Manual of the Planes (EFX, Realms Traveler)

I’m often a creature of strange habits. The very first flight I ever remember doing, as a kid, my dad recommended when the drink service came by that I get a ginger ale. I don’t remember ever having ginger ale before that flight, and in my mind, ever since, ginger ale and airplanes always go together. I do also drink ginger ale frequently on other occasions, but I also always get a ginger ale on my flights. While not my first international trip, by any means, my very first international business trip, to Germany, was right after I had recently purchased the 3e Manual of the Planes. I still almost always bring that with me on business trips. Knowing that I had an upcoming business trip meant that I dug the book out and started reading it. I’m actually traveling to Texas and Mexico to visit suppliers in the border towns next week. It’s possible that I’ll finish reading Manual of the Planes before I take that trip, but not likely, since my in-laws are coming in to town to visit on Wednesday, and I probably won’t read much after that. I suppose on the off-chance that I do finish the book before I go, or if it looks like I’ll finish the book early on in the trip and need something to read in the evenings later in the week before I get home, I’ll also grab my Paizo books The Great Beyond (the little Paizo Manual of the Planes) and Distant Worlds (the Paizo Leigh Brackett space opera but turned to fantasy) books. I’ll probably want to read them both afterwards anyway. The only other one that I’m missing from this same kind of feel from my collection is Beyond Countless Doorways, but I only have that on pdf (I think. Maybe I actually printed it out and put it in a binder years ago. That might be worth checking on, if I can get to the box in my garage where it’s probably located…) In any case, the two Paizo books in particular will feel like an interesting epilogue or alternative to Manual of the Planes. I just looked up the publication date; September 2001! I’m pretty sure I took that trip to Germany in October, or possibly November. Twenty-three years ago! That’s crazy to think about now. I also read the 4e Manual of the Planes, on Scribd or from the library or something (can’t remember now) several years ago, but I don’t actually have that book; I just read it. In many ways, I think 4e made planar adventuring more accessible and make more sense; but it’s hardly necessary since I’m just cherry-picking elements out of the 3e version anyway, not exactly integrating the actual Great Wheel concept.

A forest in DFX's Shadow Realm. Yeah, Mortal Kom at did it first... 

It’s interesting that I really like Manual of the Planes as much as I do. When I first got it, it was still a relatively new book to the 3e canon. Of course, it was a remake of a book with the same title from 1e, but I’d already dropped out of playing AD&D, or even any D&D at all by the time it came out, so I wasn’t familiar with the Great Wheel except for seeing it referenced quite briefly in the 1e DMG. I found it fascinating enough that I went to DriveThruRPG, or whatever equivalent was out back in 2001-2 or so and bought pdfs of the 2e Planescape boxed set, and maybe one or two other Planescape products. I remain to this day fascinated with the concept of dimensional travel in a D&D-like milieu, and have toyed around with my Realms Traveler idea since at least 2013, although I’d been noodling with ideas along similar lines for years prior to that. I never did much with it other than set it up as a premise; a kind of combination of the M.Y.T.H. Adventures series by Robert Asprin and the old Sliders TV show from the 90s, or Quantum Leap from the latest 80s and 90s… or even from Gene Roddenberry’s possibly apocryphal sales pitch of the original Star Trek series as “Wagon Train to the Stars” modified to “Wagon Train to the Planes.” Add to that some actual Marvel cosmic stuff, the Kree-Skrull War, or Annihilation, or all that Dan Abnett stuff with the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Nova Corps and the Starjammers and Inhumans. If I’m often mocking D&D for being fantasy superheroes, this stuff leans deliberately into the superhero vibe instead of stepping away from it.

You’d think that something like this wouldn’t be my cup of tea at all, since I regularly profess to prefer fantasy that is much more grounded, “realistic” or at least verisimilitudinistic, and darker in nature. I frequently kind of sort of deride default D&D for being too much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe in tone, feel, mood and general aesthetic generally, while I prefer one that’s more fantasy setting but tone, mood, feel and general aesthetic from X-Files, Supernatural, James Bond, westerns, and the Godfather. Realms Traveler, on the other hand, if I ever got around to running it, sounds more like the Disney+ show Loki than it does Supernatural or the X-files. And yet, as an alternative to my darker fantasy, this is actually exactly up my alley. So much so, that I’m wondering if my just recently kick-off Elemental Fantasy X would be better off as just being Realms Traveler after all; I don’t know that I have any need for an Eberron/Heroes3-like setting to place these same themes, races and whatnot in when I might be able to do what I really want a little better by reviving Realms Traveler instead. Maybe instead of being connected geographically on the map that I drew (which admittedly, I do kind of like, but still. It’s just a quick drawing; I can change my mind there) the various realms in EFX could be differing planes or dimensions of existence. 

Or, perhaps, the EFX continent is the bridge that connects all of these realms, and the realms in EFX are areas where the planar conjunction, such as it is, bleeds planar traits into the EFX world, but you can also walk from those countries deeper into the alternative planes that are away from the “normal” fantasy world. Holy cow, I thought of this right as I typed it, and I think it’s the solution! EFX is now kinda sorta Sigil and the Outlands to my alternative planar cosmology. But it’s still a nice, big, expansive “home base” modest continent (about the size of the Continental US or Australia, you may possibly recall) so everything doesn’t have to be all weird and foreign all the time. 

What I do still need to do is figure out how to modify the system to accommodate this super-heroic paradigm while still being more rules-lite and non-tedious, which is what 3e, 4e and 5e have always been. And then I need to figure out what planes each of the EFX nations connect to. Anywhere that the “planar” races (which in this paradigm includes even elves and dwarves) are “native” to must have a planar connection, because that’s what created the planar races, either by magically modifying some of the human inhabitants who were already there, or because they poured through from the planar connection. I’ll worry about that fluff stuff in another post, but let me noodle real quick with system issues; I actually will probably undo some of my anti-D&Ding of the system; have regular hit dice, maybe, and change the magic system to be much less punitive to cast spells, add more spells, etc. I might go back to having a bunch of classes again, or at least greatly expand the list of available feats so that the a la carte build your own class options are much more expansive. (I actually prefer the latter option. I’m kind of thinking that I’m about done with classes in DFX/EFX.)

But... I guess I'm now officially combining the Realms Traveler idea, which never had much development anyway, and EFX. I just need to figure out which tag I'll use for it, and how much of the actual planar traveling I'd be doing in any putative EFX/RT campaigns.

A city in Kharnimrion, Blackquarter, which fades subtly into the Plane of Shadow, or Shadowfell as it was later called. Or whatever I end up calling my version of it, which I'll borrow pretty much as is, because it's one of my favorite of the planes from D&D.

But before I work on any of those campaigns, I need to sit back down and finish the Cult of Undeath campaign that I've started, but not touched in a couple of months or so. I should be able to whip that up pretty quick if I didn't always have people coming and going from our house, and a bazillion things to read.