My PCs have reached the level where they want to start using Plane Shift in the game. Does Golarion use the standard Great Wheel cosmology? I figure it does, but the only planes Ive seen mentioned are Leng and Kadath. (I somehow doubt the party want to go there)
Creative Director
|
My PCs have reached the level where they want to start using Plane Shift in the game. Does Golarion use the standard Great Wheel cosmology? I figure it does, but the only planes Ive seen mentioned are Leng and Kadath. (I somehow doubt the party want to go there)
Golarion has its on cosmology... but that cosmology is close enough to the Great Wheel that if you use the Great Wheel... things will work out okay.
We'll be releasing more about Golarion's multiverse soon in the Hardcover campaign setting in August.
|
Creative Director
|
So we can expect symmetry for symmetry's sake? How coupled do you expect the cosmology to be with the rest of the world?
I wouldn't call it "symmetry for symmetry's" sake at all. Large parts of the Great Wheel are based on various real-world cultures' ideas of the afterlife, and we'll be following that design philosophy in building up a multiverse for Golarion. Therefore, you can expect a Heaven and a Hell, an Abyss and a Nirvana. Also, there are many planes that are "built in" to the core rules that we'll have as well, such as the astral plane, the ethereal plane, the elemental planes, the plane of shadow, and the positive and negative energy planes. It's pretty connected to the cosmology of the material plane, though, as in when a mortal creature dies, its soul goes to the outer planes to be judged in the Boneyard (the court of Pharasma) after which it is sent on to its final reward/punishment.
However, I trust you guys to come up with something better than "you are on a plane made entirely out of earth. There is no air. You die."
Some parts of the multiverse are not hospitable life, just as there are parts of Earth that are not hospitable to life. I'm not interested in a "safe" multiverse where every single nook and corner is a good place to adventure. The multiverse is unimaginably vast, after all... there's effectively an infinite number of adventuring sites out there in ADDITION to regions that you just shouldn't go. (But can go if you like if you have the proper magical protection!)
Also, what's the chance of getting some hints before August? Maybe via the blog.
Probably pretty good. Stay tuned to the blog for more details!
I remember one of the #paizo chats saw the birth of the Golarion cosmology as some overlapping pits or regional layers or some other unintelligible gobbledygook. I'm sure it made sense to them, but I couldn't make heads or tales of it based off of the conversational comments they made.
Still, it might be worth a trip to the chat transcript thread to see if that comment is still there.
|
Some parts of the multiverse are not hospitable life, just as there are parts of Earth that are not hospitable to life. I'm not interested in a "safe" multiverse where every single nook and corner is a good place to adventure. The multiverse is unimaginably vast, after all... there's effectively an infinite number of adventuring sites out there in ADDITION to regions that you just shouldn't go. (But can go if you like if you have the proper magical protection!)
Good answer. I wonder why that other RPG company doesn't see things this way? I'm nowhere close to being a WotC or 4e hater, but that "everywhere needs to be easy for adventure and all monsters need to be available to fight a regular party" stance they've taken is an insult to our intelligence.
Sam
that "everywhere needs to be easy for adventure and all monsters need to be available to fight a regular party" stance they've taken is an insult to our intelligence.
I see it more as a philosophy of "design what you need." Why bother to stat up creatures that, by definition, no one will use? If a creature is a plot hook or story element (an example might be a Haunting in Pathfinder 2) but isn't something that allows for ongoing interaction or combat, why bother creating stat blocks for it as a creature? Instead, just create what you need. And the corrolary, if you are going to create a stat block, make sure it (the stat block) has a chance to be useful to someone.
For the cosmology, I'd rather not see endless detail on places that there is no chance any PC will ever visit. Let that sort of thing stay in the realm of myth - hints of the unnatural things that exist there, oblique mentions in the stories of relevant gods or creatures, but no in-depth details. The Far Realms might actually be a good example here. Give too much detail of the exact landscape and you diminish the intent of the place. Leave it vague, a sort of "no mortal can survive here," and there's no point to excessive details.
|
|
I have no particular draw for, or against, the great wheel.
Planar hopping isn't something that is such a regular feature of my games(at least beyond treks to maybe a specific plane or two that features in a given campaign).
So putting aside whether they hold to the great wheel, or diverge from it, I think that the idea of having inhospitable places, or at least places the characters just won't want to go, adds a lot to the dynamic feel of the world. Now, that isn't to say that those places need pages of information, normally just a paragraph or two will suffice, but I think that the knowledge that there are such things adds a lot of flavor and helps maintain that suspension of disbelief.
The above poster was talking about how having everyplace be good for adventure is a good way to bring back home that its just a game, but I think that a lot of groups want to maintain that suspension of belief as they sink into their characters. Its like a scary movie or book, where you can feel your heart pounding because it seems real for a moment even though you know its not. But if there is some sort of ever present reminder that its just fiction, its that much harder to let your imagination take over.
I suspect that this is a lot like the debate over level appropriate encounters, and it stems from two distinct play styles. One group leans towards the heroes getting to be always heroic and keeping it just a tactical game, wherever the characters may roam in the world they will meet with level appropriate enemies who they can battle. The other side leans towards having the world be dynamic, running on its own, not just when the heroes interact with it. This means that if the characters decide to go to a place known for demons, then they may well encounter a demon they aren't ready for and have to flee, or when the 15th level party launches an attack on the orc village, they could just be warriors and peasants.
Obviously its hard to speak of 'realism' when you are talking about traveling the planes, but I like the idea that some of them can be more inherently dangerous then others and on the other side of that, some can be more boring too. I remember in the 'Drow War' campaign I ran a bit back, an epic campaign that was one of the few plane hopping games I've ran, one of the more memorable planes to the players was when they came across this plane that just seemed empty. They researched it after they returned home because they expected that there was something there and they managed to track down one small paragraph in a book mentioning it. It said 'A frightfully boring place of dull white sand. Its only residents are pale horseshoe crabs who would die of shock if you shouted.' Until that point, the plane hopping had just been something of a joke to them and that really brought it alive.
Planes with little use to them don't need much mention or to take up much space, but even a hint at what they are gives us DMs a canon way to take the idea and run with it, and a starting point since those brains at paizo often seem far more creative then I am.
-Tarlane
I can't particularly say that I'm a fan of the 4e cosmology. It's designed around the PCs, without existing within a context divorced from them and their concerns. It's an earth-centric model when I care for a model where the PCs and their planet might be just shallow little tidel pools of mortal life within a cosmos that is vastly stranger and oftentimes deadlier than anything they can easily imagine. Gaining levels shouldn't unlock areas of the multiverse like an ever expanding area of WoW: level 1-5 material (I'm making up the numbers here), level 5-10 feywild, level 10-15 elemental planes, level 15-20 astral sea, level 20+ future expansion.
I can't say I care in the games I've run to have the planes designed around the notion of PC accessability. I prefer to make my planes awesome places of wonder that exist alongside the mortal sphere, and could be visited by enterprising and bold mortals who realize that other planes are going to -at times- be radically different from back home. Compared to say the layer of Agathys in Carceri where it's pitch black, bitterly cold, and the only sound is that of creaking, fracturing ice and the groans and screams of petitioners frozen solid into the ground, slowly being crushed to death over an eternity, Elysium might be a pretty damn pleasant place to visit. But... how will mundane life still be enjoyable once you've physically stood upon a plane of manifest benevolence. Could you truly want to leave that sort of place? Even good planes aren't exactly meant for mortals, not while they're still mortal at least. Exposure to such places is an experience on its own, and the mortal brain isn't made to handle it fully.
They're the planes, and such places of wonder, majesty, and terror really deserve to be handled in context, rather than just being seen as different places to go to see strange things and kill them to take their stuff. I like a more in-depth examination of such places beyond "what can be put here for PCs to fight".
The Great Wheel planes were based on some mixture of transcendant concepts that exist regardless of if you believe in them or not, and a more plastic, mutable metaphysical essence that shifted with the tides of belief. You had beings that existed as mortal belief personified and idealized, and you also had nightmares that predated mortal existance entirely. Some planes are easy to adventure within, and some planes are antithetical to most mortal life. And that's the key thing there I think. They aren't wastelands of "rocks fall and you die", but just incredibly strange places that require knowledge and usually lots of magic to allow for most mortals to adapt to the local conditions. The beings in those planes in turn face the exact same thing if they chose to visit the home plane of those mortal visitors.
In my mind, one of the coolest critters in any edition IMO was the Egarus, a carnivorous fungus of Abyssal origin that was transplanted in the quasielemental plane of vacuum, and adapted to literally eating the essence of nothingness. It -thrived- in the vacuum, and even became dependant upon it, and reacted violently to the presence of normal matter like PCs, disintegrating them and converting them into the nothingness it required. Awesome critter and it's part of the plane that someone over at WotC dubbed the "antithesis of fun".
Incredibly hostile planes can exist and be cool to adventure in, they just require more imagination than opening a gate and going there like it's just another Dungeon. I've used the positive energy plane for some rather memorable encounters over the years, and it's a plane that feels good, then blinds you, then incinerates living beings by overexposure to the raw substance of life itself. It's not a trip to the castle on top of the hill, and it has to be treated differently. Some places just by their nature aren't going to be easily able to accomodate people without the power or resources or patrons that would allow them to survive there.
I <3 the planes as campaign elements, and the Paizo guys have done some wickedly cool stuff with them in the past (James and Erik made one of the best planar books of the past 30 years with the first Fiendish Codex IMO). They've got a new sandbox now with Pathfinder, and it should be cool to see what it's like.
Lots of good points
Go Shemmy!
I'll admit I like some of the simplicity of the 4th ed. cosmology, and had I never known about the Great Wheel, I'm sure I would have adopted (most of) it wholesale. But Paizo has to appease all the folks who want as much backwards-compatibility as possible. And that probably means a cosmology that's similar to the Great Wheel, or else easily portable to it.
Thank you James! I'll look forward to seeing Golarion's cosmology in the upcoming books.
For myself, I'm probably going to try to adapt the 4e version to my current game. Its much simpler and easier to use, which I enjoy. I like the main planes (Astral Sea, Elemental Chaos, Feywild, and Shadowfell) accessibility, and I can add the weird, dangerous planes as Dominions.
I'm sure there will be plenty from Golarion's version I can adapt as further dominions for the party to explore. One of the things I love about RPGs is that I don't have to stick with anything, that I can take a little bit of everything (Beyond Countless Doorways, PRPG, 4e, my favorite novels, my own imagination) to make something that my group enjoys.