A Far Out Rant

I've only ever read about the Far Realm in 3rd edition books (Manual of the Planes and Lords of Madness) and I didn't get the impression that it was evil at all.

The way I understood the realm is that it exists outside of petty little concepts like good and evil and law and chaos. Its denizens aren't "evil", merely alien to anything the Great Wheel calls life.

Where did you get the idea that WotC is trying to make it evil?

-420

I have never gotten the impression that the Far Realm is evil. Rather, it is beyond alignment. There are no morals or ethics in that plane, if you could call it a plane. Any aberrations that might have originated in the Far Realm but now live in the multiverse proper have alignments because they have become multiversal creatures - they are not far realm entities. Far realm entities are so different from anything we can imagine that any acts they do might be good/evil/neutral/chaotic/lawful or everything at once or none at all. However, when certain activities involve, say, sucking the brains out of a living creature or entrapping its soul and rending it with every breath - well, multiversal creatures usually consider that evil, simply because they are used to catagorizing activities as such.

In my humble opinion, only a very tiny percentage of those that seek to visit the Far Realm succeed, only a small percentage of those who succeed survive, and those that survive are driven barmy the experience. In other words, no DM or, for that matter, sourcebook should describe the Far Realm in any but the vaguest of terms. This works well, considering it should be so odd that no mortal creature, including metagamingly the DM and players, would be able to fathom it.

Being outside the alignment system makes perfect sense, because the Far Realm isn't part of our multiverse. It only plays by our rules if it feals like it, and even then it tends to cheat. The Far Realm really isn't in any way evil, just inhospitable. People tend to confuse the two, however.

Most likely the WotC boards. He made the same post over there.

The Far Realm is beyond alignment but if you must give some of its denizens an alignment, Neutral is probably your best bet. I'd just leave the alignment line blank though, personally.

Now for some other people who consistently have their alignments misrepresented, the Harmonium are pretty good competition for the Far Realm. Have you noticed that the Harmonium have been portrayed as being more and more evil as they go? Planescape: Torment actually had them kidnapping people and forcing them into slavery. In my mind, that's one of the biggest misuse of canon in the game.

The Harmonium are not evil. They use Neutral actions to achieve Good(ish) goals. They actually hate evil and everything it represents, but are sometimes willing to work with Lawful evil individuals to achieve greater harmony (an approach that has done a lot to corrupt them). Most Harmonium really are just trying to make a the multiverse a better place by getting everyone to work together, it's just their methods that are questionable (at best). The more malevolent acts of the Harmonium are generally perpetrated by corrupt individuals rather than the Harmonium high command. Their tendency to attack Indeps, for instance, never struck me as something the Harmonium high ups approved of, but at the same time, the Faction leadership didn't do much to stop it, and their bosses on Ortho probably didn't even know it was going on.

Firstly, my apologies for derailing this thread further, but I feel I must clarify my statement:

As I said, the Harmonium as a whole leans to the evil side, despite the majority of their members being LG. Their ends are noble, but some of their acts are downright violent and cruel. Some of these are commited by dissidents within the group, but others are fully sanctioned or even planned by the factol or other high ups. They are just too, dare I say it, hard-headed to admit, maybe even realize, that they are sometimes wrong and their actions unjustifiable. Because of that, they continue doing whatever it is they do first and thinking later. While the greater goal is, for the most part, Good, their responses to those that disagree with them are too often evil.

Although all of that applies primarily to the planar branch, rather than the original Ortho group, the latter is not without its hidden sins. I really doubt every single elf, gnome, and fey decided to leave Ortho, and yet none exist there. Where oh where could they have gone? Hmm...

On the original topic of the Far Realm, I've always envisioned it as something totally incomprehensible, largely due to a plethora of spatial dimensions. Think of it this way: if you're a two dimensional person in a two-dimensional world, the most you could see of some berk who stuck his finger through your flat planet would be a two-dimensional cross section. Probably vaguely circular, and changing circumference and shape as the finger moved up and down. Now take that idea and expand it. Maybe you're not separated by one dimension, but by several. What you see will be almost totally unrelated from what is actually present. And since you can perceive only an infinitely small slice of that world, nothing will seem to make any sense whatsoever. This is the Far Realm to creatures from our multiverse. Morals and ethics have no meaning when the world we experience and the world they experience are literally infinitely different.

EDIT: Added a bit about morals and ethics

Having been a huge fan of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, I use the concept of the far realm and far realm entities in my game. Now, some of Lovecraft's monsters were evil, and some were void of morality altogether. Morality and alignment are always strange subjects anyway, because they are so subjective. To be sure, Lovecraft himself held personal ethics and ideas that, while more comman at the time he lived, I myself consider abhorent today, and which in fact show through some of his works.

As far as far realm entities go, some may be evil, but most are simply antithetical to the realities of the multiverse. Their existance threatens our existance because existance itself threatens them. Some may be actually evil, the ones who ENJOY our suffering. Certain Powers thought to be originaly from the far realm fit that bill, as do some of the Elder Evils known to the aboleth.

When all races that come from Far Realm are "inchoate" and eat people and brains- yeah, you get that feeling all right. The Order of the Cerulean Sign? Dedicated to fighting encursion from the Far Realm. Name one race or creature given its own write-up from the Far Realm that doesn't do horrible things. (Templates do not count) Lords of Madness frames everything from the Far Realm in terms of an active threat- not a paranatural disaster.

I, too, love the Far Realm, and some Cthulu Mythos goodness is A+ ok in my book- BUUuuuuttt.....

I'm gonna have to 100% agree with the very first post made in this thread. Shaping the Far Realm to be some sort of "ultra-bad/evil" place lacks expertise, because it's simply another step towards new extremes, without exploiting the completely infinite scope afforded by an entire SEVEN infinite Lower planes. I remember when I got hooked on the planes in 1e, by that yummy little chart in the back of the Player's Handbook that had the first example of planar cartography I ever saw-- My mind raced! Places of infinite space with exemplifications of idealistic behavior? *drool*

Still, the whole 'Far Ream as uberevil' is something like trying to create a entity that can beat up Her Serenity- it misses the point. Yes, she's Large and In Charge- but in order to fire the imagination and inspire great storytelling, she does not need to be "trumped"- familiarity has bred a unwarranted degree of contempt for the common fenceposts of our planar multiverse.

And I know it doesn't fit well with this post's flow, but look up the changes for acquiring the "Alienist" Prestige Class between the 3.0e arcane magic book, "Tome and Blood" , and the 3.5e one (I forget the name). It WAS any alignment- then it became alignment-restricted. It's subtle, but it's persistent changes like that that make a few of us raise our collective eyebrows at the direction the Far Realm is going. The obscure example I bring up is simply a sign of very early change.

And really, our alignment system in the Great wheel is not petty. It defines massive swaths of planar geography and motivation. The Far Realm is the Oddball- not us. If we were to go there, that situation may be reversed- but since most people aren't running campaigns out of the Far Realm, when they come here, they get classified with an alignment befitting their characters. They also are by-in-large constrained by the spatial and temporal restrictions of our common multiverse the moment they step into it- even if back home they are 29-dimensional gods who only exist in the past and future but not present or whatever other gobbletygook passes for standard in the Far Realm.

Yeah. In D&D, my creatures get an alignment as well. Rock on!

-420

Relevant link (related to a Far Realm encounter in Dungeon Magazine):

http://dungeonmagazine.pbwiki.com/Dread%20Pagoda%20of%20the%20Inscrutable%20Ones

By the way, although I don't have any problem with Iavas' interpretation, I'm just as happy with the Far Realm as a "tiny little island" and the Great Wheel as the sea. I could go either way.