Thread starter question: How would you make the Inner Planes be more relevant in a generalist planar campaign? Which roster of Inner Planes would you use: 2e's, 3e's, or 5e's? Possibly even 4e's Elemental Chaos? How would you tie in the genies to the archomentals?
Discuss Planescape and the Great Wheel here, whether the original AD&D 2e version, the 3.X version, the 4e version (traces of the Great Wheel exist in 4e, down to the baernaloths, the yugoloths, the Heart of Darkness, Maeldur et Kavurik, Tenebrous, Pelion, and the Last Word all being canon as of Dragon #417), the 5e version, or your own original blend.
I am exceedingly well-lanned on planar canon under a holistic blend of 2e, 3.X, and sporadically even 4e lore. If you have any questions at all about the setting's lore, feel free to ask, and I will give you direct quotes and citations from as many primary sources as I can, unlike afroakuma. I will note when something is open to GM interpretation, and explicitly note whenever I give merely my own personal interpretation. If you would like to ask anything under the context of a single edition and nothing more, please mention such.
How would you integrate the concept of seasons into the planes? One of the facets of the Prime that is lost in the planes is the time-based variety created by spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Surely the planes should have just as much variety as the Prime in this respect?
Prime-like planes such as the Outlands, Arcadia, Bytopia, Elysium, the Beastlands, Arborea, and Ysgard are easy to imagine seasons for. But what do spring, summer, autumn, and winter look like in the depths of Baator or Pandemonium, the ever-changing chaos of Limbo, or the slopes of Mount Celestia or Gehenna?
What of the seasons in the Inner Planes? What does winter look like in the Elemental Plane of Fire, and what is a Paralemental Ice summer akin to?
Asher Brown
>How would you make the Inner Planes be more relevant in a generalist planar campaign?
Anything that gets lost in the ethereal plane will eventually fall randomly into the inner planes - makes it a bit fetch questy, but it's easy to justify pretty much anything falling into any given plane, and then players would have a reason to navigate the various elemental, genie, elementalist, and divine courts to find routes through the various inner planes.
Thomas Thomas
>archomentals >looks up Archomentals on wikipedia >Evil archomental of Cold
Oh god, I could see slipping an Elemental Plane of Cold in amongst the other four.
ooo, if you make 5 core elemental planes, you end up with 5 paraelemental, and 10 quasielemental planes (and ignore the positive and negative planes because they're harder to survive than the rest) - so a d20 roll can have an inner plane attached to each result.
the five quasielementals then are something like: >Earth+Cold=Metal >Cold+Water=Ice >Water+Air=Mist >Air+Fire=Smoke >Fire+Earth=Magma
Keeping the usual paraelementals for the usual four planes, add (maybe? Not super happy about these): >Cold+Positive= Sonic or Sound >Cold+Negative= Night
Kayden Bailey
>But what do spring, summer, autumn, and winter look like in the depths of Baator or Pandemonium, the ever-changing chaos of Limbo, or the slopes of Mount Celestia or Gehenna?
Maybe want to vary how many seasons each of the outer planes have - give mechanus 12 or so seasons (each one is a single, monotonous, weather pattern, so the season of Cloudy and the Season of Drizzle, the season of chilly and the season of hot etc...) and make them happen in no regular seeming order (except the Modrons always seem to be fixing their buildings and structures up in preparation for handling the next season with 100% accuracy so there's clearly SOME order, or Primus is controlling it).
Meanwhile Limbo is just BLIZZARD or MONSOON, Pandemonium has the seasons of Dripping, LOUDER, (quieter) and Steaming, while the Grey Wastes and Elysium are both constantly in early summer/late autumn respectively.
Baator meanwhile has 9 seasons that switch from topmost layers down to bottom-most layers of baator in a regular fashion, and are actually various sinful moods that sweep over the inhabitants of the 9 hells, so there's the seasons of Lust, Gluttony, Envy, Jealousy, Wrath, Cowardice, Corruption, Sloth and "Festive Season". The Pit has similar "affective seasons" but they happen without the regularity and somehow the inns and shops always seem to start their Festive Season celebrations and promotions earlier every year.
Inner Planes I might go with Moods again, or have areas of the inner planes cross over into other inner planes like gate towns, so "seasons" don't exist exactly, but there's periods when locations like major fortifications and cities made by creatures from outside the inner planes just suddenly find themselves dumped into a nearby quasi or paraelemental plane - a mining town set up in Earth wakes to find itself sinking into Ooze, though Ooze seems a lot thicker and gloopier than usual etc... Basically play up the physicality of the inner planes.
Aiden Rodriguez
This is a good plot hook, and I can imagine that it could be stretched to "anything that gets lost in the Ethereal can drop into a demiplane or a Prime crystal sphere," or even "anything that is lost in the Astral can fall into an Outer Plane."
"Cold/ice" already exists as a paraelemental plane between Air and Water in the 2e roster of Inner Planes.
I do not think that the 2e roster could use even *more* Inner Planes, because they are quite cluttered and limited in scope. The fact that a quasielemental plane of say, lightning exists means that you *cannot* have lightning in the elemental plane of air without it being a "foreign" element. Likewise, since there are a paraelemental plane of smoke and a quasielemental plane of ash, neither smoke nor ash can be present in the elemental plane of fire without also being "foreign." I personally find this rather imbecilic.
This is an unpopular opinion, but I think that a combined Planescape/Spelljammer campaign could get away with dropping all of the Inner Planes save for the Positive and the Negative. There is nothing about the elemental, paraelemental, and quasielemental planes that cannot already be replicated with appropriate Prime worlds; efreet and the courts of Zaaman Rul and Imix might wander from sun to sun, qorrash and the minions of Imix could travel from ice world to ice world, and so on. If anything, that would better highlight the sheer diversity of the Prime. There is just as much variety to a fantastical sun or ice world than there is to a homogenous glob of a single element broken up by pockets of other elements.
The same cannot be said of the Outer Planes, because they offer unique physical layouts or spiritual properties that simply cannot be replicated by worlds in the Prime. The fact that they are afterlife realms populated mostly by the deceased also helps distinguish them. One would be hard-pressed to replicate, say, the unending warfare in the cubes of Acheron in the Prime.
Carson Walker
>but there's periods when locations like major fortifications and cities made by creatures from outside the inner planes just suddenly find themselves dumped into a nearby quasi or paraelemental plane
Note I mean that they'd cross over the inner planes back and forth, so if the mining town can keep themselves from sinking into the mire they'll eventually slip back into earth - so to someone who lived their entire life in that town there'd appear to be two "seasons", one of ooze and one of earth.
Nathaniel Williams
The reason why I wanted to use a system of spring, summer, autumn, and winter is because they are a simple and familiar method of lending striking, distinct visuals to each time period. A GM already has much to keep track of with respect to the exotic physical configurations and environments of each plane; it helps to be able to say, "It is autumn in Elysium, so the trees shed their red and gold leaves," or "You can tell from the chill gales and the coating of frost upon the cavern walls that it is winter in Pandemonium," or even "summer in Baator's layer of Cania has melted away the topmost rime, revealing the ruined cities of the ancient Baatorians."
Of course, each season should still have unique touches depending on the plane. I do like your idea of tying different types of vices to the Lower Planes' seasons, although I would not quite use your list specifically.
I do not think any plane should have static seasons, because that lends a feeling of stagnation and diminishes variety.
Jose Green
>I do like your idea of tying different types of vices to the Lower Planes' seasons, although I would not quite use your list specifically.
I put "festive season" because I originally put christmas and then realised that made no sense in planescape terms - in hindsight I realise I could have dropped "vecnamas" which is a holiday someone in the lower planes would likely celebrate.
Affective seasons might honestly make more sense to confine to the outlands where things like that are a bit more important due to the gate towns.
>This is an unpopular opinion, but I think that a combined Planescape/Spelljammer campaign could get away with dropping all of the Inner Planes save for the Positive and the Negative.
hmm... I'd maybe fold all the inner planes into the far ethereal and large demi-planes or spread them haphazardly around the deep ethereal, and have the True Inner Planes be places that are utterly unvisitable because they reject anything that isn't 100% pure expressions of their respective elements.
That way you still have that "place where wizard and cleric spells draw particular elements from", a reason for the ethereal realm to exist and have more leeway to also have closely linked and visitable "elemental realms" but which can integrate more than one element together to create more varied landscapes than the current inner planes, but still with the various elements more purified and less messy in how they interact than you'd find in the prime.
Juan Harris
Each plane would logically have its own "festive season," and it would not necessarily be during the winter season. For those planes whose festivities *do* take place in the winter season, I can certainly see Cryonax being a rather grinch-like figure.
>That way you still have that "place where wizard and cleric spells draw particular elements from", a reason for the ethereal realm to exist
I would have there be an Ethereal Plane (with both the Border and the Deep), a Positive Energy Plane, and a Negative Energy Plane, then spread out a number of "elemental worlds" throughout the Prime. This way, rather than have a single plane of fire, there are the countless suns of the Prime Material Plane, many of which can be far more fantastical than real-life stars and include other elements upon their surfaces.
Luke Hernandez
To further my point here, how exactly is, say, the Elemental Plane of Fire all that different from all the suns of every Prime crystal sphere?
According to the back of the 2e Inner Planes book, there are infinite crystal spheres, so it is only logical that there are infinite suns as well.
Prime Material suns often have elemental fire creatures living upon them, judging by the examples in Practical Planetology and the books for Greyspace and Realmspace.
Mortal suns also have pockets of non-fiery matter upon them. The great fire world of Garrash has discs of metal and/or rock floating upon it, and Greyspace's sun ("Liga") has lakes of water with water elementals living in them.
Is there really anything so special about the plane of fire that would differentiate it from Prime Material suns? If the answer is "No," then repeat the above process with the Elemental Plane of Air and Prime Material gas giants, and the Elemental Plane of Water and water worlds.
Owen Watson
What's my best excuse for a furry player character?
Would an Athasian Templar maintain their powers out among the planes?
Which faction is your favorite?
Nicholas Watson
>What's my best excuse for a furry player character? You're a furfag
>Would an Athasian Templar maintain their powers out among the planes? Depends on the edition. I remember 2E specifically addresses this question
>Which faction is your favorite? Dustm... Doomg... eh, screw it, Bleakers.
Owen Richardson
I may be a furfag, but at least I understand the superiority of Law-aligned factions.
That said, my opinion is still that the vast majority of the factions have awful write-ups that present them as bland and one-note.
Michael Hernandez
First question, depends on if you want to play one of the *actual* morphic races that D&D has done, which is somewhat limited by edition (for example, AD&D has Aranaea (shapeshifting spiders), Rakasta (assorted catfolk), lupins (dogfolk who went from "everything from wolves and foxes to specific breeds of real dog" to wolf-people in 3e), Tortles (turtle-people), Gnolls (hyena-people), Minotaurs and Lizardfolk, off the top of my head) or if you want to play what is literally an anthro race.
Eli James
Lady of Pain vs Saitama, who will survive
Adrian Miller
That's not even a question, and obviously The Lady, even though it demeans her to actually have a power-level competition.
Matthew Murphy
>How would you make the Inner Planes be more relevant in a generalist planar campaign?
Elementals are now renamed to Insiders to emphasize relevance.
Sebastian Ward
The 4e version is honestly not THAT far from the previous stuff. It's mostly that several planes flowed together. The City of Brass still exists in the Planar Chaos for example.
...Honestly, I prefer the Elemental Chaos as it's more generally relevant than the individual elemental planes.
William Cook
"Outsiders" is already an awkward name. Including "insiders" would be even more stilted.
I do not see much of a reason for an Elemental Chaos to exist as a "standalone" plane when the 2e Guide to the Ethereal Plane presents the Deep Ethereal as the primordial furnace of matter and energy where many elements mingle, and when Limbo already exists as a chaotic tangle of elements.
There really does not need to be a third plane of primordial, elemental soup.
What is your take on my "exotic and seemingly uninhabitable Prime worlds as a stand-in for the Elemental Planes" method in and ?
Hudson Perez
Another way of doing things is to have the "inner planes" literally be a thing that exist inside prime worlds - basically dig too deep and you hit an infinite "inner earth" world, with the various inner planes floating in the "sky" in the center of things, look like the depiction in OP's pic.
Needs some elemental dinosaurs and cavemen to make it properly fun though.
