Do the Para-Elemental Planes exist in Golarion?

[Jib916]

I can't find a reference to any of the Para-Elemental planes (Ice, Magma, Steam etc), Do they exist in the Golarion Cosmology?

[Xenocrat]

They don't. The elemental planes have transitional areas between them that might sort of resemble such things, but they aren't separate planes and aren't of nearly the same scale as the overall elemental planes.

[James Jacobs]

The reason they don't is that the para-elemental planes, as they've classically been presented in D&D, are not open content.

Another reason is we wanted to do different things than copy D&D's stuff in this area.

[Jib916]

Gotcha Xenocrat. This should work fine for what I was thinking. :)

James Jacobs wrote:

The reason they don't is that the para-elemental planes, as they've classically been presented in D&D, are not open content.

Another reason is we wanted to do different things than copy D&D's stuff in this area.

Thanks James! I did not realize that the para-elemental planes were not open content :)

I enjoy where you have taken the setting, and can see why you did not want a direct copy.

[Xenocrat]

One note is that the elemental planes are nested and don’t all touch in the official cosmology, so you can’t get every transitional zone unless you alter that.

Air <> Water <> Earth <> Fire

So no steam, but frothy and maybe icy border, then a silty/muddy one, then something like a magma zone.

[pad300]

Xenocrat wrote:

One note is that the elemental planes are nested and don’t all touch in the official cosmology, so you can’t get every transitional zone unless you alter that.

Air <> Water <> Earth <> Fire

So no steam, but frothy and maybe icy border, then a silty/muddy one, then something like a magma zone.

No so sure that applies in pathfinder. The great circle isn't a thing, except as a "in world" conceptualization. In Occult adventures, planes are characterized 3 ways

Quote:

Separate
Two planes that are separate do not overlap or directly connect to each other. They are like planets in different orbits. The only way to get from one separate plane to the other is to go through a third plane, such as a Transitive Planes.

Coterminous Planes
Planes that touch at specific points are coterminous. Where they touch, a connection exists, and travelers can leave one reality behind and enter the other.

Coexistent Planes
If a link between two planes can be created at any point, the two planes are coexistent. These planes overlap each other completely. A coexistent plane can be reached from anywhere on the plane it overlaps. When moving on a coexistent plane, it is often possible to see into or interact with the plane with which it coexists.

The elemental planes are described as being coterminous with each other. This doesn't lock them into a notional "2 dimensional circle, with an empty (material plane) middle" planar geometry... As I understand it, in Pathfinder, you can have, for example a earth-air boundary. It might be easier to envision the elemental planes as all occupying the same space, at different levels of reality, with tunnels (coterminous areas) running between the levels at assorted areas...

[Xenocrat]

Planes of Power discusses the nested nature of the elemental planes (fire to earth to water to air) and the single/double borders of each when physically traveling between them.

[James Jacobs]

In Golarion, as laid out in multiple books, the elemental planes are nested like layers of an onion, as Xenocrat described. This is intentionally set up to build a similar but different organization from D&D, and does indeed make the concept of Paraelemental planes as seen in D&D somewhat nonsensical for Goalrion.

[Todd Stewart]

Everything big has been covered by James already, but I'd add that if you're super invested in paraelemental planes, there are published references to inclusions of one elemental plane or another drifted beyond the standard mix you get from the order that the planes are arranged within. You could certainly use those to have any of the particular paraelemental mixes you could want. Even if those inclusions are small scale by comparison to the massive size of the elemental planes themselves, for adventure purposes the difference might be academic.

[Claxon]

From my perspective, I'm not sure what difference it makes in having the planes be "nested" rather than adjacent, at least in terms of how that interacts with the rules. I can see it giving rise to the lack of para-elemental planes, but don't think I understand the full ramifications.

Honestly how exactly the cosmology of Pathfinder works and its implications has always kind of eluded me, though it was the same for D&D.

For me, I always have a hard time imagining the interactions because I always think of planes as not physically interacting. They are separate physical spaces and could really all overlap with one another. However, that's not really how it works in Golarion. Which is fine, it just doesn't fit with the concept of "plane" that I have in my mind.

Where planes overlap I always viewed it as a physical spot on a plane where the metaphysical boundaries between two planes thinned enough that their physical spaces overlapped to some extent. But it wasn't like you could walk from the plane of air to plane of fire, more like there are random "wormholes" (gates) from the thinness of the boundaries.

This is my headcannon, as far as I'm aware, because the actual setting layout is different (as I understand it).

[Set]

I don't really grok the 'nested like an onion' concept, since it *feels* to me that all of the elemental planes are both separated and touching, equally, so that one can find a 'border' between any of the four, where, if they were nested, the entire infinite plane of Y might be between X and Z. The one on the inside of the 'nest' or 'sphere' would only touch the one above it, that one would only touch the inmost sphere and the one above it, and so on, leaving the outmost sphere only touching the third 'layer' of the 'onion.' That seems inconsistent, that two of the planes would border two of the other planes, and the inner and outer layers would only border two of the 'popular' planes (plus we've seen little evidence of that, in text, that two of the planes are connected / bordering twice as much as two of the others, and that each plane is impossibly 'far' away from two of the others, separated by entire infinite universes... OTOH, that could lead to some interesting story possibilities, if the genies of the earth and fire planes were at war, but they had to send armies through the air or water plane 'between' them to raid each other, being vastly separated in this manner, or if the fire and water planes were mostly incompatible, and separated by the plane of air or earth...).

I like the notion of areas in which any two planes impinge on each other (and, since they aren't really existing as bubbles or onion layers or spokes on a wheel or whatever, in some even-larger-infinite-space, like the astral or ethereal, but are more-or-less entire dimensions of their own), those 'borders' don't have to make any sort of linear sense, but can crop up anywhere the other plane is 'bleeding through' or 'the walls between worlds are weak here' or whatever (leaving it up to the GM).

The notion of pockets of steam or mist (ruled from cloud castles by cloud giants and dragons?) or vast cliffs between earth and air with vertical cliff-cities of stone giants or an area of floating icebergs that represents as border between air and water (and is occupied by beyond-colossal planar frost giants who are more like ambulatory fimbulwinters than singular 'monsters') is evocative to me, in any event, and I'll support any planar configuration theory that allows that, whether they are 'borders / planar boundaries' or 'permanent weak spots / incursions.' :)