Pelion

I've always been positevely fascinated by Pelion and its long forgotten mysteries as well. I like it as location for adventures, but I was just thinking in the last days how can Pelion stick to the rest of Arborea, without moving to a less chaotic Plane. I was about to populate it with bands of "post-atomic" wanderers, a sort of Mad Max stuff. Not evil but chaotic enough to let Pelion stay in Arborea.

But the idea of "passion forgotten" is intriguing.... The original Pantheon was formed by gods more passionate than the Olympians? Sensates are roaming the plane to find their ruins? In my vision the rest of the True Words are connected more to "discover" and "experience" the Multiverse than sheer power...

If I understand correctly, Pelion is dying due to the lingering effects of the Last Word, a killing power on the order of true names, which Orcus used to go around killing a few gods. If Dead Gods has already happened in your campaign, I don't know what happens next; perhaps the Word has been removed and the layer can survive or fail on its own.

Perhaps, if Pelion represents the most intense of the passion of Arborea, it does so in the way of the most intense passions: briefly and unpredictably. A desert blooms after a rain -- maybe what Pelion needs to revive itself is a storm, with the last one having happened so long ago that the last Bloom has passed beyond all but the longest memories. If you want to make an adventure out of it, PCs could try finding the control source for the Thalastrom, the storm wreaking havoc on the fourth layer of Elysium (they'll need to defeat the monsters who are driving it), and steer it across the Beastlands to let it peter out on Pelion.

Alternatively, PCs could try finding a way to extend a branch of Oceanus here, giving the layer a long, Nile-like strip of green. (Has it come there before, but been dammed away through some subtle work of fiends?) Maybe it could inundate random valleys at unpredictable times, causing large-scale migrations of the planar population to follow the fertile area.

Without changing Pelion this drastically, there is another theme that could be played up here: the notion of scouring, which the winds and sandstorms embody. Pelion could be a place to go to be cleansed. There's a lovely monologue from The Ten Commandments that suits it perfectly:

Leave your goods at Nephythys. Leave your coins, leave your name there, and go into the desert without any wealth: simple clothes on your back, an unshod wooden staff. Walk into the desert. Find water, if you can. Find a secret place where you can forge a new name, and come back as something freshly created. (More game mechanically, it could be a manner of atonement for a character.)

The Egyptian gods under Ptah (and if so, why did they move?)
Ptah is a primordial deity who predates the Egyptian pantheon, and probably by a great amount since he seems to be the deity that embodies the Ethereal Plane. Unless there are any specifics on his origins in the pre-4E canon materials, I presume he is a primordial power from early on in the Multiverse's creation cycle (much like the Elemental Lords)

Speaking of Titans, I'd eventually like to flesh out some planar history and such of the Protogenoi-- the race that preceded the Titans in Greco-Roman mythology. Considering that the bulk of them were personifications rather than human-like beings, I would say that most of them were elemental beings. Not just of the elements, but also creatures like say-- darknes pseudoelementals. Another clue that they're elementals (other than the most glaringly obvious that most of them were landmarks and the like rather than people) is that the protogenoi were capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction, but favored asexual reproduction. That said, asexual reproduction from what I recall was mostly limited to the Protogenai (yes, it's true that the Titans and Olympians can reproduce asexually as well, but their capacity to do so appears extremely limited, as we see in the story of Hephaestus's conception *Hera had to pray and perform elaborate rituals for the conception*, whereas one might argue that Hephaestus's son borne when he splooged on Athena's thigh isn't a true asexual reproduction since it came into contact with female flesh.) They were overthrown (and some subsumed into the Olympian pantheon) when Chronus castrated (slew? If the Protogenoi are elemental-type beings, then it seems unlikely that literal castration would have any long-term effect-- you might as well try castrating an aboleth...) Uranus. Nyx and Gaea rank among the protogenoi, even though Gaea is the mother of the Titans. The bulk of the Protogenoi now live in Pluton since most surviving Protogenoi are children of Nyx and Erebus, who have their divine realm there (I disagree with the placement of Nyx on the Abyss or Carceri, whichever it was, even though she would indeed be chaotically-aligned, as would Erebus be *even though I believe his writeup in Dragon listed him as Neutral Evil*. Technically Nyx's and Erebus's children are not Protogenoi since they came much later and weren't involved in the world's creation, but for D&D rules they would be the same types of creatures as Nyx and Erebus. This can be evidenced by the fact that Eris is apparently a virgin, yet has hundreds of children, and I believe one or two of Eris's kids also gave birth to other Cacodemons asexually. It should be mentioned that ALL of the Cacodemons save the two sons of Ares are protogenoi-- the progency of either Nyx's or Oceanus's, or rarely-- Gaea's family lines *although in some versions Eris is Hera's and Zeus's daughter, IMO it makes far more sense for Eris to be the daughter of Nyx since the bulk of Nyx's hundreds of children were borne asexually, whereas she only had around 4-10 with Erebus depending on source.*) Probably, the Protogenoi would have been created and had their original divine realm in the Inner Planes somewhere (or perhaps Ethereal), and then eventually carved out a realm for themselves on the Outer Planes.
Chronus's overthrow of Uranus likely would have occurred when fleshy, cellular beings overwhelmingly dominated the elemental and amorphic beings, which probably would have happened either during the Cambrian explosion analogue or during the next major extinction event after it. They also would have been the beings involved in the war with the Draeden (which resulted in a draw or with the draeden losing slightly)

This goddess is great! Really!

The only problem to have a layer that when you leave you forget everything, is: what do you tell the PCs if you want to play an adventure there? To pretend they have forgotten everything after the end? Maybe you can play "flashback" adventures, where the PCs are not really sure what they have experienced in Pelion, finding only some hints of what they have done there. If the majority of the multiverse believes Pelion to be just a desert, the strength of the enchantment should be quite strong.

In my personal vision, I like Pelion to be an evocative desert, inhabited by the powers of hidden good (i love this idea). Maybe the magic amnesia is working only to make you forget you have met one of such powers. Adventure hook: the PCs are on a quest and they do not even remember who gave it to them!

This is going in a completely different direction from the rest of everyone else here, but I was thinking about how exactly Pelion fits in with everything else in Arborea recently for my own game, and this is what I came up with.

In my view of Arborea, it's not the plane of passion, that's incidental to its true theme. Arborea is the plane of the Quest. The plane of the great Homeric epics, of the huge stories of parties heading out for adventure. Arborea is the site of every great adventure. That's why those that journey to Arborea become so broad yet so shallow. They aren't becoming filled with passions, they're becoming archetypical. The party minstrel becomes the Party Minstrel. The brave and noble knight becomes the Brave And Noble Knight. In Computer Programming terms, they become the generic class from which all characters of their type are generated. And this is why emotions are so big in Arborea. Not because it's the plane of passions, but because passion is pretty much all these archetypes have in terms of personalities. They have no background, no characterization, they just are. For the period they're in Arborea, they're on stage, they aren't just acting melodramatic, they are literally within a drama of their own making. They still have free will, but it's less like they're choosing their actions and more like they're choosing the outline from which their script is written. Those not on quests of some sort are usually free from this, because there is no great epic archetype they can fall into. But when they interact with an archetype, they may become an archetype for the period of that meeting. If the Brave And Noble Knight happens to run into a village orphan, that orphan might briefly become the Plucky Urchin, for example.

And the layers match this too. Olympus is the layer of the great quest over hill and dale; the layer of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Ossa is the layer of the great sea quests, of Odysseus, of Jason and the Argonauts. And Pelion? That great desert dotted with ancient ruins and long-lost treasure? Well, what's the most common element of quest upon the Prime Material Plane when it's not a great journey over land or over sea?

Pelion is the layer of the Dungeon Crawl.

And, incidentally, this is why the ruins of these ancient pantheons survive in Pelion and nowhere else. Because they date back so far that they've been overwritten by shifts of belief, of the core mind of mortal life. They date so far back that the majority of mortal life not only doesn't believe in the same way, but doesn't even usually think in the same way. Except in that one plane whose entire theme is that of the ancient ruin, of the far-off secrets of history uncovered by a small group of brave souls. Because it certainly wouldn't be worthwhile if those secrets weren't real.