Previous  Next Index  Cover

Traveling the Planes
For a cutter to make it on the planes, he's got to know how to get around quickly. It won't do if a sod's got to wander through Gehenna and the Gray Waste because he doesn't know the quickest way to Carceri. It's pure fact: No planar wants to rely on spellcasters just to cross the Ethereal. For a blood to survive on the planes, he's got to learn the dark of portals, doors, conduits, vortices, and other planar pathways. Only then can he really safely adventure on the planes. 'Course, nobody starts off knowing all this stuff - it's something most bashers learn as they go along.

KEEPING CONTROL

A practical problem for every PLANESCAPE campaign is that of how characters will travel through the vast expanse of the planes. Normal wilderness movement from one infinite universe to the next is impossible. Except on the ring of the Outer Planes, a body can't ride, sail, or fly from plane to plane - it just don't work that way. Furthermore, a character doesn't just walk from the Prime Material to the Astral Plane, and sailing a boat across the fiery seas of the plane of Fire is going to take a pretty special boat! Even on a plane where characters can travel overland, like Arcadia, the distances between realms can be so vast as to be impossible to negotiate.

But in many ways, these problems are all similar to those faced by a DM running a prime-material wilderness adventure: Unless given limitations and guidance, player characters can travel anywhere in such a wilderness, far and wide of the DM's carefully laid plans. Also, while the multiverse offers endless possibilities for adventure, players can be quickly overwhelmed by the options. DMs in either case are faced with the impossible need to be prepared for every prospect. Few are instantly ready when the players decide their characters want to go there instead of here.

Therefore, spells, magical items, portals, pools, conduits, and vortices are just the tools to help the DM keep the planes manageable. Over most of these the DM has absolute control. The characters can't independently open a new portal in Sigil or direct the flow of a vortex; these things the DM decides. Likewise, the DM chooses what magical items are discovered and where color pools will lead. With these, the DM can prevent the player characters from reaching certain planes.

But blocking the characters from taking unauthorized tangents is only half the solution. If the players don't want their characters to explore the DM's latest creation, then blocking off all other choices only leads to frustration. Interested players certainly don't need to have their characters pushed, and they'll probably talk about where they want to go long before they know how to get there. Good DMs watch for those cues and use them.

TO AND FROM THE PRIME

Although most planars won't admit it, a prime's claim that his home world is the hub for the multiverse makes a lot of sense. It's the only plane where both the Astral and Ethereal Planes intersect, so it is something of a crossroads of the multiverse.

Yet for some reason, the Prime Material Plane isn't very open to planar travel. Folks from the Outer Planes are always amazed at the effort it takes for a group of primes to shift from one plane to another. This is mainly because primes lack the natural ability to pass between planes, a power most planars take for granted. Planar travel to and from the Prime Material usually requires special spells or magical items to make the journey. Oh, there are a few vortices and conduits, but not many and they're little known. In addition, a few of Sigil's portals open onto worlds of the Prime Material Plane.

Nevertheless, the astral spell and plane shift spells are by far the most common methods for traveling off the Prime Material. The first carries the caster (and those traveling with her) to the Astral Plane only. A plane shift is a quicker method for reaching a distant plane, since it allows the caster to skip the tedious business of traveling through any intervening planes. It does have more risk, though, since the caster is there "body and soul," as it were, and if the caster is killed, she's as dead as if she'd been killed on the Prime Material Plane. The astral spell, on the other hand, creates a new body for the caster, and this allows her to take more risks on the Outer Planes. When an astral body is killed, the caster's spirit immediately returns to her body on the Prime Material Plane. (It's said the worst this causes is a bad case of nerves and a nasty headache.)

Curiously, although the Prime Material Plane is a nexus point to the Ethereal, wizards and priests have yet to come up with an ethereal version of the astral spell. The best-guess reason for this is that without the silver cord - something unique to the Astral Plane it's impossible to make a version of this spell work on the Ethereal Plane. Sure enough, wizards haven't been able to create any spell that specifically gives them a door to the Ethereal Plane, even though this isn't a problem for magical items.

The items listed below provide other common ways for primes to reach the planes. These have the advantage that the DM can control what he or she chooses to give the players (and when).
- Amulet of the planes
- Cubic gate
- Mirror of mental prowess
- Oil of etherealness
- Plate mail of etherealness
- Robe of stars
- Rod of passage
- Staff of the magi
- Trimia's catalogue of Outer Plane artifacts
- Well of many worlds

It should be said that there are several problems in relying on magical items for getting bashers around. For one, several of these items do more than just open a path, to the planes. Giving a cutter a staff of the magi means giving him a good deal of firepower, maybe more than the DM desires. Second, a number of these items can be used only by wizards. This means everyone in the group may have to rely on a single character - another potential problem and conflict. Third, other items such as oil of etherealness have limited uses, so some characters may find themselves stranded on a plane without a way to get home. Finally, there's the matter of just giving magical items away. If at all possible, adventurers should have to earn their magical items, not just conveniently receive them.

What most primes don't know is that there are ways that anybody can use to get around the multiverse, if they know the dark of them. These are a few means to move the player characters around the planes that don't rely on spells or magical items. They are the gatelike passages known as elemental vortices, astral conduits, and portals. Color pools are accessible, but only through the Astral Plane.

ELEMENTAL VORTICES

Vortices are direct openings between one of the four basic Elemental Planes (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water) and the Prime Material Plane. They aren't the easiest things to use, since vortices are found only at the heart of great concentrations of elemental stuff on the Prime Material Plane. This means most vortices gape at the heart of things like volcanic caldera, oceanic trenches, soaring mountain peaks, or the deepest mines. Vortices are, however, very stable - such large concentrations of matter seldom shift much over the course of a human lifetime.

There also may be vortices that lead to the Quasiand Paraelemental Planes. None have yet been mapped, and if they exist they're probably only temporary things, brought into being by sudden passing events. A vortex to the Quasielemental Plane of Lightning might be found at the very center of a raging thunderstorm, and another to Radiance might be located in the curling arm of a solar flame.

A vortex looks like a shimmering pool or wall of elemental stuff - fire swirls and bends with flaming magma, water ripples with deep cerulean colors, air shimmers like heat waves, and earth grinds and shifts like earthquake-trembled rock. When a basher knows what to look for, they aren't too hard to find.

There aren't any known vortices to the Energy Planes. Although both are basic life (or death) forces, wise bloods don't classify them as Elemental Planes.

ASTRAL CONDUITS

Conduits are shafts that go directly, from the Prime Material Plane to one of the Outer Planes. Conduits pass right through the Astral Plane and look like giant silver arteries there. They snake all the way through that plane in their journey from the Prime Material to one of the Outer Planes. Although it seems that conduits don't move, the chant from astral travelers is that these conduits are constantly twisting, writhing, and wriggling around on that plane. Luckily, though, the ends remain largely stable, most always dropping a berk off in pretty much the same place each time he passes through one.

In wizard talk, conduits are either young or mature. A young conduit goes only one way, so it's possible for a poor sod to step off a conduit into Baator and not have a way back. Mature conduits let a cutter step through in either direction, which can be useful until that pursuing fiend steps through, too. Whether young or mature, conduits can only take a being to the uppermost level of any plane, though there are other conduits that can go from one level of a plane to another. A berk can't go from the Prime Material Plane straight to the seventh layer of Mount Celestia or right down to the iciest layer of Baator through any astral conduit (though why a berk'd ever want to do the latter is beyond reasoning).

A fellow can't pick out where he's going to land, either. The first time through a conduit is blind chance. All a basher knows is that it'll be somewhere on some plane. In fact, most conduits tend to drop a sod somewhere in the middle of nowhere. This ain't necessarily as bad as it sounds, though, since a fiend's not too likely to be generous toward unannounced visitors in its malignant home.

The maw of a conduit is invisible to normal sight. Under a spell like true seeing, it looks like a reflective haze - a cloudy mirror is another way to describe it. The haze is opaque, and certainly nothing can be seen of where the conduit leads or what might be on the other side. Conduits have the great advantage of being quick. They pop a body right through the Astral Plane in a nod and a wink, so a cutter doesn't have to waste any precious travel time. However, since they're often two-way, there's just as much chance of something unpleasant stepping off the Outer Planes as there is of a prime zipping to the Outer Planes for a quick adventure.

As conduits are pretty well anchored, there's a brisk trade in maps of their openings and endings. It pays to be real careful in buying these, however, because there's more than a few cony-catchers out there with cunningly made forgeries, ready to work the cross-trade on some gully pri- me.

PORTALS

Portals are the doorways to and from Sigil, and they have a lot of advantages over vortices and conduits! First, a portal can connect to any layer of any plane at any point - it's just that one end is always anchored in Sigil. Step through an archway in Sigil and a sod might find himself on the 447th layer of the Abyss or the sixth level of Mount Celestia. Second, portals don't pass through any other planes. It's not like a conduit, where the traveler still has to go through the Astral Plane (although in just seconds). Portals directly link two places. Third, portals aren't as hostile as vortices. A cutter doesn't have to figure out how to reach the center of a volcano or the bottom of an ocean in order to use a portal. Most of them are easy to reach and pass through - provided a body knows where to look.

A portal may be easy to reach, but to do that a sod's got to find it, and that's another matter entirely. Portals generally don't advertise themselves. They don't glow with strange colors, and a being can't look through one and see the destination on the other side. They don't detect as magical, but their presence can be discovered with a true seeing spell, though even this won't reveal where they go. A basher can walk through a portal and have nothing at all happen, too, because each one takes a special gate key.

This key isn't like the one used for a normal lock and it isn't a spell or power key, either. This key's something particular to that portal - a word, an action, or an object carried across the threshold, for instance. Only when the key's used will the portal come to life. Then, the portal flashes with a brief flare of light golden, ruddy, hellish, or whatever - and an electrical crackle sounds as the traveler steps through. Those watching might see a brief glimpse of the destination, if they're quick to watch before the brilliance fades away.

Some portals are stable, some are temporary, and others seem to shift around in random patterns. Portals always ground their ends in some kind of arch. In Sigil, this is mostly doorways and gates. Out on the planes it might be anything - a palace door, a cave mouth, the curve of a bridge, even a canopy of tree branches. Because of this, portals are rarer on Limbo or the Ethereal and Astral Planes, where archlike shapes are harder to find. Portals to the Ethereal lead mostly to demiplanes of solid matter. Portals to the Astral have an unpleasant habit of grounding themselves in githyanki fortresses. On Limbo, portals constantly shift and move as new arches rise and old ones collapse in the turmoil of that plane.

Sages aren't sure what the portals are and why they always have one end in Sigil. Theories abound, and it's something of a sport to try to propose an answer. It's a mystery that makes Guvners crazy - they can come up with the rules for what the portals do, but not those for why. Answers run from complicated calculations about Sigil as the nexus point of the multiverse to the incredible-sounding but perhaps accurate suggestion that the portals are living things which feed off the energies of Sigil and its travelers.

Who knows the real truth? It doesn't really matter - the portals work.

Index   Up   Cover

THE GREAT ROAD
You ever traveled the great road
and seen the madness out there, leatherhead?
Try it, and then tell me it all means something.
 - Caravan-master Phall of the Bleak Cabal

... ain't really a road and it ain't all that great, but that's what folks call it: the Great Road, the Ring. Fact is, it's an idea more than a thing. There's actually a road on some planes, but mostly it's the thought of the Ring, the grand union of all the Outer Planes, that poets sing about. What it really is is a string of portals, permanent and unchanging, that link each Outer Plane to its adjacent fellows. Now, if a berk had the years and the compliance of the fiends in his path, he just might be able to walk the whole thing in sixteen lifetimes, but, then, who'd want to?

Each portal on the Great Road exists as an arch, like the portals of Sigil. However, looking through one of the arches of the Ring, a being can see his destination on the other side. Passing through doesn't require a key, either. All a being's got to do is step through the arch.

Towns, forts, encampments, even barricades spring up around the Great Road's portals. On the Upper Planes, they're usually used for trade and commerce, but on the Lower Planes these towns are staging points for the endless Blood War. These are dangerous places to pass through - a stranger here could get himself gutted as a spy or dragooned into the fiends' ranks. Most folks don't go there without a powerful reason.

Each Outer Plane has a permanent portal that leads to the Outlands, too. Towns sprout up around the Outlander end, like Plague-Mort, Ribcage, Glorium, and Automata. But even though these burgs sit on the Outlands, their character is very much that of the plane they watch. Ribcage, which lies at the portal to Baator, is thick with pestilence and horror, and Glorium, near Ysgard, is filled with noble virtue, and so on. These are places where low-level adventurers can get a taste of the planes with a little less risk involved. See Sigil arid Beyond for ideas and further information.

THE ETHEREAL PLANE

The cocoon of the Inner Planes, the Ethereal Plane is, in Marinj the Poet's words, "The grand and misty shore." For a body that's seen it, the description makes sense, because the Ethereal's like a great fog-bound realm with mists of green, red, silver, blue, and whatnot in between. In this a cutter can sometimes see shapes: windows to other planes or drifting globs of protomatter, the stuff of future demiplanes.

The Ethereal's more like an ocean than Marinj knew, as it has its shores and its deeps. When a berk first crosses the boundary into this plane, he's in the shallow end, called the Border Ethereal. While traveling in this region, a basher's not really here or there - he's not in the Ethereal or on his starting plane; in the Border, he's in both. He can see into adjacent planes, but he's invisible to most folks there. The boundary between the Border Ethereal and the Deep Ethereal is easy to spot. It's a big, shimmery wall of color, like the "northern lights" some primes talk about. The Deep Ethereal's like the ocean, vast and bottomless.

The ethereal mist isn't completely empty, though. Shapes rise and fall out of this void like strangers in the fog. Pure fact is, there's plenty living here, things friendly and dangerous both. There's creatures that live on the Ethereal but hunt on the Prime Material. There's others that prey on ethereal travelers, waiting to snare them in the mist....

Then there's the demiplanes. They're islands of matter out in the deeps of the Ethereal. Demiplanes are like regular planes, only they're smaller and have definite borders. Sages figure that, in some millennia hence, these demiplanes might become full-fledged planes themselves, but this is only theory since it's never happened (that the sages know about, anyway). No basher knows how many demiplanes exist. Prime-material wizards keep making new ones all the time, it seems. Some of them are well mapped, but others are barely known. Of the two best known, the Demiplane of Shadow is the largest, and it's powerful enough to extend its essence into other planes. There, it feeds such creatures as the slow shadow and the shadow dragon. It's possible that the Demiplane of Shadow is near to becoming a full-fledged Inner Plane.

Another of the demiplanes is one of mystery, known only as the "Demiplane of Dread," which is forever lost in the deepest mists. Those unlucky planehoppers who find it mostly don't come back, and the few who do tell tales of horror that do well to caution others. Those sods talk of lands of darkness and despair, where evil plays with mortals like a little boy plays with toys.

Special Physical Conditions. In the Border Ethereal, a person can see the shadowy outlines of whatever plane he's adjacent to. The ground beneath his feet is the shadowy ground of that plane. The traveler can't touch, move, or speak to anything on the other plane. Actions and verbal communication are impossible without spells or magical items. In his ethereal form, a traveler can walk right through any solid object on the other plane that's not sheathed in dense metals or magic. Ethereal travelers are invisible to folks on the other plane unless they use a detect invisibility or a specially researched detect ethereal spell.

In the Deep Ethereal the ground vanishes, but travelers still move as if they were walking, riding, flying, or whatever. They're not doing any of that, though. Instead, they unconsciously move by power of thought. Distances have no meaning. It only takes "some time" to reach one's goal. The clearer the thought and desire, the less time needed to reach the intended destination.

Special Magic Conditions. Most spells function normally on this plane. ('Course, those spells that access the Astral and Outer Planes are restricted.) Solid matter created here can be moved easily, since it's virtually weightless. Illusion/phantasms created here last without concentration, then gradually fade into nothingness. There's a 5% chance of any illusion taking on a life and reality of its own, beyond the caster's control.

Natives and Hazards. Chronolily, foo creature, gingwatzim, gk'lok-lok, phase spider, terithran, and thought eater occupy the Ethereal. Many other creatures hunt in or can see into this plane. Those able to see into the Ethereal Plane can affect beings there with spells and gaze attacks. In addition, there's the risk (at the DM's whim) of an ether cyclone snatching up travelers and hurling them into random planes touched by the Ethereal.

THE ASTRAL PLANE

To some it's the most dreadful of nothings, an unrelieved expanse of silver, worse than the fog of the Ethereal Plane. For others the Silver Void (as it's also called) is a place of subtle wonder, with patterns in the shades that hint at greater things. The Astral Plane looks empty, but there's a lot drifting in it.

The most common things a basher's going to see there are the color pools  - gateways to the Outer Planes. These hang in the void, shimmering in prismatic colors like the surface of a pond. A few primes have let out the chant that the pools are color-coded, letting a body know which plane they lead to, but as usual they're wrong. One smart thing to know, though, is that a sod can use a color pool like a window, to see where he's going, if he looks through the colorful side and concentrates on what's beyond. It's sad the number of leatherheads who don't know that trick.

Color pools are one-sided, and a being can hit one from its backside without seeing it. Passing through a color pool - from either side - spits a traveler out onto the uppermost level of that pool's plane. Moving through a color pool's been described as kind of like pushing through warm molasses - the pool kind of surrounds a body when he presses against it.

Astral conduits to the Outer Planes are another feature of this plane. These look like whirling funnels, except they've got no ends. No matter how far a sod travels, these conduits seem to go further. Conduits are dangerous, too, because they tend to thrash around and can suck up a traveler and spit him out someplace he don't want to be (at the DM's whim).

More dangerous than the conduits are the githyanki, who'd just as soon put a sod in the dead-book as talk to him. Their homes are built on great islands of matter sucked out of other planes by the creation of a new conduit. Larger githyanki settlements are sometimes made on the drifting corpses of long-forgotten powers. Weakened beyond awareness, these powers have been cast out of the planes to drift helplessly in the silver void. Not dead yet not alive, these so-called "god-isles" are slowly crumbling in an undying decay. Occasionally a dim glimmer of awareness stirs the power, and sometimes its thoughts and dreams overwhelm the squatters upon it. There's also the githyanki ships - bizarre vessels powered by thought alone, used to hunt the astral whales and dreadnoughts of this universe.

Numerous little things are also found on the Astral Plane, like arrows soaring in endless flight, enemies banished to the drift in the void, and even dangerous magic that's been cast out here for the safety of all.

Special Physical Conditions. Visitors, whether on a silver cord or not, assume a solid (though translucent and pale) version of themselves. Bodies and objects are weightless, but can be propelled normally. The world has no up, down, north, or south. Creatures don't breathe, and they eat and drink sparingly. They move by pushing off things or by thought. For the latter method, the character simply thinks about his goal and moves. For player characters, Intelligence score x 30 equals the number of feet traveled per round. In that weightless environment, Intelligence determines the bonus to hit and damage as if it were Strength, while Wisdom has the same effect on Armor Class and missile fire as Dexterity does. All missile ranges (not magic ranges) are doubled, though non-native creatures suffer a -2 attack penalty.

Special Magic Conditions. The Astral has no link to the Ethereal and no extradimensional spaces. Everything radiates magic on this plane, so detect magic is useless.

Natives and Hazards. Astral dreadnought, astral wind, foo creature, and githyanki reside here. Astral winds can sweep a traveler to distant reaches of the plane without a moment's notice.

Previous  Next Index  Up   Cover

A DM Guide to the Planes