The Shape Of Strange: Portals to Celestial Morphology Pt 3 of 4
Welcome to the third part of Campaign Mastery’s major contribution to the November 2015 Blog Carnival. The theme this time around is the Unexpected, and this series is all about taking something that is usually assumed to be basic and reliable – portals and gates – and throwing some unexpected surprises into the mix…
To recap: Most GMs (and certainly, most players) assume that a portal is nothing more than an express train from point A in the celestial firmament to point B, a shortcut across planar boundaries that connects two points in localized space that are quite removed otherwise. Planar travel using portals is so inconvenient in comparison to the alternative that the portal connection can probably be considered the fundamental point of configuration of the relationship between the two planes, assuming it is at least semi-permanent. Establishing any sort of lasting connection to another plane is tantamount to rearranging the cosmology of existence to bring a formerly-remote destination right next door to Alice – and her looking glass!
That notion got me thinking about all the nasty surprises that GMs can pull using portals. This series of four articles is the result.
Are portal exits downhill from portal entrances? You don’t know? Well, let’s explore the idea that they might be, and consider the following situation. The PCs live in a land of plenty – good land, well-irrigated, with water drawn from a mighty river. Their enemies, on the other hand, inhabit something close to an arid wasteland – though it can be made to bloom with the application of a little water. Such a shame they don’t have any. What they DO have is the potential for a well-trained commando unit to sneak a single spell-caster behind enemy lines by way of a portal – and from that position, for them to create another, permanent portal that lies across that mighty river, and connects at the other end to the dam they have just finished building in a dry creek bed. Suddenly, the PCs are in the middle of a drought, while their enemies have water a-plenty!
As that example shows, Portals can be used to completely rearrange the geology and agriculture of the game world to suit whoever’s in control of the portal. Want to claim-jump a rival’s mine? Open a portal to the far side of the mineral deposit, use a shape stone spell through the portal to make a small hollow space for your first wave of miners to exploit, and get digging! Food and air and additional workers can be supplied by the same portal used to establish your mine in the first place, and the ore can be delivered right to where it will do you the most good by the same technique – moving it a dozen paces or less in the process. Heck, you might even be able to lay ore-cart rails straight through the portal!
Assimilated that wave of awe yet? Then let’s dive into some more of the deeper pools of speculation…
Image based on ‘Archway’ byParameters
There are a couple of key parameters that readers should bear in mind through the fun and games that follow. I’ve listed six, but there may be others that haven’t come to mind.
Direction
Portals and gates can be Mono-directional, Bi-directional, or Unidirectional.
- Mono-directional: Objects can only pass from one specific end of the portal or gate to the other end, and not vice-versa.
- Bi-directional: Objects can pass from either end to the other, but travel can only be in one direction at a time. Attempts to travel in the other direction when something is already in transit can be blocked or can result in a collision of some kind.
- Unidirectional: Objects can pass from either end to the other at the same time.
Permanence
What’s the behavior of the portal over time?
- Temporary: Portal lasts for a finite amount of time, and then it’s gone, or changes.
- Enduring: Portal appears permanent and stable – and then isn’t.
- Recurring, Reliable: Portal appears on a predictable basis. More complex versions may follow a pattern.
- Recurring, Anarchic: The portal is in existence at unpredictable times for unpredictable durations. It may be consistent in other parameters, or unpredictable, or cyclic.
- Permanent: Portals connect A to B permanently until disrupted or destroyed. Other parameters may change randomly or according to some pattern.
Size
While the values for this parameter described below suggest consistency, that’s not necessarily the case.
- Small: One person at a time can pass through the portal. Others may have to wait to enter until that traveler arrives, or they may be able to follow like links of sausages. That first variation also introduces the variable of travel time.
- Medium: A small group of up to four or five can pass through the portal together. Anyone more has to wait. Travel time is significant.
- Large: A wagon or large group can pass through the portal together in squads or units, up to fifty or so people at a time. More have to wait.
- Immense: An army, or a fully-crewed ship, can pass through the portal at the same time. Travel time can be tactically significant.
Travel
This parameter can be independently assessed for each end of the portal.
- Stable: The location of the portal entrance/exit is fixed in geographic location relative to something.
- Proximate: The location is defined within a locus of probability surrounding some surface feature; the exact location at any given time within that locus may differ either predictably or randomly.
- Defined: The portal is in one of a set number of locations, usually but not necessarily in close proximity, and is prone to change from one to another periodically or randomly, or perhaps after each use.
- Wandering: The portal moves, either randomly or in a predictable manner, and is not bound to any particular geographic locus. Unless it recurs with great rapidity or doesn’t move very far at a time, this can confuse people as to whether or not it is the same portal each time.
Disruption
Why should everything always leave a portal in the same condition as it left? Effects can be physical, or mental, or spiritual; and temporary or permanent. There may or may not be ways of shielding against, or mitigating, the effects. There may be patterns to the disruptive effects. A fixed degree of disruption vs. a percentage disruption can also be very significant.
- Safe: Portal travel inflicts little or no damage.
- Demanding: Portal travel inflicts minor damage that can be managed but may require planned recovery protocols. Mitigating capabilities begin to become significant.
- Difficult: Portal travel causes temporary near-incapacitation, or more significant long-term damage. Mitigating capabilities are very significant.
- Dangerous: The effects of Portal travel are temporarily incapacitating or debilitating for a significant period. Portals are only safe to use when the destination is protected by friendly forces.
Repeatability
There should be some way of disrupting or destroying a portal, though it may be dangerous. What happens then? Will a/the portal reform of it’s own accord, or must a new one be intentionally created? And will it connect with the old destination, or go somewhere new, or something in between?
- Precise: The same origin point leads to the same destination point.
- Self-Locking: The same origin point leads somewhere close to the old destination point and will eventually lock back onto the old departure point.
- Resistant: The old destination point resists the formation of a new portal connection. This resistance may be overcome in some manner.
- Vague: A new portal from the same origin may be directable to some point near where the old one was, but the exact same destination is unreachable.
- Unpredictable: A new portal from the same origin will connect with another point completely at random, uncontrollably, within the destination plane of existence, perhaps restricted to a significant region.
I’ll be repeating the essential contents of this panel at the head of each of the articles. For full discussion of these parameters and their possible effects, refer to part 1 of the series. Keep these parameters and variables in mind because I’m liable to switch gears between them without notice!
FreeImages.com/Susan Dutlefsen
Frame Image by FreeImages.com/Stasys EIDIEJUS.
Click on the image to view at 1024×768.
Click on to view Susan’s original image (720×540).
Idea #11 – Portals To The Afterlife
I have to admit that this idea has been percolating away in the back of my mind for quite a long time now. It first came to me not long after I wrote A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs way back in December of 2008.
Think about this for a moment: there is a way to have direct access to the afterlife. You can visit deceased relatives, beg forgiveness from those you have wronged, gloat over those who can no longer stop you.
Or can they? What if the portals are a two-way street? A bi-directional or uni-directional portal to the afterlife means that death is just a temporary change of address. Even if you no longer have a physical body, what can you do? Are you a ghost? Can you possess someone, borrowing – temporarily or long-term – their physical body?
Can you commit an act of evil? Once you’ve been taken to the afterlife, is there any mechanism of divine re-judgment that can condemn you? And what if you simply went back through the portal before you were missed? Just how closely does whoever’s in charge of Heaven or Elysium or Valhalla or whatever it’s called keep track of the inhabitants? Or is having been accepted into heaven a free ride thereafter? If a murder has been committed, can the authorities question the victim? Is their testimony admissible? If a criminal received absolution for a crime, earning himself a ticket into heaven, can the authorities bring him back from the afterlife to serve out his sentence or even stand trial?
Can the dead continue to make investments? Can they continue to own property? Even if they need to use a living proxy? If you’re dissatisfied by the terms of a will, can you go and complain to the author? Are oaths of loyalty binding beyond death? Oaths of confidentiality? Or is a lawyer, or doctor, free to spill their guts to anyone who asks? And what punishment can be inflicted after death if they do?
Imagine you’re the ruler of a nation. Anytime things get sticky, you pop over into the afterlife to consult a brains trust of your predecessors and the best military minds they have been able to recruit for the purpose. Or if the throne falls to an unworthy son or daughter, can the dead king come back to lead an insurrection?
Can you think of a single aspect of human existence that would not potentially be transformed almost beyond recognition – depending on how you answered these questions?
I can’t.
Idea #12 – Portal Transfiguration
There’s a general assumption that you exit a portal the same as you entered it. I’ve always felt that GMs looking for ideas should root out assumptions and challenge them.
So, what sort of transformations might be possible? It’s Alice-In-Wonderland time…
Size changes are the most obvious. But there are some points to contemplate. The first is that this might be an accidental side-effect, and that will have zero impact unless it’s unexpected. The second is that what can be done accidentally, can also be done deliberately. So your army – or just an elite cadre – enter the portal and emerge the size of giants, with strength and fortitude to match. Or, perhaps, they emerge the size of mice, or ants – ideally-sized for sneaking under locked doors and gathering intelligence.
Or perhaps the changes are less extreme – and not universal in dimensionality. You stay as wide as you were, but come out about 2 feet shorter than you went in – with the build of a rather puny Dwarf, in other words.
But the potential changes aren’t limited to mere size transformations. Complete transfiguration is possible. You go in as Human and come out as… a troglodyte. An Orc. A Gorilla. A half-dragon. A werewolf – but you don’t know that until the next full moon. The possibilities are endless.
They all have a credibility problem, however, that will devastate your campaign unless you’re playing a game with young children (who might well be thrilled!) – you have to have an answer to the question, “why?”
There are simplistic answers that aren’t very satisfying; such as the gods deciding that the population of a certain species are too low, and arbitrarily deciding to bolster them with whoever wandered by. It’s that “arbitrary” that will annoy the players who will quite rightly feel victimized. So you need a better answer.
Try as I might, there are only two alternatives that seem to ring true and that might be satisfying to the players (assuming that the transformation isn’t perfect). The first is that the gods have taken a personal interest in one or more of the PCs and decided that the transfiguration will teach a valuable lesson. For this to work, the whole chain of logic will need to be ironclad and impeccable – including the presumption that there is no other way, or no easier way, for this lesson to be learned.
A far easier answer is the final alternative: that there is something the creator(s) of the Portal need or want the PCs to do, and that is only possible if their form has been changed, at least temporarily. It’s a lot easier to construct a plausible reason for the new form to be necessary to the mission, whatever it is; and this transforms the whole situation as much as it does the PCs.
Far more interesting possibilities exist if ALL portals suddenly (or have always) had such effects, especially if transit through a bi-directional or uni-directional gate in the other direction undoes the change. Immediately, devils and demons giving themselves a “human makeover” come to mind. Or even if it’s just one class of specially-created Portal. This is also the sort of thing that Drow often come up with in my campaigns – they always come up with sneaky plots to advance their causes, and creating infiltrators as spies or a fifth column is always useful when everyone is your enemy. Your players will definitely not see this one coming – and that’s what it’s all about!
That solves the immediate problem – but it leaves open the wider problem of who made it possible for such a gate to be constructed, how it works, and what their agenda is. But this question, too, is left on far firmer ground; it merely becomes necessary to ask who had the requisite capabilities and who benefited the most from trouble between Race X and the Drow (or whoever it was). Work out the solution to that and you have everything you need to blindside your players with epic plot developments.
Orchestrating such a change in nature, even locally, is a big deal. It would not be easy, and would risk drawing the attention of all sorts of powerful beings. It certainly would not have happened overnight. But it’s the sort of thing that a Demon Prince, or Ruling Devil, might get up to if they wanted to distract the gods from some ploy – or to get their attention. That suggests (to me, at least) that maybe there’s a whole bunch of bad guys who have gathered under one umbrella to do something big – and one member of that alliance is taking out insurance against getting duped, or perhaps knows that the others intend to use him as a sacrificial lamb, and is making covert moves to block the success of the alliance. Perhaps, if the origins of Devils/Demons are anything like those in Judeo-Christianity, one has reached the point of possible redemption – that would be a big deal, and a big pay-off in campaign terms.
This one possible answer makes it clear that Portals can just as transformative of the politics of your cosmology as they can be in effectively reshaping the cosmos. Never was the ancient Chinese curse more appropriate – these PCs have definitely been cursed to live in Interesting Times!
Idea #13 – Socio-Ethical Morphology through Portal Networks
So far as I’m aware, Star Trek was the original source of the notion of encountering an alternate world in which everything was the same – but some things were (consistently) different, in the episode ‘Mirror Mirror’ of the original series. The ‘Mirror Mirror’ universe never showed up in the Star Trek The Next Generation (I always thought it would be fun to encounter a Mirror-version of Q, and the Borg, but what do I know?), but excursions into the alternate timeline in which everyone who was evil was good and vice-versa became an annual occurrence in Deep Space Nine.
But the ultimate expression of the concept was the foundation for the first two or three seasons of the TV series ‘Sliders’, available from Amazon (in very limited numbers) as a 22-disc boxed set covering the whole series, or – for the purists who stopped liking the show in season 3, after the departure of John Rhys-Davies, as a 6-disk DVD set covering only the first two seasons; (the link is to the “Dual Dimension Edition” which is what I have, and which is available at some bargain prices).
Or perhaps you would prefer to model your version of the alternate-worlds on Robert Heinlein’s Number Of The Beast. I know that a lot of people dislike this novel intensely, but I think that’s doing it a disservice. For the most part, I find it entirely enjoyable up until the fourth part, the pan-dimensional conference, in which the problem that has been the motivating force behind the entire story is dismissed in about a page by a deus-ex-machina. Had I been the author, I would have ended the novel just as the conference was being proposed – and then written another of equal length, about what happens next. The conference would have determined that the scope of the problem was far larger than originally thought, and perhaps come up with a means of detecting “the beasts” – and then we’re treated to the most epic space-and-time-opera ever, move and countermove, universe after universe, exploring the moral dilemmas of how far humanity is right to go in defense of its own existence, and how far it can go without becoming no better than what they fight – a problem of morality that comes to a head when the home of the original sentient Beasts is first discovered. Half the council of allies want to obliterate it, wiping out the threat once and for all; a minority want to rehabilitate the Beast by establishing peaceful relations before war becomes inevitable; and a small group are so outraged by the decision that they act to sabotage the council’s genocide, setting the whole train of events in motion and making the original novel inevitable. Okay, maybe what I would have added is twice the length of the original, and we’re talking about a trilogy!
Be all that as it may, the fact is that there are lots of alternate world concepts out there for you to remodel and apply to your own campaign, either as a one-off or as a persistent complicating factor! This week, the PCs go to the Diskworld, next week they are off to a steampunk Ringworld, the week after…. well, the sky is no longer the limit, is it?
Why not explicitly design your campaign world for lower level characters – and, when the PCs grow in power enough to start dominating it, shuffle them sideways into a world that’s a bit more challenging, with no way back?
Idea #14 – Portals Can Only Connect To Variant Planar Topologies
Why stop there? This series starts with the premise that Gates and Portals effectively reshape the Cosmology by bringing two remote parts of it into (effectively) close proximity – but what if all Portals led to cosmologies that had only one thing in common – they were all Different to the one that the PCs live in?
Literally anything you can think of becomes doable. The PCs find themselves in a world in which a coalition of Water and Air elementals led by General Ulysses S. Grant is fighting a terrible civil war with Fire Elementals over the enslavement of Earth Elementals? Or maybe they are trying to win their independence from the Fire Elementals and are being led by General George Washington?
This week, the sky really is an arch held up by the mountaintops. Next week, an inside-out world. The week after, white blood cells fight a desperate war against a viral invader – in a computer circuit.
Or perhaps it’s only miscast Portals and Gates that lead to somewhere strange – and you can never be sure until the first time someone goes through it and comes back to tell the tale. This week, Star Wars; next week, Star Trek; the following week, Babylon-5; and everyone carries medieval weaponry on these jaunts because anything more complicated won’t work when carried from one existence to the next.
Idea #15 – Variable-Difficulty Portals
For the final idea that I am presenting in this article challenges another assumption: why should all destinations be equally accessible by Portal or Gate? Why shouldn’t there be lines of least resistance, and to reach a more remote destination, the additional resistance must be forcibly overcome? Why shouldn’t travel to a more remote destination be akin to climbing a hill – with several hundred pounds of gear on your back?
At the beginning of this series, I pointed out that by reducing the distance between planes to a mere step, Portals and Gates effectively reshape the cosmos. The problem, from the GM’s point of view, is that this reshaping is to some degree out of control; EVERY Portal or Gate has exactly the same consequence. This new proposal restores some of that lost control, because the GM can determine those lines of least resistance.
How? Well, here’s one way of doing so.
Start with a scrabble board or something similar (a chess board doesn’t have enough squares, before anyone asks). Near the center of the board, choose a square and place a chit or scrabble tile on it to represent the Prime Material Plane. I’ve drawn a “P” scrabble tile for illustrative purposes. The standard D&D cosmology involves several layers that have to be considered. There are the three transative layers – the Astral, Ethereal, and Shadow plane – the elemental layers (which some consider to include the positive and negative energy planes), and the Outer Planes. Of these, interweaving the transitive layers is the most complicated task, so that’s where a lot of attention will be paid during this process. |
![]() Place a counter of some sort – I’ve depicted a tiddlywinks counter – in one of the squares immediately adjacent to the Prime Material Plane – top, either side, or bottom, it doesn’t matter which. Following the diagonal of squares, place more so that they form a straight line. From one of the squares that now contains a counter, count across or down four squares and place another diagonal row parallel to the first. Repeat until you’ve dealt with the whole board. These represent the Astral Plane, the most readily-available connection to anywhere. But I’m not quite finished defining it yet. |
![]() From the Prime Material Plane, count one square across and one square along the line of the diagonal as shown. Place another Astral Plane counter in the square (I’ve faded the counters already placed so that the new one stands out). |
![]() Complete the diagonal running at right angles to the first one with more Astral Plane markers as shown. From one of these new placements, count 4 squares along the line of the original diagonal and add another cross-line of Astral Plane Markers. Again, repeat until you have dealt with the entire board. |
![]() In the squares running parallel to the original diagonal lines and midway between them, place a different sort of marker to represent the Ethereal Plane. This causes them to form “strings” of three markers in a row, which I have referred to as “Ethereal Nodes”. Why? One of the most important things that the GM has to do when Planar Travel is involved is to make each plane unique and distinctive. I’ve always felt that in its original concept, the Ethereal Plane is too like the Astral Plane. Over the years, I’ve used many different variations on the Ethereal Plane purely to distinguish it in some fashion from the Astral Plane. In this case, the concept is that the Astral Plane connects everywhere (but will be hard to enter, harder to exit, and still harder to transit through) while there is a substructure to the Ethereal Plane that makes local transit (through a specific Ethereal Node) rather easier, while transit from one Ethereal Node to another is even harder than using the Astral Plane. In effect, the Ethereal Plane is subdivided into a series of foamy “bubbles” which are relatively easy to get into but will only connect with specific and limited planes (we’ll get to decide which ones later in the process). So in-and-out of one Node is easy; passing from one node to another is very difficult. |
![]() So far, we’ve filled about half the board without putting in anything of much substance. It’s time to change that, with the laying of tiles for the Elemental Planes. I’ve put them in the order of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, but you can use any order you like. Note however that it does make a big difference which plane is adjacent to which in the finished Cosmology. The tiles are placed diagonal to the Prime Material Plane and immediately next to it. |
![]() Next, it’s time to start placing the Positive and Negative Energy Planes. These represent a new level of topological complexity (so as to make it hard for players to min-max the system). Place two Positive (“+” marked) tokens and two Negative (“-” marked) tokens. Again, it matters to the final cosmology where these are placed with respect to the elemental planes – I’ve chose to bracket the Earth plane with Positives and the Water plane with the negatives, but it doesn’t have to be that way. |
![]() Now pay attention because it’s about to get complicated. Along each of the horizontal and vertical axes, count out two spaces (including any already occupied by Astral or Ethereal Tokens) and place an elemental plane token of the opposite polarity. From a plus, lay a minus, and from a minus, a plus. The reasons for this are several; I won’t go into all of them here, but I’ll mention a couple. First, I wanted to impart a little fuzziness to the boundaries between Inner and Outer planes; second, Second, I wanted to actually provide some sort of functional difference between Inner and Outer planes rather than simply as terms of convenience; and third, I wanted to raise the complexity of the topology another notch. You see, so far as I (and this system) are concerned, Each “+” tile is adjacent to its neighboring “+” tiles, as though the space in between them barely existed; they are contiguous at a level above or below the plane of this structure. The other effect that should be noted is the degree of interconnection already taking place; Look, for example, at the Fire Plane. It’s equally well connected to both Astral and Ethereal Planes, connects to both Positive and Negative Energy Planes, and connects to the prime Material Plane. In fact, the only distinction between the elemental planes and the Prime Material Plane is that the latter connects equally with all of the former, while none of the former EVER connect directly with each other. By the way, if you’re the type who likes to include the Intermediate Elemental Planes (Earth + Fire = Lava, etc), and want to know where they are, they can be considered to be in a pocket within either the Astral or Ethereal planes between the Elemental Planes, while any that don’t share that sort of connection form a pocket within the Shadow Plane (which we’ll get to a little later). For now, we’re still emplacing the positive and negative energy planes. |
![]() From the planar markers just laid (i.e. the outermost points (so far) of the Positive and Negative energy planes, count out one diagonal, turn 90 degrees, and count out two more. Where this “connects” two planes of the same polarity, place another token of the Opposite charge – so from the two positives, you get a negative; and from the two negatives, you get a positive. Where the two charges are mixed, leave the space empty, for now. |
![]() I’ve shadowed the squares that aren’t affected in this step to make the diagram a little clearer. Last time we counted radially outwards, we advanced two squares (or crossed on Transative Lines, if you prefer; this time, we advance four (or cross two transative lines). It sounds complicated, but it’s not that bad, I hope – because there’s worse to come, I’m afraid. |
![]() Having proceeded outward two steps along the vertical and horizontal axes, we next proceed diagonally out three squares – crossing three transative lines. These are the most remote peripheries of these two Inner Planes; like the points on a morningstar, the project out from the inner planes, thrusting far out into – well, into the undecided, so far. |
![]() Now things get really complicated, because it’s time to locate the Plane Of Shadows. From each of the existing Squares representing the Positive and Negative Energy Planes, in all four viable directions, count straight out two squares and one diagonal step that does not turn through more than 45 degrees. Each square that is “reached” in this fashion has a 25% chance PER CONNECTION of being a part of the Plane Of Shadows. As it happens, in this example, none of them add up to 75% – it’s 25%, 50%, 100%, or no chance at all. The affected squares have been color coded in Grey, with the darkness representing the likelihood that the square is a part of the Shadow Plane. To make things clearer, I’ve prepared two closeups (with irrelevant detail ignored). |
![]() The first closeup shows how four different “points” of the energy planes come together to give one particular square a 100% chance of being part of the Plane Of Shadows. The Second close-up, below, shows the counting pattern for a single square of (in this case) the Negative Energy Plane – there are five viable steps (shown in green) which confer 25% to each of the squares the path points to, and three that are not viable (in red) because the moves end in a square that already contains a tile or marker – in this case, a positive plane “protrusion” and two of the Elemental Planes. Look back at the image prior to the closeups, and now that you know what to look for, you should be able to see that every viable path is shown in green so that you can see how the different potential for squares of Shadow Plane is calculated. Just take is steadily and systematically, and you should have no problems. I recommend using something small as a counter, it makes the job a lot easier. The next step is get out a trusty d8 and start rolling. 1-2 = “yes” for a 25% chance; 5-8 = “yes” for a 50% chance; and obviously there is no need to roll for a 100% chance! I haven’t done anything about the Mirror Planes or anything else like that; if you want to, simply use a consistent variation on the same approach to determine which squares contain elements of those Planes. All it takes is a different pattern. But bear in mind that you need space for the real meat of the whole process. Most of this has been… not fluff, but not all that significant, either. |
![]() Any empty square can contain a Plane. You daisy-chain them to form associative chains. These chains can branch wherever seems appropriate. Any square that does not end up with Planar Content is part of The Void. I’ve done about half the board in this example. We have one chain that runs 1-2-3-4-5-6 and a branch that runs 4-7-8; we have another chain that runs 9-10-11-12-15-16-17-18-19, with a branch running 12-13-14 and another running 12-20-21-22-23-24. Again, I’ve faded everything except these tiles to make them stand out a little more clearly. The results is a complex cosmology and yet one that can reflect the traditional one – or one that’s radically different. Once you’ve finished placing planes, make a map/diagram of the results; the big advantage of using counters, as I’ve suggested, is that it makes it easy to “tweak” the resulting structure to suit your needs. If you have to, you can even scrap it all and start over. All that’s left is to establish some ground rules. The easiest way of modeling the increased “resistance” that has to be overcome is by using a Spellcraft roll or something similar, basing the DC on the path to be followed, plus a base of 10: |
- DC +10 to enter the Astral Plane, +1 per square within the Astral Plane, +10 to exit into another plane.
- DC +3 to enter the Ethereal Plane, +1 per square within an Ether Node, +5 to exit the Ethereal Plane, +8 to travel to an “adjacent” Ethereal Node.
- DC +3 to enter an adjacent plane (unless otherwise specified) corner-to-corner.
- DC +7 to enter The Shadow Plane, Positive Energy Plane, or Negative Energy Plane (+4 if transiting from one of these to another); +1 per square traveled within (bearing in mind that intervening gaps count as 0 spaces), and DC+5 to exit.
So, let’s say that you want to open a gate to Dimension 7 from the “Prime” Material Plane.
- Option One: Astral Plane from Prime Material (located between Earth and Air Planes) DC +10; 5 squares within the Astral Plane DC+5; Exit the Astral Plane directly to the destination, another +10. Total DC 10+25=35.
- Option Two: Prime Material to Elemental Earth to 1-2-3-4-7: Six steps corner to corner, total DC 10+18=28.
- Option Three: Prime Material to Ethereal (DC +3), 3 steps from one Ether Node to another (DC +24), Exit Ethereal Plane directly into Plane Seven (DC +5), total DC 10+32=42.
- Option Four: Prime Material to Fire, Air or Water (+3 corner-to-corner), to Negative Energy Plane (+7), One step to the Negative Energy Plane protrusion lying between Dimensions 2 and 10 (+1), Exit Negative Plane and Enter Shadow Plane (+4), Exit Shadow Plane direct to Plane 7 (+5); total DC 10+20=30.
(There are others, but those four routes are enough to be getting on with). So, why choose one route over another? Well, obviously, the chance of success has a big impact. In-dimension hazards during transit is another consideration. But finally, let’s consider a failed roll: Determine the amount of failure and count backwards along the chosen route to find out where you actually end up. The Astral Plane may be difficult, but it’s also relatively safe; The Ethereal Plane is only a little less safe, and is rather more difficult, this really is too far a Jaunt to suit that route; that leaves Options two and four. The longer the route, the greater the difficulty difference between the two; it’s already marginally easier going corner-to-corner (option 2). But – depending on the nature of planes 1, 2, 3, and 4, one or both of these hazards can be extremely dangerous.
So the choice is a trade-off between speed, safety, and difficulty. Some routes will be easier and faster – but hazardous to the traveler’s health; others may be safer, but slower, and/or easier.
What’s more, you are completely at liberty to impose additional penalties for specific corner-to-corner steps, or challenges that have to be overcome, or both. You can make Plane 7 as easy or as difficult to reach as you desire. These problems can be simple roadblocks, or can contain plot content. The more you invest in the transit (as a GM), the more you – and your players – will get out of it in terms of adventure, plot, and narrative.
So many of the ideas I’ve presented in this series deal in control over a situation being lost; it’s nice to be able to contrast that with one that gives the GM greater control over Planar Travel!
To Be Continued…
Entering the home stretch, with 15 unexpected nasty tricks described – and five more still to come!
- The Unexpected Neighbor: Portals to Celestial Morphology 1/4
- Destination Incognita: Portals to Celestial Morphology Pt 2/4
- The Shape Of Strange: Portals to Celestial Morphology Pt 3 of 4
- Feel The Burn: Portals to Celestial Morphology Pt 4 of 4
Discover more from Campaign Mastery
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
December 13th, 2015 at 5:55 pm
[…] The Shape Of Strange: Portals to Celestial Morphology Pt 3 of 4 […]