The stuff below, on the other hand, is perhaps more useful. I don't really see the exploration of the Otherworld as a super important or common occurrence, even for "adventurers", but it's also not completely unheard of, so knowing something about the local cosmology is nice. As DH4 gobbled up and ate MAMMOTH LORDS and some DREAMLANDS REMIXED to become DH5, why not utilize some of the other concepts that I've come up with but not really done a whole lot with? So, DH5 will now gobble up the concepts that I came up with for REALMS TRAVELER, and for that matter, even ODD D&D, which will become an important coterminous realm to the World. Which brings all of this full circle; ODD D&D was largely inspired by reading one of the realms of Beyond Countless Doorways to begin with, before taking on a life of its own and going my own direction utilizing the same high concept. REALMS TRAVELER was initially envisioned to be a complete setting in its own right; a kind of episodic "plane to plane to plane" journey as an entire campaign; one that maybe never even started out in a standard, regular, "material plane" campaign setting to begin with. Or, depending on the nature of the campaign, maybe it would be more like Asprin's Myth Adventures books; but either way the exploration of new realms and planes was the main purpose of the setting, and the plane to be explored would change from episodic module to module.
In that setting, planes clustered together like soap bubbles, and occasionally moved in relation to each other, but maintained a degree of coterminousness with at least one and often several planes at once. Other planes would not be coterminous with each other, but were accessible by traveling through a third plane, while others would have even more complicated routes, possibly stopping through multiple planes in the way.
I'm not using that campaign model for DH5, of course, but I am going to use that cosmological model. Here's a quick and dirty schematic of some of the realms that are near to the World of DH5, and will have an effect on the world that I've already thought of (and probably already added creatures to the Monster list based on these connections, at least a little bit here and there.) This isn't meant to be complete, and one could certainly find, on further exploration, that more realms connect to the ones shown here, but if so, their impact and influence on the world of DH5 has not really been felt to any degree at all. Well, with one exception: the Colonists migrated from Earth to this world by traveling through Elfhome, or Faery (or Alfheim; all words used by the Colonists as they traveled through it.) Although I keep saying that I won't keep talking about it, it's an interesting example of some of the concepts illustrated here; Earth has separated from this entire cluster and is no longer accessible at all, as far as anyone knows, and as it separated it tugged on Elfhome, so that it is now no longer coterminous itself, but hanging out there, and accessible only by first passing through Dhomus.
Anyway, let's talk very briefly about what all of these places actually are. I'm not sure how to best approach this, or rather, in what order makes the most sense, so I'll just do them as I glance at the next one and decide that's the one to talk about.
- The World: The dark green circle in the middle of this cluster is the regular world of DH5. I still haven't actually sketched a modern map of this setting, but I have an older sketch and a pretty good idea of what it looks like, plus I've talked about it enough that it should be broadly familiar by now.
- Dhomus: This is the world of ODD D&D, or at least a somewhat translated version of it. While it was meant to be used with D&D 3.5 originally, and referred to some specifically D&D-like elements, most of them can be used pretty well with my DH5 ruleset with some obvious changes (like replacing yuan-ti with my serpentmen, for instance.) Dhomus is generally a hotter environment than DH5, and the lizardmen and snakemen kingdoms there aren't super comfortable in much of the DH5 setting, except the further south. That said, they keep an interested eye in the World, and would like to conquer it, and have a number of plans brewing that would allow them to colonize it en masse; probably after exterminating most of the peoples that already live there now.
- Faery: Is probably the name most commonly used, but Alfheim and the English equivalent, Elfhome, are also used by large numbers of Colonists and natives alike. The Colonists are perhaps more familiar with this realm than the natives. It is no longer directly connected, and can only be reached by traveling from touchpoints or gates from the World to Dhomus, and then traveling through Dhomus to places where gates or touchpoints that reach Faery reside. These are poorly chronicled, as the Elfs and other fairies have little interest in the lizardmen and snakemen of Dhomus or vice versa. Because of this, and the low likelihood that the elfs and fairies travel outside their realm, Faery has become somewhat mythical to people in the World, very, very few of whom have anything like first-hand knowledge of it anymore. What is known is that it is a wild and beautiful place, full of magic and wonder and danger for mortals. The elfs and fairies divide themselves into massive clans based on the seasons, and the magical lands of, for instance, the Spring clans are always in a state of Spring, never aging into summer, and covered at all times in flowers and new growth and blossoms, etc. Many of the "gods" of Avalon are here, rather than in the realm noted below, and some of the lords of Faery are equivalent in all ways to the Outsider lords; Queen Mab, King Oberon, Baba Yaga, the Erlking, etc. are equals to Odin, Zeus, Thor or others.
- Old Ones Realms: This is actually a patchwork of many realms "sutured" together, and some of them have slightly different traits to others, but mostly it is a realm not unlike Faery. In fact, some Realms-scholars believe that Faery and this Realm were once the same, and somehow it split and Faery drifted off away from the Old Ones Realms, given that both are wild, beautiful and fey and very similar in features. However, where Faery is the home of elfs and dwarfs and gnomes and other fairy creatures and ruled by the Winter Queen and the Summer King, etc., the Old Ones Realms are the homes of powerful beings that were once worshiped as gods and their retinues. Olympus is one of these realms (as is Othrys of the Titans), Asgard is among these realms (as is Vanaheim), Avalon is here, etc. Basically, this is the source of classical mythology. Unlike Faery, which is now somewhat distant and remote, these realms are actually coterminous with the World, and inhabitants of Asgard or Olympus, (or even the darker realms like Tartarus and Hades) are not completely infrequent travelers in the World, although when they do arrive, they tend to be monstrous and cause nothing but trouble for the locals.
- Underworld: As you might imagine, the Underworld is a vast underground realm. Whatever surface it connects to is completely unknown, although occasionally walking through caves in the World, or even more likely, places like Tartarus or other Old Ones Realms that are underground, will connect you to the Underworld. I haven't done a lot of work on this one yet; I imagine that it will borrow from all sorts of similar concepts as seen in fiction and gaming, from Lovecraft's Dream-Quest, the hollow worlds of Pellucidar and Journey to the Center of the Earth, the home of Wells' morlocks, and of course, D&D's own Underdark (or Paizo's Pathfinder equivalent, the Darklands.)
- Shadow: A dark realm, home of all kinds of creatures of darkness, including the Undead, presumably (certainly Shadow has lots of undead crawling about it now.) This will have all kinds of similarities to the Plane of Shadow from D&D, the Upside-down from Stranger Things, and any other perpetually dark, shadowy alternate dimensions.
- Jozgorath: A vast watery world; a gigantic sea. Much of the action takes place with aquatic life that lives in the water full-time, but there are also many sailors and others who ply the surface of the water. Where it freezes in colder parts, it is also the home of the ettins, or jotuns as they are called by the Vikings; large creatures that sometimes, in their most powerful form, are able to manipulate elemental energy and are creatures of frost or storm or lightning. Although called Jozgorath by the natives of the World, because it was known to them from long ago, the Colonists often call it either Jotunheim, or the English equivalent, Ettinhome, but more properly, that corresponds only to the portion of this realm where the ocean is frozen solid and the ettins hail from originally.
- Daemon Realms: Much as the Old Ones Realms are a patchwork of various realms ruled by various Old Ones, or what the old pagan gods are now known as, the Daemon Realms are also a patchwork of many realms, ruled by Daemon Lords and their servitors. Despite it's slightly more distant connections to the World, the daemons have taken a strong interest in mortals and vice versa, and a great deal of contact has been sought out by both. Many daemons have traversed the Shadow realm or Jozgorath making those realms even more dangerous than they otherwise would be, although powerful cosmological structure of unknown and poorly understood nature make their entry into the World itself difficult and limited. Exploratory parties of daemons are often sent on errands from their masters to find another route, much like the mythical Northwest Passage, although there is no guarantee that any such other route even exists, of course.
- Abominatus: This is not a part of creation, and it's connections to it are often tenuous and fickle. This is good, because the beings that live here are so alien, so hostile, and so horrifying, that they represent an existential threat to all of creation. Few of them have managed to leak through, but occasionally one of the smaller, weaker and sneakier ones does, which is the source of the specifically Lovecraftian monsters in the monster list.
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