Plan Nine from Outer Planes

Just curious. There's some overlap in purported accounts of being stolen away to Fairyland, and ideas of being abducted by aliens, of being mesmerized by dancing lights. And the elves have a fairly old spelljamming civilization, don't they?

I think the Far Realm is useful as a catchall, but when everything alien just gets lumped into it by default, I think that does it a disservice. There's more than one kind of alien, and the Lovecraftian aliens are very different than the ones out of abduction stories. For instance, the natives of the Far Realm find our world as disgusting and alien as we find theirs, case in point the beholders. Meanwhile, races which adapt more fully to our world are probably just as corrupted by *us* as we would be in their place-- adrift in the Far Realm and warped by its influence.

The way Spelljammer portrays illithids, for example: they're evil, sure, but not altogether unnatural. Even on the planes, it seems like they're hated because of the way they feed and reproduce rather than because they're from the Far Realm. But they have a god in the Outer Planes. They're part of this world now, for better or worse. One wonders what they were like in their own time, if they seemed less monstrous, if the brains they ate and the hosts they took weren't intelligent humanoids.

So yeah, mind flayers are useful as brain eater aliens, as the evil empire now consigned to history. But they can't really fit the role of a paternalist precursor race, for which I'd use the eladrin. The yugoloths fill in the side of modern-day conspiracy, men-in-black, and experimentation for its own sake.

If the yugoloths are the oldest of fiends, then it makes sense to me that they'd also be among the most technologically advanced, what with the endless arms race of the Blood War. It's hard to sell weapons to either side, of course. Given the power of the greatest baatezu and tanar'ri, weapons like the ships of chaos or the Relentless aren't seen as having much practical impact on the war.

But even at the zenith of their personal power, as ultroloths, the yugoloths don't have the physical might of either the demons or devils. Maybe it's because of their hatred of the gods? They shun all divine power, including whatever divine spark resides in the soul of the individual. As a result, they don't grow into demon princes or unique devils without outside intervention. They make up for it, then, with magic and science.

The Crawling City, the Tower of Incarnate Pain, the artificiality of yugoloth reproduction (thanks Rip). I don't see vehicles we would interpret as UFOs (disks of floating force?) would be a stretch. Abducting people, cutting them open, implanting them with things, testing their latest weapons on them? Definitely not.

@atombicb: Thanks, and thanks again for the links. I didn't know much of anything about these three races. The Juna's hiding place on the Plane of Shadow, in relation to VikingLegion's mention of the Keepers, and their war with the ethergaunts and old aberrant empires... I can definitely use this.

Lots of good information in the timeline, too.

@VikingLegion: Good point about the keepers, and don't apologize. It's cool when you pull off that kind of long-term gambit. It does seem like the Keepers were made to fit exactly that role, a cryptic shadow agent trying to carry out his orders while also being hamstrung by them. The MIB, whether their ends are sinister or noble, try to persuade people to stay away but are not allowed to tell them why, and cannot even give them the comfort of a plausible lie. Exactly the kind of enemy the yugoloth probably love having, since they can be quite personable when it suits them. Lack of communication kills.

@Glim-- Heh, thanks.

The zard remind me of the rods from Dark Matter. I haven't been able to find anything on the Missi-- what are they like?

I imagine that in keeping with their mutual (-ly exclusive?) interest in mortals for mortals' sake, maybe the eladrin and yugoloths are very careful about what sorts of spacefaring beings make it into certain spheres? There are other galaxies out there, apparently entirely unexplored. Magic can function quite differently from sphere to sphere, and the Outer Planes are infinite, so who knows if there aren't worlds of science out past the rim of known wildspace, whose expressions of belief take up different, equally farflung portions of the Great Wheel? Or another set of Outer Planes altogether, just slightly out of sync with the ones we know?

I can see what you’re saying with the Colour Out of Space reference. If the magic-eating misi ever made it to one of the planes where life is intrinsically magical-- a world of the fey, perhaps? --I imagine the comparison could become pretty direct-- with the locals losing their colour and shape, turning gray and crumbling into powder. And who’s to say that isn’t exactly what was happening in spooky old New England? They came in ships to an unspoilt land, and in their wake, years later, followed Colours that had never been seen on those shores.

All of which is rather dark. I do like that the misi aren’t especially predatory. Reading up on them, they sound more like herds of wild cattle. Left unchecked, finding an easy source of magic to graze on, they’ll gorge themselves until there’s nothing left. But they’re rarely left undisturbed for long, and they probably avoid larger concentrations of magic, associating them with threats-- misivores, maybe, the difference between the plains and the forest. Because a whole planet full of magic probably means wizards using that magic, and while misi are a danger to the wizards, the wizards are probably more of a danger to the misi, since they’re the only ones who can even hurt them.

The Colours (out of space) apparently used Earth to incubate their meteorite, like sea turtles laying their eggs on the beach. Maybe the misi have a similar life-cycle, one that doesn’t need to be as horrible or radioactive.

…

Gehenna has always felt lunar and barren to me. Out of all the Lower Planes, I think it works as the Spelljammer hell: a yawning void for ships to ply, lunar ports of call, markets that will fence any contraband, a neverending war to exploit. Even the four mounts are not much stranger than planets that can be found in wildspace.

And on the note of asteroids and moons, astereaters, and on that note the whole extended family of beholderkin, seem like they’d be a good fit for Gehenna. They’re greedy, xenophobic, hateful, and hungry for dominance. They’d fit right in.

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I think the yugoloths probably don’t openly rule worlds the way that tanar’ri and baatezu do. They don’t need them as staging grounds when they can just use the primes taken by the demons and devils, not to mention their outposts on the planes intervening Baator and the Abyss. The worlds that are obviously held by yugoloths tend to be primitive burgs ruled by those tinpot mezzoloth dictators you sometimes hear about, half-assed cults run by exiled yagnoloths, or dead worlds overrun by roving hordes of feral dergholoths. Basically, worlds it seems like the yugoloth high-ups have forgotten about.

But of course that’s only a front. Anyone who knows yugoloths knows better. They don’t go out and crow about empires, and they would like you to believe that the miserable worlds of their underlings are the best they can do, and the most that they aspire to.

But then you have the Golden Lords, Shemeshka among them. The Golden Lords buy and sell whole worlds, day in and day out, from the comfort of the parlour or solarium. Nobody hears about it-- the people living on the worlds in question probably least of all.

And that’s just how the yugoloths like it. The worlds the yugoloths control are often not the ones you’d guess. And while they have the means to scoop up as many humans at they might like for their experiments, they would never be that obvious about it. Hence the abductions. Hence, in all likelihood, the flashing lights and the crop circles, and the confusion with the fey. Pageantry. Deliberate obfuscation.

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I don’t think the eladrin are out taking over the multiverse, but I don’t think they’re above giving whole species a gentle nudge in what they suppose is the right direction. It’s very difficult to say this in any way that doesn’t carry terrible implications, but it just might be possible that, through all their manipulations, they really do have our best interests at heart.

The fey are timeless. I like the idea that even at their most cruel and indifferent, they might actually be acting out of some strange altruism. “Better that he died at that moment, than live to carry out the words of the prophecy…” It’s still harsh, and presumptuous, and not at all nice. But it could still be Good.

If you want Good to be nice, go talk to the guardinals.

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Part of me really wants to write Mulder and Scully analogues on the Great Wheel.