Information Elementals?

Edit: I really ended up going off on a tangent here, just so you know. I guess I usually do.

So on the Beastlands Renovation thread, Jem suggested axes of Passive and Active, of Yin and Yang, perhaps even Samsara and Nirvana (not clockwork, though), and I think that's a great idea. It's especially apt in relation to the ever-changing Outlands, where one thing constantly changes into another, and the interplay of light and dark creates perfection (or someone's vision of perfection, presumably). Knowledge is also already a central theme on the Outlands, what with Thoth's Library, the Caverns of Thought, the Well of Urd, the Mausoleum of Chronepsis... I wouldn't take that away from it, but would rather suggest that the realm of pure knowledge is beyond mere mortals-- not out of their reach, but outside their comprehension.

I feel like there's room for multiple planes along this axis, but they spread up and down the spindle rather than arching around a wheel, and I'd like it if they were always unaligned, and at their apex, fed back into each other-- that's yin and yang. Bearing that in mind, two ideas:

Yin (Nirvana). We're through the looking-glass now, Alice.

The plane of brilliance, of reason and light. A plane of intent, a world of angles and absolutes, but also infinite paradox. Like Mechanus, like the Astral, like the Outlands, a plane of impossibility and abstraction.

It's a white void that fatigues the eye, a place of light with no shadow, the origin of flashes of inspiration and blinding insights. It's a land without roads, without land, really, because things do not exist until they are conceived; but once they are conceived, they exist instantaneously. It's a place where shaping belief is the simplest thing in the world, and also the most dangerous. Ever been told you're so sharp you might cut yourself? It's true here. The dangers of Yin are most often self-inflicted.

As a plane of knowledge, it's somehow a place where there is no actual learning, only immediate, intrinsic understanding. In this sense, it can be an environment just as unforgiving and alien as any of the Inner Planes. The shock of this instantaneous knowledge can overload a living brain untrained or unprepared to receive it. Order and method are survival traits here, and causality and determinism are the law of the land-- they *are* the land, in some respects-- but while fate and destiny can be forged here, they are also irrelevant: it would be like forging all iron in the world into one hammer, while holding that same hammer.

It's easy to get lost here, not by losing your way, but by losing yourself, losing yourself in your own thoughts, or getting lost in someone else's mind. Many travellers to the plane fear picking up a stowaway mind, or having their body hijacked by a fellow-traveller. If you ever wanted to run a body-swap adventure, this might be a good plane to start.

At its worst, it's a place where you are alone in your own head, trapped with only your own thoughts for company. At its best, it holds all the splendour and majesty that you can imagine, and you are only ever a finger's breadth away from the minds of anyone else here.

It's like the Astral, only more so. Hell, it's pretty much the Matrix.

4e's Hestavar could fit well here, an oasis in the void, with its triad of gods of light: Pelor (the sun, good, in 4e time), Erathis (civilization, invention, law), and Ioun (magic, skill, fate). It's also a fitting place for 4e's version of angels: not archons, not even necessarily humanoid but uniformly beautiful, sublime automatons of light and divine power, absolutely loyal to whatever god commands them at the time. In my game, this is pretty much how I characterize the aasimon, meaning the planetars, solars, and cosmars (devas are not aasimon in my cosmology). Whereas in the case of archons, devas, and asuras, they are all planar races first, servants of good second, and servants of the gods somewhere after that. That's not so with the angels/aasimon-- as weapons of the powers, their alignment matches their god, and evil gods can and often do command flights of angels.

The aasimon were created by the gods to serve them, but there are natives here. Heading back to information elementals, I picture them as floating clusters of sensory information, mostly images and sounds. Closer to the border with the Outlands, these elementals are often tinged with alignments. They can be helpful or malicious, and they might flicker and jitter madly, bleating with static, or they might hold their shape, perhaps even becoming perfect polyhedrons like the modrons. The small ones contain no more than a single image, or perhaps a single fact which they transmit endlessly to anyone within range; the greater elementals are each comparable to a great library, if you can only capture them, translate them, or retrieve the one salient fact out of the garbled, glitching mess of a chaotic infomental without killing the sodding thing.

...

Where Yin is empty, Yang is full. Where Yin is mind, Yang is body. And while in Yin you change the world, in Yang, the world changes you.

Yang (Samsara). If they say the sleep of reason breeds monsters, then this is the place.

The pregnant plane, the womb, the realm of both otherness and the familiar. A world of darkness, of monsters and mothers, a place where risks need not carry the consequences. The plane of emotion, intuition, instinct, memory, and empathy. Like the Outlands, like the Ethereal, like Limbo, a plane of possibility and potential.

Yang is not the collective unconscious, not the Demiplane of Dream, but it is strongly influenced by both.

Yang is a high-density plane like Pandemonium or Elemental Earth. Gravity is subjective, and the entire plane is filled with a fluid medium which allows one to swim, walk, or fly through the plane's many tunnels with equal ease. All creatures are able to breathe the fluid atmosphere of the plane.

Much of the landscape is made up of huge, sleeping beasts, wrapped in vines, buried in mud, ensconced in chambers like the ventricles of a heart. There are artificial structures, but they seem tacked onto the organic architecture of the place-- facades of houses wedged between tree trunks, picket fences standing among gardens of gently beckoning human arms. Yang is dark and crowded with life, often surreal, yet it is warm and safe when it should be frightening. It is memory and reality spun together using the logic of a dream, emotion imposing itself over the most analytical mind. It is a maze of passages where one is never lost, simultaneously the crush of a crowd, the wildness of a forest, the dark of a cave, the depth of an ocean-- and at all times, the loving embrace of a mother, the safety of your own bed.

Friends, family, and lovers, even ones you have never met, are always near. The place confers a certain level of acceptance on those within it. Fear itself is difficult to feel, and claustrophobia almost impossible, as are true hatred or, for that matter, deep reverence or, say, an appreciation for higher mathematics. For a realm of memory, it is curiously easy to forget things here, no matter how important they might seem in the outside world.

Or at least, that's what it's like in the deepest parts of the plane. As one nears the surface, one encounters pockets of heightened emotion, intrusions of the Outlands such as the buzzing tunnels that emanate out from the Caverns of Thought, or constant noise of the waking world near Tir Na nOg, or the cloying stillness when one is near the Spire. To say nothing of what happens when the plane borders on the heavens or hells, or the Prime. Like Gaia, of whom it may be some aspect, it is a mother of all life which loves all its children, even monsters and demons. There are creatures on the plane which do terrible things to their prey, where killing them would be the kindness.

The other great danger of the plane is becoming trapped without realizing it. Those who wander on Yang are never lost, as the plane itself guides them to wherever they need to go-- but it is easy to forget one's purpose, and become wrapped up in the many distractions on the plane, and to eventually stray so far into the plane that it would take a thousand years to find a way back. It is the Sensate's Snare, becoming so enamoured of a single experience that one spends eternity repeating it, with no chance of no release, and no control of one's own body, until one is swallowed up by the plane and reconstituted into whatever bizarre, perhaps mindless form pleases it, perhaps deep within the most far-flung recesses on the plane. People do sometimes, rarely, vanish altogether on Yang. One can only hope they are happy, wherever it is they end up.

The most cynical planars describe the plane as a pitcher-plant which lures in the unwary and spends centuries digesting them. But nobody really buys that, do they?

Each experience and sensation here is not so much heightened as broadened-- moments imprint themselves on your very being as muscle-memory, unscratchable itches, nervous tics, and phantom limbs. Death, it is generally taken for granted, is not permanent here, as upon dying, one is always reborn-- albeit not always in one's own body, and not always as the same species. Yang is full of beasts, plants, inanimate objects, as well as outright monsters, many of whom were once human.

The changes wrought on Yang are usually impermanent-- one leaves the plane in much the same shape one entered, and the memories, however vivid they are at first, fade in the manner of a dream. One is not entirely oneself here; you probably can't retain experience levels here, and if you die and reincarnate as a fish or a silver dragon, you probably won't come out of Yang as one. Although it could be a pretty great adventure hook if you did, and a great many bizarre monsters could come out of the plane.

At its best, Yang is the land of make-believe, a playhouse of souls, where no wrong can be done. At its worst, it is a pleasant dream which becomes a nightmare, one in which you can't wake up.

The biomentals of the plane are rarely seen, but are highly varied: they may resemble small planets, perhaps covered in ordinary flowers and grass or miniature forests, or knobs of flesh and guts, or masses of tentacles, or swarms of eyeballs.