Planar portals and our world

Ooh! I did something like this once for a one-shot adventure. The portal I used was one to Mechanus that involved riding the elevators in a certain office building in a certain pattern. If you did it right, then the last stop the elevator made would be on one of the more remote gears. I like your idea of an Acheron portal in an old missile silo. It seems appropriate. Here's some other portal ideas:

Ysgard: I'd say that Stonehenge would be an excellent place to put a portal here.
Limbo: The bermuda triangle is pretty random. It'd be fun to take a cruise that winds up sailing through chaos-stuff
Pandemonium: A deep, abandoned subway tunnel where you can still hear the shrieking of the trains above.
Abyss: A basement door in the home of a long dead serial killer
Carceri: Behind a triple locked door in an abandoned prison with grafitti on it reading "Oubliette"
Hades: A place which has been home to intense sadness and despair. Concentration camps (perhaps a little too graphic to use) or some similar location would be appropriate.
Gehenna: A cave on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii that is associated with the wrath of Pele
Baator: A wrong turn down a corridor during a tour of the Great Pyramid of Egypt could land you in Set's realm on Stygia
Arcadia: A deep mine shaft might cross over into the Dwarven Mountain
Mt. Celestia: The parthanon, the acropolis, some Greek-related religious site would be the most likely location.
Bytopia: Deep wilderness locations could lead to Shurrock, much like the Beastlands
Elysium: A certain church somewhere in the world keeps a very large purplish red feather in a reliquary. If it is ever carried through the front doors of the church, it opens a portal that dumps the bearer into the nest of a now annoyed pheonix on a mountaintop in Elysium
Beastlands: Like Iavas said, a very remote, undeveloped area
Arborea: That Redwood tree in California that you can drive through might lead to somewhere in the forests of the elves, if you have the right portal key in your car
Outlands: As a land that strives for neutrality, I think Switzerland would work. Perhaps there's a portal in one of those famous bank vaults
Inner Planes: I'd avoid them because they're all very deadly to planars, no less clueless primes. Portals would probably be associated with deadly places, too.
Transitives: Unlikely and confusing. I'd avoid these, too

Actually, the giant tree you can drive through is a Sequoia, not a Redwood. I've actually been through that tree when I was a kid. It was a bit wild. I also got to see the tree called General Sherman, the largest living thing on the planet (not counting fungi). It was actually smaller than I expected. Oddly.

But tree related tangents aside, those are some good ideas. Of course, if you get lost somewhere on the great plains, you could turn around and find an infinitely tall spire behind you where there was only scrub before. And then you totally wouldn't be in Kansas anymore, or Wyoming or whereever, but that doesn't sound as good.

Heh! Here is an idea: players would not be so clueless after all, since Planescape campaing setting exists on our world. (and we all like Planescape).
Maybe Monte Cook was planewalker himself and PSCS is handbook for new generation of planewalkwrs.

According to Eco-Mono (anybody remember him?) there's a portal to Sigil in a shopping mall somewhere (probably in the US or Canadia).

I'm not sure if this thread was responsible for it, but I had a dream last night where I was part of some secret government organization and the only way to get to the headquarters was to take an elevator to a particular floor and then do something with the buttons such as going to the same floor again without going anywhere else first. So, yeah... maybe I'm spending too much time on these forums. Not that a wierd dream would stop me.

There are also numerous cases of mysterious disappearances, such as the ones at the Bermuda Triangle but not tied to a specific place. Now, I don't wish to be inconsiderate of those who lost or were lost in such events, whatever the cause may be, but some of them are so blatanly modified that they are more urban legend than historical account at this point. So, log on to any paranormal website and search for mysterious disappearances and check out the places and conditions under which such events supposedly happened. Much inspiration there.

As a portal to the Outlands, specifically Tir na Nóg, I would reccommend the central chamber of the Irish monument Newgrange (look it up. It's interesting). The key would be natural sunlight which gives us one day a year and if we add another key in (Say, a piece of bronze jewellery) it means that the Irish leadership isn't going to get sucked in.

New York, but the adventure takes place in both New York and Chicago. Technically, it isn't "our" Earth, but a doppelganger constructed in a demiplane.

That was IM1, The Immortal Storm.

OD&D is "Original DnD" - that would be the version prior to '1st edition' which was "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons". It came out in... I want to say 1979, paperback and sorta flimsy. Back on OD&D elf was a class.

In this case, it means the parallel version of Dungeons & Dragons that TSR continued to support for legal reasons long after Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (which we call 1e or 1st edition now) was created.

The original D&D was credited as being co-created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Dave Arneson wanted a cut of the profits, so on legal advice Gary Gygax created a new game called "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" credited to him alone. The original Dungeons & Dragons game continued to be published in order to make it clear that AD&D was a different game and not a replacement of D&D; it was marketed as a simpler, introductory game for beginners, but it rapidly (under the auspices of Frank Mentzer) became more and more complex, evolving in ways very different from how AD&D evolved. There were, at one point, five boxed sets that defined the 0D&D game: Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortal. Basic was character level 1-3, Expert was 4-10, Master was 25-36, and the Immortal rules were for playing gods, or beings who were essentially gods. Each boxed set had a bunch of adventures to go with it, although the Immortal rules only ever had three or four. The Immortal Storm was for first level gods, and involved a quest to various inner and outer planes, and finally a version of Earth, in order to capture the purest forms of various elements and concepts in an attempt to prevent a bizarre storm from destroying the multiverse. They go to Earth in order to get the essence of pure scent from a perfume factory in Chicago.

The only salient difference between the Earth of that adventure and our Earth is that in that Earth, fantasy never became a popular genre of fiction. Therefore there are no fantasy RPGs, and there's no chance of the PCs finding versions of the players playing the game that they're in. It's in a demiplane because there was really no place in the 0D&D cosmology for alternate primes, and the core 0D&D world (which later became named Mystara, but was then called Urt) was at the time supposed to be our Earth hundreds of millions of years ago.

The D&D Immortal set came out in 1987, the same year as the original Manual of the Planes and the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, to give you a little context. 2nd edition came out two years later, in 1989, and the 0D&D line finally ended in 1994 or thereabouts. 1st edition AD&D was originally published from 1977-1980 (that's when the Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Player's Handbook were originally published), so the "progression" from 0e to 1e to 2e to 3e wasn't linear.

I like the idea of portals on Earth leading to the Planes. But I think that the Greek temples should lead to Arborea, since that's where the Greek gods live. A huge redwood tree could be a portal to Yggdrasil.

Here are some wierder ones:

The Far Realm:
The psych ward of a prison. Alternatively, wherever H.P. Lovecraft grew up.

Plane of Earth:
The bottom of one of those South African diamond mines that go down for miles.

Plane of Water:
The bottom of the Marianus trench or perhaps just the middle of a deep lake like Lake Bikal.

The Plane of Dreams:
Falling asleep in a magical "hot spot." A hot spot being anywhere where the planet-wide Dead Magic Zone has a hole.

The Temporal Plane:
Falling (or jumping) off of Big Ben.

The Plane of Ice:
Standing naked on the North Pole.

Steam:
A cave leading to an undiscovered Yellowstone geyser.

Sigil:
Taking a wrong turn in an unfamiliar (and foriegn) big city. Like an American taking a wrong turn in London or Shanghai and bumping into a gang of Gith.

Has anyone ever read Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness? Going by that I'd put the Far Realm portal in subterranean Antarctica. If I recall his Old Ones first appeared and prospered there. It may be fiction, but Providence just doesn't seem dark or mysterious enough to warrant a gate into the realms of complete and alien madness.

Good point. If Arkham and Miskatonic university are assumed to exist, those would be perfect locations for portals to rather nasty places. Doesn't the witch house actually have something remarkably like a portal to the Far Realm in the protagonist's room, where the 'key' is a certain half-dreaming state of mind?

I recently sent the players top a layer of the Abyss with a permenantly stormy ocean where (as has been suggested by some already) the Bermuda triangle and equivalent thigns on other material planes open up. One of the coolest dungeons i've ever had was a modern day cargo ship run agraound on a reef, tipped on its side and half filled with water. A dragon eel lived amongst some of those huge metal crates in the hold and the party were thrilled when theyfound one of those self inflating life rafts ("Hey guys, I've found a magic boat!").

I also put in a Storm Ship from Ebberon with a bound air elemental, the only vessel that could navigate those waters, and onboard was a bunch of undead who had a captive secret service agent from the world of the His Dark Materials books. it was cool and I'm all inspired to send the PCs into the real world to hunt down fiends that have infiltrated various governments and such.