Everything on a single plane

[Yora]

I'm toying around with various ideas of how the lands of gods, spirits, and dead could be connected to the world of the living in different ways than the common standard of separate material and divine planes.

One option, that seems to be quite uncommon but also pretty interesting is to have everything being different locations in the same single world. Having the dead rest in actual caves beneath the earth and gods living in a castle on a huge mountain. I think the idea is quite interesting, but it makes me ask the question of why dangerous supernatural creatures are stying in their lands and don't simply walk into the lands of mortal peoples to do as they please. They are usually much more powerful and the more evil ones often love to take every opportunity to hurt mortals. So what is stoping them?

One intriguing option is to have the mortals have some pretty strong powers to keep other beings out of their lands, but I have a hard time imagining how that could look like.

[Nifft]

Being on a single plane doesn't imply that you're stuck on a single world.

Maybe the spirits of the deceased leave the good green Earth and reside on the cold, bone-white Moon of the Dead. (This is why we hold our funerals at high-moon, when the moon is highest in the sky, whatever time that happens to be on this day of the month.)

Maybe angels are the love children of the Sun and the Sky, and their swaddling cloth is the curtain of heavenly light that can oft be seen in the farthest north. They live on clouds, having tea with silver dragons and cloud giants. Monks meditate on the tops of mountains specifically in order to attract angelic tea-parties, at which they hope to gain enlightenment.

Or maybe angels are from Jupiter, children of the Lord of Sky and Thunder.

There are many worlds here on our single plane -- use them!

[Yora]

That's also some cool stuff.

[Nifft]

Maybe the spirits of the deceased leave the good green Earth and reside on the cold, bone-white Moon of the Dead. (This is why we hold our funerals at high-moon, when the moon is highest in the sky, whatever time that happens to be on this day of the month.)

Ooo, and maybe ghosts / specters / etc. are what happens when someone is murdered during the dark of the new moon, so the anguished spirit can't find its way home. This is one of the most terrible crimes.

Honorable wars are put on hold during those 3 moonless days and nights.

-- -- --

Anyway, for a caverns-are-hell type of view, take a look at Eberron -- the most powerful fiends aren't bound to a separate plane, they're bound underground, since they're natives of the world.

Great magic was worked by the Couatls (who are from the ring around Eberron), and IIRC the Dragons also helped a bit. This great magic holds the fiends away from the surface, but through specific spells it's possible to call one up. Dragons don't like this sort of thing, and neither does the Church of the Silver Flame.

[Recherché]

Maybe the sun is innately inimical to spirits and the dead. This the dead live under the earth and only can return at night. Ghosts occur when a dead spirit instead of going beneath the earth finds refuge from the sun inside a building or another structure.

[Yora]

Anyway, for a caverns-are-hell type of view, take a look at Eberron -- the most powerful fiends aren't bound to a separate plane, they're bound underground, since they're natives of the world.

If magical lands are actual places in the regular world, than the normal rules of physics, geology, and ecology are already not applying to the world. So any impossible geography like an Underdark can easily be justified.

[ericgrau]

Or maybe the deities do get directly involved in the world. Maybe their power is more limited or they have agreements in place, similar to the way you handle multiplanar deities with easy interplanar travel. Well, same idea except it's more involved.

[Nifft]

If magical lands are actual places in the regular world, than the normal rules of physics, geology, and ecology are already not applying to the world. So any impossible geography like an Underdark can easily be justified.

Yeah, absolutely.

Flying islands, impossibly huge tree-cities, castles in the clouds, caverns that sparkle like the night sky of a different world... basically, the world of D&D as she is played, which is not like the regular world.

[Yora]

In my experience, they usually are. Normal world with a couple modern technologies being replicated by magic. Really crazy environments is what travel to other planes is for. The one kind-of exception that I can think of is Planescape, which basically ignores the material planes and has all the regular adventure stuff take place in Sigil and the outer planes from the start.

Having all the supernatural and divine stuff being in remote places around the world is actually quite common in Japanese fantasy. Any travel to other dimensions that I recall is to the realm of the dead and even that is rare.

I really like to have settings that don't have creator gods or are clockwork worlds and much prefer worlds that seem like they evolved into their present state through natural processes without any intentional design. Which many of the more crazy settings seem to imply.
One idea I just got to have a reasonable explanation why seemingly mundane places where normal people live on farms exist in the same world as outragously magical places is to have the magic level of the world be affected by some kind of stuff that is unevenly distributed. Like a magical mineral in the rocks that either increases or decreases magic. Since they are significantly less powerful than magical beings, humans could live reasonably safely in low magic regions where they are not bothered but that are still suited to their own survival.
There's actually plenty of cases on Earth with animals seeking protection from predators in crazily hostile places. Penguins are really not well suited to either fighting off predators or running away from them. So emperor penguins over 10 km from the sea into a frozen wasteland with no food or water and stay there for four months in constant snow storms and total darkness. Or there are sea birds in Chile that lay their eggs in the driest and most barren desert in the world and make a 70 km trip to the sea and back to feed while leaving their chicks unattended. By the standards of other species, these places are not only uninhabitable but might kill you in well under an hour. But if you can survive there you can be absolutely sure that there isn't anything for miles around that could be a threat to you.
Humans could simply live in magical deserts and find them actually much more safe and comfortable.

[Nifft]

I'm toying around with various ideas of how the lands of gods, spirits, and dead could be connected to the world of the living in different ways than the common standard of separate material and divine planes.

One option, that seems to be quite uncommon but also pretty interesting is to have everything being different locations in the same single world. Having the dead rest in actual caves beneath the earth and gods living in a castle on a huge mountain.

I really like to have settings that don't have creator gods or are clockwork worlds and much prefer worlds that seem like they evolved into their present state through natural processes without any intentional design. Which many of the more crazy settings seem to imply.

I feel like there's a bit of a conflict here.

I can help you build an evolutionary world. Or I can help you build a world where gods live on Mount Olympus and the dead huddle in caverns that Orpheus can walk into and out again. But not both in the same world.

Especially not the stuff about souls. Eternal souls wouldn't just happen by accident. To me, that is a big GOD(S) DID THIS flag.

In my experience, they usually are. Normal world with a couple modern technologies being replicated by magic. Really crazy environments is what travel to other planes is for. The one kind-of exception that I can think of is Planescape, which basically ignores the material planes and has all the regular adventure stuff take place in Sigil and the outer planes from the start.

Having all the supernatural and divine stuff being in remote places around the world is actually quite common in Japanese fantasy. Any travel to other dimensions that I recall is to the realm of the dead and even that is rare.

Quite common in Western myth as well.

Jack climbed a beanstalk and found a giant's castle in the clouds.

Orpheus walked to the afterlife, and then walked out again.

The Midgard Serpent is right here in Midgard, by definition.

The afterlife is just west of here, past a lot of desert and some mountains, right nearby where the sun enters the Underworld every night to traverse the Twelve Hours of Night, during which Amun-Ra is regenerated and rises again.

The faeries live under those hills right there, which is why we nail up iron horseshoes over our doors, and leave out milk at night. They're everywhere.

[Anymage]

I feel like there's a bit of a conflict here.

I can help you build an evolutionary world. Or I can help you build a world where gods live on Mount Olympus and the dead huddle in caverns that Orpheus can walk into and out again. But not both in the same world.

Especially not the stuff about souls. Eternal souls wouldn't just happen by accident. To me, that is a big GOD(S) DID THIS flag.

Souls could be anything from us starting as spirit stuff that discovered how to inhabit matter, to a deist creator who made everything and then left the universe to do what it did.

I'm not Yora. But I assume he wants to avoid the classic stance of handwaving away any glaring inconsistencies with "a wizardgod did this". Godlike beings can exist in in their own areas, somewhere like Olympus, but only care about their own turf/interests. They're not watching magical creatures elsewhere like some form of reality cops.

[Goaty14]

Ghostwalk does this in 3.5. There's a city where dead spirits are whisked away to when they die. Elves (because they're weird) end up being laid to rest in trees outside the city... etc etc etc. Just have locations and such represent other planes.

Another way to do it is to think of it as the layers of the abyss. The Abyss is technically still a single plane, except with layers.

[Yora]

I feel like there's a bit of a conflict here.

Yes, it blends two assumptions together that are often regarded as diferent. Which is why I made a thread to get more ideas how a single plane cosmology could look like.

Quite common in Western myth as well.

Yes, though apparently not in RPGs, which really is a shame. I feel that's something that is missing.

I remembered a short but pretty good post on Hill Cantons about Corelands, Borderlands, and te Weird. The idea is that within the same landscape there are regions where magical forces are strong and others where they are weak.

I find the idea of magic being driven away by civilization and technology a bit dull, but mentioning deserts and and polar winters yesterday, and having recently read about extreme erratic weather during the late middle ages, I find the idea of a variable magical climate quite interesting.
There are regions where magic is very strong and magical creatures are thriving, and there are other regions where magic is very weak and magical creatures are scarce and people can live in peace. (And regions that are somewhere in the middle.) It's quite consistent in the short term from year to year, but on the scale of centuries the patterns are shifting and some areas become safe for settlement while others see magical creaturs returning in large numbers, so that cities have to be abandoned and new lands settled.
For added visual effect, magical regions can be detected by the appearance of polar lights during nights and there are small glowing sprites coming out and floating in the air after sunset.

[Eldan]

If the magical climate is variable, it also gives a good opportunity for what are actually quite standard fantasy plots, such as the occasional horde of monsters sweeping over a civilized city when suddenly the magic allows for it.

[Yora]

A bad winter drives the wolves south. A really bad winter drives wendigos and ice elementals south.

[PopeLinus1]

The source of the gods power could be the mountain, making them weaker when they leave. The spirits of the dead are teathered to the land of the dead, and necromancy cuts that tether. On the borders of the lands where fire elemental rule, powerful wizards once placed powerful Ice spells, warding them away.

All of this factored into your worlds lore.

Ask yourself how the planes affect the people who live their and factor all that in. The adventures jobs might very well end up containing these powerful forces, and each generation brings about a new batch of hero’s who do the same.

[Zale]

I would think the things keeping various supernatural beings from wrecking havoc is a web of favors, obligation and various other defenses.

You leave out milk for the faerie riders, you give flowers each year to quiet the restless dead, you give a tenth of your harvest to the field gods to gain their favor.

And if they breach the etiquette- if they demand more than you can give, or if they go beyond the agreed upon rules-

Then you need heroes and exorcists and shamans. People who know how to deal with these things.

Be they heroes who can strike down the beasts from the wilds, or cunning people who know the secret ways to bind the dead and hedge out the spirits, or the shamans who know how to calm even the angriest of gods with the proper rites.

Beyond the personal, I'd imagine that most settlements have some kind of supernatural protector, or protectors to whom they have a mutual obligation. One town might have a powerful river god, another a council of ancestral spirits, another an understanding with the ladies from under the hills, another a deal with demons for protection-

If something terrible happens, they'd look to them and to outsiders for help. If the Dragon of the Smoking Mountain descends in her terrible fury, then they'll look to their gods and ancestors, to their protectors and heroes and the terrors that are, at least, their own.

If the world is filled with magic and magical beings, humans will adapt to find ways to work with them.

The only exception is if these beings are so power, so beyond need, that humans have nothing to offer them at all.

[akma]

I actually planned a world that fits this concept, for a story idea that I abandoned.

In one end of the world, there are the human lands, and in the other, the land of the gods, and generally, the more you approach the land of the gods, the more supernatural things are. The gods meddle a lot, but they have a lot of rules punishable by death, so they are limited from interfering too directly or forcefully. Most other beings are not that interested in the human lands. The ones that are much stronger then humans, will have to march an entire army through many lands of beings not much weaker then them, which will be a logistic problem, and will likely cause hostility if you can't convince the locals that they are not your real target.
That world has much less magical creatures then the average D&D world, and the few type of beings that have the potential to wreak a lot of havoc as an individual have specific reasons not to do so, so it might not be easy to transfer to other settings.

Another option is "mundane races" have a much bigger population then all the non-mundane races combined, so while there are a lot of enslaved humanoids, most are free since there are too many to enslave.

Or maybe the humanoids are just pawns in a bigger game, and have relative freedom because each side manages to destroy the others plans to enslave them all.

Or maybe the beings don't care much about humanoids, and have other things to fight about.

[Yora]

Gods really do require special considerations with this kind of setup. i could see them work as either spirits at the top of the food chain, or as highly abstract beings on a completely different level than the monsters and demons heroes could encounter and fight. Active personal gods of cosmic power don't feel like they would fit in.

[Vogie]

You could also have parallel layers of world on the same plane, similar to the ones seen in Sergei Lukyanenko's Watch series, or more commonly known, Netflix's Stranger Things or the version of hell from the movie version of Constantine. You have different planes of existence that co-exist "physically", but are out of phase with each other. Buildings and whatnot are replicated in each, and ways to change phase are connected to certain places or times (or both), or can be accessed by certain individuals.

[redwizard007]

I deal with this slightly differently in my homebrew. The gods, and lesser spirits live in secluded locations attached to the mortal realm, but taking no space within it. Pocket dimensions, if you will.

These godshomes are both palace and prison to the great spirits within. Only the least powerful denizens are able to slip through the gateways to the mortal realm. These servants of the great spirits work the will of their masters in the realms of man.

This arrangement allows a sailor to be washed up on an island that is the home of the sea god, or a lost princess to stumble into a wooded glen that is home to a goddess of the wood. It also allows occasional "odd" events at the gateways as powerful outsiders try to force their way past the barriers. It even lends itself to a lover invading the Lord of death's caverns to return his lost lady to life...