540,000 Degrees Fahrenheit

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Justhanthalas's picture
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540,000 Degrees Fahrenheit

Hey, I have a campaign concept here, inspired by a Fear Factory song Sticking out tongue

Let's suppose an Athar wizard has a real problem with a single-sphere deity (the power in question is only really prevelant on one Prime Material world).

Now, let's suppose the wizard in question can create a sustainable portal or conduit from the Inner Planes... let's say, the Elemental Plane of Fire. This means that the elemental plane isn't a passvie portal, i.e. just doesn't sit there, but actively pours out the element in question out of the conduit.

What would happen if the wizard could create a portal (or conduit) from the elemental plane of fire onto the Prime Material Plane? Since the Elemental Plane of Fire is by nature infinite, and the portal in question can expel the elemental property outside of itself on the destination (the prime world), wouldn't this mean that the Plane of Fire would be pumping pure elemental fire into the Prime Material Plane?

That means the world in question would soon be incinerated as the atmosphere is eaten by the non-stop flame pouring into the world... The oceans would boil away and all life on the world would be atomized, leaving only a barren, charred world. Thus, effectively killing all of the worshippers of said deity in one fell swoop, starving the deity in question of power and belief, and dooming the power to a slow death.

However.

Since the Plane of Fire is by definition infinite, and the Prime Material Plane is by definition infinite, does this mean the fire would spread across the Prime, destroying worlds across the plane? The Big Fire. Utterly obliterating countless Prime Material Worlds. The End, plain and simple.

The last thing anyone would see was the sky becoming bright... too bright, before the atmosphere was devoured... more fuel for the fire.

Which would also mean that every single Prime Material World and every Power in the Outer Planes would be in danger because some barmy Athar found out a way to destroy a Power. Imagine the devastation that it would cause, especially if you subscribe the the "phlogiston and crystal sphere" theory proposed by Spelljammer... Phlogiston is flammable, you know...

How would run with this concept? Would you try to have the PC's stop it before it stops? Or would you have the PC's doing damage control before it reaches their Power's world or even their own?

Tell me what you think.

Smeazel's picture
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540,000 Degrees Fahrenheit

'Justhanthalas' wrote:
Since the Plane of Fire is by definition infinite, and the Prime Material Plane is by definition infinite, does this mean the fire would spread across the Prime, destroying worlds across the plane?

No.

It could if you wanted it to for your campaign, of course, but it's not a necessary consequence. For one thing, even if there's an infinite amount of fire on the Plane of Fire, there's still a finite amount of it coming out of the conduit over any given finite period of time. Therefore, the fire from the conduit won't fill an infinite space until an infinite amount of time has passed. But even if the fire is coming out of the conduit infinitely fast...it still won't necessarily fill the Prime. You can take an infinite amount of space out of an infinite amount of space and still have an infinite amount of space left over. (There are an infinite number of prime numbers. There are an infinite number of integers. But take the prime numbers out of the integers, and you still have an infinite number of integers left. Infinity minus infinity doesn't necessarily equal zero.)

There are other reasons why such a conduit wouldn't necessarily have the consequences you describe. Would even pure elemental fire keep burning indefinitely once removed from the Elemental Plane of Fire? Would it necessarily spread out, instead of just being more and more concentrated in one place? Would it be able to cross space, where there's nothing to burn? Would it be able to penetrate the crystal sphere? Could the gods step in and create a break or otherwise stop its spread?

But, again, it depends on what you want for your campaign. A conduit permanently spewing elemental fire doesn't necessarily mean the entire Prime Material Plane is in danger...but if you want it to mean that for your campaign, sure.

Korimyr the Rat's picture
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540,000 Degrees Fahrenheit

Not to mention, crystal shells are indestructible and don't conduct heat-- and phlogiston can't exist within a crystal sphere.

Nasty, nasty surprise for the first 'jammer to enter the Sphere after a few hundred millenia had passed, though. Especially if the Sphere pressurized.

eldersphinx's picture
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540,000 Degrees Fahrenheit

"And for my next trick, I'll pop on over to Athas.org and ask about opening up a permanent gate to the Plane of Water toget rid of that nasty desertification problem..."

Your concept has a few slight problems with it, in the long run.

First involves an Athar wizard able to create permanent active Gates to the Elemental planes. We're talking epic-level magic here, probably a Transport seed with permanent duration and an area effect - a DC of around 185 or so, before mitigating factors. And arguably, not even that is enough to start flame gushing out like a firehose. In short, any mage able to actually start an Elementally-driven planetary inferno is probably capable of just going and disintegrating the deity directly, and saving himself the trouble.

Second issue is with the portal after it's created. It's a spell - an epic spell, but still a spell - and so vulnerable to at least a few tricks. Dispel effects or Disjunction can destroy it, and getting to it only requires some fire immunity; similarly, it's not out of the question to surround the portal with something that's immune to fire and so block it up forever. (Yes, such a container's exterior would be 1600 square feet at minimum on the outside, but we're talking about epic casters and deities here. Being reasonable went out the door a long time ago.) Since we are talking about threatening a deity here - actually, a whole planet of deities - appearance of avatars and all those crunchy Salient Divine abilities come into play. Protecting the portal with additional epic spells and artifacts is possible, but probably more trouble than it's worth.

Third issue is how the portal's handled from the other side. The Elemental Plane of Fire may be infinite, but its volume and substance are still closely balanced against the other elemental planes, and no elemental ruler or sultan of the efreeti is going to care for huge quantities of flame being sucked away to the Prime and reducing their power, solely to fuel some mad wizard's vendetta. Noble efreeti can throw wishes at the problem, elder elementals have epic druidic allies, and the entire treasury of the City of Brass is available to buy outside help. Which means this portal will now be under constant apocalyptic attack from both sides.

Fourth issue. Suppose the gate is created. Suppose it stays open, in spite of everything. Suppose it pumps through pure elemental fire at a rate of four hundred cubic feet per round (the standard for an area-effect Transport seed), for all of eternity.

Thing is, as far as geological scales go, four hundred cubic feet per round is not a lot. A typical earthlike planet has a diameter of nearly eight thousand miles; burying it a mile deep in fire requires pumping out nearly seven quadrillion cubic feet of elemental flame. At four hundred cubic feet every six seconds, you'd get the needed volume after about three trillion years. And this is assuming that your expelled flame 'stays low', hugging the planet's surface, and doesn't bloom into an evenly-distributed hemisphere pimpling out from the side of the planet.

And since planetary scales shrink into insignificance when compared with cosmological scales, the threat of a "Big Fire" destroying 'countless' other Prime worlds is probably even lower on the scale than the danger of Mount Celestia being overrun by a horde of cybernetic flumph assassins riding giant space hamsters. Or so I'd guess, anyway.

astralsahu's picture
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540,000 Degrees Fahrenheit

One could take an example from elemental vortices, as well. For some worlds, these are how the inner planar essences get to the Prime and combine, anyway. The vortex to Magma at the heart of a volcano is why the volcano is there in the first place. So these are presumably a good model.

The volcano doesn't cover the planet because it's surrounded by dirt from all those Earth vortices on the planet's crust, and the Ice vortices at the poles don't cover the world in an ice age (for most of them) because the Radiance vortex sun shines bright and warm through the clear atmosphere provided by the Air vortices.

A new Fire vortex would cause some major damage, sure, but this would probably be localised by pressure from the other elements and geological in nature (e.g. the heart of a new desert that would grow over the next millenium).

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540,000 Degrees Fahrenheit

Now, a really fun idea would be for those Athas mages to open a gate to the Positive Energy Plane, to try and undo all the defiler damage to the Tablelands. And an army of raavids comes through and animates the entire planet, which then chomps its way through the Prime Material like a global-sized Pac-Man.

Bob the Efreet's picture
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540,000 Degrees Fahrenheit

'Rhys' wrote:
And an army of raavids comes through and animates the entire planet, which then chomps its way through the Prime Material like a global-sized Pac-Man.

You made my day Laughing out loud

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