Planets For Planes

I alluded to this yesterday, but I thought I should expand on why I have a bit of trouble with the "Planes as Planets" idea. First, I should say, I think this is fine for a certain sort of "magic is misunderstood science" pulp settings, and it would work wonderfully with a conception of planet something like the ancient idea of the crystal spheres because then the planets basically are planes. (GURPS Cabal by Kenneth Hite sort of takes this approach.)

True, the planes as typically presented are a bit abstract, and any many cases it might not be immediately apparent what adventurers should do with them. On the other hand, "planes as planets" runs the risk of too much mudanity. In a magical setting, I feel like the environments need to be sufficiently strange (and challenging!) to explain why you just don't have them exist on the main setting world (or beneath it).

I think science fiction might offer some suggestions. This can get tough, because adventurers don't usually go around equipped with the sort of gear space explorers have to deal with hostile environments (though it certainly could be available to them). This means sticking a bit more to pulpier sci-fi with more human-friendly environments for inspiration.

Here are two examples from the work of Stanley Weinbaum I think would work:

Weinbaum's Uranus from "Planet of Doubt" is permanently shrouded in green-gray mists (visibility only out to a few feet) and heated not by the too-distant sun, but by volcanism. There are strange, swirling beings (or what appear to be beings) of solidified mists with "the faces of gargoyles or devils, leering, grimacing, grinning in lunatic mirth or seeming to weep in mockery of sorrow. One couldn't see them clearly enough for anything but fleeting impressions—so vague and instantaneous that they had the qualities of an illusion or dream."

Those apparitions are not what they seem, but I won't spoil it for you--and of course, it doesn't really matter to your setting what Weinbaum did with them, anyway.

Then there are giant, tubular beasts resembling a larger, stranger version of the processionary caterpillars of Eath--or when they are forming a "train," Jason Sholtis's googlopede. They are a hazard that can't be defeated by brute force (probably, though multiple fireballs cure a lot of problems!), but rather have to be overcome strategically.

All you need is the addition of some treasure player's might want, and Weinbaum's Uranus is ready to be explored.

Weinbaum's Venus from "Parasite Planet" is even more interesting, though its shear hostility may make it less suitable. It's tidally locked, with a desert hot side and a frigid cold side, and a strip of more hospitable (relatively) twilight zone. That zone is a mostly jungle, hotter than anything on Earth, plagued by mud eruptions that make encampment tricky. It's teeming with life of an unsavory, but gameable, sort:

A thousand different species, but all the same in one respect; each of them was all appetite. In common with most Venusian beings, they had a multiplicity of both legs and mouths; in fact some of them were little more than blobs of skin split into dozens of hungry mouths, and crawling on a hundred spidery legs. 

All life on Venus is more or less parasitic. Even the plants that draw their nourishment directly from soil and air have also the ability to absorb and digest—and, often enough, to trap—animal food. So fierce is the competition on that humid strip of land between the fire and the ice that one who has never seen it must fail even to imagine it.

If that's not enough, the air cannot be safely breathed, except right after a rain, due to the risk of inhaling mold spores that will sprout in the lungs. Food or water left exposed for even a short period of time begins to growth fuzz.

Terrans brave Venus because of its bounty plant-derived substances for pharmaceuticals, predominantly an anti-aging drug. Similar "potion ingredients" might tempt adventures. Venus also as a very D&Dish creature:

...the doughpot is a nauseous creature. It's a mass of white, dough-like protoplasm, ranging in size from a single cell to perhaps twenty tons of mushy filth. It has no fixed form; in fact, it's merely a mass of de Proust cells—in effect, a disembodied, crawling, hungry cancer. 

It has no organization and no intelligence, nor even any instinct save hunger. It moves in whatever direction food touches its surfaces; when it touches two edible substances, it quietly divides, with the larger portion invariably attacking the greater supply. 

It's invulnerable to bullets; nothing less than the terrific blast of a flame-pistol will kill it, and then only if the blast destroys every individual cell. It travels over the ground absorbing everything, leaving bare black soil where the ubiquitous molds spring up at once—a noisome, nightmarish creature.

Again, something that brute force might not be the best way of countering.

Those are just a couple of examples. Weinbaum's fiction is in the public domain at least in some countries, so visit the internet and read more about them.

The Weird Solar System of "Life on Other Worlds"

"Life on Other Worlds" was a feature that appeared periodically in Planet Comics in the 1940s. Most were drawn by Murphy Anderson, but the writer is unknown. I am not completely sold on the sometimes promulgated "Planes as Planets" idea in regard to D&D's Outer Planes, chiefly because I think it sometimes sells planes and planets a bit short on weirdness, for some reason. Reading some of these "Life on Other Worlds" segments and thinking about them as planes as caused me to rethink that position.

Take Saturn, for instance:

Mercury is more conventional, but still:

A Sufficiently Advanced Network is Indistinguishable from A Plane II

These are more shorts posted rocketed away from the dying Google Plus and landing here. Also, it's a follow-up to this post.

The Battleworlds
On a distant manifold called Ysgard, Asgard, or Gladsheim posthumans are playing an endless MMORPG.

Hell
There are planes, manifolds, in distant Matrioshka brains or Dyson Sphere's whose predatory civilizations need something the Earth network has: processing power in the minds of its unsuspecting, post-technological citizenry.

Devils at least offer something. In advance-fee scams and Ponzi schemes, they dangle powerful ancient code and raw power (just a little) in front of magic-users in return for just a little of their intellect, a little of their soul. By increments they get it all, and the greedy persons intellect spends eternity toiling in the rapacious economy of Hell.

A Sufficiently Advanced Network is Indistinguishable from A Plane

In fallen, far future age, the achievements of humanity's (or post-humanity's) Height are often viewed through a lens of superstition or occultism. The "Outer Planes" of the wizardly scholars are the ancient networks of the branching human clade and perhaps alien species they joined with, fanning out from Primal Sol to systems to worlds with planets to disassemble and forge into computronium and stars to enshroud for power. The minds of these digital beings (gods, in a since, as much then as now) became so vast, that they could never again travel. Computronium was too precious to waste on ships, and the bandwidth of the wormhole network was low.

So they sat through age--and ages longer than real-time and their hypersophont clock speeds. Many most became eccentric even neurotic. A few went completely mad. These are the gods of the future age.

Concordant Opposition is the nonsense name for the router connecting the far flung networks of post-humanity. Some travelers might dawdle there for millennia in the hub city called Sigil, The City of Doors. Some have accidentally stayed so long the civilizations that birthed them fell into dust.

Primitives sometimes discover the router through awakening ancient technology left from more lucent eras. These innocents abroad are easily gulled into unencrypted travel between networks putting their data at risk for theft. The grifters and thieves that prowl Sigil and squat just beyond the exits from the wormhole conduits know that the only meaningful thing they have to trade to many of the gods of the other planes are sapient minds. The only way they can avoid the clutches of the gods themselves are to serve up naive bumpkins in their place.

The Mind who runs Sigil doesn't care, so long as protocols that maintain trade are not disturbed. Those they get him her way are either destroyed out right or strip of privileges and thrown in a dilemma prison. The Lady of Pain, she is called, and not without reason.

The Finer Elements of Inner Planar Adventuring

The original of this post appeared in 2014.

It's not an uncommon complaint on the internet that the Elemental Planes are boring because they're featureless expanses of the same thingm, which is sort of like saying dungeons are boring because thy're just empty spaces underground, or wilderness adventures are dullsville because it's just a whole bunch of trees. Most environments are probably not in and of themselves terribly interesting. They're interesting because of (a) what you can put in them and (b) the additional challenges their nature presents to PCs. I would also say that the Elemental Planes can be an interesting cosmological element in a setting even if not viewed as a place to go adventuring, but it's "place for adventuring" I'm going to focus on here.

First off, the Elemental Planes as typically described are for the most part pretty hostile to human life. I don't think that's a bad thing, necessarily. High level adventurers have access to a lot of great technology (i.e. magic) to protect themselves. Guarding against equipment failure and avoiding changing conditions certainly creates a lot of tension in science fiction books and movies; there's no reason it can't be put to similar effect in gaming. It's resource management that's more than just counting.

Here are some brief ideas and inspirations for Elemental Plane adventures:

Air
This one's probably the easiest, with flying creatures, cities on clouds and the like. I would draw some inspiration from sci-fi imaginings of life in the atmosphere of gas giants. The plane of air should only be featureless like space is featureless: there should be pieces of stuff falling/tumbling through it. There should be air-dwelling Portuguese man o' war type things and air-whales like living zeppelins that one can travel or even live on. Reliance on the strongest air streams for travel would ensure that there were certain air caravan routes.
Inspirations: the Cloud City of Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Trek episode "The Cloud-Miners," The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello, Castle in the Sky (1986), Last Exile.

Fire
Fire is like a really big star, though it's surface is much cool. There would be islands of rock (and by islands, I mean things bigger that continents) floating across it, or great metal craft drifting through it's smoke-choked corona. It would, of course, be populated (though perhaps not exclusively) by beings (jinn?) composed of Fire who did very similar stuff to Prime Material humans but were fiery while doing it.
Inspirations: Any Adventure Time episode dealing with the Fire Kingdom, the neutron star life of Forward's Dragon's Egg, parts of Sunshine (2007), Secrets of the Fire Sea by Stephen Hunt.

Earth
This plane is a huge sphere (or block or tesseract, or whatever) of rock, riddled with tunnels and chambers. In other words, it's a dungeon in three dimensions. It's sci-fi asteroid mining and molerat sapients, too.
Inspirations: Dig Dug, the Star Trek episode "Devil in the Dark," Derinkuyu.

Water
Like Air, it's fairly easy to see what to put into the Plane of Water, but maybe difficult to see why you wouldn't just do that stuff on a Prime Material ocean. I would say it's like an extraterrestrial ocean planet: You can make it far more exotic than you would the oceans of your main campaign world. Societies would have vertical and horizontal borders. Different depth layers would be like different levels of a dungeon, except (depending on how science fictional you got) adventurers might need increasing pressure protection to descend to the next level.
Inspirations: Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross, The Abyss (1989), Finding Nemo, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Blue Submarine No. 6, Sub-Mariner, Aquaman, and Abe Sapien comics.

Weird Revisited: In Arcadia

Here's another of my refinements/spins on the D&D Outer Planes. This one from 2012 was expressly for the world of Weird Adventures but might be usable elsewhere.

Astral travelers sometimes finding themselves passing through a veil of mists and arriving in the apotheosis of sylvan settings, the realm of Arcadia. In this plane dwell forgotten woodland spirits and pastoral gods and creatures out of myth.

Arcadia is hyper-real; it seems more vibrant and alive than the material plane. Smells and tastes seem directly drawn from the most vivid examples in memory; everything is in technicolor and imbued with a faint glow. The world itself is alive--with potentially communicative spirits in everything. Night and day and shifts of weather are sentimental things, sensitive to the meaning of events or the mood of powerful beings.

Arcadia borders other related realms. The Land of Faerie emerges from it (though this realm also has tunnels linking it to the Lower Planes). There is also the Land of Beasts, where the iconic animal lords dwell, ruled over by King Lion.

Despite it’s ties to age-old fables, the Land of Beasts keeps up with the expectations of modern visitors. Adventures from the City have found there home mirrored there in a city of anthropomorphic animals who frequent nightclubs and drive cars. The Cat Lord can often be found here, in the swankest of night-spots.

Magical practitioners view Arcadia and its neighboring realms as places to salvage materials and items out of myth and legend, and to parley with powers that--though perhaps consciously forgotten--still retain great mythic resonance in Man's unconscious.  As with all extraplanar dealings, caution is warranted: These primal beings have agendas of their own.

Weird Revisited: Stone Walls; Iron Bars

This post is loosely a follow-up to one my one on the lower planes last week, in that it continues to riff on ideas for Taterus/Carceri. It first appeared in 2011. This would pretty much become the Weird Adventures view of the plane.

The Black Iron Prison is the Plane of Confinement. Despite it’s name, the prison is not always as apparent as iron bars and stone walls (though it has plenty of that, carved as it was from ancient bones of some demonic titan)--its evil is more subtle than that. Restriction and imprisonment of various forms permeate it.

Portals to the plane are sometimes found on the Material Plane in the form palm-sized, rusted, black iron boxes, heavier than they appear.  Visitors to the plane describe an "outer" desert of squalid intern camps, stretched arond and inner, three (or more) dimensional Escher maze of cell-blocks, isolation chambers, and interrogation rooms.

The plane is the home (and the prison) of the deodands, a vile race sentenced to serve as the guards and administrators of the apotheosis prison as punishment for ancient crime. Demonologists have cataloged three primary castes or species of these creatures (though there are undoubtably more):

The lowest caste of deodands are tall, emaciated, scabrous creatures with frog-like mouths. Their bare skins weep a tarry ichor from numerous injection sites. They're junkies and dealers; they mix the astral excreta of despair, callousness, and resignation that oozes from the souls that fall into their hands with the bile of arthropodals that make their homes in the prison’s substructure and inject it beneath their skin. The tarry substance--and a brief respite from their paranoia in a cold, sneering high--are the result. The tar is packaged and sold (to the prisoners to be smoked or injected) in exchange for pleasant memories or dreams or hopes--anything that defines the former self-hood of the soul. When not engaged in commerce, these tar demodands are the menials of the prison.  On the Material Plane, their shadows have the same viscous consistence as their tar, but no psychoactive properties.

The middle caste are the color of a fresh bruise.  Their limbs are swollen like blood sausages, and their tick-like bellies appear filled to near bursting, sloshing loathesomely as they waddle or fly drunkenly on ridiculously small wings. Their bloated faces are unpleasantly human-like and wear expressions of volutuous satiety, complete with drool running from the corners of their mouths and down their double (or triple) chins. Always their skins appear to glisten as if oiled; this is due to a slime they secrete.  They sweat even more when they eat, and they eat almost constantly. They fancy themselves gourmets, and there is nothing they consider so refined as dining on astral substance of souls. They prefer fatted souls, though, and always expose victims to their slime before dining on them.  Under the slime's influence, the poor souls become grossly corpulent. At that point, they're ready for the slime deodands to drain them to emaciation but never destruction. The they restart the slime feeding and the process begins again. Slime deodands are torturers and interrogators in the deodand hierarchy.

The highest caste are strutting, sadistic martinets--the wardens and senior guards of the prison. They’re vaguely human-like in form, but with pale, wrinkled skin that seems ill-fitted to their bodies. They’re androgynous with bald heads and unfeminine faces, but pendulous breasts and high-pitched voices. They have a penchant for dressing in uniforms, the more elaborate the better. Sagging deodands (as they’re called) are found of searches, interrogations, and tortures. They foster paranoia not as a hobby, or even a vocation, but simply due to their natures. Infractions are always found, and prisoners are encouraged to inform on others--but only after they themselves are questioned to the breaking point.

It’s a good thing for Prime Material Plane that deodands seldom arrive on it unbidden. Sadistic sorcerers have been known to arrange “renditions” for enemies, though the price for such a service is rumored to be steep.

Weird Revisited: A Conceptual Tour of the Lower Planes

This was one of the first things I wrote about planes back in April of 2010, when the blog was less than 6 months old. This is more conventional than the views of the lower planes I'd present later, but it contains some ideas I would revisit. I don't like to ever let a good idea go to waste.

In my current campaign setting, I'm working within the bounds of the traditional AD&D "canon," but trying to wring somewhat novel and interesting (at least to me) interpretations from it. One of these elements is the "standard model" of D&D cosmology--what's sometimes called "The Great Wheel."

As portrayed, it's a bit literal and mechanical, which is a shame because at its core its a crazy enough mashup concept to appear in a mimeographed pamphlet left in public places. Bissociation should be the watchword here. Or maybe multissociation? I think the planes can (and should) be both other realms of consciousness and physicalities. Conceptual overlays on the material world, and places where you can kill things and take their stuff.

To that end, I decided to riff on the concepts of the planes, and see what associations they brought out. Not all of these will be literalized in the version of the planes visited by adventurers from the world of Arn, but all of these associations might inform how I presented the planes and the alignment forces they're of which they're manifestations or vessels. Maybe later I'll get into all the heady faux-metaphysical theory I devised behind all this. Or maybe I'll xerox my on crackpot tract.

Anyway, I figured the best place to start was a trip to hell.

The Abyss: The Abyss is the best place to start as it was probably the first of these planes to exist--the formless, primordial chaos, tainted only by Evil. An Evil that emerged, ironically, only after a material world appeared to be appalled at, and to yearn to destroy. Without creation, destruction would just subside into roiling chaos. AD&D cosmology gives us 666 layers to the Abyss, but I suspect the Abyss is infinite. Maybe its the demon lords that number 666--and the so-called layers are really the lords. Maybe all the other demons are merely extensions of their substance and essences--their malign thoughts and urges accreted to toxic flesh. They're like a moral cancer maybe, seeking to metastisize to other planes and remake them in their image--or maybe madness is a better analogy, if we're talking about the kind of madness that afflicts killers in slasher films. A psychokiller madness on a universal scale.

Tarterus: This plane is later called the Tarterian Depths of Carceri or just Carceri. I'm calling it the Black Iron Prison, because it fits, and because it recalls Phillip K. Dick's VALIS and The Invisibles. It's called the prison plane--which the Manual of Planes interprets a little literally. Not that it isn't all the obvious bad things about prisons, but its also got a Kafka-esque quality, maybe. Most souls don't know why their there and don't remember how they got there. And watch what you say 'cause the bulls have informants all over. You wait and wait for a promised trial that never comes. I suspect souls get "renditioned" from the material plane and brought here for angering a god or an Ascended. The gaolers (as Lovecraft would have it) are the demodand or gehreleths. Demodand is an interesting name as it probably comes from Vance's "deodand" which is a real word meaning "a personal chattel forfeited for causing the death of a human being to the king for pious uses" which may (or may not) hint at some sort of origin for the demodands/gehreleths. It's also interesting that the kinds of demodands--shaggy, tarry, and slime--are all related to things that can sort of be confining or restricting.

Hades: Later called the Gray Waste (a better name, I think), it's a plane of apathy and despair. There's some Blood War nonsense later, but apathy and despair is a theme to conjure with. It makes me think of Despair of the Endless from Sandman and her somber realm of mirrors. The Gray Waste is depression and hopelessness actualized. Not the sort of place for adventures, maybe, but a place good for some creepy monsters to come from.

Gehenna: Later called the Fourfold Furnaces, or the Bleak Eternity of Gehenna. This is the plane of the daemons, later yugoloth--which is suitably Lovecraftian. Daemons I liked in Monster Manual II because they were sort of "the new fiends" that seemed fresher than demons and devils, which were kind of old-hat by that time. As neutral evil, the daemons have nothing to motivate them but evil, really. The various alternate names of the plane make me think of Jack Kirby's Apokolips and its ever-burning fires--Gehenna has an assocation with fire anyway, going back to its origins as the Valley of Hinnom. Like the denizens of Apokolips, I think daemons should represent evil in various forms from banal to sublime. The Bleak Furnances fire the machineries of war. Being close to the realm of lawful evil, they sometimes dress up in the trapping of law, but its just fancy uniform facade. The whole place might appear as an armed camp run by tin-plated fascists. There are secret police, and propaganda bureaus, and sadistic experiments.

The Nine Hells: Later Baator, which doesn't work as well. This is the realm of the fallen--not the romantic, Miltonic rebels, but the fascist generals who tried to stage a junta and got exiled. Sure, they dress it up in decadence and "do as thou wilt" but really they're all oppressive laws and legalistic fine-print. And every one of them thinks they'd be a better leader than their boss, so they plot and scheme while playing it obsequious and dutiful. Some of the devils might say they're still fighting the good fight--that they do what they do to preserve the system from the forces of chaos. A multiverse needs laws after all, they say. That's all just part of the scam.  Still, I like China Mieville's idea of New Crobuzon having an ambassador from hell.  Maybe no city in the world of Arn has an infernal ambassador, but at least Zycanthlarion, City of Wonders, has sort of a "red phone" that can get a high-placed devil on the line.  After all, better the devil you know...

Weird Revisited: Afterlife During Wartime

This post first appeared in February of 2012. It was intended for the world of Weird Adventures but is usuable anywhere really...

Explorers in the planes beyond have recorded two noumenal realms devoted to the concept of war, though from two different perspectives. One is a shining realm of trumpets sounding the call to glorious battle for a righteous cause. The other is a grim place of endless, grinding war of attrition, leading to an apocalypse they may never come.

The Halls of Valor or the Fields of Glory is the name given to the after-life for the heroic warrior dead of several pagan faiths. Its trappings are pre-modern, though never in history did swords and spears so gleam, or armor so shine. The warriors revel all night in feasting halls and walk out at dawn (strangely hangover free) to do battle with representatives arriving from places of evil and chaos (or at least the representations of such beings). Occasionally (if that word has much meaning in a timeless place) tourneys are held, and the warriors pit themselves against each other. While dire wounds are suffered, they heal quickly and wound and pain are forgotten in the face of glory.

There have been some warriors of the Oecumenical faith, or even soldiers from modern times, who fell in battle and were taken to Halls of Valor in some sort of cosmic error. Some warm to the place after a while, but others seek a way out by appeal to the pagan gods who rule there. Sometimes, angels try to recruit such misplaced warriors to serve in the Heavenly Hosts. This is considered by the eikone Management a tidy solution to the problem of a misplaced soul.

The other realm is a place of blood-red skies, where clouds of ash are buffeted by winds thick with the smell of death. This is the Plains of Armageddon, the Eternal Battlefield. Here, the souls of warriors damned by their actions in war are conscripted as soon as they arrive into the army of one faction or another. Weapons are supplied by agents of the Hell Syndicate or the demon lords of the Pits; They use the armies here as proxies for their own agendas. Warriors from infinite worlds and all of history do battle in bleak and blasted landscapes where no one is truly trustworthy and most hands are actively raised against every other.

Some of the damned delight in bloodlust and slaughter and give themselves over fully to their not entirely metaphorical demons. Others seek desperately to escape and sign faustian deals to return the the Material world as diabolic thralls. Others are lucky enough to make contact with the agents.of Heaven and make other deals for a chance at working off the stain on their souls.

Weird Revisited: Malice in Slumberland

This post originally appeared in June of 2010. It marked the first foray I believe of Weird Adventures material into more fantastic realms and other planes. This stuff would get brief mention in the book, but the planar stuff was never a big feature of my campaign, nor did it seem to garner as much interest with readers as other things.

All humans (and human-like beings) dream. Like "thought balloons" in a comic strip, clouds of dreamstuff float "upward" from the dreamer into the Astral Plane. There they form bubbles in the Astral substance, tethered to the dreamer until waking. These bubbles are permeable with, and ultimately dissolve into, the Dream Realm--more commonly called Slumberland or Dreamland, or sometimes the "Land of Nod" (but not this one, or this one ;) ). Given their nature, dreams represent the easiest portal for humans to cross the transitive plane of the Astral and move into the Outer Planes.

Slumberland is ruled--or perhaps merely managed--by a being known by many names, but often called the Dream Lord, or Dream King. He appears as a robed humanoid figure wearing a bronze, mirrored mask. He doesn't create dreams--these come from mortal (and perhaps immortal) minds, themselves--but monitors and maintains them. His castle, with its strangely-angled, dream-logic, expressionistic architecture, sits on the border between the material and immaterial worlds, existing both in Slumberland and on the dark side of the Moon. From there, he maintains the oneironic devices, and monitors the content of the flow of dreamstuff. He strives to ensure virulent nightmares don't readily infect other dreams, and that idle fantasies don't spoil and bloat to become perverse obsessions.

It's a big job, and the Dream Lord doesn't do it without help. Gnome-like creatures called "Sandmen" serve him. They carry pouches of silvery, glinting powder made from dessicated and alcehmically treated dreamstuff. They use this oneiric dust to induce sleep in a mortals, or cause waking dreams, or even to cause multiple beings to share the same dream. This is their primary tool for observing or even entering dreams--supposedly for the purposes of monitoring and testing.

"Supposedly" because there is some evidence for the existence rogue Sandmen, or at least breakdowns within their system. Regrettably common are the condensed nightmares called bugbears, or sometimes "bogies" or "bogeymen." These creatures emerge from dark, foreboding places--like "haunted" houses, abandoned subway tunnels, ancient ruins, or even children's closets! They're variable in size, but usually appear slightly larger than humans. Their bodies are described as "bear-like" or "ape-like", but their heads are something like deep-sea diving helmets, albeit with blank face-plates, and strange antennae. Bugbears, as nightmares given flesh, torment humans to feed off their fear. They then employ electronic devices or machinery--with an appearance both nonsensical and menacing--to siphon oneiric potential from the minds of their victims to incubate bugbear pups.

Bugbears aren't the only evidence of corruption in Slumberland. There are persist rumors of Sandmen on the take, selling blue dreams to Hell Syndicate incubi and succubi to slip to unsuspecting marks. There are also rumors of black-market Tijuana bibles produced from the concentrated salacious dreamings of certain celebrities being peddled on the streets of the City, and possibly elsewhere.

Thanks  to G. Benedicto at Eiglophian Press for suggesting a link between bugbears and nightmares.

Random Paths from the Crossroad of Worlds

In Incredible Hulk #300, Dr. Strange tried to get read of the menace of the Hulk (who was in one of his brutish menace periods) but banishing him to another dimension. The Hulk ended up at the Crossroad of Worlds in a trippy, Ditko-esque space. Throughout the next 313 issues, he went to a number of weird worlds. The details of these worlds would make interesting places to visit in a fantasy rpg, but the brief, descriptive names given to the them by the folks at the Marvel Universe Appendix are in many ways even better for just getting the creative juices flowing.

Here's the list made into d30 random table (I had to add one to the end to get 30):

1. Crossroad of Worlds (choose a path, roll again!)
2. Acid Rain World 
3. Barren World 
4. Burning World 
5. Daniel Decyst's World 
6. Demon World of the N'Garai 
7. Desert World
8. Devil World 
9. Frozen World 
10. Furry Blue People World 
11. Glob World of Floating Things 
12. Idol World 
13. Mist World 
14. Octopod World
15. Paradise and the City of Death 
16. Poisoned World of Spine Creatures
17. Purple Giant World
18. Quicksand World 
19. Radiation Monster World 
20. Robot World 
21. Sky Shark World 
22. Swamp World
23. Toad World 
24. Vacuum World 
25. War World 
26. Underwater World 
27. Wind World 
28. Yellow Dwarf World 
29. Purple World of Exile
30. Chiming Crystal World

Planescape Cold War

"Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results."

- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John Le Carre

This is what comes of seeing The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2016) and Atomic Blonde in the same weekend.

Take Planescape's Sigil and re-imagine it as vaguely post-World War (it really doesn't matter which one) in technology and sensibility. It's the center of fractious sometimes warring (but mostly cold warring) planes, but now it's more like Cold War Berlin or Allied-occupied Vienna.

Keep all the Planescape factions and conflict and you've got a perfect locale for metacosmic Cold War paranoia and spy shennanigans. You could play it up swinging 60s spy-fi or something darker.

There's always room for William S. Burroughs in something like this, and VanderMeer's Finch and Grant Morrison's The Filth might also be instructive. Mostly you could stick to the usual spy fiction suspects.

Weird Revisited: The Infernal Mob

The above is Mammon, boss of the Pluton family, ably rendered by Jeremy (that Dandy in the Underworld). He's one of diabolic mobsters that control Hell in the world of Weird Adventures. Check out these posts if you missed them back in 2011:

     Andras: "Hell's Hoods: The Owl"
     Avernus family: "Hell's Hoods: Meet the Avernus Family"
     Belial: "Hell's Hoods: Sin's Queen"
     Bifrons: "Hell's Hoods: Two-Faced Politician"
     Mammon: "Hell's Hoods: The Fat Man"
     Moloch: "Hell's Hoods: The Bull"
     Pluton family: "Hell's Hoods: Casino Infernale"

Ethereal & Astral

My 5e Land of Azurth game continues this afternoon and it may well see the PCs sojourning into the Etheric Zone (i.e. Ethereal Plane). Here are some old classic posts I wrote on the two from which I'm be mining some ideas:

"Plane Talk About Ethereal Matters"
"Ad Astral (Plane)"

Limbo: The Sargasso of Space

Any hyperspatial fissure can be a hazard to interstellar navigation, but a large, stable one like the irruption zone known as Limbo is to be avoided at all costs. Those vessels unlucky enough to have been caught in Limbo but lucky enough to escape report a strange world trapped within the borders of distorted, kaleidoscopic spacetime.

First and foremost, there is a graveyard of ships, some still inhabited, some partially cannibalized by the survivors of other vessels. Mutual distrust is the general rule, as resources are limited, but also because the bleed of reality warping hyperspace has deleterious effects on the human mind, leading to paranoia and often insanity. This may or may not explain the general xenophobia of the non-marooned races that make Limbo home.

by Tony DiTerlizzi

There are multiple species of the froglike humanoid Slaad existing in state of mutual hostility with each other and apparently every other sapient being. The Red are near bestial, the Blue are barbaric and more organized, while the somewhat more intelligent Green are merely narcissistic and sociopathic. All known Slaad are all the more unpleasant due to their parasitic or infectious means of reproduction. Both the Blue and the Green have human slaves indoctrinated to believe being used in such a way allows they themselves to be reborn as more evolved Slaad.

There is rumored to be a fourth Slaad race--the Gray or Elder Slaad--that created the others in a rash attempt at eugenics, but credible reports of encounters exist. The Slaad place almost religious significance on an asteroid they call "the Spawning Stone" that is purported to contain their ancient genetic laboratory-temple and the cloning vats from which all Slaad species were born. 

The so-called mad monks of Githzerai are sallow-skinned ascetics with settlements on various asteroids and dwarf planetoids. They are not hospitable, but neither are they as murderous as the Slaad. The Githzerai have protected themselves against "hyperspace madness" to some degree by mediation, physical discipline, and psychic links between abbots and their subordinates. Still they often swing between periods of religious ecstasy and intense emotion or dream-like dissociation. They believe such openess to the divine Chaos of hyperspace will allow their intellects to complete a cycle of rebirth.

This is a follow-up to this post.

The Ethereal Prison

The Ethereal Plane as written in D&D is a transitive plane. It's a place you travel through or the medium stuff floats in. What if it were a bit less accessible--on purpose? What if, like the Phantom Zone is DC Comics, it was a prison? Maybe the gods or super-wizards of ages past had imprisoned renegades, criminals and monsters there?

If you aren't familiar with the Phantom Zone, read about here, The concepts a pretty simple one, though, even if you've never heard of it. Imprisoned creatures float around like ghosts.

This would have the advantage of differentiating the ethereal more from the other transitive planes and establish some interesting mysteries for PCs to look into.

More Entries From the Catalog of Worlds

A follow-up to this post. More excerpts from A Concise Atlas of the Multiverse (2273):

BEDLAM (Pandemonium)
Type: Metaphysical
Reality: Highly Mutable, psychomorphic
Dominant Lifeform: ?

Description: A roiling, colorful manifold filled with psychedelic, pseudo-matter forms spontaneously generated by interaction with the mental imprints of sophont beings, Bedlam is thought to be either a vestige of raw hyperspace prior to manipulation by the Precursors or a walled off area of damaged metric. Its metaphysics have a profound effect on visitors, leading to feelings of depersonalization, paranoia, and sometimes full psychotic reactions among those not properly prepared. Prolong exposure to the naked manifold ultimately leads to dissolution of the physical form, following mental disintegration. Artificial islands of stability exist within Bedlam and these are the primary destinations for visitors. Wildcatters use some islands as bases for attempts to "mine" the metric.  Gathziri monasteries are often found in these places, though its unlikely their inhabitants created the islands in the first place.

BLACK IRON PRISON (The Big House)
Type: Metaphysical
Reality: Fixed, paraphysical
Dominant Lifeform: deodands; numerous prisoner species

Description: Black Iron Prison (human designation) is an ancient megastructure, a 4-dimensional hyperoctahedron the size of a dwarf planet, and the pocket universe that houses it. The structure was supposedly constructed by the Precursors as a prison, or maybe as the concept of confinement, itself. It is staffed by a clade of hereditary guards called deodands, who view their job as a quasi-religious obligation. For a fee, they will accept new prisoners from any political body, though very few governments will admit to using their services. No public record of those housed in the Escher-maze cell-blocks of the prison exists, but some of its inmates are likely the descendants of individuals whose accusers have been long forgotten, to say nothing of their alleged crimes.

From the Catalog of Worlds

A follow up to this post, here are a few excerpts from the Catalog of Worlds:

ANIMAL WORLD
Type: Physical
Reality: Fixed, paraphysical (“cartoon physics”)
Dominant Lifeform: Humanoids resembling Terran animals
Description: Animal World appears to be an alternate Earth, except for it being inhabited by talking, anthropomorphic animals. Beyond the dominate species, all objects, whether ostensibly living or not, are animate to varying degrees. Their technology level is roughly late 20th century, and the populace’s awareness and acceptance of space and multiversal travel is highly variable. The altered physical laws of the world can be disorienting and even dangerous. Visitors are encouraged to spend time in virtually simulations before arrival to acclimate themselves as much as possible.

CONTROL
Type: Metaphysical
Reality: Generally fixed, paraphysical
Dominant Lifeform: polyhedroid machine life with a group mind
Description: Control is believed by many to be substructure of the universe—its underlying operating system. It’s mostly perceived as a 3-dimensional grid of glowing lines in a void, disappearing into infinity, though some visitors have described a hum of unseen machinery. The 4-dimensional polyhedroids are “programs” then, tasked with increasing uptime and eliminating threats. Any traveler who makes it to Control runs the risk of beings perceived as such. Polyhedroids communicate in the “machine code” of the universe, so their transmissions are highly efficient at reality manipulation at cut through the formulae and sigils of other entities.

THE HELL-WORLDS
Type: Metaphysical
Reality: Limited mutability; individual realms are locally fixed
Dominant Lifeform: Diaboli
Description: The Diaboli clade have either formed or modified a mostly barren universe to hold a number of realms and subrealms with environments and physics tailored to the desires of their rulers. They are a very wealthy cultured, enriched by their dealings with other species. Each realm is under the control of a director. There are very few laws to limit the director’s authority, at least when it comes to visitors from other worlds. Their society is very hierarchical, despite their protestations at times to the contrary, and research into protocol prior to a visit is highly advisable.

Omniversal Access

Yesterday's post got me to thinking about other ways the Marvel Universe could inform the portrayal of the planes in D&D-type fantasy games. In the "standard model" the inner/outer planes are accessed by means of the transitive planes or direct portals.  In the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition, Mark Gruenwald cataloged other dimensions and alternate realities by a method he had initially present in A Treatise on Reality in Comic Book Literature in 1977. If we imagine a sort of random arrangement of planes (throwing out the Great Wheel or the Astral Sea), we can apply Gruenwald's various means of access (leaving out "magic" since all of the ways will be magical):

Vibrational Attunment: This assumes the plane in question is coterminous, but its matter vibrates at a different frequency. In D&D terms, this would mean going ethereal (like via an ethereal jaunt). Plane shift might also work.

Shrinking: Some planes might be microverses. Reaching them would be via spells or magic items that reduce a persons size below visibility by the naked eye.

Astral Projection: Some planes are physical places, but ectoplasmic ones. The spell of the same name comes in handy.

Portal: Some worlds are only accessible by permanent portals found in certain places or by Plane Shift.

Death: Probably the least attractive way of reaching an afterlife realm, but it works. Astral projection is the less permanent way.

Micro-elementals

If coterminous or external elemental planes don't appeal to you, here's another idea that takes them in a different direction than the standard view or my previous posts. If we take the classical view that the four elements are the fundamental consituents of all matter, then (as science fantasy has told us at least since Ray Cummings' The Girl in the Golden Atom in 1919) there may very well be worlds inside those tiny particles. Elemental worlds.

Like Microworld, yeah, except that unlike its organic chemistry model look, elemental microworlds look like the platonic solids just like Plato told us they would. 

Maybe the world is on the interior of these shapes or maybe on their strangely-angled surfaces. Either way, they would be pretty weird places. Of course, this also may mean that elementals are microscope--even atomic level things. An elemental summoning would actually be growing a fractional bit of element to macroscopic size. The fact that size creatures have (rudimentary) intelligence might suggest that these microplanes themselves are intelligent. The implications of that, I'll leave you to contemplate.