I was reading that abyss topic and am wandering: why are there so many insanity-induced creatures associated with far realm and none with pandemonium? Isn't pandemonium the madness plane of the great wheel?
Okay, I see how far realm is more "elemental" (but unlike elemental planes, it's on the outside) and pandemonium is mostly a home for powers, but dividing the two seems to me like a waste of a perfectly good infinity.
Any thoughts on this?
Pandemonium is home to (essentially natural) creatures that have been driven bughouse nuts.
The Far Realm is home to profoundly unnnatural creatures that will drive YOU bughouse nuts if you ever encounter them.
And in the original Mentzer canon, denizens of the Far Realm (aka the Nightmare Dimension) consider us as bizarre and hideous as we do them. We're also poisonous, as far as they're concerned...
Ooh, I like this :shock: :twisted:
Right.
The Far Realm is beyond Innsmouth, in other words. The Far Realm is scary to guys like Asmodeous and even the Powers, because it doesn't make any sense - and we don't make any sense to the myriad realites within it.
Sure, Mystra can Cast Spells and Have Sex With Main Characters (tm) as a Free Action, but the Far Realm is beyond space and time.
Pandemonium is part of reality - just the sad part we wish didn't really exist. But the Far Realm is beyond even the odd and contradictory laws that make up D+D and the Planes.
In the Far Realm, you can be made of Jello Pudding Spiders and secrete bunnies from your pores.
Because, well, it's the Far Realm. The reason why it's underused is, by definition, it's the stuff that's *beyond* our human imagination. Slaad at least make sense. They may Giant Frog with the power of their Giant Frog, but they're created by us. The Far Realm is created by us, too, but it's mostly stuff we're supposed to see glimpses of - H.P. Lovecraft, if you will.
I think the creatures of the Far Realm also have just as much problems with Reality as real beings have with the Far Realm. Far Realm creatures that visit Reality and then return to the Far Realm probably also lose their equivalent of sanity.
There are no "equivalents" in the Far Realm. That's the point. You don't just excrete bunnies through your pores. You excrete Pseudo-natural, non-corporeal, bunnies that are made out of a mixture of anti-phlem (Like phlem only not), and happiness out of your pores. If by "pores" you mean: "infinite eye-maws that constantly bubble up from your viscous non-flesh."
Basically the Far Realm makes no sense. In order to understand it you have to abandon everything you know about the multiverse, including the notion that you or the multiverse exist at all. Once you have purged your mind of all such "predjudices," you are finally ready to except the truth of the Far Realm and the truth is it still makes no sense.
Pandemonium leaves you desperate for a release and unable to discern what is real and what is illusionary, but the Far Realm will drain you of your sense of reality to the point where concepts like "real," "illusionary," and "discern" no longer have any meaning to you. It's like reality is speaking in English, and you can only understand pidgin-Klingon that is being spoken backwards and projected through a long tube until it comes out as notes on a broken kazoo.
So basically we've come to a consensus. However, I promote discussing the Far Realm some more just to see the random crap I can come up with off the top of my head by throwing together nouns, adjectives, and other words that either don't belong or that I made up until I get something strange enough. 
Five inch elephants as green as milk flying through their own nostrils while reciting the motto of the high seas - Arrr.
Well, OK. Maybe there are no equivalents. I still think that Reality is probably harmful to them.
Here are some of my thoughts on the Far Realm: The idea that the "ordinary" multiverse is as harmful to the inhabitants of the Far Realm as the Far Realm is to "ordinary" life stems from a misguided dualism. It is not a matter of there being the multiverse (with all of its infinite planes) on one side and the Far Realm on the other; both essentially equal "realities". Rather the reality of the Far Realm in some ways trumps the reality of the rest of the multiverse.
Temporally, the multiverse for all of its nigh incomprehensible ancientness, did have a beginning and before that beginning was the Far Realm; and as the multiverse has a beginning, it also has an end and after that end is the Far Realm. "Spatially", the Far Realm exists outside of the Multiverse; it might seem paradoxical for something to exist outside of infinite but really no more so than for infinite planes to have borders (which I believe likely makes perfect sense to beings of superhuman intelligence such as dragons, pit fiends, Powers, and the sort). These two facts taken together suggest to me that the multiverse, as a closed system, is resting like a bubble inside of the Far Realm and was created by the matter of the Far Realm.
It seems plausible that the entirety of the multiverse could have been created from the dreams of an incomprehensibly powerful Far Realm entity(ies). If this is the case it would answer the question of how life in the Outer Planes could exist before mortal life: the belief that constitutes the Outer Planes could have come from outside the multiverse (which would also explain the resemblance of early Outer Planar life, such as Obyriths, to the inhabitants of the Far Realm). If this is the case, it is also possible, indeed somewhat likely, that other multiverses with alien systems of alignment and different elements or entirely different arrangements devoid of elements or alignment could exist floating in the Far Realm.
I do not believe that the maddening nature of the Far Realm rests in the fact that it "makes no sense" and talk of incorporeal bunnies seeping out of pores makes the Far Realm seem to much like an even more chaotic Limbo in which you cannot exert influence over the flux. I would argue that the Far Realm does, in its way, make perfect sense; but it follows a logic utterly alien to this multiverse. An exceptionally intelligent individual can attempt to understand the Far Realm but since its laws are so contrary than the laws of our multiverse they must set aside and forget their knowledge of the laws of the multiverse; since the laws of the Far Realm are so much more *real* than those of the multiverse, and come with an understanding of the utter insignificance of our reality in the face of what lies outside, once a person begins on this path of knowledge their is no turning back. But though this path contains great power, the fact that all of us are composed of the matter of our multiverse and our minds aligned to its laws; one can only travel so far before their mind is destroyed. Perhaps the Gods can come to understand the workings of the Far Realm, and those who do likely ascend beyond the multiverse to the primordial reality that birthed it.
That's an interesting thought. That's sort of what I was thinking, where the Far Realm is not so much an antagonist (couldn't think of a better word) for the multiverse but rather above and around it. Sort of the multiverse equivalent of the Astral, if that makes any sense.
But, if the original Outer Planes were based on the beliefs of a single Far Realm entity, then why did the Material Plane form and take over the belief system? What happened to the entity, did it just lose interest and leave the multiverse to its own formation. Could the entity not be, in fact, that gelatinous bunny? It bears discussion. Discussing it is like contemplating the Lady, albeit less dangerous. You should never really come up with a definate answer but rather a lot of interesting theories. As for the bunnies... well that's just because our measley human brains cannot describe anything that we shouldn't be able to understand, ergo we just try to be as random as possible, ending up with Limbo^2.
The Far Realm as a multiversal Astral Plane is as fitting an analogy as is possible (hopefully it won't encourage any planewalkers to try to traverse it).
Regarding how the material plane fits into the multiverse if it was created by a Far Realm entity; I agree that this should be kept as speculative as possible. One possibility is that the it created the outer planes and loosely created the binary system of the alignments (actions/attitudes in class A are good, in class B are evil; class C lawful, Class D chaotic) completely arbitrarily (since concepts such as these mean nothing in the Far Realm, and thus overarching reality, as a whole). Then the various intricacies of the alignments, and other attendant beliefs, came from the inhabitants of the material plane that assumedly formed "naturally" from the inner planes which were also created by this entity. This was likely intentional.
For the present whereabouts of this entity, and the reason why it created the multiverse, it could be that it created all of it as an experiment/ form of amusement (though this is likely too anthropomorphic) and the multiverse will end when it becomes bored of it. Or perhaps the entity is sleeping and the multiverse is its dream and when it awakens the multiverse will end. Since either could conceivably happen at any time; knowledge of this would likely make anyone become a Bleaker.
There are no murderous pore-bunnies. Those are simply the closest our minds can come to actually understanding what is going on. It's not Limbo squared, because it makes perfect sense to the beings that dwell there. I think the closest equivelent would be if you stuck the rest of the multiverse in a blender and then poured it out and let reform into something else. It has its own rules, sure, but they mean nothing to us.
I think that there is no way to know how old the Far Realm is in relation to the other planes, because time isn't a straight line there. Time on the Far Realm is more like a sphere, or possibly a polyhedron with infinite sides. You aren't going anywhere, and you aren't coming from anywhere, but your position still moves. Therefore, the Far Realm has no beginning or end, but that doesn't mean it will always exist or has always existed.
I don't like the idea of the Outer Planes coming from the Far Realm. I think that the Inner planes formed first and leaked matter through the Ethereal to form the Prime Material. As soon as the first life appeared on the Prime, the Outer Planes were born. The Obyriths, Ancient Baatorians, and other such ancient monstrosities have their origins in the time before sentient life became dominant. They are based on instinctual, animalistic fears and beliefs that seem initially foreign to us but are actually hidden deep within our own psyches. Dagon, for instance, is the ultimate reflection of fear of the ocean. When Sentient life firmly took root, there was a massive reallignment and new demons based on the complex fears of intelligent life took form. For instance, Pazuzu began as an Obyrith who was the representation of danger coming from above. He has since fallen in with the more complex Tanar'ri and reimagined himself as a manifestation of temptation.
I say both views should be held as valid, for nobody in-character could ever truly find out the dark of it without going completely barmy, and thus it shouldn't be spelled out as definative game statistics either. Again, as I said, sort of like the Lady of Pain. There should be many different and weird ideas concerning the truth, but none of them should be any more valid than the other.
Far Realm shouldn't really be interpreted as madness, per se. It, along with all the beings that call it home, are beyond the scope of the multiverse. It is so different that space, time, and alignment have no place there. Nobody should be able to reach it at all, but there are tears in the fabric of reality. At the beginning and end of time, there is the possibility of leaving the multiverse as we know it and entering the Far Realm. Fluke events could open up a temporary path there, such as the breaking of an artifact, the death of a deity, or even throwing your portable hole into a sphere of annihilation. Because the multiverse and Far Realm are so incompatible, creatures from one have a hard time surviving in the other. Even the aberrations, which might have originated in the Far Realm, have changed to fit into the rules of the multiverse (and they still stand out among the more natural inhabitants). Considering, as I've stated earlier, the lack of direction, causality, and belief in such a place, it should be no surprise that the sods that somehow survive the horrors that flow through the squiggly solvents of the Far Realm come out a little worse for wear in the sanity department.
Pandemonium, on the other hand, is a plane of chaos with a tinge of evil. It is the place where howling winds and inexistent whispers drive a cutter to madness until the barmy loses all hope of purpose. Unlike the Far Realm, which toys with sanity because the concept does not exist there in the first place, Pandemonium is simply the embodiment of the darker side of chaos and the insanity (or lack of order and caring) that it brings about.