Planar Renovation Project

I i'd be interested in seeing your take on Carceri, Palomides. I'd hate to see you holding back for fear of being branded a heretic. Don't be shy.

I've never thought it was lacking, though, personally. It has a clear theme (traitors, imprisoned by the eternal cycle of betrayal). It functions well as an inverted reflection of the Beastland's wild nature and as the opposite of Bytopia's benevolent community (Bytopia is where everyone gets along, their strengths complementary; Carceri is treachery, where relationships are eternally undermined by mistrust; Bytopia is I scratch your back and you scratch mine while Carceri is I stab your back and you stab mine). It has a distinctive, interesting native race (the gehreleths, though I also love the gautiere). It has an obvious plot hook (something treacherous is trying to escape. Stop it.). It has a very distinctive look. Even each layer has its own explicit theme. Though I think Gehenna is fine too, I agree that it's much more of an evil miscellany than Carceri is, a muddle of 'loths, thieves, warriors, and wizards, much more defined by its physical nature than Carceri. Carceri made it to 4e virtually unscathed, while Gehenna was transformed into the realms of Tiamat and Zehir.

The only plane I thought has been consistently poorly done is Bytopia. It's clear that no one at TSR/WOTC ever quite knew what to do with it. It's been relegated to being the gnome plane or the happy peasant plane, and the few native sapients it was given (air sentinel and adamantine dragon) didn't fit with the plane's themes and never caught on. I was happy with my own interpretations and additions, but I never actually looked at the Bytopia rehabilitation thread on these boards. I think I meant to, but got distracted and forgot.

I think the unique representative species should not be a requirement. We developed Arcadia and Bytopia both without any sort of exemplar and I think they turned out just fine. In fact, I think trying to come up with one would be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

I believe if it feels natural to add one during the course of development (as it did with Gehenna and the pre-existing barghests) then we add one. Otherwise, don't try and force one in.

Unique terrain may also not really be necessary. Honestly, the physical properties of the plane are usually of least concern. Ysgard may be the exception to that rule for me. But I feel the issues the PRP deals with are usually more conceptual than concrete. Plus, each plane (especially the Inner Planes) usually has its own unique physical properties already. I think by and large these properties do all right to define the plane. Like the way nature proceeds in a very ordered and meticulous way on Arcadia, but on Arborea nature is very big and dramatic.

Unique overall theme is good. My biggest problem with Ysgard and to a lesser extent, Arborea, is that each layer just seems to stand by itself rather than be a part of a whole. If each individual Outer Plane is supposed to represent some kind of moral and ethical philosophy, it seems to me that each layer should somehow be tied to the larger overarching philosophy.

Reasons for PCs to visit is also good, though not of pre-eminent importance. I think the conflict within the plane should be the more important factor. If we build that, then players will come. For example, IIRC we didn't give Arcadia a particularly important reason directed specifically at PCs. We did, however, make it a more alive place so if PCs go there, there's something to do.

Philosophical opposites I think will come as we develop. Neither Arcadia nor Bytopia were developed with opposites particularly in mind. I think Gehenna is the first time this idea was brought up by rip. It worked for Gehenna and works for Acheron, but may not necessarily be a major point of contention.

I think this is what made Arcadia work well. In canon, the layers of Arcadia were virtually identical except for some individual locations. Post-renovation, Arcadia's first layer was turned into a plane of orderly conflict between governments of different ideologies, and the second layer became the place of peaceable conflicts. So, when we proceed with the renovation, we should keep an eye towards making each layer of a plane be reflective of some aspect of the overall qualities of the plane. When we come across a plane whose layers are virtually identical, thematically, it's probably a sign that it needs to be renovated.

Philosophical opposites are no problem. Each plane already fits perfectly into this scheme. Except for the four "cardinal" planes of Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil, every plane has both two mirror opposites, or equivalents across the moral or ethical axis, and a diametric opposite, creating four groups of four.

The first group I'll consider is Pandemonium, Acheron, Ysgard, and Arcadia.

Arcadia and Pandemonium are diametric opposites. Arcadia is accord and Pandemonium is discord or, to put it another way, harmony and dissonance, or still another way euphony and cacophony. In Arcadia, all strives toward agreement, each element harmonious with the rest. Arcadia is a vast song where everything is in key, each note working with the others to create a greater whole (this isn't to say it's a single united government, or that Arcadia's governments can't disagree with one another, only that this is the plane's basic theme). Pandemonium is a broken and shattered symphony, a shrieking cacophany where every note is wrong and twisted, disordered and in conflict with the rest. Arcadia is disturbingly sane, its inhabitants filled with a clarity of purpose that seems eerie to prime observers. Pandemoniacs are mad, their minds discordant and broken, a jazz solo gone wrong. In Arcadia harmony is the highest form of Good, and in Pandemonium discord is the only meaning, harmony a blasphemous lie invented to torment the insane. Arcadians see Pandemoniacs as the worst thing in the multiverse, the original disease that begat all others (even the Abyss is a comparatively harmonious place, even Limbo comparatively healthy and sane), and Pandemoniacs see Arcadians as the original and cruelest lie.

Arcadia and Acheron are trans-axial equivalents (this being the good-evil axis in this case). Arcadia is harmony and Acheron is conformity. Arcadia is righteous order and Acheron is unrighteous order. Where Arcadia is united for the greater good, its individuality sacrificed in favor of a great composition, Acheron's individuality is beaten down brutally, stripped from its victims for the sake of stripping them down. Harmony is the reward offered to Arcadia's souls in exchange for the loss of personal volition. Acheron is Arcadia with no reward, where the loss of individuality is its own reward. Acheron is the home not just of faceless grunts eternally battling for causes they've forgotten, but of every bureaucrat, toady, lickspittle, and thrall who has allowed duty to come before judgment. Acheron is Arcadia seen through a looking glass darkly. Acheron is Arcadia without the point. Arcadia is Acheron with a cause worth fighting for.

Arcadia and Ysgard are trans-axial equivalents, and in this case the axis is the Law-Chaos one. Where Arcadia is the home of those who have surrendered their individuality for the sake of their cause, Ysgard is the home of those who embrace their individuality for the same reason. If Arcadia is harmony, Ysgard is individualism. Where Arcadia's warriors bunch together in tight phalanxes, its formians in massive hives, in Ysgard the warriors fight as proud individuals and berserk rogues. Arcadia's artists and musicians compose propaganda pieces for the glory of the state, while in Ysgard the poet's inspiration comes from the lonely places, sacred wells and god-granted drafts of mead, solitary sojourns into the realm of the moon, howling out pure kennings in defiance of gods, giants, elves and men.

Pandemonium and Acheron are trans-axial opposites, Pandemonium's discord mirroring Acheron's diseased, obsessive-compulsive brand of order. Where Pandemonium is a plane of wild, individual madness, Acheron is the madness of crowds, the mob-mind assaulting the individual conscience and drowning it out because to the mob, conformity is the only morality that matters.

Acheron and Ysgard, then, are antitheses as well. As with its opposite Arcadia, Ysgard is a place where fighters remember why they're fighting. They have a goal in mind, whether it's to destroy the giants at the end of time or something more immediate. Acheron is the plane of lost causes, where fighting is the only purpose of fighting. Where Acheron is essentially a hollowed-out Arcadia, it is the complete opposite of everything Ysgard stands for. In Acheron, conformity is the only purpose. In Ysgard, individuality is the highest purpose. Acheron is the opposite of Ysgard in every respect that Arcadia was, with the additional lack of the one thing Ysgard and Arcadia have in common: good intentions. Ysgard holds an extreme view of Good that upholds personal volition as the greatest virtue, so for them Limbo is more moral than Elysium. Acheron holds personal volition as the greatest evil, the worst of crimes, and their ideal of conformity is such that even Baator falls short as a bunch of roguish scoff-laws, far too permissive for their own good. So it is that Acheron and Ysgard see one another as personifications of all that is wrong and broken in the multiverse, the darkest of evils: individuality and conformity, twin sins.

Ysgard and Pandemonium are mirror images along the good-evil axis. Ysgard is inspiration and creativity, the wellspring of poets, the base of the Infinite Staircase that stretches to every plane where art and imagination exist. Ysgard is the native plane of the lillends, and it's the plane where all warriors are poets and berserk fury is equated with enlightenment. Ysgard is also the home of some of the multiverse's greatest smiths and artisans, and the inspiration of the smiths among the dwarves and elves of Nidvellir is just as joyously individual as that of the warriors. Ysgard is, perhaps, the outer plane that's closest to the idea of creation. Muspelheim is the primal spark, the first flame, the creative spirit that drew forth the frozen potential of Niflheim and allowed movement and life to exist. The giants of Muspelheim are the guardians of that spark and raw as they are, wild as they are, their purpose is to protect the fires of creation from every threat, including the gods who stole it. But I digress. Having established that Ysgard is creativity, Pandemonium is creativity as well, but gone wrong. Pandemonium is just as wild and imaginative as Ysgard, but it represents the dark side of the imagination, the dream become nightmare. The line between genius and madness is thin, and perhaps that line is called Limbo. The genius and inspiration of Ysgard is reflected in the tangled fever-dreams of Pandemonium's depths, Ysgard's independent eccentrics becoming Pandemonium's lonely madmen. They are not so far apart, really. As with Arcadia and Acheron, Pandemonium is Ysgard, but with the purpose drained out and made hollow. The same motions are performed in Pandemonium as in Ysgard, but the meaning is lost. In Pandemonium they wander in the darkness, futilely trying to do what Ysgardians do, but everything they touch going askew.

The second group of four is Gehenna, Carceri, Bytopia, and the Beastlands. While the first group we considered represented different sides of conformity, creativity, madness, and harmony, this four represents different sides of nature and partnership.

Gehenna and Carceri are mirror images along the law-chaos axis. Gehenna is exploitation and Carceri is treachery, and these are two, equally evil solutions to the problem of how any two or more people should deal with competing interests.. In Carceri, the solution is to create an alliance and then break it as soon as it is convenient. The prisoners of Carceri strive eternally to escape the prison their disloyalties create, aware that cooperation is essential for success but too selfish and independent to maintain this in a plane that forces them to choose between their own well-being and that of their partners. Gehenna is more orderly, and relationships can be preserved there, but their own solution is to subjugate their associates permanently, so one is forced to serve the other's interests at the expense of their own. Carceri is what Gehenna would be if it was too chaotic to maintain its social structures. Gehenna is what Carceri would be if it was orderly enough that its relationships didn't constantly fall apart.

Carceri and Bytopia are antitheses. Carceri is a mockery of everything that Bytopia stands for, and Bytopia mocks Carceri by being everything it fails to achieve. Bytopia is community, industry, symbiosis. It is complementary strengths. It is mutually advantageous partnership. Carceri creates mockeries of all these things only to forever betray them. There can be no betrayal without trust, so Carcerians continually build up trust only to shatter it, time and again, hollow mockeries of what works so well in Bytopia. To Bytopians cooperation is the highest good, so trust is essential. Nothing defines Carcerians more than the violation of trust, and so to Bytopians, Carceri is the worst of all evil.

Bytopia and the Beastlands are mirror opposites, reverse-twins seen across the law-chaos line. Where cooperation is key in everything Bytopians do, Beastlanders are independent, free. In Bytopia, a hunter and a farmer combine their advantages. In the Beastlands, they ignore each other, or may even eat each other. The freedom of the Beastlands isn't like the radical libertarianism of Ysgard, or even like the libertines of Arborea. Beastlanders aren't concerned with Chaos as the highest form of good; they're just too wild to cooperate effectively. They compete instead, predators striving for the same prey, prey striving to evade predators. In Bytopia connections are made between disparate communities through trade; in the Beastlands, the biggest social unit is a small pack or herd. Not everyone in the Beastlands is an animal, necessarily, but the same ethos of independence and competition holds true across species, from the sages and scholars in the realms of Deneir and Zivilyn to the winged elves of Ilifar-in-the-Wind. Bytopia is cultivated nature acting in harmony with the wild. In the Beastlands, the wild competes with cultivation, constantly encroaching and seeking to swallow it up. Everything competes in the Beastlands in a Darwinian struggle. In Bytopia, everything cooperates instead. The two planes aren't that far apart, but their approaches are opposite.

Gehenna and the Beastlands are diametric opposites. While the Beastlands is everything wild and lush and fertile and alive, in Gehenna everything is exploited and stripped and used up and dead, with nothing remaining. The highest concern in the Beastlands, besides the independence and freedom of the wild, is renewal and conservation. Nothing is taken unless it can be replaced. The sick and weak are weeded out so that the health of the species is improved in the Beastlands, while the healthy and strong are left alone. In Gehenna the sick and weak are preserved because they're easy to manipulate, while the healthy and strong are either made weak or destroyed as a potential rival or threat. The Beastlands is wild freedom and independence from social constraints, a place where one's inner nature shines forth. Gehenna is oppression and domination, where inner natures are forcibly suppressed from without or deliberately hidden, for secrets are power and Gehennans must remain constantly alert lest their enemies see their hidden weaknesses. In Gehenna, Beastlanders see the death of all they hold dear. In the Beastlands, Gehennans see the kind of weakness that, in their own plane, would mean their death or enslavement. Gehennans often refer to the Beastlands as the Plane of the Weak, the personification of every flaw they seek to suppress. In the Beastlands, they see their own deaths looking back at them, for in Gehenna, one's true self is one's weakness is one's destruction. The Beastlands fill them with envy, disgust, and terror all at the same time. No plane is as honest as the Beastlands, and nothing threatens Gehennans more than honesty.

The Beastlands and Carceri are parallels. Both are equally wild, equally untamed, equally concerned with independence and the embrace of the wild aspects of their natures. Carceri is Nature at its most savage and cruel, and the Beastlands is Nature at its most benevolent and wise. The Beastlands is one's true self at its most noble, and Carceri is one's true self at its most corrupt. In the Beastlands, predator and prey compete honestly; while they might take advantage of camouflage and stealth, they do not try to hide what they are, and they do not try to build relationships they don't intend to honor. They avoid Bytopia's path entirely in the Beastlands, while in Carceri they imitate Bytopia only to mock and dishonor it. Carceri is no more capable of maintaining structure than the Beastlands are, but Carceri pretends an order it does not, cannot possess.

And Gehenna and Bytopia are similar parallels, exploitation the malevolent equivalent of cooperation, Gehenna's degrading trade a dark reflection of Bytopia's uplifting trade, Gehenna's slave labor reflecting Bytopia's proud tradesfolk.

The other groups of four are the cardinal alignment planes: the "corner planes" of the Abyss, Celestia, Arborea, and Baator, and the pure planes of Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil: Mechanus, Limbo, Elysium, and the Waste. The ways in which these planes oppose one another are more obvious. The Abyss is injustice, atrocity, and sin, while Mount Celestia is justice, mercy, and virtue. Baator is tyranny and Arborea is freedom. The Waste is as depressing and cruel as Elysium is vibrant and kind. Limbo is as chaotic as Mechanus is orderly. Baator is as lawful as Celestia, and Arborea's passions are as chaotic as the darker passions of the Abyss. Baator is a sinkhole, a pit leading to further depths of corruption just as Celestia leads ever upward toward enlightenment. Baator's punishments are a hollow reflection of Celestia's merciful justice. The Abyss's debauchery is a hollow reflection of Arborea's rapturous pleasures. The Abyss is passion and hate, and Arborea is passion and love. Arborea is freedom-fighting and Baator is endless slavery to an eternal tyrant. Celestia and Arborea disagree fervently over the nature of Good and the importance of freedom versus the importance of public order. Baator and the Abyss are at war. Celestia views Arborea as a plane of sad and corruptive sinners as divorced from true Good as Baator is, and Arborea in turn thinks Celestia is as wrong-headed as the Abyss, seeing Celestians as a plane full of self-righteous fascists.

And in the middle of it all, reconciling and synthesizing all the different opposites, is the Outlands. Between love and hate, between liberty and tyranny, between responsible competition and exploitation, between trust and betrayal, between corruption and purification, between concord and discord, between order and senselessness, between hope and despair, between conformity and individualism, between tyranny and anarchy, between justice and liberty lies the contradictory, complementary, paradoxical Land, a place of contrasts and opposites and also a place where the vibrant colors of the extreme planes blur together to form neutral tones, grays and browns that make the spots of color all the more shocking.

Arborea (liberty, passion)
Mirrors: Abyss, Celestia
Antithesis: Baator

Ysgard (individualism, creativity)
Mirrors: Arcadia, Pandemonium
Antithesis: Acheron

Limbo (chaos)
Antithesis: Mechanus

Pandemonium (discord)
Mirrors: Ysgard, Acheron
Antithesis: Arcadia

Abyss (vice)
Mirrors: Arborea, Baator
Antithesis: Celestia

Carceri (treachery)
Mirrors: Beastlands, Gehenna
Antithesis: Bytopia

Gray Waste (despair)
Antithesis: Elysium

Gehenna (exploitation)
Mirrors: Carceri, Bytopia
Antithesis: Beastlands

Baator (tyranny)
Mirrors: Abyss, Celestia
Antithesis: Arborea

Acheron (conformity)
Mirrors: Arcadia, Pandemonium
Antithesis: Ysgard

Mechanus (order)
Antithesis: Limbo

Arcadia (harmony)
Mirrors: Acheron, Ysgard
Antithesis: Pandemonium

Mount Celestia (virtue)
Mirrors: Arborea, Baator
Antithesis: Abyss

Bytopia (cooperation)
Mirrors: Beastlands, Gehenna
Antithesis: Carceri

Elysium (hope)
Antithesis: Gray Waste

Beastlands (independence, honesty)
Mirrors: Carceri, Bytopia
Antithesis: Gehenna

Outlands (synthesis, balance)
Mirrors: None
Antithesis: None
Syntheses: All

I'd say Vacuum. The whole "void" idea is already taken by the Negative, which at least puts in some things. A plane of absolute nothing should be totally changed.n

I thought Elysium was the best fleshed out/defined of the Upper planes....

The entire layer of locked-away evil?

Don't forget that that layer is also the origin of the quesar. Belieren has always, to me, been the layer of self-sacrifice; a significant chunk of the plane of purest good deliberately sullied to protect the rest of the multiverse. There's plenty to build upon on that theme; martyrs who absorb the pains of others, literal chunks of other planes squirreled away in the swamps, holdovers from the early days before the planes took their present shape.

The prisoner(s) of Belieren are not necessarily evil, however. Just dangerous. Belieren is the where the deepest, darkest secrets of the guardinals are squirreled away; not necessarily things that make the guardinals look bad (although there's probably some of that) but also sensitive things that they don't want others to know. The quesar do make their creators look bad, though their creators aren't guardinals. The aasimon who made the quesar were driven out of Elysium, but I don't think they'd be welcome back in Mount Celestia, so I imagine they have a city in Bytopia where they continue to experiment in the creation of living celestial constructs; upper planar warforged, distant cousins of the quesar of Elysium.

There is, paradoxically, stuff in Vacuum, which I find amusing. (My air genasi wizard has actually researched some spells and Guvner loopholes relating to the plane, but that's a side story.)

However, if you want to change it, I can see a certain distaste for having negative Air be nothingness -- after all, why isn't that true for all the rest of the elements? So here's a fix which might require a little work, but which maybe makes things a little more symmetrical.

Move Vacuum to be a region in each of the negative quasielemental planes, the region of absolute zero nothingness just before the Multiverse goes, horribly, past nothing and in to the anti-life existence of the Negative. Allow the Vacuum creatures like egarus to live in all of these regions (with lots of planar paths -- after all, how could you even tell when you had gone from one a vacuum of one element to a vacuum of another?).

Replace Vacuum with Smoke as the negative Air quasielemental. As you head Negative from Air, breathing becomes harder. The air becomes stale, polluted, and devitalized. The glow slowly fades, and visibility is limited. In core Smoke there's plenty of air, but it doesn't support any creature that has to breathe. Further Negative, the air pressure itself starts decreasing toward zero.

The next part is what might make reshuffling some of the native creatures' spell, spell-likes, and resistances a bit tricky.

Replace Smoke with Lightning as the Fire/Air paraelemental. Replace Lightning as the positive Air quasielemental with the Plane of Thunder. If you leave various powers and resistances alone, everything is fine, though efreet might mock djinn about it. If you replace most resistances to electricity with resistances to sonic attacks, and a lot of electric powers with sonic, thing might get a little complicated but hopefully wouldn't be too much out of balance. Air being opposed to Earth, sonic effects as positive Air make a lot of sense.

The Plane of Thunder would be something like this:

Going Positive from Air, the winds get more active, until you come to a plane where hurricanes and tornados rip across the endless sky. Whipcrack wavefronts of sonic booms hurtle invisibly from one art of the plane to another, sometimes expoding outward from a point for no visible reason, sometimes banging together or even collapsing inward on a brief moment of intense pressure that creates sonic jewels, air crystallized in the form of a sound node. Endless thunder shakes the atoms of everything in the plane; all objects not protected against sonic damage suffer 1d10-1 points per round, and living creatures with less than 5 points of sonic resistance must make Fort saves against deafness.

In addition to gyre mephits (from dust devils up to tornados) and invisible sound quasielementals, living songs roam the plane, which adventurous bards seek for magical effects, some paying with their hearing. There are places here where you can hear anything you want to hear, and you will. Floating effects of holy word, blasphemy, dictum and word of chaos drown out the other effects of the plane and are inhabited by beings of alignments that find them comfortable. Words equal in power but having nothing to do with alignments have been discovered here, like word of ransom, nickname, bon mot and mot juste. Ecumenical outposts of a surprising variety of religions feature mystics who believe that within the sound of the Thousand Thunders one can hear the voice that spoke Creation, or the words that Reality is telling us now, or the secret knowledge that makes gods.