planes?

[AuraTwilight]

Well, not zero, I gather it involves throwing universes at one another and equally ludicrous feats as a matter of course... but that's about it.

Exalted isn't quite that ridiculous.

It only involves throwing the cool parts of universes at each other.

[afroakuma]

The realm that fae and such come from The Feywild, is it an extension of the material plane like the shadow and ethereal planes?

Sorry, I don't speak 4E.

In 3.X, though, the Plane of Faerie is a quasi-Outer Plane with demiplane traits; it overlaps the Material Plane, but does not extend from it (as Shadow and the Deep Ethereal do). It is accessible without passing through the Astral Plane, and as an Outer Plane is insulated from both the Ethereal and Shadow Planes, though they may all overlap the same world. Faerie has borders with the Beastlands and Arborea and has been linked with Pandemonium by the Queen of Air and Darkness.

[Xefas]

Zzzzzzzzzzzero.

Well, not zero, I gather it involves throwing universes at one another and equally ludicrous feats as a matter of course... but that's about it.

Okay! Important bits: in Exalted, the top of the food chain, as we know it, are the Primordials. They are complex inhuman ideas spawned from utter chaos and impossibility, and while their true nature is incomprehensible to mortal minds, they can be perceived as... essentially, a living plane of existence, plus some kind of ruling entity/heart for that plane, plus its native Outsiders and, finally, the legend of that place, person, and people.

For example, Malfeas is a plane-sized city, and he's the sun that lights the city, and he's all the mad denizens of that city. He's the legend of a city that never sleeps, eternally scorched by its self-loathing nuclear heart, and will eventually flow forth in a bloodthirsty tide and either conquer or obliterate everything in its path.

In the distant past, the Primordials were running the show, until the Gods and the Exalted showed up, and imprisoned them so that they could have all the hookers and blow for themselves.

I'm putting these guys into Planescape as interesting locales. In short, the Primordials were here before the Great Wheel. The Gods showed up and fought them. The Gods won, but couldn't completely destroy the Primordials, so they had to imprison each of them individually - often in some way that also aided them, because Gods are clever that way. Now the Primordials are neat little places that your planes-hopping party can go to, and even speak with, if they want. I already did some work on it that I've posted (and a lot that I haven't posted); it's in my extended homebrew signature (which is... in my signature).

The problem is that, in Exalted, there are 23 of them currently imprisoned, and I've only got ideas for some of them! So, knowing Planescape, I figured you could help come up with interesting planar prisons. In question form... "Where would the Gods imprison these guys in Planescape?"

These are summaries of ones I've already done and written about, to give you a brief idea of what I'm talking about.

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Malfeas. I already talked about him. The Gods turned him inside out, and made his skin the planar border between the Abyss and the rest of the Wheel. You can commune with him by going to the Layer of the Abyss that still has his sun-heart in it.

Cecelyne is a big, empty, desolate desert where hope and meaning go to die. I thought about the Grey Wastes, but she has a schtick about being the boundary between things, so I had the Gods stick her between the Wheel and the Far Realm to make the whole... 'idiots and accidents' thing a bit more difficult. You can commune with her by attempting to use standard planar travel to go to the Far Realm. You end up stuck in her for five days before popping out the other side (assuming you survive).

She Who Lives In Her Name is a collection of ten thousand spheres that contain every basic concept from which all things are formed. I had the Gods crack her spheres open, and use the contents to create a tapestry of objectivity, bound to the Wheel. She's why the concept of Yellow is the same in Baator as it is in Elysium, even if the language is different, and there are different connotations. She enforces that x = x. You commune with her by standing at the top of the Outlands Spire and looking down.

Adorjan is a wind that loves all things, and everything she loves dies gruesomely. The Gods made Pandemonium, and funneled her inside, so now she and her descendants are the winds of madness that blow there. You commune with her by finding the place in Pandemonium where all the wind is coming from.

The Ebon Dragon is darkness and antagonism given serpent form. Seemed a pretty easy fit to twist him around the Ahriman/Jazirian myth, and have him be defeated by the Gods, where his body fell, creating Baator, and now he lays in the Serpent's Coil. You commune with him by going to the head of the coil.

Others, I have ideas for, but haven't written them out yet. These four, though, I have no idea where to stick them.

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Isidoros is the core of a black hole, roughly hewn into the shape of a colossal boar. He's utterly oblivious to the world outside of himself, largely due to his nature being antithetical to nearly all things. He destroys, but not intentionally. He's just incapable of restraining himself; like a tornado in a china shop.

Metagaos is a swamp that devours everything, albeit slowly. He eats matter, energy, even thoughts, ideas, space, and time. He's largely just a collection of hungers, putting on facades to lure food into the bog from which they'll never escape, but never truly feeling anything above the Id.

Kimbery is an ocean. Which is also sort of a womb in a mother-of-all-monsters kind of way. From her poisonous waters, she continually births new and horrifying leviathan-children to do her bidding, feeds them on spite and venom, and sends them forth to fulfill her own inscrutable designs. She's quite emotionally unstable, flipping between love and hate at the drop of a hat, with a lot of help and nurturing to give, and infinitely more punishment.

Cytherea is a big bang. Or possibly The Big Bang. She's considered the Mother Of All, and is somehow capable of transferring a portion of her immense power into others, but is incapable of acting on her own behalf. Other than that, there's not much known about her, even in Exalted.

Isidoros and Cytherea, I have trouble with, because I want something more clever than "We stuck them in pocket dimensions somewhere", but that's all I can think of. Metagaos and Kimbery, I have trouble with, because I want something more clever than "A layer of the Abyss", but that's all I can think of. Surely the Gods got more creative than that?

I also kind of like instances where I can slip them into a gap that Planescape already sorta had. Pandemonium already had mad, flesh-flaying winds. So I put the mad, flesh-flaying wind Primordial there! Baator already had a big serpent-shaped font of all darkness, so I- well, you get it.

Conjecture? Ideas? Comments?

[afroakuma]

There are a few things of that sort drifting around the Planes already (Ulgurshek, for instance). There are also plenty of terrible places to be:

• The Prisoner of Elysium, an evil entity of some sort that an entire layer of the plane of pure good is secretly devoted to keeping imprisoned.

• Ocanthus, the frozen depth of Acheron. The infinite icewall below the spinning, razor-sharp shards of frosty death may seal away some deeper secret.

• For Isidoros, why not a deep region of the Negative Energy Plane or the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Vacuum?

• Similarly, for Cytherea, why not the Positive Energy Plane?

• The Styx runs very far and very deep, and spans several planes. In its infinite depths could lie a great hiding place; its waters would help subdue the memory of an entity caged deep within.

• The Caverns of Ilsensine lie underneath the Outlands. There, the Herculean mind of the illithid's deity collects the secret knowledge of the multiverse and discards that which is redundant.

• Celestia's seventh layer, Chronias, is an impenetrable mystery. Apart from the head of the Hebdomad, no entity has ever come down from Chronias who has ascended.

• The sands of Pelion, the third layer of Arborea, conceal ancient secrets hidden amid the ruins of some unknown race. Even the eladrins don't know who or what once resided there, but it is said that deep within these ruins is where the undead divinity Tenebrous discovered the power that kills gods.

• There is a place in Hades known as the Ghoresh Chasm, a massive earthen rift miles wide, impossibly long, terrifyingly deep. An expedition to the bottom discovered a great seal marked with sigils of law, chaos and evil. The appearance of this mysterious portal prompted only the second pause in the Blood War in history, as ambassadors of all three major fiendish races congregated to study it. The conference broke apart in minutes, and what the seal truly holds remains a mystery.

[Xefas]

Ooooo, I didn't know about several of those, and they're all neat bits of information. Thanks, afroakuma. I've got plenty to work with now.

[willpell]

On that note, the Far Realms and the Wyld are literally the same thing, right? I mean seriously, they are.

My knowledge of Exalted is minimal, but since the Wyld is supposed to be the chaos from which the world emerged (ie as Creation gets bigger the Wyld gets "smaller", though it's probably infinite so the shrinkage is only for the sake of argument), rather than something concurrent with but antithetical to the world (the Far Realm is probably at least as big as the Material Plane and did not "give way" to it as far as we know), it seems like a better analogue to the wyld would be Limbo, which 4E expanded into the Elemental Chaos and (I think) subsumed the Elemental Planes into it. (There's no particular reason they couldn't be part of it in a slight variant of the 3E cosmology, given that Limbo is just a bunch of air and earth and water and fire all mushed together and constantly transforming into each other.)

EDIT - Ninja'ed (Swordsages are only sometimes Ninja-esque, so I've never thought that usage was fitting; if Ninja is too weak then why not "Invisible Bladed" or something?)

EDIT 2 -

Others, I have ideas for, but haven't written them out yet. These four, though, I have no idea where to stick them.

Spoiler

Show

Isidoros is the core of a black hole, roughly hewn into the shape of a colossal boar. He's utterly oblivious to the world outside of himself, largely due to his nature being antithetical to nearly all things. He destroys, but not intentionally. He's just incapable of restraining himself; like a tornado in a china shop.

Metagaos is a swamp that devours everything, albeit slowly. He eats matter, energy, even thoughts, ideas, space, and time. He's largely just a collection of hungers, putting on facades to lure food into the bog from which they'll never escape, but never truly feeling anything above the Id.

Kimbery is an ocean. Which is also sort of a womb in a mother-of-all-monsters kind of way. From her poisonous waters, she continually births new and horrifying leviathan-children to do her bidding, feeds them on spite and venom, and sends them forth to fulfill her own inscrutable designs. She's quite emotionally unstable, flipping between love and hate at the drop of a hat, with a lot of help and nurturing to give, and infinitely more punishment.

Cytherea is a big bang. Or possibly The Big Bang. She's considered the Mother Of All, and is somehow capable of transferring a portion of her immense power into others, but is incapable of acting on her own behalf. Other than that, there's not much known about her, even in Exalted.

I had a few ideas on them which differ from AfroAkuma's.

* The closest thing to a Mother of Monsters ocean-creature that I can think of in D&D, apart from possibly the Kuo-Toa's rather absurd goddess, is the vestige Eurynome, Mother of the Material, who was originally a Titan who danced on the waves and separated heaven from earth. Perhaps Kimbery was imprisoned with or in place of Eurynome in wherever the vestiges are kept, or maybe Eurynome originally had a demensne in the home plane of the titans (assuming they have one), and when she fell to Vestigehood that location was abandoned until Kimbery was bound there to take Eurynome's place in the original myth-cycle.

* Isidoros seems like solipsism incarnate, which definitely means he has to go in someplace Chaotic and Evil; perhaps he was the first prisoner of Carceri, whose hatred for his own confinment echoed out and turned that entire plane into a prison-dimension, long before anyone else had ever been sentenced there.

* The I-think-third layer of Hell is a swamp into which everything slowly sinks (except the city of Kytons which is chained to the ceiling of the layer above). Fairly obvious fit for Metagaos.

* No clue on Cytherea, except that "transfers her power to others but has none of her own" could apply to a number of power sources in D&D. One thing worth noting is the Sapphire Eidolon, a being of pure Incarnum (Incarnum is sort of like solidified positive energy, though not exactly) which teaches its Sapphire Hierarch servants that everything which exists is part of a single truth or continuum or something - it's an arch-Lawful being, plus y'know sentient in general, so it's almost certainly not an exact fit for Cytherea. But possibly it could be some shard of her that split off and escaped her imprisonment in the Bastion of Souls on the PEP or something? I'm not at all sure on this part though.

[Deadline]

I've got some more questions for you:

1. What can you tell me about the Friendly Fiend in Sigil beyond the fact that he appears to be a friendly shopkeeper?

2. What can you tell me about the Dabus?

3. Is there a canon description of the all or part of the Infinite Staircase? If so, what is it?

[willpell]

There is some info about the Staircase in the 3.0 Manual of the Planes, though certainly more exists elsewhere. Akuma probably knows at least some of that elsewhere, hopefully he can help you with that and perhaps the other two questions.

[afroakuma]

I've got some more questions for you:

1. What can you tell me about the Friendly Fiend in Sigil beyond the fact that he appears to be a friendly shopkeeper?

The expression "a friendly fiend" means something very rare; the Friendly Fiend is a shop that deals in curios, magical items and (under the table) information. It's run by A'kin, the "friendly fiend" himself, an arcanaloth who's disturbingly pleasant and generous. It's rumored that he might be a rival to Shemeshka the Marauder, who has been in Sigil for nearly as long.

2. What can you tell me about the Dabus?

The dabus are the Lady of Pain's silent attendants, caretakers of Sigil and monitors of its curious "order." They communicate for themselves or for the Lady by projecting rebuses above their heads, which require interpretation. All dabus float above the ground - all except for one, Fell, who dared to worship the interloper god Aoskar. Fell is now an outcast, running a tattoo parlor in the Market Ward.

3. Is there a cannon description of the all or part of the Infinite Staircase? If so, what is it?

Of all of it? No. It's infinite.

There is, however, a splendid adventure module from 2E called Tales of the Infinite Staircase. I rather liked it.

The Infinite Staircase is a planar pathway unlike any other; with its base at the Gates of the Moon in Ysgard, it extends upward, terraces hosting doors that connect to significant places of creativity around the multiverse. The Staircase has no consistent design; across its thousands of thousands of steps and terraces are nearly as many architectural styles. The Staircase is protected and supervised by the lillendi and a number of shards.

It is said that somewhere on the Staircase lies a door for each individual, leading to the "city of your heart's desire." The chant holds that the door waits for everyone, but if you leave this city, you may never find your way back.

[enderlord99]

Is Tharizdun (or however it's spelled) the Prisoner of Elysium? Come to think of it, is Tharizdun even part of 3.5?

[afroakuma]

Is Tharizdun (or however it's spelled) the Prisoner of Elysium? Come to think of it, is Tharizdun even part of 3.5?

Tharizdun is in 3.5, yes, and he's not the Prisoner of Elysium.

[enderlord99]

Vestiges have to exist somewhere. Where?

[Xervous]

1. Are any major players in the PTC named in canon other than Estavan?
2. I read somewhere that Zadara the Titan has wealth equal to or greater than that of a thousand prime worlds, any rough estimates on this (exponentials?) and how it might compare to the supposed size of deities' hoards (of those that are known to keep hoards)?

[afroakuma]

Vestiges have to exist somewhere. Where?

They exist "outside." What that means isn't precisely clear; it has been posited by some scholars that they may exist on the theoretical "Ordial Plane." They certainly do not inhabit the Far Realm, nor any of the Outer or Inner Planes. None of the known Transitive Planes would be a suitable medium for them, either.

1. Are any major players in the PTC named in canon other than Estavan?

Not that I'm aware of; only a competitor, Aleena Jerkot. It's likely that at least one factol is a player in the PTC, though.

2. I read somewhere that Zadara the Titan has wealth equal to or greater than that of a thousand prime worlds, any rough estimates on this (exponentials?) and how it might compare to the supposed size of deities' hoards (of those that are known to keep hoards)?

You could probably do some math on that using your DMG, but I'm not a big fan of undertaking such exercises. I do suspect that Zadara inflated that figure by tallying the sorts of Prime worlds that don't have much (or anything) of value, but she's definitely immensely wealthy. Most gods concerned with wealth would probably trump her holdings, however; Zadara has certain aspirations that trump even her considerable purchasing power, which suggests that such powers as could aid her and would be interested find her tenders insufficient.

[Lord_Gareth]

So I've been looking at Lichfiend (Libris Mortis) and I cannot, for the life of me, comprehend what would make undeath seem like a good idea to any fiend, let alone a spellcasting one. What would tempt a denizen of the Lower Planes to trade in their immorality for a much crappier version of immortality?

[ShadowFireLance]

What is the Exact amount of planes in the Current Universe?
(And What be their names?)
(Perhaps Demiplanes as well, Only those noted though)

[Lord_Gareth]

Is it possible to expand a demiplane into a true plane? If so, what kind of plane would it be? How would one (or more) go about doing that?

[Eldan]

They exist "outside." What that means isn't precisely clear; it has been posited by some scholars that they may exist on the theoretical "Ordial Plane." They certainly do not inhabit the Far Realm, nor any of the Outer or Inner Planes. None of the known Transitive Planes would be a suitable medium for them, either.

I don't know... I could see them fitting into the Astral Plane. There are some interpretations of that plane around that border on the lovecraftian. And it is the multiverse's outside, so to speak. The behind, too. And the between. It really had a lot of things now associated with the Far Realm, back in Planescape.

Demiplanes growing into true planes is hinted at, at least. In the AD&D Planescape books, Shadow was mentioned to be the biggest known demiplane. There was a theory back then that it would soon grow into a full plane. Given that it is a full plane in third edition, I guess it succeeded.

[Lord_Gareth]

Why is it that the corpses of gods seem to end up, inevitably, on the Astral Plane?