Inter-planar, No Heaven and Hell conflict Adventure brainstorm!

[Mavacas]

Hello everyone, I've recently got my creative juices flowing and wanted to start framing up an adventure for some of my friends just incase our DM needs a break.

So I wanted to create an adventure that goes to some crazy locations, and with weird creatures. (and when I got here I saw the Spellgate thread so I might be stealing that lol)

But, there is a catch, Evil Outsiders are totally overdone by my group as either the BBEG or the Saturday morning cartoon evil-guy needed to fill out adventures.

Looking to probe your minds to see if any of you can think up some cool encounters on a different plane, the monsters themselves, and maybe even some sort of planar-political intrigue that doesn't involve the Hells, or the Abyss.

One Idea I had was once the characters get to plane hopping, Go to the Plane of air and do some cloud fighting. the twist is the enemies are fighting amongst themselves, Air elementals vs mephitis, the heroes choose who they want to help and go from there, the twist is they are on moving clouds, and can move to larger or more stable clouds through whatever means they have. etcetc. Another one is maybe sailing the astral sea and maybe fighting some followers of Besmara.

You guys have any idea you're willing to share?

[cmastah]

Well, one thing I'm planning though I have no idea of the balance issues:

They reach a demi-plane of some nutty little girl whose powerful father created for her. On this plane she gets to play with all the animals she wants, pretty much the player's characters all turn into animals and they now control animal stat blocks with this little addition:

Supposing for instance one guy is controlling a lion while another is controlling a wolf, obviously there's a power disparity so instead of only controlling one wolf, it would be like 3-4 of them and he'd have something like a hive mind control however a wolf would permanently disappear if it got further than a certain distance. I'd keep combat at a low CR to be on the safe side (unless I see the players dominating), they could be finding their way to tea parties where the girl has a hissy fit and they now have to fight deranged and angry medium-sized teapots and candelabras which speak in an English accent.

Another:

This IS in Hell, but bear with me:

They could find themselves there, get captured and enslaved and have to fight in gladiatorial combat (I'm designing Hell in my campaign to look like Rome), looking up some of the types of gladiatorial combat, there are some really interesting types. I found one where the combatants fight blindfolded, except I'd instead treat it as the players being physically blinded (with claws rights into the eyes) and then their eyes fixed up afterwards (there are quite a few types of gladiatorial combat).

For heaven (LG):

There are debates in Heaven about (both are already good, what's being debated about is what is ultimately beneficial to the future of a race) whether interventionist policies will lead to a society that can flourish or whether they should stay out of it and let them find and work for their own future, building themselves up. They could be given the task of caring for a small goblin community that is in the throes of finding themselves converting from CE to CN, the players have to put up with the awful treatment and acts of the goblins while fighting threats to the community and introducing new concepts of philosophy to the community (for example showing goblins selflessness by helping them build a well for nothing whatsoever, showing them mercy by NOT killing aggressors and instead pardoning them before the goblins). They could also be given tasks of educating angels (archons live in heaven, angels in elysium) to be more hard working and less carefree and annoying.

[DonDuckie]

How about proteans working to return all existance to primal chaos. Starting by destroying outer planes of good and evil. This would mostly be background events(unknown to low-levels, but with hints/signs that something is amiss - like celestial/fiendish refugees on other planes, good/evil team-up skirmishes across planes, demi-planes popping into the material from breaking down "planar walls", temporal instabilities), and when the players get to plane-hopping capabilities, large parts of the multiverse are already 'dissolved', and the LN plane is mounting its all-out last stand defense against protean invasion and trying to prevent their plane from unraveling. Then the TN plane, the elemental planes, and finally the assault on the material/shadow/etherial coexisting planes.

Some would say it's just a relabeling, but that's only if you want it to be. The unraveling of time and space could be a fun thing - rather than the kill/destroy/corrupt/taint approach from traditional evil.

[Nuclearsunburn]

DonDuckie wrote:

How about proteans working to return all existance to primal chaos. Starting by destroying outer planes of good and evil. This would mostly be background events(unknown to low-levels, but with hints/signs that something is amiss - like celestial/fiendish refugees on other planes, good/evil team-up skirmishes across planes, demi-planes popping into the material from breaking down "planar walls", temporal instabilities), and when the players get to plane-hopping capabilities, large parts of the multiverse are already 'dissolved', and the LN plane is mounting its all-out last stand defense against protean invasion and trying to prevent their plane from unraveling. Then the TN plane, the elemental planes, and finally the assault on the material/shadow/etherial coexisting planes.

Some would say it's just a relabeling, but that's only if you want it to be. The unraveling of time and space could be a fun thing - rather than the kill/destroy/corrupt/taint approach from traditional evil.

That could get morally very interesting, as Archons and Devils grudgingly work together with Inevitables to stop this from happening, while Demons and Azatas unwittingly (or voluntarily, in the case of Demons) aid the Protean schemes. All of it masterminded my Groetus, god of the end times. It actually sounds like a very cool AP for Paizo to work on.