Pathfinder Manual of the Planes


Product Discussion

51 to 100 of 166 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | next > last >>

4 people marked this as a favorite.

I think we tend to get more Evil outsiders because that's what players tend to fight. XD ...I do think Law and Chaos are a bit under-represented, though. (I mean, one of the reasons I like Chaotic Neutral Lovecraftian stuff is because they help fill in the niche of "non-evil chaos power"...)

Paizo Employee Pathfinder Society Lead Developer

7 people marked this as a favorite.
The Gold Sovereign wrote:
Todd Stewart wrote:
Honestly I'd take The Great Beyond and expand the hell out of it while also refining some of that early material to incorporate changes and additions to the setting.

This. I would love to see the Great Beyond expanded. It's supposed to be endless after all, right?

As for how the planes could be presented in the book, I would like to see something similar to what was done for the Elemental Planes in Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Planes of Power.

An introduction describing the specific plane, followed by subsections similar to those that follow:

1) "Exploring the Plane", detailing the common way to adventure in the plane;
2) "Inhabitants", fleshing out the plane main races and population;
3) "Gazetteer", write-up about the many notorious places and mysteries of the plane;
4) A detailed entry for a "capital" city, from where we could easily start playing campaigns of any levels in the plane.

While I was a little disappointed with the fact that there are no illustration nor entries for each of the Elemental Lords in Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Planes of Power, it's still one of my favorite Paizo books, and I really liked how the planes were fleshed out in that book.

As a reminder, book reviews on paizo.com are one of the ways in which we determine what goes on our product schedule and how we organize/prioritize what goes into those products. Sales data are important, but being able to say "look at this softcover book that received many and positive reviews" helps convey that there are appetite and passion for a subject.

If you have not left a review for Planes of Power or any other book that inspires you, please do so. Leaving notes about what you liked of the contents and structure is especially helpful.

Silver Crusade

12 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

People who spend insane amounts of time and energy dissecting the book before its release and then only write negative reviews in case the book fails to live up to their expectations but never write positive reviews in case they actually like it should take particular note of John's comments.


GM Rednal, I would say that CN/LN is a lot more then a "bit" under-represented but I agree otherwise with what you said.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
GM Rednal wrote:
I think we tend to get more Evil outsiders because that's what players tend to fight. XD ...I do think Law and Chaos are a bit under-represented, though. (I mean, one of the reasons I like Chaotic Neutral Lovecraftian stuff is because they help fill in the niche of "non-evil chaos power"...)

And in Pathfinder? LN and CN are a lot more interesting than the D&D versions.

Axis is an expansionalist power pressing against the Maelstrom and Abyss. The Proteans are experimentors of creation and destruction formed into many choruses with their own motives. There's a lot you can do there that needs fleshing out.

Jon Brazer Enterprises

1 person marked this as a favorite.
John Compton wrote:

As a reminder, book reviews on paizo.com are one of the ways in which we determine what goes on our product schedule and how we organize/prioritize what goes into those products. Sales data are important, but being able to say "look at this softcover book that received many and positive reviews" helps convey that there are appetite and passion for a subject.

If you have not left a review for Planes of Power or any other book that inspires you, please do so. Leaving notes about what you liked of the contents and structure is especially helpful.

This is also true for Pathfinder Compatible publishers. We tend to be more nimble than Paizo and have our own take on various ideas, allowing us to cater to a smaller group of gamers. So if you want to see something different from Paizo's ideas that can be more tailor made to better suit your game, leave reviews of products you like. Lots of reviews.


Yea, I could see picking up some 3PP planar material. Heck, 100% of the 3pp pathfinder print books I have (as opposed to PDFs) is planar in nature.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Really, it's the good-and-'neutral' planes of the Outer Sphere that interest me. The evil planes each already have development and their own books, but it's mostly only in a big honking book do areas like that get developed.


I would definitely throw down for a hard cover.

Besides a gazetteer and Capitol City description I would love if each plane got a page dedicated to a particularly noteworthy spot with a fuller write-up.

I'd also expect to book to include some planar history, more information on the river of souls, and some hooks and flavor on planar politics and conflicts.

Also +1 to the suggestion the art include landscapes and vistas, or more highly detailed local location -- like a floor from the library of oaths or a locale within the boneyard.

Generally I'd like to see each plane given a broad history, some political analysis, a bunch of 1 paragraph gazetteer entries and one more fully fleshed entry be it a city or some noteworthy place, with a smattering of landscape pictures or map of some particular spot in that plane.


First World had a really great map, I'd be down for more like that.

Grand Lodge

Personally I would like to see two products. The hardback for the known planes of existence, and perhaps a some softcovers about demiplanes that have have drifted off, and been forgotten, or hidden.


Herald wrote:
Personally I would like to see two products. The hardback for the known planes of existence, and perhaps a some softcovers about demiplanes that have have drifted off, and been forgotten, or hidden.

Ooh, that does sound cool.


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I always find this topic interesting, because in my experience views about the planes tend to fall into one of two distinct schools of thought:

1) Planes as dungeons - This is the "old school" idea, where the planes are considered to be natural extensions of hostile terrain that's ripe for adventuring in, but little else. The idea here is that the planes are so weird, so incredibly different from Material Plane life, that they're not really fit for anything else except high-level dungeons. To this thinking, planes like Hell or Heaven should absolutely not be relatable to "mundane" life, with cities and commerce and similar societal constructs. They should be utterly alien.

2) Planes as exotic lands - This is the "new school" idea, where the planes are treated as strange new worlds to be explored. This idea finds treating the planes as just locales for dungeon-diving to be highly restrictive, and ignores a wider series of cultures and ecologies that are rich with possibilities. The societies and cultures of things like angels and demons are features, rather than window dressing, to this point of view.

The new school line of thought has been in vogue since at least Planescape, and Pathfinder seems to fit in with it pretty well, but maybe things will be different going forward?

Shadow Lodge

I think an approach that is aporox 75% #1 with a 25% ish #2 would be perfect. While I like some #2, the main problem with it's mindset is that it makes it so mundane, which ultimately cheapens it.

Planescape was really just a unique exception because of the way it was handled overall, but not one that really applies to Pathfinder or Golarion. We can pretty clearly see this on PFS's current season, where there are a few, . . . "exotic" rules and flavorings, but it is really nothing all that special or different.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

I like the Planes as exotic lands. Planes as dungeons would be like if you made the inner sea one big dungeon...that would not be interesting.


DM Beckett wrote:

I think an approach that is aporox 75% #1 with a 25% ish #2 would be perfect. While I like some #2, the main problem with it's mindset is that it makes it so mundane, which ultimately cheapens it.

Huh, I find 'exotic lands' makes them less mundane than dungeons. There's a lot of creative stuff you can do with a whole living place you can't do with, well, basically a place to fight.

Liberty's Edge

I've been interested in this for a LONG time as well. I hope it comes through.


Davia D wrote:
Huh, I find 'exotic lands' makes them less mundane than dungeons. There's a lot of creative stuff you can do with a whole living place you can't do with, well, basically a place to fight.

If it's just a dungeon, then you limit what adventures people can do in those environments (and it's pretty stupid when the game has actually already said there are settlements in basically every plane).

You just have to make sure the exotic-ness isn't just "Like x country but with clouds". That would be very mundane.

Instead have things like, the Heaven in my setting being seven heavenly cities each surrounded and separated from each other by the exhaust fumes from the "above" plane of Utopia. Most citizens in the cities were Aasimar and mortals who's ancestors fought alongside the Archons, these archons now rule them as benevolent-ish dictators who do 1984 control with magic item infrastructure, and the archons ensure safety with their innate supernatural abilities and a strange talent which allows them to pass through walls and walk on air, which is actually a result of each city being a separate layer on the plane all of which overlap and the higher in the ranks the archon is the more layers they can coexist on.

Contributor

8 people marked this as a favorite.
Alzrius wrote:

I always find this topic interesting, because in my experience views about the planes tend to fall into one of two distinct schools of thought:

1) Planes as dungeons - This is the "old school" idea, where the planes are considered to be natural extensions of hostile terrain that's ripe for adventuring in, but little else. The idea here is that the planes are so weird, so incredibly different from Material Plane life, that they're not really fit for anything else except high-level dungeons. To this thinking, planes like Hell or Heaven should absolutely not be relatable to "mundane" life, with cities and commerce and similar societal constructs. They should be utterly alien.

2) Planes as exotic lands - This is the "new school" idea, where the planes are treated as strange new worlds to be explored. This idea finds treating the planes as just locales for dungeon-diving to be highly restrictive, and ignores a wider series of cultures and ecologies that are rich with possibilities. The societies and cultures of things like angels and demons are features, rather than window dressing, to this point of view.

The new school line of thought has been in vogue since at least Planescape, and Pathfinder seems to fit in with it pretty well, but maybe things will be different going forward?

I don't necessarily agree with the premise of the first option. I've always seen treating the planes as high level dungeons to absolutely strip any notion of being alien away from them. It reduces them to just another mundane adventuring location, but with higher level enemies.

I've always preferred the approach that Planescape took. The planes are alien. The planes are places of wonder and majesty, terror and unreason. I don't want to treat them as just prosaic, higher level dungeons with stranger monsters to fight. They exist independent of mortal adventurers and they aren't sitting around waiting for level 20 heroes to fight. They have their own (often alien) ecologies, their own natives, their own reasons for being and the flavor text should emphasize this whenever possible. Don't skimp on the detail or make them seem normal unless for some reason the plane or its natives are trying to provide a small region more amenable to visitors for a specific reason.

I've tried to make things bizarre and alien when at all possible in planar content that I've worked on. I'll leave any measurement of my success there to other folks. :)


Well, The Great Beyond is definitely one of my favorite planar books... XD

That said, I do have some questions about the expansiveness in the setting. Do we have planar mixes (ye olde paraelemental and quasielemental planes) in Pathfinder? Maybe some more esoteric mixes, like aligned planes 'near' to elemental planes, or demiplanes made for certain purposes by various groups?

I don't get to USE these sorts of things as much as I like, but I love reading about interesting planar locations.


Milo v3 wrote:
Davia D wrote:
Huh, I find 'exotic lands' makes them less mundane than dungeons. There's a lot of creative stuff you can do with a whole living place you can't do with, well, basically a place to fight.

If it's just a dungeon, then you limit what adventures people can do in those environments (and it's pretty stupid when the game has actually already said there are settlements in basically every plane).

You just have to make sure the exotic-ness isn't just "Like x country but with clouds". That would be very mundane.

Instead have things like, the Heaven in my setting being seven heavenly cities each surrounded and separated from each other by the exhaust fumes from the "above" plane of Utopia. Most citizens in the cities were Aasimar and mortals who's ancestors fought alongside the Archons, these archons now rule them as benevolent-ish dictators who do 1984 control with magic item infrastructure, and the archons ensure safety with their innate supernatural abilities and a strange talent which allows them to pass through walls and walk on air, which is actually a result of each city being a separate layer on the plane all of which overlap and the higher in the ranks the archon is the more layers they can coexist on.

Or in other words, the planes allow you to make lands that don't resemble any country because they don't have to fit our rules. They aren't made of humans, they aren't based on drawing resources from the land in the same way as mundane nations (they arguably still do so in a way, but even that way can vary place to place), and without a conventional ecosystem... like, Abaddon's 'ecosystem' is based on the locals trying to devour every soul they can find while evil souls pour down and an evil eye stares from above. The Maelstrom is a sea without water, where groups of Proteans called Choruses (that can be of almost any size) can have almost any motive and you can travel between them freely. It's an alien experience.

Shadow Lodge

Davia D wrote:
DM Beckett wrote:

I think an approach that is aporox 75% #1 with a 25% ish #2 would be perfect. While I like some #2, the main problem with it's mindset is that it makes it so mundane, which ultimately cheapens it.

Huh, I find 'exotic lands' makes them less mundane than dungeons. There's a lot of creative stuff you can do with a whole living place you can't do with, well, basically a place to fight.

I guess it depends more on what is meant by "Dungeon" vs "Exotic Land". I took Dungeon to mean more along the lines of better suited for relatively short adventures in that environment with a larger focus on what makes that Plane different than the norm rather than a literal Dungeon Crawl.

On the other hand, "Exotic Location" to mean a place that really is not all that different from other locations on the Material Plane, knowable, and despite some of the fundamental laws of reality being different, everything ultimately works about the same and has an easy equivalent.

"Dungeon" is more difficult to use for long term campaigns (in game) unless the DM hands out powerful magic items freely to help make it possible, (such as the ability to breath water indefinitely at level 1), but can be used well to showcase the difficulty of adventuring there for a few days/weeks/months (again in game) at higher level play when the characters can actually cast these spells or buy these items appropriately. Now, by "adventuring" I mean pretty much anything, dungeon crawl, diplomatic envoy, studying historical sites, negotiating a trade deal, or hunting down a plane hopping fugitive.

On the other hand, "Exotic Lands" is easier for long term adventures as most of the difficulties for normal Material Plane characters are hand waved. There is little to really experience on the Plane of _________ that differs from places on the Material Plane, because the mechanical differences are minimal, mostly window dressing. This makes it a lot easier to use for any level of play, and also for long term games (in game), at the expense of the "Exotic Lands" actually being very exotic challenges.

As an example, I'm currently playing a PFS scenario where the group is taken to the Plane of Earth. This is a Level 1-5 scenario, and I am only partially (1/2?) through it. But, so far, not a single thing has happened that could not have identically happened basically anywhere on the Material Plane. That doesn't make our first trip to the Plane of Earth special, it makes it feel extremely mundane. More so as I am playing an Oread and another player has brought an Undine. Granted, this is PFS, but many of the other Scenarios I've played or run that involved a different Plane have been similar, minimal difference from adventuring anywhere else so that it could basically take place somewhere on the Material Plane and no one would really notice.

Shadow Lodge

GM Rednal wrote:
Well, The Great Beyond is definitely one of my favorite planar books... XD

I really enjoy it as well, but mainly for Golarion. I'd love to see a similar book that's not directly tied to the setting, (but could be if an individual DM desires), that isn't bound by Golarion's assumptions out of the gate.

The Great Beyond part 2 just isn't very appealing to me.


A good example of Exotic Lands, IMO, is in Hell's Rebels, when you go to hell to handle...
a legal issue. You aren't there to hack your way through, you are dealing with part of a larger society and bureaucracy that may possibly work in your favors if you play your cards right.

Or Wrath of the Righteous, when you visit Noctulia's isles and talk to people and interact
with these horrible people who are opposed to the horrible people you face.

Or the First World, where most inhabitants are not necessarily malicious but don't 'get' this death thing since they don't have it and it informs a lot of their behavior.

The elemental planes I usually find weak because they lack these social aspects, they're just places with more rock or fire and such, but the others? Quite interesting, way more so than a dungeon.

DM Beckett wrote:
GM Rednal wrote:
Well, The Great Beyond is definitely one of my favorite planar books... XD

I really enjoy it as well, but mainly for Golarion. I'd love to see a similar book that's not directly tied to the setting, (but could be if an individual DM desires), that isn't bound by Golarion's assumptions out of the gate.

The Great Beyond part 2 just isn't very appealing to me.

Well, like I asked above, what exactly does a planar book not tied to a setting even look like? Different than just removing some Golarion references, that is?

A whole new setting, or a planar toolkit with no really developed planes seem the options to me.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Todd Stewart wrote:

I don't necessarily agree with the premise of the first option. I've always seen treating the planes as high level dungeons to absolutely strip any notion of being alien away from them. It reduces them to just another mundane adventuring location, but with higher level enemies.

I've always preferred the approach that Planescape took. The planes are alien. The planes are places of wonder and majesty, terror and unreason. I don't want to treat them as just prosaic, higher level dungeons with stranger monsters to fight. They exist independent of mortal adventurers and they aren't sitting around waiting for level 20 heroes to fight. They have their own (often alien) ecologies, their own natives, their own reasons for being and the flavor text should emphasize this whenever possible. Don't skimp on the detail or make them seem normal unless for some reason the plane or its natives are trying to provide a small region more amenable to visitors for a specific reason.

I've tried to make things bizarre and alien when at all possible in planar content that I've worked on. I'll leave any measurement of my success there to other folks. :)

The issue - and bear in mind that I'm relating sentiment that I've heard elsewhere, rather than my own opinion - is that if you (as humans or other mortal beings) can understand the mindset of planar denizens, the ecologies of their home realms, or pretty much anything about the planes, then you're "doing it wrong." The idea of treating the planes as being high-level dungeons is because they're too alien, too inimical to mortal life, to be treated as anything else; basic concepts such as "cause and effect" or "time" shouldn't work the way mortals understand them. Treating the planes as extremely hostile locales that only the strongest individuals can enter for even a brief period should be the only method by which mortals can directly interact with them.

To that mindset, Planescape didn't really convey any "wonder and majesty." You had towns - complete with inns and taverns - set up in places like Hell and the Abyss. You still bought goods and services with gold coins in Heaven. With only a few mild exceptions (mostly the Inner Planes), every place had normal gravity, breathable air, and physical laws that weren't at all inconvenient to mortal travelers. Yeah, Bytopia had split gravity between its layers, but that was little more than an odd quirk of the place rather than massively changing one of the fundamental building blocks of existence.

Literally going to Hell - in this point of view - should be a soul-blasting experience. Just being there, even for a few moments, should utterly rend your humanity asunder unless you have godly mental discipline and powerful magic protecting you. Heaven should be a place that, if you go there, you never want to leave because it offers peace and fulfillment in a manner that can't be adequately described using mere words. Primal chaos should not be a primordial soup that you can channel into whatever you want with your thoughts; it should be a realm that's alien beyond comprehension and which quickly breaks down the laws keeping your physical self functioning. And so on.

Having the Abyss be a place where the trees are snakes and you take a -2 penalty to Charisma checks if you're Lawful or Good isn't quite the same thing.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

Tammy likes the snake trees.

Shadow Lodge

Davia D wrote:

Well, like I asked above, what exactly does a planar book not tied to a setting even look like? Different than just removing some Golarion references, that is?

A whole new setting, or a planar toolkit with no really developed planes seem the options to me.

I would think very similar to how The Great Beyond looked, as at the time, Golarion as a Setting was still very undefined and unexplored, much like how 3E's version of Greyhawk in the Core book was a very lite setting.

It can contain developed planes, but they don't have to be ones that are directly linked or related to Golarion as a setting, (but with minimal tweeks, very easily could be if desired).

I went with a few concepts about specifically to try to highlight some of the more common things that some folks do not like about Golarion or the official assumptions for that setting, such as godless Clerics, 99% of Undead being Evil, and Positive Energy being associated with Good/Negative Energy being associated with Evil, mechanically.

A plane where some of these things do not apply, or stuff for the groups that do not play in Golarion would be infinitely more cool, interesting, and useful for me that yet another book that only focuses on a big concept through the lens of one setting and ignores ideas, flavor, and concepts that don't work within it's assumptions. Consider that the original The Great Beyond was also retconned a lot to change the Golarion Setting, and some of those original ideas where dang cool.

We already have plenty of books and material that looks at different planes from the perspective of Golarion. We also have two APs, at least, and a handful of other books that go outside of Golarion as a setting, (Reign of Winter and Mummy's Mask both directly link to a real world Fantasy Earth, while Artifacts and Legends has links to earth and other Settings without specifically calling them out). My understanding is that those where also very popular.


Alzrius wrote:


The issue - and bear in mind that I'm relating sentiment that I've heard elsewhere, rather than my own opinion - is that if you (as humans or other mortal beings) can understand the mindset of planar denizens, the ecologies of their home realms, or pretty much anything about the planes, then you're "doing it wrong." The idea of treating the planes as being high-level dungeons is because they're too alien, too inimical to mortal life, to be treated as anything else; basic concepts such as "cause and effect" or "time" shouldn't work the way mortals understand them. Treating the planes as extremely hostile locales that only the strongest individuals can enter for even a brief period should be the only method by which mortals can directly interact with them.

To that mindset, Planescape didn't really convey any "wonder and majesty." You had...

The problem there, of course, is "see adventure, kill," is possibly the single least alien experience an adventurer can face!

I also fundamentally disagree. Take, say, the works of CJ Cherryh. She writes a lot of aliens, and they're pretty darn alien psychological, and over the course of the series you can learn to understand the rules under which they operate, which still doesn't make them your rules (or the aliens necessarily predictable).

A place that operates on a set of rules different from our own is alien, even if we're capable of intellectually understanding them.

And, say, Sigil? That was a city. It was also like *no* existing city in D&D at the time of it's creation. It has a mix of beings often normally only found in combat and never side by side, it had places with weird philosophies that you wouldn't encounter in a normal city (there's a group of big ol' hedonists... and they're a public institution. The nihilists aren't a dark cult, they run city services. Etc.). It's not even as alien as some places can be, but it really was a rather exotic, and importantly, new place.

As for things like 'cause and effect' and 'time' being too ... good luck running a game there period! You certainly can't do a dungeon like that.

Quote:


Literally going to Hell - in this point of view - should be a soul-blasting experience. Just being there, even for a few moments, should utterly rend your humanity asunder unless you have godly mental discipline and powerful magic protecting you. Heaven should be a place that, if you go there, you never want to leave because it offers peace and fulfillment in a manner that can't be adequately described using mere words. Primal chaos should not be a primordial soup that you can channel into whatever you want with your thoughts; it should be a realm that's alien beyond comprehension and which quickly breaks down the laws keeping your physical self functioning. And so on.

Having the Abyss be a place where the trees are snakes and you take a -2 penalty to Charisma checks if you're Lawful or Good isn't quite the same thing.

Note the Hell and Heaven there would just be completely unplayable. I agree that primal chaos being something that'd just become whatever you want is too easy and simple, but one that just quickly breaks you down is fundamentally boring because you can't *do* anything there.

Basically, while some people my argue that? Those people simply aren't going to use any publishable material on the planes period, because what they want is non-gameable and honestly kinda boring.

I mean, that *is* what the Positive and Negative planes traditionally have been, and they're normally also the absolutely least-used planes below even the elemental planes (which are themselves also tending to lack spice).

The Abyss should be more than taking -2... but a society of creatures that operate on different rules and are a different mix than you'd see anywhere else is what makes it interesting, not the -2.


DM Beckett wrote:


I would think very similar to how The Great Beyond looked, as at the time, Golarion as a Setting was still very undefined and unexplored, much like how 3E's version of Greyhawk in the Core book was a very lite setting.

It can contain developed planes, but they don't have to be ones that are directly linked or related to Golarion as a setting, (but with minimal tweeks, very easily could be if desired).

I went with a few concepts about specifically to try to highlight some of the more common things that some folks do not like about Golarion or the official assumptions for that setting, such as godless Clerics, 99% of Undead being Evil, and Positive Energy being associated with Good/Negative Energy being associated with Evil, mechanically.

Here's the thing- you can, on the one hand, just houserule the Great Beyond to uncouple things like undeath and evil- which honestly isn't that hard, just give Pharasma her old type of undead servants and such and toss in a place for the godless.

Or, alternatively... you just aren't asking for a non-golarion specific planes book, but a specific single non-golarion setting which cannot be used with Golarion because you want stuff specifically designed to clash and not fit.

So, in that sense, do you really think it's a good idea to make a pathfinder product that is 100% designed to not be used with Golarion? The actual setting non-specific stuff (like Ultimate [X] books, which gives you stuff like vigilantes and kineticists but not on where they're from or what they do) is still compatible with Golarion in a way that this wouldn't be.

Like I could see some pages in the back for alternate plane settings and cosmology assumptions, but a whole book focusing on developing an unrelated setting doesn't strike me as *more* interesting or cool, just different- what about being unrelated and unconnected makes it so? That I don't get.

Plus I think you'll agree that "Let's make a book that specifically cannot work with Golarion without major adjustments," would be a bizarre business call for Paizo, yes?

Quote:


We already have plenty of books and material that looks at different planes from the perspective of Golarion. We also have two APs, at least, and a handful of other books that go outside of Golarion as a setting, (Reign of Winter and Mummy's Mask both directly link to a real world Fantasy Earth, while Artifacts and Legends has links to earth and other Settings without specifically calling them out). My understanding is that those where also very popular.

We have a number of planes sites and stuff, but they're often small in scope and a lot of planes are still pretty undeveloped and have less real information on them than the blurbs on the various countries in the "Inner Sea World Guide" gave for each of the nations.

Note also that Reign of Winter and Mummy's Mask are still set in the Golarion cosmology and this all the assumptions on magic etc. still apply, and are compatible with Golarion (i.e. you go to and from the other worlds in RoW, one from the Distant Worlds book, one on Earth) in a way that your suggestions specifically wouldn't be.

Sure, they're popular, but they're expanding the setting ala the Great Beyond, not unrelated settings. Everything in RoW and MM and so on is Golarion-compatible even if it's taking place in Russia or the Drakelands of another world.


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Davia D wrote:
The problem there, of course, is "see adventure, kill," is possibly the single least alien experience an adventurer can face!

As I understand it, the point is to outline that the planes are so alien that they're inimical to mortals being there as a consequence, and so they can only be used as "high-level dungeons" because there's no other way to feasibly interact with them. They're "supposed" to be an extremely hostile environment, turned up to 11, in this view. That allows for dungeons that are unlike anything experienced up to that point, and so are more alien than anything else.

Quote:
I also fundamentally disagree. Take, say, the works of CJ Cherryh. She writes a lot of aliens, and they're pretty darn alien psychological, and over the course of the series you can learn to understand the rules under which they operate, which still doesn't make them your rules (or the aliens necessarily predictable).

I haven't read her works (though some quick Googling suggests that they're very interesting), but they seem to presume that these aliens are at all understandable, since they exist in the same universe and so have to play by at least some of the same rules. That already makes them more familiar than, to the "planes as dungeons" adherents, more relatable than aliens would be.

Monte Cook's Dark*Matter novel Of Aged Angels dealt with characters (on contemporary Earth) who were trying to recover a mcguffin before it was retrieved by (alongside several other groups) some "ultraterrestrials" - other-dimensional beings. The interesting thing was that we never actually meet the ultraterrestrials in the novel. Their very presence warps the fabric of the universe (and messes with everyone's perceptions), and it's remarked that even some aliens (met in previous books) would have no idea how to relate to them. They make themselves known only through tulpas who can only imperfectly act like humans. Going to their home dimension is never put forward as a possibility.

Quote:
A place that operates on a set of rules different from our own is alien, even if we're capable of intellectually understanding them.

Not if the difference is too great to be overcome due to not operating on anything that remotely resembles what we know. The idea is that those planes operate on a "explain colors to someone who was born blind" level of reasoning, but for much more fundamental aspects of existence.

Quote:
And, say, Sigil? That was a city. It was also like *no* existing city in D&D at the time of it's creation. It has a mix of beings often normally only found in combat and never side by side, it had places with weird philosophies that you wouldn't encounter in a normal city (there's a group of big ol' hedonists... and they're a public institution. The nihilists aren't a dark cult, they run city services. Etc.). It's not even as alien as some places can be, but it really was a rather exotic, and importantly, new place.

The idea that Sigil was different from any city presented in D&D to date (which seems iffy, since the City of Brass was already established) says more about how D&D than it does about Sigil. The idea that such minor - and mostly cosmetic - changes present anything "truly" different is one that I've seen a lot of people turn their nose up at (and that's without getting into issues of the cant). If having "weird philosophies" and "monsters getting drinks together" was meant to be an alien experience, well, the idea there is that it wasn't really that alien compared to what a lot of people thought the word meant, as opposed to how comparatively mundane D&D had been up until that point. It's the "exotic lands" idea to a T, which is fine, but it's not what a lot of people wanted the planes to be (again, as I heard).

Quote:
As for things like 'cause and effect' and 'time' being too ... good luck running a game there period! You certainly can't do a dungeon like that.

Yes you can, it's just difficult to do because you need to come up with some sort of unique circumstances for why/how adventurers can be there at all. The most common idea that I've encountered in this is the "staging ground" area, where there's some portion of that plane that's intruding onto the mortal plane, often as some sort of forward outpost or frontier station or even just an accident; that has some aspects of the plane that are muted by it also having aspects of the mortal plane. The idea there being that you can make some sort of super-deadly dungeon where most of the "rules" (not just of the setting, but of reality itself) are different, with the underpinning message of "and this is mild compared to what that plane is really like!"

Quote:

Note the Hell and Heaven there would just be completely unplayable. I agree that primal chaos being something that'd just become whatever you want is too easy and simple, but one that just quickly breaks you down is fundamentally boring because you can't *do* anything there.

Basically, while some people my argue that? Those people simply aren't going to use any publishable material on the planes period, because what they want is non-gameable and honestly kinda boring.

The idea is that you're not supposed to do anything there, save for extremely limited forays under unusual circumstances at very high levels with powerful magic. Anything less, the thought goes, should be as suicidal as diving into the heart of a star. After all, if we have such hazardous locales here in this universe, a place that's built on different physical laws should be far deadlier than "just" a nuclear furnace!

You call that boring, but to the people who enjoy that sort of thing those adventures are going to be the least boring things imaginable, since they'll be the basis for extremely unique dungeons where you can't take anything for granted. To the people who like that, "boring" is "you go to Hell, and head to the nearest tavern once you arrive in Dis. Make a check to pick up any local rumors. There's an old man in the corner who wants you to check out a nearby merchant that's involved in some smuggling," which all sounds like every other adventure ever. The idea that it's in Hell becomes nothing more than a backdrop which ultimately doesn't do very much. The idea that these are devils you're walking next to is suddenly no more exotic than if you went to a different country on your own world.

It's the homogenization of exoticism, in other words. It drives home that everyone is just a human in a funny hat.

Quote:
I mean, that *is* what the Positive and Negative planes traditionally have been, and they're normally also the absolutely least-used planes below even the elemental planes (which are themselves also tending to lack spice).

The Inner Planes tend to be viewed - that I've seen - as cut-rate versions of what this camp wants in their planar adventures. They're at least hostile enough to drive home the point that the planes aren't "just somewhere with funny-looking people" in them. Guarding a caravan is guarding a caravan, whether it's in your kingdom or through the Outlands.

Quote:
The Abyss should be more than taking -2... but a society of creatures that operate on different rules and are a different mix than you'd see anywhere else is what makes it interesting, not the -2.

Again, that's not any different than what you'd find in another country. Some players want another dimension to go a bit further than that.


Davia D wrote:
And, say, Sigil? That was a city. It was also like *no* existing city in D&D at the time of it's creation. It has a mix of beings often normally only found in combat and never side by side, it had places with weird philosophies that you wouldn't encounter in a normal city (there's a group of big ol' hedonists... and they're a public institution. The nihilists aren't a dark cult, they run city services. Etc.). It's not even as alien as some places can be, but it really was a rather exotic, and importantly, new place.

That doesn't sound like a different plane than the material one, just another country actually, heck it almost sound like Irrisen actually.

Davia D wrote:
As for things like 'cause and effect' and 'time' being too

That actually sounds like what a plane should start to look like, the denizens and their culture are alien because their reality is alien (aka different from the material plane)

Davia D wrote:
Note the Hell and Heaven there would just be completely unplayable.

Not unplayable, just reserved for high level adventures that have the actual means to survive there.

Davia D wrote:
The Abyss should be more than taking -2... but a society of creatures that operate on different rules and are a different mix than you'd see anywhere else is what makes it interesting, not the -2.

What does it mean anywhere else? You don't need to go to other planes to see different societies, if what you have in a plane could have as easily been presented in another region of Golarion then most probably it should not have been another plane to start with.

EDIT: And now Alzrius expressed in a much better way the point I was trying to make


One benefit of if it was setting-neutral would mean it'd be much more helpful to individuals who don't know/like the Golarion gods and demigods... since for some reason I imagine they'd come up a decent amount in a book about the Golarion planes.


Not gonna lie, a book with lots of Open Game Content planes would be pretty nice to offer to publishers of all kinds... XD


Alzrius wrote:
As I understand it, the point is to outline that the planes are so alien that they're inimical to mortals being there as a consequence, and so they can only be used as "high-level dungeons" because there's no other way to feasibly interact with them. They're "supposed" to be an extremely hostile environment, turned up to 11, in this view. That allows for dungeons that are unlike anything experienced up to that point, and so are more alien than anything else.

Yea, being inimical to human life, well, isn't very alien! Not in itself at least. It's hostile and dangerous, but there's not much complexity there.

Like one of my biggest complaints on the Great Wheel/Limbo was the Slaad. 'Chaos' was represented by 'frogs that will eat you,' and thus the plane of chaos was far less alien than the plane of law, where you had to interact with beings who could only hold a precise number of actions in their heads and couldn't conceive of members of their species up more than one level.

Quote:
I haven't read her works (though some quick Googling suggests that they're very interesting), but they seem to presume that these aliens are at all understandable, since they exist in the same universe and so have to play by at least some of the same rules. That already makes them more familiar than, to the "planes as dungeons" adherents, more relatable than aliens would be.

In the Chanur books, there's a species that is so hard to communicate with, we can only speak to them through the filter of another species we can only sorta communicate with. It's, "Ok, these aliens may have multiple brains and it takes us an hour to translate any sentence completely, but they find these other ones *weird*."

But the thing is, "Lack of communication," doesn't actually say much alienness to me, or at least not interesting alienness. Like, it renders interaction simple. Avoid or fight? Hope it doesn't notice you? That's really straightforward.

These planes, for all that some are describing them as alien, are about as hard to predict as the Elemental Plane of Poison Spikes from the sound of it.

Dangerous, but dangerous due to 'funky effects described in different ways but fill the same role as more known ones.'

In the Foreigner books, there's aliens that humans thought they got and were assumed to be pretty similar Star Trek-y aliens, but it turns out they worked on different basic emotional wiring and a war got started due to both sides mutually just not getting each other. It's possible to intellectually learn about how the other side works, but it takes time and effort and it's still quite possible to get things wrong - and it makes for really, really, good stories. That's alien but the fact there's comprehensibility made them interesting and tricky in their alienness, in a way "can't possibly comprehend," isn't.

Quote:


Monte Cook's Dark*Matter novel Of Aged Angels dealt with characters (on contemporary Earth) who were trying to recover a mcguffin before it was retrieved by (alongside several other groups) some "ultraterrestrials" - other-dimensional beings. The interesting thing was that we never actually meet the ultraterrestrials in the novel. Their very presence warps the fabric of the universe (and messes with everyone's perceptions), and it's remarked that even some aliens (met in previous books) would have no idea how to relate to them. They make themselves known only through tulpas who can only imperfectly act like humans. Going to their home dimension is never put forward as a possibility.

Ok, so that sounds very much like the 'foreign land,' camp. One foreign enough you can't visit it, and where you need translators to talk to them, but... you're communicating, and it's non-hostile or not necessarily hostile. There's just weird abilities in play, you don't know their motives, and your interactions normally happen at a remove.

That's playable, though I wouldn't want *every* alien like that as it's also a lot of work for interaction.

Quote:
Not if the difference is too great to be overcome due to not operating on anything that remotely resembles what we know. The idea is that those planes operate on a "explain colors to someone who was born blind" level of reasoning, but for much more fundamental aspects of existence.

Heh, explaining stuff like that in a concise manner is something of a hobby of mine.

--

You know how sounds have different tones and volume? Color is a lot like that- an object's color is basically it's 'tone,' if there was another form of hearing beyond your range, and it's 'volume' is determined by other conditions we call 'brightness.' And just like how two sounds at the same time can sound like a third sound, so too can 'color' be combined or appear to be a different one under some circumstances.

--
Also, when it comes to adventuring? Motives and interaction are much more interesting for making a story and adventure anyway, IMO.

Quote:
The idea that Sigil was different from any city presented in D&D to date (which seems iffy, since the City of Brass was already established) says more about how D&D than it does about Sigil. The idea that such minor - and mostly cosmetic - changes present anything "truly" different is one that I've seen a lot of people turn their nose up at (and that's without getting into issues of the cant).

If a place's society, inhabitants, culture, and physical set-up are 'minor and cosmetic'... well, I don't really know what to say to that. Granted the cant can be annoying, but Sigil is still a rather stand-out place.

Quote:
If having "weird philosophies" and "monsters getting drinks together" was meant to be an alien experience, well, the idea there is that it wasn't really that alien compared to what a lot of people thought the word meant, as opposed to how comparatively mundane D&D had been up until that point. It's the "exotic lands" idea to a T, which is fine, but it's not what a lot of people wanted the planes to be (again, as I heard).

Frankly, it sounds to me like these people want something I wouldn't call alien at all- they want the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey with all the lights and random imagery, not something aliens would do.

And, I mean, since when are foreign lands boring? Before it event gets into foreign-lands-with-inhuman-beings-operating-on-vastly-different-viewpoints?

Quote:
Yes you can, it's just difficult to do because you need to come up with some sort of unique circumstances for why/how adventurers can be there at all. The most common idea that I've encountered in this is the "staging ground" area, where there's some portion of that plane that's intruding onto the mortal plane, often as some sort of forward outpost or frontier station or even just an accident; that has some aspects of the plane that are muted by it also having aspects of the mortal plane. The idea there being that you can make some sort of super-deadly dungeon where most of the "rules" (not just of the setting, but of reality itself) are different, with the underpinning message of "and this is mild compared to what that plane is really like!"

Which is a cool approach, though unless you have some rules, it's just doing random stuff. Also it works just fine with 'exotic lands' too.

Quote:
The idea is that you're not supposed to do anything there, save for extremely limited forays under unusual circumstances at very high levels with powerful magic. Anything less, the thought goes, should be as suicidal as diving into the heart of a star. After all, if we have such hazardous locales here in this universe, a place that's built on different physical laws should be far deadlier than "just" a nuclear furnace!

Stars aren't particularly alien, they're just stars, is my point.

And these people you're talking about sound boring to game with!

The results aren't anything that different or interesting in my book, there's little to understand or do much with, just fancy

Like I noted, the Positive and Negative elemental planes fit these descriptions the best and practically no-one uses them. Pathfinder makes them the more interesting they've ever been, and that's with Paizo adding much less alien bits like the Manasaputra.

Quote:
You call that boring, but to the people who enjoy that sort of thing those adventures are going to be the least boring things imaginable, since they'll be the basis for extremely unique dungeons where you can't take anything for granted.

How so? Like, simply as a dungeon, that sounds kinda crap to me. Either you've got protection from the extreme local effects, at which case it's hack and slash. If you don't, then it's not a dungeon, it's a trap you walk into ala a spiked pit.

Compare to a place where, say, gravity works differently, you need to puzzle out how distance works to figure out where to go, and each encounter you need to figure out if you can talk to them and then once you do, what they want and what you can learn from them. That requires less 'alienness,' by your standards since gravity's comprehensible and you can talk to people, but has a lot more to do.

If you can't talk to people or deal in puzzles or such, it sounds like a description block combined with a very straightforward experience.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

My thinking is that a setting neutral book can be done by anyone. Only Paizo can produce one tied to Paizo's IP.

Putting out some Golarion tied planar material leaves the "no setting planar material" niche free for 3PPs (most of whom don't have a fully fledged setting anyhow so they're not missing an opportunity).

That's from a business perspective. From a creative perspective I'd like Paizo to do both. However, I recognise they have to devote resources to where there's a decent return. All in all, leveraging their IP seems like an obviously superior strategy to me from a commercial viewpoint. Golarion is a valuable resource worth developing, imo.


edduardco wrote:


That doesn't sound like a different plane than the material one, just another country actually, heck it almost sound like Irrisen actually.

I can't really think of anything that resembles creatures of pure Law interacting with an organization who funds expeditions into the multiverse to find new forms of pain to sell to jaded individuals, while exemplars of good and evil interact but are kept in check by the threat of labyrinths, and the ones who maintain the place speak in Rhebuses.

Like, Irrisen has witches, trolls, and wolves. Am I missing something here? It's an interesting culture too but it's a really different one from Sigil and much more mortal-rooted.

Sigil certainly isn't the max of usable alienness or remotely near it, but it was the weirdest place to date (there was the City of Brass, but that was much more conventional in culture, it was just on fire).

Quote:


What does it mean anywhere else? You don't need to go to other planes to see different societies, if what you have in a plane could have as easily been presented in another region of Golarion then most probably it should not have been another plane to start with.

EDIT: And now Alzrius expressed in a much better way the point I was trying to make

You don't need to go to another plane to have other societies, you do if you want to meet a society where 'death' is that thing they heard of elsewhere but don't really get, or where of course everything fits absolutely into a perfect hierarchy with Asmodeus in the top, or where this one group is working on dissolving your home into oblivion but their neighbors are focusing on crafting something that's never been in existence before, and the two aren't opposed.

Frankly you two are making 'alienness' sound like 'just making things so different you can't interact with them,' and it's like, isn't interacting with things where the fun is, with pretty much anything? Sometimes with great difficulty of course, but if you can't interact, it's a description.

If 'has a society' is a minus to you and says 'not alien', no matter the basis on which it's made... I submit to you that you're in a much smaller minority than suggested.

And/or most of the people who think it's a good idea have never actually tried making a game of it.


Hm, or to summerize in a much shorter fashion (and sorry for posting so much):

Aliens so alien that you can't interact can make a colorful bit of background flavor, but gaming settings should be gameable.

Heck, you can interact with the Outer Gods, and communicate with their servants.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

Few things:

1) I would *absolutely, positively, love a Pathfinder Manual of the Planes* especially if the lead writer was Mr Stewart.

2) James Jacobs has said that more or less all RPG line books, like the Advanced Players Guide(I don't recall too much Golarion stuff in there), were written to be used within Golarion. So, while the book itself may have little to no 'setting' specific information, it will still be tied to Golarion.

Ie, other than the Summoner, all the classes we got from the APG, existed within Golarion, but weren't official till the book was released.

So sure, we could have a setting neutral planar book, but it would still be created in such a way as to be used in Golarion. Which to me, seems to be rather counter to what you guys are asking for.

3) When I hear 'setting neutral planar book', I either think of book of random ass planes that have hardly anything to do with each other or are super generic, but still basically what we have already.

Ie, instead of Hell(which, I believe has always been the Devil plane), we have the Plane of Lawful Evil, and instead of the Abyss we get the Plane of Chaotic Evil.

4) Regarding the whole 'planes are dungeons', what you're suggesting isn't a bad idea, or necessarily a boring one. After all, I would assume the entire reason we all play D&D/Pathfinder is to go on badass adventures, be they to the save the town from the goblin horde, to stopping the big bad evil, or going to Hell to rescue the soul of a loved one.

HOWEVER I fail to see how you make a book, even a 32 page Player's Companion, out of this.

As I see it, you need a couple of pages listing planar hazards, and then a couple of encounter tables, and that's pretty much it.

I mean, after all, if only 15+ level PCs can only go there for a short period of time before their souls are rent asunder, or they dither about in blissful peace, you have no need to write up in much detail what the planar features are.

You don't need any cities, towns, villages, no mage towers, temples, or thieves' guilds, or anything else that would generally take up pages in a book, because all of that is mundane and normal and that's not what you want.

You want alien, bizarre, crazy!

Problem is, if you can write up it, you can understand it, and it's not alien.

So, cool, go take the info already out there on Hell, Heaven, the Abyss, etc, and go run your 10 minute expedition,

And leave the discussion about a potentially new Paizo product, since that's clearly not what you want.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

A Manual of the Planes would be excellent. Yes please, Paizo.


+1 for a planar hardcover with some Golarion-relevant lore.

Encounter tables, please! Possibly one for the "countryside" and one for a major city/location.

And I like the idea of "snapshot/landscape" art rather than a too-vague map which is basically useless in play.

Player options. (And not a tonne of Teamwork feats!)

Some focus on monsters beyond the traditional devils and demons.


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Davia D wrote:
Yea, being inimical to human life, well, isn't very alien! Not in itself at least. It's hostile and dangerous, but there's not much complexity there.

"Complexity" is not the measure of "alienness." Something is alien by how different it is, which means that something that's so different that even basic interaction is virtually impossible is as alien as it gets. This is compared to something where basic norms and values are slightly askew, which is only skin-deep in terms of how alien it is.

Quote:
Like one of my biggest complaints on the Great Wheel/Limbo was the Slaad. 'Chaos' was represented by 'frogs that will eat you,' and thus the plane of chaos was far less alien than the plane of law, where you had to interact with beings who could only hold a precise number of actions in their heads and couldn't conceive of members of their species up more than one level.

Actually, the complaint about the slaad was dealt with in Tales from the Infinite Staircase. But with regards to the modrons, I liked them because they were the first step in the right direction, but only a first step. Even then, they were an exception, rather than the rule for how most planar beings were portrayed.

Quote:

In the Chanur books, there's a species that is so hard to communicate with, we can only speak to them through the filter of another species we can only sorta communicate with. It's, "Ok, these aliens may have multiple brains and it takes us an hour to translate any sentence completely, but they find these other ones *weird*."

But the thing is, "Lack of communication," doesn't actually say much alienness to me, or at least not interesting alienness. Like, it renders interaction simple. Avoid or fight? Hope it doesn't notice you? That's really straightforward.

Again, "range of interaction" isn't the barometer of alienness; it's "(lack of) basic points of commonality." When the biggest issue is that you can't speak the local language, that's the same as what you get when you go to a foreign country, which means that you've taken another reality entirely and boiled it down to being nothing more than what you'd find if you crossed a few borders in the mortal world. That's incredibly boring!

In fact, that's actually a good standard for measuring how alien the planes should be. If your other-planar beings can be boiled down to differences in language, practices, or other issues of culture, then you haven't made a new plane; you've just made a new country. The planes should be MUCH more different than that.

Quote:

These planes, for all that some are describing them as alien, are about as hard to predict as the Elemental Plane of Poison Spikes from the sound of it.

Dangerous, but dangerous due to 'funky effects described in different ways but fill the same role as more known ones.'

How can you predict what's going to happen when the very aspects of reality that you take for granted are going to be repealed? How can you predict what's going to happen when the concepts of "left and right" become sounds rather than directions, or where "thought" becomes a somatic - rather than cognitive - process? The planes should be where you stretch your imagination furthest, not just "fantasy [insert country here]."

Quote:
In the Foreigner books, there's aliens that humans thought they got and were assumed to be pretty similar Star Trek-y aliens, but it turns out they worked on different basic emotional wiring and a war got started due to both sides mutually just not getting each other. It's possible to intellectually learn about how the other side works, but it takes time and effort and it's still quite possible to get things wrong - and it makes for really, really, good stories. That's alien but the fact there's comprehensibility made them interesting and tricky in their alienness, in a way "can't possibly comprehend," isn't.

"Two cultures meet, and a misunderstanding leads to war." I've read that story before, numerous times. That's not alien, that's a very tried-but-true plot with a different coat of paint applied on top of it. Those stories have been told before, and I know a lot of players who are familiar with those tropes and know what to do about them. That's also not very game-able, since it requires the GM to not only come up with a huge range of different values, beliefs, and practices, but also have to justify how the PCs can't just get them near-instantly with a skill check or a tongues spell.

Quote:

Ok, so that sounds very much like the 'foreign land,' camp. One foreign enough you can't visit it, and where you need translators to talk to them, but... you're communicating, and it's non-hostile or not necessarily hostile. There's just weird abilities in play, you don't know their motives, and your interactions normally happen at a remove.

That's playable, though I wouldn't want *every* alien like that as it's also a lot of work for interaction.

Except you can't talk to them, which is sort of the point. All you can do is talk to their tulpas, which are essentially robots with a set of pre-programmed responses (it's notable that the heroes, when they have a communication breakdown when they won't do what a tulpa is telling them, end up in a fight with it). The communication is entirely one-way (their tulpa-bots talking to humans), and outside of those parameters they're either hostile or entirely non-responsive. That's the sort of interactions that feel alien.

Quote:

Heh, explaining stuff like that in a concise manner is something of a hobby of mine.

--

You know how sounds have different tones and volume? Color is a lot like that- an object's color is basically it's 'tone,' if there was another form of hearing beyond your range, and it's 'volume' is determined by other conditions we call 'brightness.' And just like how two sounds at the same time can sound like a third sound, so too can 'color' be combined or appear to be a different one under some circumstances.

--
Also, when it comes to adventuring? Motives and interaction are much more interesting for making a story and adventure anyway, IMO.

In all honesty, that's not a very good explanation. You've just tried to lay down points of commonality in terms of variability, but haven't adequately described what an entirely new, heretofore unknown sense is like when you actually experience it. It's a comparison that's entirely without description, and so doesn't really tell them anything about what sight is actually like. That's understandable, since you can't describe something that's so fundamental that it forms the basis for which you describe everything else.

Likewise, when it comes to adventuring, motives and interaction are only interesting when you have a plausible basis for exploring such things in the first place. If you have beings that come from a place where the basic terms and definitions no longer apply, being able to understand their motives and interaction means that you're watering down how different they are.

Quote:
If a place's society, inhabitants, culture, and physical set-up are 'minor and cosmetic'... well, I don't really know what to say to that. Granted the cant can be annoying, but Sigil is still a rather stand-out place.

Again, that's because it's another country masquerading as another realm of reality. Issues of culture are indeed cosmetic, because they presume that all of the basic building blocks of existence are exactly the same as they are in your home dimension. When you don't even change the atmosphere or the gravity, you haven't really ventured into an "alien" realm; you've ventured across the countryside, and that's about it.

Quote:

Frankly, it sounds to me like these people want something I wouldn't call alien at all- they want the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey with all the lights and random imagery, not something aliens would do.

And, I mean, since when are foreign lands boring? Before it event gets into foreign-lands-with-inhuman-beings-operating-on-vastly-different-viewpoints?

Foreign lands are boring because they're entirely terrestrial, which doesn't live up to what the planes are presumed to offer. The people who want something more than that want - and this isn't the best example, but it's at least an attempt in the right direction - something out of Event Horizon, except where they have characters powerful enough to fight back. Just the tiniest little bit of Hell leaking into the mortal world should be an event that's apocalyptic in scope. It shouldn't be "okay, we'll meet up with you in Dis for drinks later."

Quote:
Which is a cool approach, though unless you have some rules, it's just doing random stuff. Also it works just fine with 'exotic lands' too.

The whole point is that the rules have changed to the point where the players don't know what they are ahead of time, and so have to think on their feet and use creative solutions to problems that are brain-bendingly difficult. That's not "exotic lands," that's "alien reality."

Quote:

Stars aren't particularly alien, they're just stars, is my point.

And these people you're talking about sound boring to game with!

The results aren't anything that different or interesting in my book, there's little to understand or do much with, just fancy

Like I noted, the Positive and Negative elemental planes fit these descriptions the best and practically no-one uses them. Pathfinder makes them the more interesting they've ever been, and that's with Paizo adding much less alien bits like the Manasaputra.

Stars are extremely alien; they have none of the physical basics you'd assume for your standard adventuring land. That's opposed to a Heaven that's just a really pretty beach with some mountains in the background.

Likewise, the people who want the planes to be truly different would find yet another culture where you have humans in funny hats to be incredibly boring. When you have to come up with a new way to figure out how to convey ideas and concepts, that's far more interesting than yet another issue of tripping over issues of not taking off your shoes at the door or making sure to never eat food while wearing a hat.

The planes, under this thought, are best "used" as small encounter areas where the PCs get in, get the job done, and get out. You don't "use" an entire plane of existence unto itself, which is - to that mindset - the problem that Planescape (and wider D&D, by extension) has had ever since it tried to make them more "player-friendly."

Quote:
How so? Like, simply as a dungeon, that sounds kinda crap to me. Either you've got protection from the extreme local effects, at which case it's hack and slash. If you don't, then it's not a dungeon, it's a trap you walk into ala a spiked pit.

You still have to interact with the alien reality on its terms, at least partially. The powerful magic prevents it from killing you outright, but you can't help the fact that a lot of the local rules of reality need to be re-learned. It's like adventuring underwater, to the Nth power.

Quote:
Compare to a place where, say, gravity works differently, you need to puzzle out how distance works to figure out where to go, and each encounter you need to figure out if you can talk to them and then once you do, what they want and what you can learn from them. That requires less 'alienness,' by your standards since gravity's comprehensible and you can talk to people, but has a lot more to do.

Gravity is a fundamental interaction between units of matter; if you're going to a place where it works differently, the place should be incomprehensibly different, rather than "people fly here." That necessitates more "alienness," since one of the basic assumptions of how the world works has been completely turned on its head. That's a first step in making the planes work as a realm that's so different that it's inherently hostile.

Quote:
If you can't talk to people or deal in puzzles or such, it sounds like a description block combined with a very straightforward experience.

It's far less straightforward than having yet another culture where you have to walk on eggshells for fear of tripping over some local custom. Alternate dimensions should be more than just a foreign country, remember.

Dark Archive

2 people marked this as a favorite.

Bring it on, Todd! ;-)

Shadow Lodge

Just to be clear, when I say encounter, I dont mean combat encounter, but anything from combat to social to traps to communication. Similarly with hostile, I dont mean that the locals are hostile, but rather that the entire plane is to some degree to those that are not from it. Travellers can be protected from it, through magic, gear, or other mrans, but without those special precautions they will die within seconds or hours, or days, depending on the specific Plane.

That is mainly why it is a higher level "dungeon". Not literally, but without DM/Story Fiat, lower level PCs just do not have the means to exist there, or not very long. But, like with any "dungeon", it could be any blend of goals/missions/encounters. It could be entirely social.

But going to the City of Inferno on the Plane of Fiery Death should not just be like walking across Katepesh with slightly different window dressing.

Liberty's Edge

Agreed but that's why we assume that high level PCs use their abilities to get there and survive there. This is why things like Plane Shift and Protection From Elements exist. At lvl 3 you shouldn't be able to go planaring willy nilly but by lvl 15 you certainly should, or what's the point of even having the planes otherwise.


...So you can use Plane Shift on your enemies and send them into hostile terrain without protection?


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Rednal wrote:
...So you can use Plane Shift on your enemies and send them into hostile terrain without protection?

Which is why I house rule that plane shift only works on willing creatures. If you want to transport prisoners across planar boundaries or otherwise move unwilling creatures, you need to find an existing portal or open a gate.

I don't have my 1E and 2E books handy, but I don't recall being able to use plane shift offensively in them (though I might just be pulling a Brian Williams, there). If that's the case, then I wonder what prompted the designers of 3E to change that.

Dark Archive

Oh but where is the fun of that, especially since the best is almost always to send things to the negative energy plane, done and done.


Davia D wrote:
Frankly you two are making 'alienness' sound like 'just making things so different you can't interact with them,' and it's like, isn't interacting with things where the fun is, with pretty much anything? Sometimes with great difficulty of course, but if you can't interact, it's a description.

I won't go as far as to say that you can interact with it, just that the interactions are going to be different than what people are used to in the material plane at the very least.

And frankly you are making planes sound like just another country in the Inner Sea Region and the planes should be much more than that. We are not talking about just another country here, we are talking about going to a different dimension.


Alzrius wrote:


"Complexity" is not the measure of "alienness." Something is alien by how different it is, which means that something that's so different that even basic interaction is virtually impossible is as alien as it gets. This is compared to something where basic norms and values are slightly askew, which is only skin-deep in terms of how alien it is.

Complexity isn't a matter of alienness, but if something is simple then the experience won't be a very alien one regardless of how alien the reason for it being simple is.

"It kills you environmentally and lacking communication, you interact with hitting," is something that's not very alien whether it's because the reason why is you're fighting mindless things or things so advanced their thought cannot reach ours.

Complexity may not equal alienness, but it is pretty much required to make any longer term interaction feel alien.

edduardco wrote:
Davia D wrote:
Frankly you two are making 'alienness' sound like 'just making things so different you can't interact with them,' and it's like, isn't interacting with things where the fun is, with pretty much anything? Sometimes with great difficulty of course, but if you can't interact, it's a description.

I won't go as far as to say that you can interact with it, just that the interactions are going to be different than what people are used to in the material plane at the very least.

And frankly you are making planes sound like just another country in the Inner Sea Region and the planes should be much more than that. We are not talking about just another country here, we are talking about going to a different dimension.

Ok, I'm talking about, and have specifically mentioned, places where gravity doesn't work and where one has to deal with beings who operate on rules and morality far outside the norm that aren't based on any real culture and which leave out stuff like 'knowing what death is.' (which is one that exists in PF).

Does your Inner Sea just include much weirder stuff than mine does? Because last I checked while they're interesting and diverse they're still mostly human societies.

I'm sensing a bit of an excluded middle here, why exactly is 'can interact with them and view them as a society of *some* kind even a very odd one divorced from human philosophies' inner sea like? Other than not being the color from outer space, that is.

Frankly if your view is any society is normal/not alien enough, then your guidelines aren't very useful to me, don't seem to have much granularity when it comes to weirdness, and like Monkeygod notes, really isn't material for a Paizo / pathfinder book, pretty clearly so.


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Davia D wrote:
Complexity isn't a matter of alienness, but if something is simple then the experience won't be a very alien one regardless of how alien the reason for it being simple is.

On the contrary, if we hold that complexity isn't a barometer for alienness, then it holds that something can be wildly alien regardless of how simple or complex it is. Being alien means that it's different - extremely so - which is independent of whether or not your range of responses is diverse or limited.

Quote:
"It kills you environmentally and lacking communication, you interact with hitting," is something that's not very alien whether it's because the reason why is you're fighting mindless things or things so advanced their thought cannot reach ours.

On the contrary, that's extremely alien because of the inherent difficulty of figuring out how it's doing that, and how you can adequately respond to it. What's far less alien is talking to yet another group of humans in funny hats who are explaining in yet another unknown language that they're declaring war on you because you broke an egg from the wrong end. Remember: if your interaction could conceivably take place in a foreign country, then it's not alien enough for the planes.

Quote:
Complexity may not equal alienness, but it is pretty much required to make any longer term interaction feel alien.

Long-term interaction isn't a priority. Why would it be, when the realm in question is so extremely alien that it's inherently hostile to life - and even existence - as you understand it? That's part of why the planes, in this line of thought, are dungeons; you get in, get the job done, and get out. Long-term interaction is a job for explorers and diplomats, not adventurers.

51 to 100 of 166 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | next > last >>
Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Paizo Products / Product Discussion / Pathfinder Manual of the Planes All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.