Planar Renovation Project (sort of): Arborea

I mostly think about Sigil, rarely Arborea, my take on it right now is that ''passions'' is a basic concept from where you start imagining the place, but it's a lot more. After that you go on to passion for life, creativity, joy, openness to change, being nonjudgemental, living without expectations, acting how you feel, finding and expressing your unique self, unrestricted love, love of experience, emotion, nakedness, fun, and so on. High-ups of the plane don't command, people commit to things they are passionate about, some petitioners act like children, they'd hug a fiend. Also I think that the true exemplars of the plane are composed of pure thought-energy, I have them appear in three, thoughts (unknown, unseen race), words (true), and deeds (eladrins) personified.

/080306/hidden-layers-arborea

I loved this.

"Most and first of all they want to experience their own universe, want to feel how good they are, and Arborea is the most natural, not normal, place to be. I think the source for most conflict on their plane comes not from within, but from other planes, their openness, welcoming everyone gets them in all sorts of encounters. Celestia is closed to all who don't agree, Arborea is the opposite."

I really like this as it gives a meaning to Arborea's Freedom that also causes natural conflicts. Arborea welcomes ministers of Order, elemental ambassadors, even fiends if they can keep themselves from misbehaving too much.

Heck, you don't even need fiends as the diversity of Upper Planar residents - representing different gods/cultures/planes is enough to cause conflict.

Good thoughts on this Ozymandias.

I think Abyssal freedom is the freedom to indulge your whims over all other considerations.

To the Aborean that path leads to tyranny. You either control or are controlled. However, as Plato notes, even the tyrant at the top of the heap is not free because he must continually watch his back.

The Aborean might also argue that continual indulgence at the expense of all others, where the user also shapes the layer one resides upon, leads to imprisonment of Self. True freedom and variation depends upon the consideration of others' needs.

The Abyssal of course thinks the Aborean is just rationalizing. The Limbonian doesn't even care about the conversation because it's been spending this whole time as a lemon fruit pie and now it's a butterfly with a dog's head flying through a caramel flavored void...

Yes, I agree with the existentialism - how good Bleakers want to live. Ideally, it's pure ''lust for life'', tanar'ri have lust for hurting life, and the angels of Celestia act on belief that someone higher knows what's good for them, their passion is in proving themselves, the Arboreans don't feel that obligation. Like in Assassin's Creed game, when you know ''nothing is true, everything is permitted'', the Arboreans know that giving freedom to others is for their own Self-interest - by the Unity of Rings principle they will also be free.

My ruminations...

Passion is everywhere, just like tyranny and destruction are everywhere, but on Arborea, passion is a virtue unto itself. Following your passions is worthwhile in its own right, and good will come of it-- somehow. The passions of dragons, hags, and devils give rise to heroes necessary to fight them. The passions of the fey produce objects of great beauty, places of wonder, beings full of grace and whimsy-- and romances and tragedies, in roughly equal measure. The placement of Mount Olympus on Arborea seems meant to suggest that for all their pettiness and flaws, for all the chaos they wreak upon mortal lives, Zeus and the rest are a force for good. That it’s rather debatable whether the good they do outweighs the bad seems fitting for the axis of Chaos and Good.

Ask: can the beauty of a single flower make up for the hardship and suffering of a lifetime? Is true love worth letting the rest of the world burn? How far would you go to save a single life?

What’s more important: good actions, good intentions, or good outcomes? I would say that on Celestia, all three are considered fundamental, but on Arborea, two out of three ain’t bad. Even just one of the above deserves credit for trying.

As Cromlich and Sci were saying, the openness of Arborea is interesting. I’d take it a step further, and say that Arborea deliberately lures in guests of opposing alignments. Like no other Upper Plane, Arborea seeks to tempt and seduce outsiders. And unlike Baator, it’s not a concerted effort, not some insidious political machine. It’s just a (deceptively) innocent, (seemingly) naïve desire to share and share alike. Rather than converting anyone, breaking them down, brainwashing or corrupting them, there’s just a basic acknowledgment that yes, you have a place here.

Rather than just being a forest plane full of elf-like celestials (who aren’t fey, but maybe they should be?) and satyrs and more evil-aligned creatures than is strictly usual for one of the Upper Planes, I’d focus on Arborea as the Feywild: the Prime, but moreso. It’s that kind of heaven-- everything you loved in life, but more of it. The good, to be enjoyed, and the bad, to be instructive. I would focus on the idea that sensations are heightened here, realer than real, overwhelming, disorienting. Senses and memory can be deceiving, to say nothing of the illusions the locals are so adept at using. Emotions and dreams are more vivid, time and distance seem to stretch and distort-- as with the enchanted slumber of Sleeping Beauty or Rip Van Winkle, or the mythical seven-league boots. Portals are not necessarily any more common on Arborea than elsewhere, but they’re kept open, and the paths are well-trod-- at least on the way in. Everyone is welcome in Arborea-- nobody said it would be easy to leave. Why would you want to?

So as a defining feature, I would have Arvandor/Olympus seem more crowded and eventful than it has any right to be. The Abyss has infinite layers, but many of those are quite barren; all the planes are theoretically infinite, but often rather sparse (Celestia crams everything into just the single mountain, infinitely big though it might be). Not so with Arvandor. What other planes spread out or attempt to catalogue into layers, Arborea simply lets fall where it may, like so much junk out of an overcrowded closet. Many empty spaces on the map are inhabited by sprites and chatty woodland animals, gnomes under stumps, trolls under bridges, monsters and cherubs in uncharted corners. Ancient dragons no one ever heard of before crawl out from under stones, villages lost for centuries appear by the roadside. Even the truly empty spaces seem emptier-- lonelier and more imposing, further from civilization, loved ones, the object at the end of your quest-- closer to the past you’re running from, to despair, to oblivion.

Arborea, as the Sensate’s primary plane of influence, is a plane packed with experience. Never a dull moment, literally. It is the plane itself which finds ways to keep you. People find themselves fitting into the narrative of the place without ever meaning to, so great is the allure of this particular heaven. Devils, try as they might, find their schemes lead to happy endings for the people concerned. Hags’ hearts are softened, as they find themselves reminiscing on lost love. Demons are redeemed, dragons tamed, on Arborea.

…That’s my thought, anyway.

I’d like to use Ossa as a storing-house for any place in Arborea that, by necessity, must be secluded. Sunken continents and forbidden cities, too, not only the afterlives of antisocial (but good-hearted) sages and artists. Avalon, the island of Circe, the island where Koschei keeps his death (unless that’s somewhere else already). I’d like there to be untold depths to the ocean, and perhaps destinations in the starry sky-- I like using Arborea as my Upper Planar port-of-call for spelljammers.

Pelion? A layer of rest, maybe, on what could otherwise be a rather clamorous plane. A layer for somber reflection, remembrance and forgetfulness. I picture a moment, where a drunken mortal, stolen away by one of the endless fairy revels to be found in Fairyland, suddenly stumbles out of the party and onto the great dry plain of dust and long shadows, perhaps near the foot of some great tomb or fallen statue. An ominous, sobering moment, a reminder that every party ends, even immortality, and that perhaps that is just as well.