Dark Roads & Golden Hells from Open Design (a book I'm only slowly absorbing) includes a plane called simply Between, designed to be a sort of limbo where planewalkers are stranded when planar travel goes terribly wrong; the kind of place you end up when you put a bag of holding inside a portable hole, or when a bag of devouring eats you but you hack your way out of its digestive tract, or when someone destroys a planar conduit before you've finished crossing through it, or when you mash every button on your d-hopper at the same time, and it explodes - maybe even where you end up when the demiplane you're in disintegrates unexpectedly, or when a gate-town tries to slide into Hades and Elysium simultaneously.
The Astral Plane functions this way in the Planescape cosmology, but the Astral Plane isn't really a trap - it's full of color pools, conduits, whales and flying ships and asteroid settlements, and maybe it's too silvery and open and not the sort of claustrophobic prison plane you're looking for. Being sucked into the Astral Plane is annoying and probably hazardous, but it also opens up fabulous new vistas and possibilities. It may be hard to get home from, but it's fairly easy to escape.
Well, okay, so this book offers a claustrophobic prison plane, animated by a mysterious, malevolent, predatory intelligence, raising the wrongness factor for those who've ended up somewhere no one should be. My problem? It's basically a series of tunnels and caves, like the Underdark, or like Pandemonium without the winds. And that... seems less than evocative for the unnatural plane of cosmic wrongness. The Underdark itself is more visually interesting, since you can fill it with glowing crystals and chasms and stairs and ancient citadels and shining hollow worlds and whatever else, and Between is just endless dreary tunnels, weeping cysts, and black, bone-filled lakes. The tunnels are constantly changing form and you can shape them with your mind, so that's pretty cool, but it's not as visually compelling as it might be.
So I started this thread, hoping to brainstorm ways to spice it up a little. What do you guys think a place in between all the other places might look like?
- a mazelike "backstage" area filled with curtains and scaffolding, green rooms and dressing rooms, and the blank reverse sides of set facades. No matter where the travelers go, though, they never find the stage itself, and never see the fronts of the facades.
- The infrastructure of the cosmos. Support beams, pipes, ventilation shafts of gargantuan proportions.
- An organic gullet, expanding and contracting with each breath, fleshy and warm and obviously alive.
- An inchoate realm of hungry shadows and glowing mists, with no solid surfaces.
- A dense, impossibly tangled web of Astral conduits, silvery and translucent but obviously mangled, torn in places, their metallic luster fading and dying. This is the graveyard of planar connections, the place where celestial tunnels of light go when they die.
- A similarly dense network of broken elemental vortices made of solid fire, water, earth, air, and other substances swirling into one another, or possibly tangled with Astral conduits. When the circulatory system of the planes goes wrong, this is where the paths are ejected.
- An endless, labyrinthine mansion with no exterior doors or windows, all flooded basements, dusty, crowded attics, rickety stairways, dark halls, and abandoned rooms.
- A ruined, wintry city with shattered classical architecture and sealed portals (like in Lev Grossman's novel The Magician King).
- A series of poorly maintained roads on a barren plain or leafless wood, leading nowhere. There might also be looping rivers with no source or mouth, choked with debris.
- An endless shallow sea without winds, currents, or tides.
- A seemingly bustling metropolis, except no one has faces or voices, no one is really going anywhere, the buildings have no doors and the streets loop on themselves. If killed, a faceless citizen crumbles to dust and is absorbed by the plane.
- A reversed Sigil built on the outside of a torus or tire shape. On the inside of the ring waits a hungry nothingness.
- An infinite inverted staircase. Gravity is oriented so that the other side, with banisters and carpeting and railings and landings and (sealed or broken) doors, repels travelers while the side of the stair with cobwebs and nails and the shadowy, haunted places beneath the landings (and absolutely no railings) is treated as the "top" as far as gravity is concerned.
- A realm filled with every portal imaginable: stone circles, doors, arches, wardrobes, police boxes, toll booths, pits, cubes, obelisks, pentacles, windows, pools, mirrors, and rifts, all of them sealed or broken, all of them seen, where applicable, from the reversed side.
A plane of Between might shift from one appearance to another, or be a combination of all these appearances. It could also be combined with the idea of the Palace of Lost and Broken things, a crumbling structure filled with museums and monuments of everything that was ever lost or broken. Maybe it's the place where keepers banish the secrets they kill to keep.
Comments? Any other ideas?
My two favourites, of all those ideas, are the network of tangled, mangled, chewed-up-and-spit-back-out colour pools, vortices, portals, and other Astral-stuff-threads, and the city of sealed portals.
I think it would be cool to have a city that features bits and pieces of cities of different major civilizations. Illithid construction here, Formian there, Drow and Elven and Mesopotamian and Roman and everything, all put next to each other like pieces of different puzzles that were just forced to click into one another. A city of debris. A city of cities that have, also, become lost; that have fallen into Between.
In some places all of these pieces of different cities have been forced to click into each other, and they do, and then in other places you can see the seams - white threads of nothingness trying to sew them together, holes in reality; you look down this one alleyway and you see... nothing.