Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Adventures in the Upper Planes

In the mythos of D&D, good and evil become tangible differences when one emerges from the physical world into the Outer Planes. The Outer Planes are fundamentally pretty weird, as they're a place that looks physical and material, but is truly made up of philosophical belief and position - and yet it is real. The souls of the dead eventually journey to these Outer Planes to spend their afterlife, and so they must be as real as the people who live in the Prime Material Plane, despite their odd nature.

D&D thrives on adventure, and adventure generally needs danger. As such, journeys into the Lower Planes - those seven on the Great Wheel that are fundamentally evil - are obvious locations for adventure. The Nine Hells are filled with Devils who want nothing more than to entrap your soul and torment you (or turn you into one of them to serve as an underling.) The Abyss is chock full of demons who would love nothing more than to eviscerate you and wear your skin like a t-shirt. Acheron's an endless battlefield, Gehenna is a treacherous landscape of volcanos. Hades is a bleak wasteland where trapped souls become mindless grubs. Carceri is a deep, dark prison. And Pandemonium drives you insane with incessant winds and dust.

The stakes aren't hard to imagine. It's a dangerous place, and you'll want to do what you've gone there to accomplish and get out of there as soon as you can.

But there's symmetry in the Great Wheel cosmology, and that means that there are Upper Planes as well, which are fundamentally good. Yet, they're right there, begging to be used as adventure settings. So, then, how do you create a sense of adventure?

The first concept is the notion that the adventurers aren't worthy. 

Why are you going to the Upper Planes? My guess would be that you need someone or something from there. Let's say that there's some powerful magical artifact - you need the Chalice of Dawn, from which pure sunlight can be poured endlessly, in order to destroy some vampire who has ascended to demigod status and has, let's say, covered your world in endless night. So you find out that this thing exists, but it's kept in the palace of Doros, the God of the Sun, high up on Mount Celestia. Doros has many angels (and let's say some giant robots because hey, it is a lawful plane) who are sworn to guard the Chalice and ensure it's not taken, for fear that it will be corrupted or destroyed by those will ill intent.

Now you've got a challenge in which your party is doing good by taking it to destroy the Vampire God, but where the people you're fighting are also doing good by fulfilling their sacred oaths.

How violent this conflict becomes is up to the DM and the players - one could assume that Celestials are much more willing to hear out the party's pleas, but are also capable of defending themselves if needs be. But perhaps Doros has some reason not to want them to get the Chalice that could be for a greater good, or perhaps because he doesn't think the party stands much of a chance even with the Chalice and would hate for it to be corrupted by the evil Vampire God. There's still a possibility for conflict between good sides.

There are also odd mechanics to the Outer Planes. In the Outer Planes, if enough people of a certain alignment gather and behave that way in a region of the plane, that piece of the plane will actually shift and be absorbed by the plane that adheres to that alignment. For example, there's a whole layer of Arcadia that became too Lawful Neutral and not enough Lawful Good that it got absorbed by Mechanus.

The souls of mortals who go on to the Outer Planes are selected rather precisely to match the plane to which they're being sent, but mortals who travel via the Astral Sea or the Plane Shift spell might not. While the fundamental goodness of the Upper Planes suggests that they likely get along decently, there is a distinction between them. The Upper Planes run the gamut just as the Lower Planes do between Lawful and Chaotic. While there's no real equivalent of the Blood War between the Nine Hells and the Abyss among Mount Celestia and Arborea, there is still the same difference in alignment between them.

One could imagine that a group of industrious, say, Gnomish souls camp out in Elysium, but their somewhat lawful nature threatens to draw part of that realm into Bytopia. So some entity of Elysium might employ the party to kick them out or at least change their behavior to preserve things.

(Note that this aspect of the Outer Planes does seem to have exceptions. The Githzerai are a lawful neutral culture that exists within Limbo, the chaotic neutral plane, and they don't seem to have sucked part of it to Mechanus or Arcadia, which seem to more closely resemble their attitudes.)

Of course, another adventure concept is fairly easy: the test. In Critical Role's first campaign, for example, the party had to travel to the realms of various gods in order to get the power needed to defeat the big bad. The gods were not willing to invest that power in anyone who wasn't worthy, and so some of the party members had to perform feats to show they could be trusted to use that power well.

This creates conflict without any real antagonism, and can give the players challenges despite being "among friends" as it were.

I have been ignoring, to this point, the "Factols" of the Planescape setting. While these are all based in the city of Sigil, itself an odd neutral ground for beings from all the Outer Planes, these factions have their own bases of operation on other planes, and while you might be fine with those Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral folks in Ysgard, you might have a more specific beef with one of the Factols that has set up there.

Of course, the last possibility I'll talk about is if your player characters are just evil. They might be going there to steal some source of power not for the greater good, but for their own greed. Or they might wish to inflict harm on beings of good because they're jerks. Here, the conflict writes itself.

But most games run with good or neutral PCs, so this is probably going to be a bit rare.

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