Having recently read the excellent ecology of the Keeper article, I thought about the groupings of the keepers. These make up a good summary of odd mysteries of the D&D universe: the Apotheosis, the Draeden, the Final Gate, the Iron Flask, the Maze, the Mists, the Gray Path, the Seven Parts, the Ur-Fiend, the Unliving God, and the example character's grouping: the Colorless Pool.
So, with what we all know or can find out, what are these referring to? I have a good idea about many of them, but it would be exciting to see what you guys can come up with. In many cases, the challenge is to see what the associated mystery is.
So, open floor. Take one mystery, see if you can develop it, if there are good sources for this, and how to use it in a game?
And this is spoiler marked for a reason.
Having recently read the excellent ecology of the Keeper article, I thought about the groupings of the keepers. These make up a good summary of odd mysteries of the D&D universe: the Apotheosis, the Draeden, the Final Gate, the Iron Flask, the Maze, the Mists, the Gray Path, the Seven Parts, the Ur-Fiend, the Unliving God, and the example character's grouping: the Colorless Pool.
Glad you enjoyed! :)
Of that listing, only the Colorless Pool was something I had in my draft, and the others were presumably added by one or another of the editors (I think Wesley edited the ecologies?). However a number of those on the list seem to reference some of the demiplanes I had included in the listing of 20 odd demiplanes in the article.
I'm at work at the moment, but I'll add more in depth stuff later tonight.
the Draeden - self explanatory: the creatures of the same name, one of whom is locked inside of the Abyss, others might reside in torper in Paraelemental Ice, and others might likewise reside in the demiplane of Draenden.
the Iron Flask - presumably the Iron Flask of Teurny the Merciless
the Maze - presumably the Mazes of Her Serenity, the Lady of Pain.
the Mists - Ravenloft
the Seven Parts - Rod of Seven Parts I'd guess
the Colorless Pool - A unique, Colorless astral color pool which can only be found, so it is said, by someone who has already stumbled across it before (first and otherwise only reference in the 2e Guide to Astral Plane). My own conception of the place (which isn't in the article) is rather different from that originally in the 2e source, and I've used it rather extensively in my current 3e Planescape campaign. I'll post some about that later tonight, as well as some ideas on some of the other topics that aren't (to my knowledge) based on a solid reference to something already in the body of planar lore.
Todd's hit it right on the head. After reading "The COlorless Pool" I added in a bunch more in during editing. He notes all the thinly veiled D&D references above, the others are all for you.
The Apotheosis - perhaps it's a method by which a mortal might ascend to godhood without first cultivating the needed threshold of belief and worship. Perhaps it's a method to steal divinity from a true god and absorb it into oneself. Perhaps it's a name given to the transition that Anubis underwent when he cast away his divinity and transcended into the Guardian of Dead Gods?
The Final Gate - Sigil is a giant ring, a single gigantic bound space. Sigil's portals are all bound spaces. What sort of portal might Sigil itself form? What might be the key? Where might it lead? Why was it locked? Who is it keeping in? Who might it be keeping locked away? Or perhaps it has nothing to do with Sigil at all, but to a doorway of black iron in the depths of Pandemonium within a bubble of rock, surrounded by the liches of nine men who swore to find it, looked at what lay beyond it, and were horrfied enough by what they saw to never rest before the capacity to open that door again no longer existed in the multiverse.
The Gray Path - perhaps it's a secret held by the enigmatic Queen White and King Black of the Refuge of Color, deep within the Quasielemental Plane of Radiance. Perhaps it's the route of finding the Isle of Black Trees. Perhaps it's a path leading to the Loadstones of Misery on the Gray Waste, or a way to unlock the seal in the depths of Ghoresh Chasm on that same plane. Perhaps it's a name given by the vanished Kamarel to the process by which their mirrored reality might be found, or perhaps it's a name given by the Rilmani to a trial and method by which mortal petitioners might be transformed into Rilmani.
The Ur-Fiend - If we assume a usage of "Ur" in the sense of "old, original, or primordial", we might assume the "Ur-Fiend" could apply to the baernaloths of the Gray Waste, or perhaps their creations the Obyriths and Ancient Baatorians who were the oldest incarnations of CE and LE respectively.
The Colorless Pool - more detail than my earlier post above. Originally, the pool was a virtually invisible color pool on the Astral, noted for its ability to evade location. You couldn't define its location on any map, or by relation to other points on the Astral. You had to either stumble across it randomly, or follow someone who had been there before. The Pool also resounded with a sound like the ringing of 1k's of bells, chimes, or the hum like running your finger in a circle around a damp rim of a crystal wine glass. The thing is though, color pools -like portals- connected to another point off of the Astral on some distant plane. However the Colorless Pool was connected to every point on the planes at once, so goes the legend, and from it issues forth every sound on those connecting points at once; screams, whispers, conversations, anything and everything, and with enough raw force to powder the bones in your ears.
My own variation upon the Colorless Pool IMC, is that the Pool was a doorway not to anywhere you wanted to go on the planes, but a doorway into another layer of the Astral plane itself. A realm of pure though, when mortal souls pass through its expanse on the way to the outer planes, they shed their mortal memories like ships throwing off their anchors and casting away to some distant promised shoreline. Those memories and superfluous bits of mortal "self" outside of a soul's core being, end up precipitating like bits of crystal in the Astral, and eventually erode down to nothing, carried away on the winds of the silver void.
But what if they didn't decay or erode? What if they went somewhere? And beyond the Colorless Pool is just such a place, a reliquary of mortal experiences and a storehouse for the lost bits of self every petitioner leaves behind as they embrace the immortality of the Outer Planes. Everything from the memories of a mortal peasant to a mortal king to an evil priest whose soul eventually becomes a demonlord; it's all there almost as if it were being collected, organized, sifted, saved, preserved, and oddly cherished.
I called the place the House of Memory*, and the resource it presented played a rather important role in my current campaign along with a side plot of sorts. Imagine knowing that you're going to be imprisoned, that your power will be stripped from you, and that your mind will be shattered by what your captor will do with you over the course of millennia. Now imagine that you could somehow copy your memories, your personality, and every dose of revenge you had, and you managed to inject it wholesale into the House of Memory before you died, wound up in enough sorcery to make a god of magic weep, in order to keep that copy of your personality and memories and magic intact once inside, and perhaps even still self aware and brooding for revenge.
*a name I snagged from Ori / Orroloth from something rather different he used in his own planar campaign. Read his stuff, it's made of awesome.
Thank you! =)
This is great stuff, and much will most definitely find a home in my evolving Ethereal/Inner Planes/Demiplanes campaign. Even so, if anyone has more theories, please feel free to put them here.
I find that there should be more to some of them than merely a reference to an artifact. For example, the Rod of Seven Parts is more or less common knowledge. The keepers need an associated mystery to protect, and just thinking about the Rod, I figure that perhaps it's the pattern for its appearances, or what happened to Miska the Wolf-Spider? Or perhaps the reason it was made, and other legacies related to it, presumably on the plane of Air?
Because, it's not such a stretch to think that all the keeper groups take care of various parts of the whole mystery, the one they were originally set to guard.