Pathfinder Manual of the Planes


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Alzrius, Long term interaction is important because this is a *game* trying to tell a story.

Alienness for it's own sake to the point where you can't really interact with it may be your barometer, but you are leaving aside the, 'ok, and now what?' aspect where you now have this incredibly alien thing in the distance, and then you spend all your time in the actual inner sea because your planes aren't game settings, and even for dungeons they're very short and limited in what you can do there because they're so weird.

Like, I don't think your view of sufficiently alien is good for much beyond a SF short story, or perhaps one or two specific planes while leaving the rest in the interactable zone.

And no, what you describe does not actually sound like a very alien experience to me from, specifically, a player perspective. It sounds like a fairly straightforward experience with extremely alien flavor text. Like, you're specifically removing 'interact with an intelligent being' as an aspect of interaction. It's a puzzle to figure out how to move,
some high level spells to provide you your 15 minutes, and... then you leave after getting a thing or fighting a thing? And while you dismissed the idea that figuring one's way around a floating gravityless place would be interesting either, either way it's one 'figure out how to move' puzzle.

Maximum alienness is divorced from usefulness as a setting or game or something even interesting in a story.

Also, I do note your 'broken egg' example is completely different than the examples that I've given and citing the First World's lack of knowledge of morality so, no, the examples I give cannot take place on the material plane and nor can any other society based on inhuman morality. If you would please stop doing an excluded middle where there's nothing between 'funny hats' and 'cannot interact,' that'd be nice. People are giving you
examples.


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Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

But would the outer planes really be that alien? They exist as semi-sentient manifestations of universal axioms, Law, Good, Chaos, Evil. These aren't alien concepts at all, and the souls of the deceased (usually) travel to these realms upon death, to whichever plane that is most closely associated with their moral/ethical philosophies. While the societies that develop in these regions would be quite different, and no doubt confusing and perhaps even horrifying, they are nonetheless reflections, dark ones mayhap, but reflections nonetheless of mortal souls.


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Some of them would definitely be more alien. The parts of the Abyss dominated by the qlippoth, for example, are alien and horrifying in ways barely imaginable.

Liberty's Edge

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Heaven's described as a bunch of people sitting on clouds playing harps. That's not too difficult to grasp.

Hell is described as a bunch of layers with different sorts of torments. Again not too tough to grasp.

If someone wants to make them Alien and Inconceivable, have a ball. But I don't need that. Mythology has consistently described the planes as fairly simple concepts.


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Davia D wrote:
Long term interaction is important because this is a *game* trying to tell a story.

No, this is a game trying to be fun for the people that play it. Going on a five-year mission of cross-cultural understanding, with a secondary goal of setting up a trade agreement and a tertiary goal of a mutual-defense treaty, might make for a great story, but it's not very game-able. An adventure, which is much more game-able, is more typically going to be short-term, and developing a rich understanding of a foreign culture isn't going to play very deeply into that.

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Alienness for it's own sake to the point where you can't really interact with it may be your barometer, but you are leaving aside the, 'ok, and now what?' aspect where you now have this incredibly alien thing in the distance, and then you spend all your time in the actual inner sea because your planes aren't game settings, and even for dungeons they're very short and limited in what you can do there because they're so weird.

On the contrary, the "okay, now what?" aspect is preserved because alien realms of existence require a great deal of imagination in figuring out how to navigate them and deal with their implicit hostility - both environmental and with regard to the natives - when the your basic understanding of how existence works no longer applies. If what you want is a foreign culture to explore and interact with, then you already have that in the mortal world; any given planet with sufficient biodiversity and enough time to form a history - something that most campaign settings have in spades - should be overflowing with foreign cultures that aren't beyond your capacity to understand. If the game world has reduced all of that to pastiches and paragraph-long ecology articles, then it's done a bad job of doing what you want it to do.

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Like, I don't think your view of sufficiently alien is good for much beyond a SF short story, or perhaps one or two specific planes while leaving the rest in the interactable zone.

That's not my view; I'll reiterate that I'm telling you a common viewpoint that I encountered when Planescape was in vogue. The common response (I'm paraphrasing of course) to your take on things was "if it sounds like you're just visiting another country, then it's too boring for another dimension."

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And no, what you describe does not actually sound like a very alien experience to me from, specifically, a player perspective. It sounds like a fairly straightforward experience with extremely alien flavor text. Like, you're specifically removing 'interact with an intelligent being' as an aspect of interaction. It's a puzzle to figure out how to move, some high level spells to provide you your 15 minutes, and... then you leave after getting a thing or fighting a thing?

Yes, provided that the puzzle and/or entity is sufficiently alien enough by not holding true to basic assumptions that are always taken for granted. That's seriously alien, far more so than figuring out the significance of being asked to always sleep facing north when in someone else's home. That's exotic-sounding flavor text covering up an entirely mundane interaction, and the lack of depth quickly becomes apparent, especially when superficially-similar-but-meaningfully-identical scenarios pile up. That's not an adventure, per se, it's the GM showing off their world-building.

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Maximum alienness is divorced from usefulness as a setting or game or something even interesting in a story.

I disagree; maximum alienness is extremely useful as being an obstacle to be overcome, in terms of challenging adventurers.

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Also, I do note your 'broken egg' example is completely different than the examples that I've given and citing the First World's lack of knowledge of morality so, no, the examples I give cannot take place on the material plane and nor can any other society based on inhuman morality. If you would please stop doing an excluded middle where there's nothing between 'funny hats' and 'cannot interact,' that'd be nice.

I've likewise noted your not responding to the idea of "lack of knowledge of morality" as being an aforementioned simple case of different cultural values, which already take place on every single society on the Material Plane. Just because they place different degrees of importance on different things doesn't make something alien; quite the contrary, that's as familiar as can be, since you can find people with different value systems everywhere you look, including this conversation!


Squeakmaan wrote:
But would the outer planes really be that alien? They exist as semi-sentient manifestations of universal axioms, Law, Good, Chaos, Evil. These aren't alien concepts at all, and the souls of the deceased (usually) travel to these realms upon death, to whichever plane that is most closely associated with their moral/ethical philosophies. While the societies that develop in these regions would be quite different, and no doubt confusing and perhaps even horrifying, they are nonetheless reflections, dark ones mayhap, but reflections nonetheless of mortal souls.

I think there should be degrees of alienness. Some of them, yea, aren't *that* alien, but I think their differences should be emphasized- like, focus on the areas where they different from mortals and the important parts that make them fundamentally different.

Alzrius wrote:


No, this is a game trying to be fun for the people that play it. Going on a five-year mission of cross-cultural understanding, with a secondary goal of setting up a trade agreement and a tertiary goal of a mutual-defense treaty, might make for a great story, but it's not very game-able. An adventure, which is much more game-able, is more typically going to be short-term, and developing a rich understanding of a foreign culture isn't going to play very deeply into that.

Excluded middle here- there is a difference between a five-year mission and a single short encounter. Most games, I would hazard, include multiple encounters, play session, and communication with opposition/obstacles/etc..

Like, most games are more than a single location or location.

From what you describe, a planar visit would be a 5-8 page section of a single part of a single adventure path or adventure. Not the whole book of the AP, just a small section. I don't think you could do more than a few sessions on that.

I mean, they may be an interesting session or two, but if you're in an ongoing game, you certainly can't hang a campaign on it. You're there for a reason since you can't form any lasting ties there, after all.

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On the contrary, the "okay, now what?" aspect is preserved because alien realms of existence require a great deal of imagination in figuring out how to navigate them and deal with their implicit hostility - both environmental and with regard to the natives - when the your basic understanding of how existence works no longer applies.

What I mean is, you're left with the question 'now what?' and are specifically not then providing an answer. You're getting to the question and then stopping, saying, "No, you can't understand more."

The question 'now what?' is fine for a short story, but for a game? You're expected to answer it every single session, if the players don't know what to do next, the game ends.

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That's not my view; I'll reiterate that I'm telling you a common viewpoint that I encountered when Planescape was in vogue. The common response (I'm paraphrasing of course) to your take on things was "if it sounds like you're just visiting another country, then it's too boring for another dimension."

Which is not that people were asking for 'beings too alien to communication and interact with and planes too hostile to visit.'

Note that a lot of Planescape, like the Outlands, really was boring towns and such, only the gate towns of the outlands were remotely interesting.

Limbo? Aside from the frogs-that-will-eat-you, the primary place you visit is... the monstaries of the Githzerai, who are mortal monks not that different from a Tibetan analogy.

People weren't complaining about Xaositics and Sensates and the Factions and Sigil in general generally (and again, Sigil is not as alien as one can go, it's just a cool unusual place that relies on being offworld but isn't mind-blowingly weird... but note, it does have stuff like 'if enough people believe someone exists you can actually make a new person appear,' which is not something that happens in Vulda or Tian Xa), they were complaining about, well, the boring parts, which were common and generally paled next to Sigil.

I myself am someone who has complained pretty heavily on some of the parts being just too mundane.

I've never heard of someone, outside of this thread, say the problem with Planescape is that you can talk to Outsiders at all.

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I've likewise noted your not responding to the idea of "lack of knowledge of morality" as being an aforementioned simple case of different cultural values, which already take place on every single society on the Material Plane. Just because they place different degrees of importance on different things doesn't make something alien; quite the contrary, that's as familiar as can be, since you can find people with different value systems everywhere you look, including this conversation!

Again, excluded middle, and skipping my argument where, yes, I did address that specifically, a couple times even.

You're saying, "Because different earthly cultures have different values, all examples of cultures with different values are no more different than that."

Note that I am explicitly talking about basing cultures on differences and values that *do not exist in mortal humans*. Or extremes that humans cannot do. Death has literally no meaning, the idea of direction is pretty iffy, interaction follows an explicit set of rules of a type no earthly culture has, goals no mortal would have, etc..

If you're saying, 'anything that has a culture may as well be a normal foreign land,' well, I don't know what to say, except I don't think you're reading what people are saying and/or simply have a highly reductionist view which, yea, excludes the middle.

Because I don't think there's any culture on Earth or Golarion where the concept of mortal life is considered weird and exotic (like, in the Worldwound they may make jokes on the subject, but that's just them being morbid, they know full well what it is).


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Davia D wrote:
Excluded middle here- there is a difference between a five-year mission and a single short encounter. Most games, I would hazard, include multiple encounters, play session, and communication with opposition/obstacles/etc..

You keep talking about "the middle" and then posting more examples that aren't substantively different from what you've already said. The idea of a culture with no moral philosophy whatsoever - as you posited with the First World - is not "the middle" between a culture that, say, reveres death and an alien realm where happiness itself is a combustible material. It's a minor extension of the point you've already raised, because it's not really that different at all, it just looks like it is.

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Like, most games are more than a single location or location.

An entire campaign might be, but a single adventure doesn't need to be.

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From what you describe, a planar visit would be a 5-8 page section of a single part of a single adventure path or adventure. Not the whole book of the AP, just a small section. I don't think you could do more than a few sessions on that.

I mean, they may be an interesting session or two, but if you're in an ongoing game, you certainly can't hang a campaign on it. You're there for a reason since you can't form any lasting ties there, after all.

That's correct; you don't have an entire campaign in an alien realm where the electromagnetic spectrum manifests as a liquid, or anything like that. You go there during a brief, extremely difficult adventure when the entire party is level 18 and has moved beyond terrestrial challenges. It's self-evident that you don't hang an entire campaign on that sort of idea. Not everything is an adventure path, nor should it be expected that to serve as one.

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What I mean is, you're left with the question 'now what?' and are specifically not then providing an answer. You're getting to the question and then stopping, saying, "No, you can't understand more."

No, what you're doing is getting to the question and saying "this is what you have to work with" - where "this" is not only extremely lacking in information, but directly contradicts the most basic of assumptions about how things works - and then telling them to figure out what they're going to do, and more importantly how they're going to do it.

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The question 'now what?' is fine for a short story, but for a game? You're expected to answer it every single session, if the players don't know what to do next, the game ends.

You say "every single session" like you're still expecting to hang an entire campaign off of planar adventures. That's not how they work, in this point of view; the planes are called "planar dungeons" because they're dangerous locales that only come up for high-level characters near the end of their adventuring careers. The game doesn't end if the PCs need to retreat, it just means that they can try again, try something else, go somewhere else, or otherwise deal with the problem in some other way.

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Which is not that people were asking for 'beings too alien to communication and interact with and planes too hostile to visit.'

Only because I was reiterating what they didn't want, rather than what they did. Believe me, the idea of "have the other-dimensional beings seem like creatures from beyond mortal understanding" came up a LOT.

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Note that a lot of Planescape, like the Outlands, really was boring towns and such, only the gate towns of the outlands were remotely interesting.

Having cities with a different aesthetic sitting on Hell's doorstep really wasn't that interesting, to hear some people tell it. The idea that you're squatting just outside of Hell wasn't that much different from squatting just outside of any other evil castle, the way it was portrayed.

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Limbo? Aside from the frogs-that-will-eat-you, the primary place you visit is... the monstaries of the Githzerai, who are mortal monks not that different from a Tibetan analogy.

Exactly. If your Limbo is Tibet, then just have the players go to fantasy-Tibet in the game world and be done with it. Having "realm of primal chaos" be "Tibet" is reductionist, not alien.

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People weren't complaining about Xaositics and Sensates and the Factions and Sigil in general generally (and again, Sigil is not as alien as one can go, it's just a cool unusual place that relies on being offworld but isn't mind-blowingly weird... but note, it does have stuff like 'if enough people believe someone exists you can actually make a new person appear,' which is not something that happens in Vulda or Tian Xa), they were complaining about, well, the boring parts, which were common and generally paled next to Sigil.

The idea that anything in Sigil was "unusual" was only true if you weren't already familiar with the concepts that it put forward, which I honestly find hard to believe. All of the philosophies that the factions put forward - literally ALL of them - were terrestrial philosophies. The only thing they did was try to play them up by saying how "on the planes, they have power" and then presenting that power as being so incredibly diffuse and imperceptible that it was little more than legerdemain. Yes, maybe the Sign of One could have believed a dead god back to life, but the books made it clear that they hadn't yet and were currently trying to explain why that was that their big trick was always right around the next metaphorical corner.

The only reason that philosophies like that don't appear in Tian Xa or Vudra is that those countries aren't written with the diversity of culture and beliefs that we've seen in the real world, let alone planar realms that are utterly unlike anything in the mortal realms.

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I myself am someone who has complained pretty heavily on some of the parts being just too mundane.

The thing here is that there's a credible argument to be made that that would be most of its parts. Planescape was notable for being different from D&D up until then; that doesn't mean it was presenting anything that was truly pushing the boundaries of imagination.

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I've never heard of someone, outside of this thread, say the problem with Planescape is that you can talk to Outsiders at all.

I've heard plenty of people say exactly that. Though when you've gone from "talking" to "kicking back a few beers together," you've pretty well underlined the point.

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Again, excluded middle, and skipping my argument where, yes, I did address that specifically, a couple times even.

Again, you're misrepresenting a minor extension of your point as being "the middle," which is why you didn't, in fact, address what I brought up.

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You're saying, "Because different earthly cultures have different values, all examples of cultures with different values are no more different than that."

Which is, in fact, the case. If "values" is the biggest difference you can come up with between peoples - to say nothing of entire places - then that's not very alien at all, regardless of how wildly you twist them. That is the absolute minimum setting for making something different. Alienness is found in different states of being, not a different set of opinions.

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Note that I am explicitly talking about basing cultures on differences and values that *do not exist in mortal humans*. Or extremes that humans cannot do. Death has literally no meaning, the idea of direction is pretty iffy, interaction follows an explicit set of rules of a type no earthly culture has, goals no mortal would have, etc..

Again, that's only a minor extension of your point, and you're characterizing it as a major one. It's not. You can live forever; big deal. We have plenty of fantasy cultures that do that - from Tolkien's elves to vampires - and so already embody that. That's all easily within the realm of contemporary imagination. It's not alien when you explore the concept of "death has literally no meaning" by conducting an interview with a vampire. It's been done.

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If you're saying, 'anything that has a culture may as well be a normal foreign land,' well, I don't know what to say, except I don't think you're reading what people are saying and/or simply have a highly reductionist view which, yea, excludes the middle.

It's not reductionist to point out how limited that particular idea truly is. A different culture is no different than a foreign land, since you've posited no other differences besides the values of the inhabitants, and that's the same story we've heard before with a few non-salient details changed. That's just limited; another reality entirely should be more than that.

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Because I don't think there's any culture on Earth or Golarion where the concept of mortal life is considered weird and exotic (like, in the Worldwound they may make jokes on the subject, but that's just them being morbid, they know full well what it is).

Which isn't very imaginative, and certainly not very alien. If they're cracking jokes, you know they have a sense of humor, and so they're not very different from you after all. When the similarities are so easily found, then that's too small to be worthwhile of another dimension, presuming that other dimension wants to be the apex of alienness.


Alzrius wrote:
It's not reductionist to point out how limited that particular idea truly is. A different culture is no different than a foreign land, since you've posited no other differences besides the values of the inhabitants, and that's the same story we've heard before with a few non-salient details changed. That's just limited; another reality entirely should be more than that.

Mm, it really isn't. If a culture is one that cannot realistically form from humans, it's pretty unusual. And 'no other differences'? It seems to me like you want me to do a whole write-up here. I've posted several individual aspects which clash with your point and can't fit in any inner sea located, any Golarion located, any Earth-ish located nation period.

Providing a couple examples of aspects that cannot develop with humans demonstrates the point, and wanting even-more examples on your point doesn't change the point is shown.

Hm, another pretty common example- group minds, especially ones that lack any 'queen' figure. They think different, they are something that will never arise from a foreign human culture (until you get into transhuman modification). Again, not max-playable-alienness, but a communicatible culture that's quite playable and very much not a foreign country in a useful sense of the term.

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Which isn't very imaginative, and certainly not very alien. If they're cracking jokes, you know they have a sense of humor, and so they're not very different from you after all. When the similarities are so easily found, then that's too small to be worthwhile of another dimension, presuming that other dimension wants to be the apex of alienness.

Yea, I was using them as a contrast to show how no-one on Golarion fits with the aspects I've said, not even the Worldwound.

Also, really, 'have a sense of humor' tells you nothing about what one has a sense of humor about. The specific example isn't an example of it, but 'is capable of reacting in a way similar to humor' doesn't suddenly mean they're like humans two continents over. They're spore-based and transfer memories between each other by exchanging body parts giving a semi-racial memory where each, but they can laugh at a joke therefore they're on a foreign land? They're beings of chaos who perform single missions then dissolve themselves into pools passing on their knowledge to a new choir, but they chuckle at the idea that someone is still the same person from one year to the next? Nah, that doesn't work unless you're reduced the definition 'foreign land' to uselessness.

I think we're done here. I don't get the impression that you'll accept any granularity between 'normal foreign country' and 'so alien you can't communicate' as anything more than a foreign culture, and it's just going in circles. Either the point I'm making isn't reaching you or you're choosing to reject it- either way, you aren't getting anything from this and I sure as heck aren't either.


Back to the main topic!

What lesser known outsiders are people eager to see? Obviously there's a bunch of stuff on Demons, Devils, and Daemons already, so I hope not too much of them. I think the Celestials need some fleshing out. And my love of Proteans is well known.

But minor ones I'd like to learn a lot more about is the Ramasaputra and how their reincarnation thing and meddling plays with the rest of the outsiders, the Asura and their abomination-against-gods things, maybe some on their neighborly relations with the Devils, and of course the Psychopomps. They're at the center, the Boneyard, their role is vital to almost all (often as a role in their own creation, sometimes as great enemies in the case of those who'd rather do without souls). Where'd they come from? What's their story? Who are the Ushers?


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LN and CN need some serious love.

I am really interested in some of those dimensions, pocket dimensions, etc. that are mentioned in the softcover planar book.


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Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

I'd like a l book that goes into detail about the Great Beyond and its cosmology – as long as it's not a Planescape rehash. And no Sigil analogue, please.


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Dragon78 wrote:

LN and CN need some serious love.

I am really interested in some of those dimensions, pocket dimensions, etc. that are mentioned in the softcover planar book.

On pocket dimensions, it feels to me like Leng and similar lovecraft stuff could get it's own separate softcover.

Shadow Lodge

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Davia D wrote:

Back to the main topic!

What lesser known outsiders are people eager to see? Obviously there's a bunch of stuff on Demons, Devils, and Daemons already, so I hope not too much of them. I think the Celestials need some fleshing out. And my love of Proteans is well known.

But minor ones I'd like to learn a lot more about is the Ramasaputra and how their reincarnation thing and meddling plays with the rest of the outsiders, the Asura and their abomination-against-gods things, maybe some on their neighborly relations with the Devils, and of course the Psychopomps. They're at the center, the Boneyard, their role is vital to almost all (often as a role in their own creation, sometimes as great enemies in the case of those who'd rather do without souls). Where'd they come from? What's their story? Who are the Ushers?

Id like to see some Good Outsiders that, as a society are not written as if primarily right at the edge of LN/LE, but have silvery light instead of cloven hooves and horns. Ive always hated the idea that "angels" are tyrranical entities that enforce good and really dont give a crap about lesser mortals that dont do what they say like we see in Consyantine or Supernatural.

Id also like to see some planar temples that are dedicated to multiple deities more focused on a conept they have in common than the specific faiths. Especially if its left open for whatever pantheon(s) rather than just specifically the Golarion ones, but either way, how these might look and work on different planes would be cool. (Sort of along the same lines as tge original Godclaw idea, but for different concepts).


DM Beckett wrote:


Id like to see some Good Outsiders that, as a society are not written as if primarily right at the edge of LN/LE, but have silvery light instead of cloven hooves and horns. Ive always hated the idea that "angels" are tyrranical entities that enforce good and really dont give a crap about lesser mortals that dont do what they say like we see in Consyantine or Supernatural.

Agreed! And to be fair I don't think most of the Empyreal Lords fit that for the most part, they seem pretty good.

Right now the upper planes are really underdeveloped, what the four different outsider societies are like, and we know they're loosely allied with each other but it'd be nice if the conflicts between good were developed because having them be too buddy-buddy seems a bit too pat.

I'm curious if any of them have their own unique conflicts and grudges. Sorta like how in 3ed Great Wheel, the CG Eladrin were the arch enemies of the CE Obyrith. Pathfinder likes to mix up the alignment oppositions more, so there's room for some fun stuff there.

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Id also like to see some planar temples that are dedicated to multiple deities more focused on a conept they have in common than the specific faiths. Especially if its left open for whatever pantheon(s) rather than just specifically the Golarion ones, but either way, how these might look and work on different planes would be cool. (Sort of along the same lines as tge original Godclaw idea, but for different concepts).

One thing to note is there's definitely a lot of gods who don't visit Golarion.

Like some deities, especially the more ancient ones, are all over, I'd assume Desna and Sarenrae and Asmodeus are on the wide majority of planes, but there's probably a ton of one-world or a couple-of-world gods.

I mean, heck, the Osirion pantheon is mostly focused on other words nowadays.


Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Dragon78 wrote:

LN and CN need some serious love.

I am really interested in some of those dimensions, pocket dimensions, etc. that are mentioned in the softcover planar book.

Both of these, a million times over!


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Just tossing some ideas out (that anyone is free to take, use, modify, publish, alter, and in general do whatever they want with, now and forever)...

> Ethereal/Elemental demiplanes. A kind of "ghostflame" plane with fire that burns ghosts, an ethereal plane of water that attracts ghostly pirate ships that are raiding [Seaside region of choice], et cetera.

> Better establishment of eldritch aberrations into a Chaotic Neutral role. Maybe a new type or two of creatures? The point is, don't just make "slightly less evil qlippoths". Go for motivations people find hard to understand, and that don't make a whole lot of sense. It helps if they're not actively malevolent, just really weird. Players shouldn't feel they ought to kill such entities on sight.

> Better PR for Axis. We have demons pouring out of the Worldwound and devils being summoned in Cheliax. Where's the messengers of law and order visiting or being summoned to give advice to those in need?


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GM Rednal wrote:


> Better PR for Axis. We have demons pouring out of the Worldwound and devils being summoned in Cheliax. Where's the messengers of law and order visiting or being summoned to give advice to those in need?

Axis is a really interesting place- it didn't form like most other planes.

It was built by a civilization of mid-level Outsiders (i.e. not the normal power range), who came from outside (and possibly added Law to the multiverse in doing so), to construct it and not just to make a place but to continue to expand, and the main Outsiders of the Plane are ones they made for that purpose. So the actual bosses are a civilization of CR 8 Axiomites conducting, basically, a war against both Maelstrom and Abyss, with the CR 2 through 20 Inevitables being their tools.

It's a totally different setup than any other plane.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

I would like to see a Pathfinder Manual of the Planes with 10 page writes for each of the 22 planes listed below. Overall probably about a 320 page book. Included in the write ups would be rules for typical planar traits for the plane. And 6 page writes ups for a couple of demiplanes. The overall layout would look like this:

Introduction
Planes (10 pages per plane)
--Material Plane
--Elemental Plane of Air
--Elemental Plane of Water
--Elemental Plane of Earth
--Elemental Plane of Fire
--Astral Plane
--Ethereal Plane
--Shadow Plane
--Positive Energy Plane
--Negative Energy Plane
--Axis
--The Boneyard
--The Maelstrom
--Abaddon
--The Abyss
--Hell
--Elysium
--Heaven
--Nirvana
--First World
--Dimension of Dreams
--Dimension of Time
Demiplanes
--Creation Rules
--Leng
-- Akashic Record
Planar Hazards
Player Options
Magic Items
Spells
Extradimensions (Places Beyond Reality)

Then in the Campaign Setting line a 64 page book with 6 page write ups for any 8 of the demiplanes below, plus a bestiary and maybe a hazards section. Starred are the eight I want to see most. Although I wouldn’t mind if this was an oversized book of 120 pages so it could include more demiplanes.
Demiplanes
--Armageddon Echo
--Circle Between*
--Crypt of the Dying Sun
--Dead Vault
--Fleshwarren
--Freehold of the Rogue Angel*
--Harrowed Realm*
--Immortal Ambulatory*
--Kakishon
--The Lost*
--Machine Armory
--Mnemovore*
--Prison of the Laughing Fiend*
--Ramlock’s Hollow
--Runeforge
--Alicavniss’ Refuge
--Asmodean Knot
--Belzeragna
--Book of the Damned’s Repository
--Cenotaph of Queen Tashanna
--Crux of Nex
--Decanter of Black Breath
--Eye of Avarice
--The Fable
--Fellnight Realm
--Geb’s Accord
--Hao Jin Tapestry
--The Jarl’s Prison
--Midnight Mirror
--Refuge of Nex
--She of Bliss and Loss’ Island
--Spire of Nex
--Vanth’s Demiplane
--Whispering Place

If I am missing an demiplanes let me know.


Brinebeast wrote:

I would like to see a Pathfinder Manual of the Planes with 10 page writes for each of the 22 planes listed below. Overall probably about a 320 page book. Included in the write ups would be rules for typical planar traits for the plane. And 6 page writes ups for a couple of demiplanes. The overall layout would look like this:

{. . .}
Then in the Campaign Setting line a 64 page book with 6 page write ups for any 8 of the demiplanes below, plus a bestiary and maybe a hazards section. Starred are the eight I want to see most. Although I wouldn’t mind if this was an oversized book of 120 pages so it could include more demiplanes.
{. . .}

If you're going to come out with this much Planes stuff, great, but we NEED to have an AP to go with it.


I don't agree with Brinebeast, I would prefer those demi-planes to be in the hardcover book with the rest. I think giving each one like half a page would be nice.

Dark Archive

UnArcaneElection wrote:
If you're going to come out with this much Planes stuff, great, but we NEED to have an AP to go with it.

And, with an AP, or even a lower to mid level adventure involving planar travel or planes-hopping, a few lower CR residents of various planes would be handy, for those first volumes of the AP, where even the weaker demons and whatnot might be a bit out of reach.

Dark Archive

An AP yes but I would also like a season of PF play to have a bunch of planar modules to go with it as well, so as many different kinds of planar adventures be explored at once, not just the big scale ones that an AP give


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
UnArcaneElection wrote:
Depends upon what you mean by alien and by physical basics. The physical conditions are very different from what is found on Earth, but the physical laws are the same on Earth (although some are not easily apparent there), and a decent fraction of the physics and conditions thereof can be tested in the laboratory and comprehended by people having somewhat common scientific training.

Sure, and that's why our universe's stars are only a basic step in that direction, but it gets the point across: diving into a star should be the mid-level stuff that you can feasibly accomplish by level 13 or so, which means that by level 18 it's time to go further (much, much further) than that. Now it's no longer just surviving incredible temperatures, massive radiation, crushing pressure, etc. Now it's something hard.


More to the point, it should probably be more challenging than "I cast Planar Adaptation"...

Dark Archive

I'm not sure that lv13 is where you should start getting immunity to fire damage, possibly immunity to electricity, light and gravity based damage. Diving into a star and surviving enough for an adventure I wager is something for lv20.

Liberty's Edge

Planar adventures should not be as challenging as diving into a star. That is some Dark Phoenix level stuff. We're talking deity level CR 25+ material. The planes should not be limited to such out-of-PC-bounds level material.


And yet there it is Eziah, a humble wizard level 16 not even mythic with his own tower on the sun.

I find difficult to understand why going into space should be more difficult than going to another dimension.


There are outsiders with a CR of two... The planes should not be so stupidly alien that requires everything to be ridiculously high level to survive.

Silver Crusade

Conversely, it's not like everything on the Material Plane is a pushover. Dragons, Kaiju, dragons, Great Old Ones, dragons, etc.

Liberty's Edge

edduardco wrote:

And yet there it is Eziah, a humble wizard level 16 not even mythic with his own tower on the sun.

I find difficult to understand why going into space should be more difficult than going to another dimension.

"On or near the surface of the sun", as Eziah's abode is described, is vastly less challenging than "into a star". Stars get incredibly hostile once you go actually *inside* them.

Also, just plain "going into space", as you say, should be fairly trivial with the magic in Pathfinder. Just plain going orbital should be somewhere around level 7-11 stuff. But that's irrelevant because we were talking about inside a star.

IMO both space and planar (Spelljammer and Planescape) should be well within the reach of level 10+ characters. Level 15+ certainly so.

But no way should either space (excluding very hostile environments like inside a star) or the planes be restricted to lvl 20+ mythic characters. That's taking a huge part of the classic RPG experience and restricting it to the 1%.


...Well, for what it's worth, the general style of planar adventures has been established for awhile now and it's not likely to change. Most planes are fairly comprehensible - indeed, there's some evidence the aligned outer planes actively change when being viewed to be more understood. The elemental planes are still pretty hostile, though.

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