Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being is one of the standard formats of creation myth, I dig it. Norse mythology is one of the notable ones, I think.
The other basic types, if you want to look at things from that direction, are ex nihilo (there was nothing, and then...), the earth diver (an animal is sent into the primal waters to retrieve the earth from the bottom), emergence (essentially the idea of a series of drafts - many attempts were made at the modern world, but only the final one was successful), and from chaos (chaos, either as a vast expanse, or confined as a cosmic egg, is brought into order by a deity).
But I'd want something that could facilitate the creation of twenty separate realms/planes/worlds at once and have them all be deeply connected.
There was a real fun rolplaying thing we did in CF way back in the day where we all took parts of a dead fish god.
I think @Rankenphile either organized it or was one of the Gods? It is super fuzzy in my memory.
I was late to the party so I took “nothing” from the fish, that which was left after the fish had been stripped away. I was kind of the evil god of unmaking.
It was really fun!
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being is one of the standard formats of creation myth, I dig it. Norse mythology is one of the notable ones, I think.
The other basic types, if you want to look at things from that direction, are ex nihilo (there was nothing, and then...), the earth diver (an animal is sent into the primal waters to retrieve the earth from the bottom), emergence (essentially the idea of a series of drafts - many attempts were made at the modern world, but only the final one was successful), and from chaos (chaos, either as a vast expanse, or confined as a cosmic egg, is brought into order by a deity).
But I'd want something that could facilitate the creation of twenty separate realms/planes/worlds at once and have them all be deeply connected.
Well yeah.
Obviously you've got how to do that with the creation by dismemberment (sometimes this one is also creation by coupling - a child was born that was the earth, essentially).
Ex nihilo would essentially be a bunch of different divine beings creating something out of nothing. It's a pretty boring option for cosmology, if you ask me.
The earth diver would be a variety of different animals being sent out from the cosmic raft, each recovering a different material to create the earth with. Their earths were all created, and form the planes (which are all floating in a cosmic ocean still, which is kind of like a real ocean and kind of different).
Emergence would suggest that the drafts of the earth and of life itself, while discarded, are still floating around out there. The material plane is the final product, but there are drafts that were too fiery, or too miserable, or whatever.
From chaos would be pretty similar to ex nihilo in this instance, another variety of deities creating their own realms from the cosmic chaos. I like this more than an ex nihilo solution, because it has some elements of Prometheus/Epimetheus, where everyone is competing to make the best plane, to their own personal tastes, from a combined pool of materials, but I still don't love it.
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
There was a real fun rolplaying thing we did in CF way back in the day where we all took parts of a dead fish god.
I think @Rankenphile either organized it or was one of the Gods? It is super fuzzy in my memory.
I was late to the party so I took “nothing” from the fish, that which was left after the fish had been stripped away. I was kind of the evil god of unmaking.
It was really fun!
Oh yeah! The Scale!
There was a wiki we used to organize it. I didn’t start it, I just played as a god of balance where whenever someone would make something I’d come in and change the rules a bit, adding a curse or a boon to try to level the playing field a bit. I remember someone got salty because I made a change to their creation they didn’t like, but I don’t recall many other details. It was a long time ago, but yeah, that was a good time.
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I have also debated making my planes flat, as opposed to planetary.
I'm still debating that one though.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I'm very fond of planar structures that mirror terrestrial structures, myself. Like there's the cosmic sea, as discussed, which presents the idea that the planes are but islands, floating upon a massive ocean of roiling chaos. Or Yggdrasil, where the planes are attached through a tree structure. Or if you did the world carved out of a corpse, you could do a thing where it's not actually dismembered - travelling between planes is hitching rides through veins and arteries Osmosis Jones style.
When we're dealing with real world mythology, these are indicative of how these objects and locations were important to the culture. I think that fantasy stuff tends to fall into a planar structure for cosmology because that's how we think of planets and therefore it must be true, but truth is a very different beast with mythology.
I like to treat the planes as moderately ephemeral. They have mutable constantly expanding and contracting forms that intersect with one another organizationally yet arbitrarily. For instance the mud regions caused by the intersection of the plane of water and plane of earth do not form a distinct straight line between planes but form in random pockets within both the elemental plane of water and the elemental plane of earth representing a metaphysical barrier point between planes that is easier to pierce and traverse.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Anyways, I'm not sure if I have a direct point in this, it's more observational than anything else. Spire is a very good fantasy RPG, and manages to do the work of blurring the line between rules and flavor to establish its thematic overtones nicely. I think D&D has a lot of value as a framing device, even if I do not like it as a game, and there's some... interesting stuff with how other fantasy RPGs interact with it, I guess.
The only D&D class that comes out of the pages with any kind of ideology built-in is the Paladin. Every other PC class is a blank slate motivated only by what their player or the story brings to the table, but the Paladin has an in-built drive. It should be unsurprising that in traditionally bad D&D games this leads to a lot of conflicts starting between the Paladin and other members of the party. But ultimately it's fine for D&D, where motivation is either the universal drive for gold or XP, or generated by the plot.
However, in a game where the baseline is revolution you can't have non-ideological characters -- revolution can't exist without ideology.
I'm not sure I would argue that all Spire classes are Paladin variants, but rather that Spire made the design decision to build the ideological starting point for revolution in their classes, and because we still tend to map all RPG design to D&D we look at ideological class design and think "Paladin."
GrogMy sword is only steelin a useful shape.Registered Userregular
Emergence sounds great for a creeping horror story- what if you find out your plane wasn't the final product?
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
Hmm... Maybe this as an approach. So, something akin to a mixture of ex nihilo & chaos:
The elder gods are born from the separation of the One Beyond All (OBA), and they initially create a realm of pure illumination just for them to gather.
The Supreme Realm Elysium (Realm of the Gods)
That would effectively be the sun, as it would provide the gravity the anchor the other realms around it. After that the gods would have children, the primordial gods. Eventually these primordial gods grow tired of Elysium and ask for the freedom to craft their own homes.
The Primordial Realms Borealis (Realm of Air) Dal Quor (Realm of the Mind) The Dreadlands (Realm of the Lost) Limbo (Realm of Chaos) Mechanus (Realm of Order) Muspelheim (Realm of Fire) Oceanus (Realm of Water) The Shadowlands (Realm of Shadows) Stonemire (Realm of Earth)
These realms are crafted in accordance with their gods desires and after some time begin to develop/populate with creatures. The elder gods see this as a positive experience, so they craft realms for themselves, for them to rule with absolute sovereignty.
The Divine Realms The Abyss (Realm of Evil) The Beastlands (Realm of the Beasts) Hades (Realm of Death) Nirvana (Realm of Good)
So now the elder gods sit down and decide they will populate these realms with creatures beyond the scope/capabilities of your standard beast. They first try with dragons but they are far too powerful, and as a result are locked in their own realm. Next they create giants but they're just too big, so they are given their own realm. After them they went smaller and created the fey, but they discovered the fey were so petty & egotistical, so they were put on their own realm. They finally were content with the creation of the earliest mortal humanoids (created in part by other creatures from across the primordial realms).
Jotunheim (Realm of Giants) Kakaranathara (Realm of Dragons) Obba (Realm of Mortals) The Twilight Forest (Realm of the Fey)
With so many realms and creatures to look after them, the gods created the angels to act as guardians/wardens and to maintain a celestial army against any other divine beings who might encroach upon their quadrant of realmspace. They also fashion a realm as a meeting place between all different realms.
Celestia (Realm of the Angels) Glyth (Realm of Crossroads)
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Oh, I've got a fun planar structure idea.
From the divine there is a light. The purity of divine existence is light - pure and unaltered.
Planes serve as a modifier to that light. They're like gels or gobos, in theatre terms - they're flat planes that the divine light shines through. The elemental plane of fire makes things red, and the nine hells make its edges sharp, and so on.
But when you stack them all on top of each other, that's where you get the material plane. Different colors of light will combine back into white light, the shapes provided by hell and heaven even each other out and create something in between. But if one of the planes were to be removed from the divine light, or weakened in some way, than the others would throw off the balance.
From the divine there is a light. The purity of divine existence is light - pure and unaltered.
Planes serve as a modifier to that light. They're like gels or gobos, in theatre terms - they're flat planes that the divine light shines through. The elemental plane of fire makes things red, and the nine hells make its edges sharp, and so on.
But when you stack them all on top of each other, that's where you get the material plane. Different colors of light will combine back into white light, the shapes provided by hell and heaven even each other out and create something in between. But if one of the planes were to be removed from the divine light, or weakened in some way, than the others would throw off the balance.
I dig this, it might get a little stolen.
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
I think the MTG setting of Alara had some useful and interesting interpretations of that idea. Each shard of the plane was "purely" three of the five colors of magic, with a complete absence of the other two colors, rotated about the color wheel so that you had five different setting combinations.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Anyways, I'm not sure if I have a direct point in this, it's more observational than anything else. Spire is a very good fantasy RPG, and manages to do the work of blurring the line between rules and flavor to establish its thematic overtones nicely. I think D&D has a lot of value as a framing device, even if I do not like it as a game, and there's some... interesting stuff with how other fantasy RPGs interact with it, I guess.
The only D&D class that comes out of the pages with any kind of ideology built-in is the Paladin. Every other PC class is a blank slate motivated only by what their player or the story brings to the table, but the Paladin has an in-built drive. It should be unsurprising that in traditionally bad D&D games this leads to a lot of conflicts starting between the Paladin and other members of the party. But ultimately it's fine for D&D, where motivation is either the universal drive for gold or XP, or generated by the plot.
However, in a game where the baseline is revolution you can't have non-ideological characters -- revolution can't exist without ideology.
I'm not sure I would argue that all Spire classes are Paladin variants, but rather that Spire made the design decision to build the ideological starting point for revolution in their classes, and because we still tend to map all RPG design to D&D we look at ideological class design and think "Paladin."
Oh I know that describing them all as paladins is a stretch. It's not entirely accurate for any of the ones I mentioned, and it's minimizing some of their cleverness to just call them weird paladins.
But it also lead me to the realization (one which I have assuredly come to plenty of times before) part of the reason I do not like D&D is because it does not have an ideology built in. It's part of D&D's general simulationist vibe, in my feelings, even in instances of D&D which are much less simulationist in other ways. It's what makes other people describing their D&D games feel alien to me sometimes, because the ideology that I used the structure to build is different from that of others.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Anyways, I'm not sure if I have a direct point in this, it's more observational than anything else. Spire is a very good fantasy RPG, and manages to do the work of blurring the line between rules and flavor to establish its thematic overtones nicely. I think D&D has a lot of value as a framing device, even if I do not like it as a game, and there's some... interesting stuff with how other fantasy RPGs interact with it, I guess.
The only D&D class that comes out of the pages with any kind of ideology built-in is the Paladin. Every other PC class is a blank slate motivated only by what their player or the story brings to the table, but the Paladin has an in-built drive. It should be unsurprising that in traditionally bad D&D games this leads to a lot of conflicts starting between the Paladin and other members of the party. But ultimately it's fine for D&D, where motivation is either the universal drive for gold or XP, or generated by the plot.
However, in a game where the baseline is revolution you can't have non-ideological characters -- revolution can't exist without ideology.
I'm not sure I would argue that all Spire classes are Paladin variants, but rather that Spire made the design decision to build the ideological starting point for revolution in their classes, and because we still tend to map all RPG design to D&D we look at ideological class design and think "Paladin."
Oh I know that describing them all as paladins is a stretch. It's not entirely accurate for any of the ones I mentioned, and it's minimizing some of their cleverness to just call them weird paladins.
But it also lead me to the realization (one which I have assuredly come to plenty of times before) part of the reason I do not like D&D is because it does not have an ideology built in. It's part of D&D's general simulationist vibe, in my feelings, even in instances of D&D which are much less simulationist in other ways. It's what makes other people describing their D&D games feel alien to me sometimes, because the ideology that I used the structure to build is different from that of others.
Yeah I wasn't really disagreeing with you so much as expanding on your point in a different direction.
I like to treat the planes as moderately ephemeral. They have mutable constantly expanding and contracting forms that intersect with one another organizationally yet arbitrarily. For instance the mud regions caused by the intersection of the plane of water and plane of earth do not form a distinct straight line between planes but form in random pockets within both the elemental plane of water and the elemental plane of earth representing a metaphysical barrier point between planes that is easier to pierce and traverse.
I'm actually theorycrafting a road-trip type of adventure around this concept at some point.
The pitch: A railroad tycoon's youngest son wants to prove that he's more worthy of inheriting the family empire than his brothers, so he hatches a plan that could revolutionize long-distance rail travel. What if, instead of laying track across thousands of miles of wilderness, you could hire a group of planomancers to chart the ever-changing border regions and connections between the virtually limitless planes of existence, and devise routes that utilize planar gates to cross the continent in hours instead of days or weeks? Of course, to build such a route, you'll need to first travel it and secure it against any dangers or..."conflicting property rights". And of course, if the young railroad heir's brothers get wind of his plan, they may have something to say about it...
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
If I am okay leaving the idea of realmspace and all it brings (like aliens & such!), what about this idea?
All of creation is an endless forest full of trees. Each of those trees is its own galaxy.
All of my different worlds are ornaments on the tree.
I don't know, I'm just throwing things at the wall.
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
From the divine there is a light. The purity of divine existence is light - pure and unaltered.
Planes serve as a modifier to that light. They're like gels or gobos, in theatre terms - they're flat planes that the divine light shines through. The elemental plane of fire makes things red, and the nine hells make its edges sharp, and so on.
But when you stack them all on top of each other, that's where you get the material plane. Different colors of light will combine back into white light, the shapes provided by hell and heaven even each other out and create something in between. But if one of the planes were to be removed from the divine light, or weakened in some way, than the others would throw off the balance.
I dig this, it might get a little stolen.
Playing with it further, the layer in which you apply these plates is important. As an illustration:
So at the top we have the elemental planes, which are the building blocks of the universe. I didn't stress myself about the order of these too much, but the idea is that first there was the sky and then the waters below, and the earth was created and fire upon it. But you could go Genesis style and have it start with fire, or whatever you want.
After that comes Fairy, which is the elements in their purity. The fey do not know of heaven nor hell, they have no morality but their own.
Then we have Heaven and Hell - Heaven is a world without Hell, and thus comes before it, and Hell cannot exist without the dream of Heaven.
All of this gets layered onto itself still, resulting in the prime material plane.
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
I tend to follow Discworld theology when I'm world-building
there's a Place you're on, let's not say too much about how or why, it's all very metaphysical
but then the collective unconscious starts birthing Gods who take credit for the creation of said Place because they gotta keep those numbers up, their power diminishes with each lost sheep
now this sounds like the kind of situation where the Place devolves into a wasteland of holy wars, with each God trying to have the most followers through forcible conversion and Deicide.
but Gods don't want to die any more than mortals do, so they form a loose coalition, a Pantheon, where they all just stick to their roles and try not to interfere beyond the occasional miracle for particularly Faithful people
and the worlds turn
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
So if you're going by a Divine Light -> Elemental Plane Filters -> Material Plane analogy, then each elemental plane filter is removing something from the input, and when you've removed N features/aspects of the source light then you're left with what becomes the material plane. That sets up an interesting consideration for how the hierarchy of elemental planes is structured. Does each elemental plane represent the Filter at its level of this hierarchy? Or does each elemental plane represent the material that is Filtered by something else?
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
edited March 2019
Perhaps I could go a bit simplistic but each separate plane/realm is a radical modification on the material plane?
So the material plane is like our standard Earth, with rivers & lakes & oceans & mountains.
But each plane applies its aspects on top of those same geographical features.
So for example, the same simple river in the Material Plane is a river of lava in the Elemental Plane of Fire.
It would certainly make the creation of maps for me very easy and also provide players a sense of geographically familiarity with all of these different planes.
Zonugal on
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
Perhaps I could go a bit simplistic but each separate plane/realm is a radical modification on the material plane?
So the material plane is is like our standard Earth, with rivers & lakes & oceans & mountains.
But each plane applies its aspects on top of those same geographical features.
So for example, the same, simple river in the Material Plane is a river of lava in the Elemental Plane of Fire.
It would certainly make the creation of maps for me very easy and also providing players a sense of geographically familiarity with all of these different planes.
You should check out the book, Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch.
Perhaps I could go a bit simplistic but each separate plane/realm is a radical modification on the material plane?
So the material plane is is like our standard Earth, with rivers & lakes & oceans & mountains.
But each plane applies its aspects on top of those same geographical features.
So for example, the same, simple river in the Material Plane is a river of lava in the Elemental Plane of Fire.
It would certainly make the creation of maps for me very easy and also providing players a sense of geographically familiarity with all of these different planes.
You should check out the book, Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch.
if given the choice between 20 planets/planes/pocket dimensions/whatever or 20 cavities carved out of the corpse of a titanic creature, I'm gonna go with titanic creature every time
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
So is the Divine light is like cosmic background radiation?
Exactly!
Let's compare The Divine Light to the sun. It is nothing like the sun, of course, but we've already associated it with light and it is nothing like light either, so let's just keep extending this.
The sun is the source of life on earth, but we are not ever experiencing the sun in its purest form. We have millions of miles of distance from it, first off, and then we have things like the ozone layer and cloud cover and whatever else. I don't know, I'm not a scientist. Those things protect us from the sun, because even though it is the source of life, if we were to experience it in its purest form, it would kill us.
The various other planes serve similarly. By diluting the divine light, bit by bit, layer by layer, they prevent too much of it from touching the prime material plane. Even though the divine light is everything and is in everything, it's made just enough less by the existence of the planes.
This is also why we have changelings and people taken by the fey - the fairy kingdom is closer to the light source, and spending too much time there will change a person in strange and unexpected ways. The fairies themselves are made for that realm, but people are not.
If we go with the cosmic background radiation metaphor that is leftover from the big bang and is basically the edge of our vision into deep space which relativity tells us is also looking back in time.
So what kind of axes should the layers be placed in? Time? A physical spacial one?
I’ve done all sorts with planes, but for later use I quite fancy saying the material plane came first, and the rest sprang into being as echoes of that true place.
An idea building off that is these other planes die off from time to time as mortals change, and new one’s come into being with new concepts.
So realm of a forgotten god is in ruins, barely existing, and the realm of metal over time changed from a cave of ore to a colossal mechanical foundry.
If we go with the cosmic background radiation metaphor that is leftover from the big bang and is basically the edge of our vision into deep space which relativity tells us is also looking back in time.
So what kind of axes should the layers be placed in? Time? A physical spacial one?
I generally go with a separate planes of existence, there's nothing but magically piercing barriers and moving that way. Time and space are aspects of the material plane. If you travel in time it's along the path the material plane took. You could travel back in time then jump to another plane to see it as it existed in relation to that time frame on the material plane. Traveling the stars is just that, traveling between planets on the material plane. Going to something like the plane of fire requires magically piercing the veil of material existence and escaping through the hole into the esoteric realm of fire which exists parallel to the material plane.
If we go with the cosmic background radiation metaphor that is leftover from the big bang and is basically the edge of our vision into deep space which relativity tells us is also looking back in time.
So what kind of axes should the layers be placed in? Time? A physical spacial one?
I generally go with a separate planes of existence, there's nothing but magically piercing barriers and moving that way. Time and space are aspects of the material plane. If you travel in time it's along the path the material plane took. You could travel back in time then jump to another plane to see it as it existed in relation to that time frame on the material plane. Traveling the stars is just that, traveling between planets on the material plane. Going to something like the plane of fire requires magically piercing the veil of material existence and escaping through the hole into the esoteric realm of fire which exists parallel to the material plane.
I’ve had a strange idea reading this. Maybe only the material plane has time, and absolutely nothing changes or progresses out on the planes unless a mortal makes contact.
Like sure Abaddon exists, but what is he doing when cultists aren’t conjuring an aspect of him? Nothing, that’s what. They’re just frozen unless a mortal mind and the physics of the material allow them to truly exist.
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I think having actual realmspace is important for my setting, because I want to be able to tell stories involving space and beings/encounters within it.
I also want to be able to do something like the origin of Aku.
Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
the world isn't even the cosmic egg; it's the broken shell, the trash, the leavings of the birth of an infant god that created multitudes without even knowing the act of creation was possible, before being whisked away to some celestial nursery, and the crawling bacteria of "life" emerges on the shattered remnants of the shell that once protected omniscience.
the world isn't even the cosmic egg; it's the broken shell, the trash, the leavings of the birth of an infant god that created multitudes without even knowing the act of creation was possible, before being whisked away to some celestial nursery, and the crawling bacteria of "life" emerges on the shattered remnants of the shell that once protected omniscience.
This plays well with the idea that the universe is an expanding sphere, except the sphere has cracked and the contents have left the egg. What happens when one gets close to the break in the universal egg... well that's where things get weird.
When you look at D&Ds planar system, you see that none of the planes are "pure". The central feature of the plane of fire is a city made of brass, suggesting some overlap with the plane of earth. The plane of air is marred by clouds and storms, requiring contact with the plane of water. The plane of earth is a great chain of mountains, underneath an endless sky. The plane of water is dotted with atolls and islands. And so on. The elemental planes are really planes that more heavily favor one element compared to the prime material plane. I think if you lean in on this, it takes you to some interesting places.
I think of planes more as bubbles than discs. Material beings are unable to exist, or even really conceive of, a pure plane. What "plane" material beings live on is actually the intersection of uncountable number of planes, like an enormous, 11-dimensional Venn diagram. So when a traveller goes to the "plane of fire", it is an equally true statement that they are moving away from the plane of water.
This leaves a lot of room in ways I like. Sentience, as we think of it, requires overlap from planes of thought, of skepticism, of sensation, and so on. So if you move away from the plane of altruism, for example, you may end up in the nine hells, with the devils. Devils are evil because they literally don't have good in their world. Its why they can't be reasoned with in a material plane kind of way. Its thought entirely alien to us. The plane of curiosity is nowhere to be found in Mechanacus's domain, explaning the modrons, and so on.
This even ties into my cosmology Gods are extraplanar beings, who are fundamentally unable to live on the prime material plane. They can influence it, sure, but they cannot directly exist on it. So they have to send agents who can to do their work.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about all this, there's a lot of places it can go. There are planes that don't intersect ours. Demons, true demons, are beings from those places, trying to force their way into ours. Our reality twists and turns them into horrible, pained shapes, screaming at a world where they were never meant to be. They got what they wanted, access to our world. They didn't understand the price, and now they're so wracked with existential pain that they can't focus enough to get out. They lash out, trying to destroy this plane just so they can be free of it.
I think having actual realmspace is important for my setting, because I want to be able to tell stories involving space and beings/encounters within it.
I also want to be able to do something like the origin of Aku.
I think having actual realmspace is important for my setting, because I want to be able to tell stories involving space and beings/encounters within it.
I also want to be able to do something like the origin of Aku.
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But I'd want something that could facilitate the creation of twenty separate realms/planes/worlds at once and have them all be deeply connected.
I think @Rankenphile either organized it or was one of the Gods? It is super fuzzy in my memory.
I was late to the party so I took “nothing” from the fish, that which was left after the fish had been stripped away. I was kind of the evil god of unmaking.
It was really fun!
Well yeah.
Obviously you've got how to do that with the creation by dismemberment (sometimes this one is also creation by coupling - a child was born that was the earth, essentially).
Ex nihilo would essentially be a bunch of different divine beings creating something out of nothing. It's a pretty boring option for cosmology, if you ask me.
The earth diver would be a variety of different animals being sent out from the cosmic raft, each recovering a different material to create the earth with. Their earths were all created, and form the planes (which are all floating in a cosmic ocean still, which is kind of like a real ocean and kind of different).
Emergence would suggest that the drafts of the earth and of life itself, while discarded, are still floating around out there. The material plane is the final product, but there are drafts that were too fiery, or too miserable, or whatever.
From chaos would be pretty similar to ex nihilo in this instance, another variety of deities creating their own realms from the cosmic chaos. I like this more than an ex nihilo solution, because it has some elements of Prometheus/Epimetheus, where everyone is competing to make the best plane, to their own personal tastes, from a combined pool of materials, but I still don't love it.
Oh yeah! The Scale!
There was a wiki we used to organize it. I didn’t start it, I just played as a god of balance where whenever someone would make something I’d come in and change the rules a bit, adding a curse or a boon to try to level the playing field a bit. I remember someone got salty because I made a change to their creation they didn’t like, but I don’t recall many other details. It was a long time ago, but yeah, that was a good time.
I'm still debating that one though.
When we're dealing with real world mythology, these are indicative of how these objects and locations were important to the culture. I think that fantasy stuff tends to fall into a planar structure for cosmology because that's how we think of planets and therefore it must be true, but truth is a very different beast with mythology.
The only D&D class that comes out of the pages with any kind of ideology built-in is the Paladin. Every other PC class is a blank slate motivated only by what their player or the story brings to the table, but the Paladin has an in-built drive. It should be unsurprising that in traditionally bad D&D games this leads to a lot of conflicts starting between the Paladin and other members of the party. But ultimately it's fine for D&D, where motivation is either the universal drive for gold or XP, or generated by the plot.
However, in a game where the baseline is revolution you can't have non-ideological characters -- revolution can't exist without ideology.
I'm not sure I would argue that all Spire classes are Paladin variants, but rather that Spire made the design decision to build the ideological starting point for revolution in their classes, and because we still tend to map all RPG design to D&D we look at ideological class design and think "Paladin."
The elder gods are born from the separation of the One Beyond All (OBA), and they initially create a realm of pure illumination just for them to gather.
The Supreme Realm
Elysium (Realm of the Gods)
That would effectively be the sun, as it would provide the gravity the anchor the other realms around it. After that the gods would have children, the primordial gods. Eventually these primordial gods grow tired of Elysium and ask for the freedom to craft their own homes.
The Primordial Realms
Borealis (Realm of Air)
Dal Quor (Realm of the Mind)
The Dreadlands (Realm of the Lost)
Limbo (Realm of Chaos)
Mechanus (Realm of Order)
Muspelheim (Realm of Fire)
Oceanus (Realm of Water)
The Shadowlands (Realm of Shadows)
Stonemire (Realm of Earth)
These realms are crafted in accordance with their gods desires and after some time begin to develop/populate with creatures. The elder gods see this as a positive experience, so they craft realms for themselves, for them to rule with absolute sovereignty.
The Divine Realms
The Abyss (Realm of Evil)
The Beastlands (Realm of the Beasts)
Hades (Realm of Death)
Nirvana (Realm of Good)
So now the elder gods sit down and decide they will populate these realms with creatures beyond the scope/capabilities of your standard beast. They first try with dragons but they are far too powerful, and as a result are locked in their own realm. Next they create giants but they're just too big, so they are given their own realm. After them they went smaller and created the fey, but they discovered the fey were so petty & egotistical, so they were put on their own realm. They finally were content with the creation of the earliest mortal humanoids (created in part by other creatures from across the primordial realms).
Jotunheim (Realm of Giants)
Kakaranathara (Realm of Dragons)
Obba (Realm of Mortals)
The Twilight Forest (Realm of the Fey)
With so many realms and creatures to look after them, the gods created the angels to act as guardians/wardens and to maintain a celestial army against any other divine beings who might encroach upon their quadrant of realmspace. They also fashion a realm as a meeting place between all different realms.
Celestia (Realm of the Angels)
Glyth (Realm of Crossroads)
From the divine there is a light. The purity of divine existence is light - pure and unaltered.
Planes serve as a modifier to that light. They're like gels or gobos, in theatre terms - they're flat planes that the divine light shines through. The elemental plane of fire makes things red, and the nine hells make its edges sharp, and so on.
But when you stack them all on top of each other, that's where you get the material plane. Different colors of light will combine back into white light, the shapes provided by hell and heaven even each other out and create something in between. But if one of the planes were to be removed from the divine light, or weakened in some way, than the others would throw off the balance.
I dig this, it might get a little stolen.
Oh I know that describing them all as paladins is a stretch. It's not entirely accurate for any of the ones I mentioned, and it's minimizing some of their cleverness to just call them weird paladins.
But it also lead me to the realization (one which I have assuredly come to plenty of times before) part of the reason I do not like D&D is because it does not have an ideology built in. It's part of D&D's general simulationist vibe, in my feelings, even in instances of D&D which are much less simulationist in other ways. It's what makes other people describing their D&D games feel alien to me sometimes, because the ideology that I used the structure to build is different from that of others.
Yeah I wasn't really disagreeing with you so much as expanding on your point in a different direction.
I'm actually theorycrafting a road-trip type of adventure around this concept at some point.
The pitch: A railroad tycoon's youngest son wants to prove that he's more worthy of inheriting the family empire than his brothers, so he hatches a plan that could revolutionize long-distance rail travel. What if, instead of laying track across thousands of miles of wilderness, you could hire a group of planomancers to chart the ever-changing border regions and connections between the virtually limitless planes of existence, and devise routes that utilize planar gates to cross the continent in hours instead of days or weeks? Of course, to build such a route, you'll need to first travel it and secure it against any dangers or..."conflicting property rights". And of course, if the young railroad heir's brothers get wind of his plan, they may have something to say about it...
All of creation is an endless forest full of trees. Each of those trees is its own galaxy.
All of my different worlds are ornaments on the tree.
I don't know, I'm just throwing things at the wall.
Playing with it further, the layer in which you apply these plates is important. As an illustration:
So at the top we have the elemental planes, which are the building blocks of the universe. I didn't stress myself about the order of these too much, but the idea is that first there was the sky and then the waters below, and the earth was created and fire upon it. But you could go Genesis style and have it start with fire, or whatever you want.
After that comes Fairy, which is the elements in their purity. The fey do not know of heaven nor hell, they have no morality but their own.
Then we have Heaven and Hell - Heaven is a world without Hell, and thus comes before it, and Hell cannot exist without the dream of Heaven.
All of this gets layered onto itself still, resulting in the prime material plane.
there's a Place you're on, let's not say too much about how or why, it's all very metaphysical
but then the collective unconscious starts birthing Gods who take credit for the creation of said Place because they gotta keep those numbers up, their power diminishes with each lost sheep
now this sounds like the kind of situation where the Place devolves into a wasteland of holy wars, with each God trying to have the most followers through forcible conversion and Deicide.
but Gods don't want to die any more than mortals do, so they form a loose coalition, a Pantheon, where they all just stick to their roles and try not to interfere beyond the occasional miracle for particularly Faithful people
and the worlds turn
So the material plane is like our standard Earth, with rivers & lakes & oceans & mountains.
But each plane applies its aspects on top of those same geographical features.
So for example, the same simple river in the Material Plane is a river of lava in the Elemental Plane of Fire.
It would certainly make the creation of maps for me very easy and also provide players a sense of geographically familiarity with all of these different planes.
You should check out the book, Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch.
A book?!?!
Exactly!
Let's compare The Divine Light to the sun. It is nothing like the sun, of course, but we've already associated it with light and it is nothing like light either, so let's just keep extending this.
The sun is the source of life on earth, but we are not ever experiencing the sun in its purest form. We have millions of miles of distance from it, first off, and then we have things like the ozone layer and cloud cover and whatever else. I don't know, I'm not a scientist. Those things protect us from the sun, because even though it is the source of life, if we were to experience it in its purest form, it would kill us.
The various other planes serve similarly. By diluting the divine light, bit by bit, layer by layer, they prevent too much of it from touching the prime material plane. Even though the divine light is everything and is in everything, it's made just enough less by the existence of the planes.
This is also why we have changelings and people taken by the fey - the fairy kingdom is closer to the light source, and spending too much time there will change a person in strange and unexpected ways. The fairies themselves are made for that realm, but people are not.
So what kind of axes should the layers be placed in? Time? A physical spacial one?
An idea building off that is these other planes die off from time to time as mortals change, and new one’s come into being with new concepts.
So realm of a forgotten god is in ruins, barely existing, and the realm of metal over time changed from a cave of ore to a colossal mechanical foundry.
I generally go with a separate planes of existence, there's nothing but magically piercing barriers and moving that way. Time and space are aspects of the material plane. If you travel in time it's along the path the material plane took. You could travel back in time then jump to another plane to see it as it existed in relation to that time frame on the material plane. Traveling the stars is just that, traveling between planets on the material plane. Going to something like the plane of fire requires magically piercing the veil of material existence and escaping through the hole into the esoteric realm of fire which exists parallel to the material plane.
I’ve had a strange idea reading this. Maybe only the material plane has time, and absolutely nothing changes or progresses out on the planes unless a mortal makes contact.
Like sure Abaddon exists, but what is he doing when cultists aren’t conjuring an aspect of him? Nothing, that’s what. They’re just frozen unless a mortal mind and the physics of the material allow them to truly exist.
I also want to be able to do something like the origin of Aku.
This plays well with the idea that the universe is an expanding sphere, except the sphere has cracked and the contents have left the egg. What happens when one gets close to the break in the universal egg... well that's where things get weird.
When you look at D&Ds planar system, you see that none of the planes are "pure". The central feature of the plane of fire is a city made of brass, suggesting some overlap with the plane of earth. The plane of air is marred by clouds and storms, requiring contact with the plane of water. The plane of earth is a great chain of mountains, underneath an endless sky. The plane of water is dotted with atolls and islands. And so on. The elemental planes are really planes that more heavily favor one element compared to the prime material plane. I think if you lean in on this, it takes you to some interesting places.
I think of planes more as bubbles than discs. Material beings are unable to exist, or even really conceive of, a pure plane. What "plane" material beings live on is actually the intersection of uncountable number of planes, like an enormous, 11-dimensional Venn diagram. So when a traveller goes to the "plane of fire", it is an equally true statement that they are moving away from the plane of water.
This leaves a lot of room in ways I like. Sentience, as we think of it, requires overlap from planes of thought, of skepticism, of sensation, and so on. So if you move away from the plane of altruism, for example, you may end up in the nine hells, with the devils. Devils are evil because they literally don't have good in their world. Its why they can't be reasoned with in a material plane kind of way. Its thought entirely alien to us. The plane of curiosity is nowhere to be found in Mechanacus's domain, explaning the modrons, and so on.
This even ties into my cosmology Gods are extraplanar beings, who are fundamentally unable to live on the prime material plane. They can influence it, sure, but they cannot directly exist on it. So they have to send agents who can to do their work.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about all this, there's a lot of places it can go. There are planes that don't intersect ours. Demons, true demons, are beings from those places, trying to force their way into ours. Our reality twists and turns them into horrible, pained shapes, screaming at a world where they were never meant to be. They got what they wanted, access to our world. They didn't understand the price, and now they're so wracked with existential pain that they can't focus enough to get out. They lash out, trying to destroy this plane just so they can be free of it.
Okay so I've never actually sat down and watched much Samurai Jack
Is the implication here that
You should definitely check out that episode (and its sequel). They follow Jack's father, who somehow manages to be even more badass than his son.
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