Thursday, March 5, 2020

Handling Planar Travel in the Magic Multiverse

With Mythic Odysseys of Theros, we're getting the second official guide for a Magic: The Gathering plane.

In D&D, all (or rather, most) campaign settings exist within the Prime Material Plane. The worlds of the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Exandria, etc. all share that plane. In fact, the Spelljammer campaign setting is actually a means to link these various settings together and travel from one to another. Meanwhile, Planescape, another setting, is another sort of meta-setting, expanding beyond the Prime Material to include all 16 - or rather, 17, given the Outlands as the True Neutral plane - Outer Planes, as well as the various Inner Planes and the Prime Material.

While there are some settings that have their own cosmologies, this is typically explained away by having them inhabit some odd part of the overall D&D multiverse. Eberron, for instance, appears to have its own various planes, but to weld that into the overall D&D cosmology, I believe it is canonically a kind of bubble inside the Ethereal Plane - in the Deep Ethereal.

My own homebrew setting, Sarkon (and the greater Celestial Expanse that it exists within) is one I decided is itself in a bubble in the Far Realm, making it very difficult to reach from the canon settings, but not strictly impossible. (I've considered retconning this fact to take advantage of the chance to cross over into other settings, but I also like that, for instance, my Lawful Evil plane was long ago conquered by the undead led by the Angel of Death, who I think make much more sense as LE than CE, and it also means that Hell has literally frozen over and also we have some fun with Devils in exile.)

The thing is, the planes of Magic were not invented to be D&D settings, and for over a quarter of a century, the creative team on Magic has built their own cosmology.

You could, of course, simply smash Ravnica and Theros onto the Prime Material Plane and treat them like any other D&D setting, but I think the lore of Magic is rich enough that they deserve to be portrayed as part of their own multiverse.

The Acquisitions Incorporated games are at least partially canonical (Omin Dran, Jerry Holkins' character, is canonically one of the masked lords of Waterdeep) and when they've traveled to Ravnica, they've done so by traveling across the Far Realm.

The Far Realm is fairly convenient - many fantasy properties include some sort of "ultimate outer plane" where Lovecrafitan cosmic horror can be found. Given that it's the ultimate "outside," it also sort of works as a bridge between canons. The eldritch nature of the Far Realm means it could be truly infinite in size (or if infinity isn't enough, it could be basically infinity to the infinite power.)

But to scale back down again, what about the Magic multiverse?

Specifically, how do spells like Etherealness, Plane Shift, and Astral Projection work in the Magic multiverse?

I think it depends a bit on how canonical you want to get.

First off, the Magic multiverse currently does not have any canon name like "The Great Wheel" or anything like that. However, in the early days of the game, it was called Dominia, and the primary setting of Magic for its first ten years (with a couple excursions to other settings) was Dominaria - a plane whose name meant "Song of Dominia." Dominaria was at the nexus of the multiverse, though in practice that just meant it was the important setting.

In a lot of ways, what distinguishes Dominaria from the other settings is A: it's got the most fleshed-out history, geography, and map and B: it's the most generic of the settings, existing as a kind of catch-all fantasy world, because for many years, it was all the game had (well, except for "Rabiah," which I think was basically a retcon to justify the Arabian Nights set, which was Magic's first "expansion set".)

In the lore of MTG, the various planes are all distinct worlds, but they're less interconnected than those in typical D&D. Gods that are worshipped in one world are unheard of in others. Indeed, the existence of other planes is unknown to the vast majority of people in MTG worlds.

Travel between those planes is also extremely rare, and typically can only be done by a Planeswalker.

Now, planeswalkers have existed in two major forms during Magic's canon.

In both cases, a planeswalker has what is called a planeswalker spark - a latent potential to become a planeswalker. Usually, one is simply born with this by chance, though there are cases of people gaining a spark through some artificial means - including the most famous planeswalker of Magic's early days, Urza.

Prior to an event called The Mending, Planeswalkers were essentially gods who had been born as mortals. Planeswalkers could create entire planes, and were immortal and incredibly powerful.

It was also before the Mending that other creatures could more easily travel between planes. The evil biomechanical Phyrexians had planar gates that allowed them to jump between worlds. But also, a planeswalker could summon individuals from one plane to another to fight for them (though some canonical sources suggested that summoning a creature was really more like making a copy of them.)

However, after The Mending, the old planar gates stopped working, and Planeswalkers degraded from living gods to something more like superheroes - powerful, sure, but still mortals.

In this state, it seems as if Planeswalking is the only way to go between the Planes, and that puts some limits on your player characters in a D&D campaign. Unless you flavor your planar travel spells as allowing the character to become a Planeswalker, it's not clear that you could be consistent with the lore and allow your players to travel between the planes.

Now, there is already one canonical exception that allows some things to travel between planes without being Planeswalkers. In last year's War of the Spark event, the evil Elder Dragon Nicol Bolas used a Planar Gate created on the Steampunk-India world of Kaladesh to bring his army of metal-plated mummy-warriors from Amonkhet (a world he had basically Bene-Gesserit-ed for centuries to view him as their God-Emperor before wiping out most of its population and raising them as undead) to invade Ravnica.

If it's just that the old planar bridges don't work and new ones can be built in a different way, then perhaps the planar travel restrictions can be lessened.

I'm investigating that possibility for the future of my Ravnica campaign (no one is over level 2 at this point, so I've got time.) However, I did come up with a quasi-consistent-with-canon possibility:

I have created a Feat called Planeswalker Spark. I won't go through all the details, but here's the gist of it:

When you take the feat, you get to raise one ability score of your choice by 1. Then, at a time determined by the DM (when the player is subjected to a moment of profound stress,) a couple things happen: the Planeswalker spark ignites, healing them to full. Immediately, the players then involuntarily casts Plane Shift to a plane determined by rolling on a random table.

Counting this involuntary one, the player can now cast Plane Shift once per long rest on themselves, with no required material components. Returning to their home plane (Ravnica) is easy, but traveling to planes they haven't been to before has a chance to fail and send them to a random one instead.

Where we start to break canon is that they can spend the time it would take to learn a new tool or language proficiency to become "proficient" with Planeswalking, allowing them to draw upon the mana of the land to summon allies with them as they go (or send an unwilling target elsewhere.)

We're, of course, pretty far from players learning all those other planar travel spells, but I'm hoping to have a robust system in place - not to mention some go-to locations and scenarios for all those other planes.

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