Travel and MoP (and Great Beyond, Distant Worlds)

https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2024/09/1-de-octubre-nuevo-dia-de-descanso-obligatorio

Doing business with Third World countries is obligatory, because all corporate overlords care more about skimming a few more cents of profit from the activity for the shareholders (including executive salaries and bonuses, most especially) than they do about the long-term health of their customer base, their communities, or even their own organization, which ultimately they tend to find disposable. If a corporation is no longer able to provide earnings for shareholders, it's discarded and the investment is moved to someone who does. Truly, corporate America is more like ravening plagues of locusts than the responsible capitalism that we're promised in our economics classes that describe the theory.

But to that point, we have to do business with Mexico. I was scheduled to go to Mexico next week, to visit one supplier in Ciudad Juarez, across the river from El Paso, TX on Tuesday, and then another one in Ciudad Acuña, across that same border from Del Rio, TX. This meant that I was going to travel by air on Monday, be there Monday night, have a (relatively) leisurely 6 to 6½ drive across quiet country roads in west Texas on Wednesday. Maybe a little longer, because I'd stop for a leisurely lunch in Fort Davis, which wasn't too far out of my way, and do a little site-seeing in the Davis Mountains, which I haven't seen in 15-16 years or so, and then arrive in Del Rio with plenty of time. Both evenings, it'd be easy for me to spend a couple of hours or so in the hotel reading my Manual of the Planes, or whatever other books I brought with me. As noted in my last post, I have an odd habit of bringing Manual of the Planes with me on business trips, but I'm not coincidentally re-reading it right now and utilizing some of its material for setting development; especially for EFX/Realms Traveler, but maybe even somewhat for DFX here and there too. 

However, as the link above notes, Mexico is not a super predictable place. I had already made these travel plans when the government decided that October 1st is going to be a mandatory day off for all workers, with only about a week's worth of notice. Now, I will either 1) stay home until Wednesday, and just see the second supplier, without going to El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, Fort Davis or any of that at all, or 2) fly into El Paso on Tuesday instead of Monday, see the facility in Juarez much more quickly just in the morning of Wednesday, and then have a much less leisurely drive across Texas... although I'll still probably get a late lunch or early dinner in Fort Davis, and hopefully see the Davis Mountains long before it's dark, and then get into Del Rio at or around dark thirty. It's a six and a half hour drive from El Paso to Del Rio; about fifteen minutes out of my way to stop at Fort Davis, but of course, I'll need to get gas, I'll need to eat lunch/dinner, and I can't stand going out to the west and not seeing something. Seminole Canyon State Park a little outside Del Rio and on the way is probably going to be out of the question; even if it's not dark, it'll be closed. Luckily, I'll probably get back to Del Rio again for other business, but the drive from El Paso to was an unusual if not unique opportunity. I'm quite disappointed; I can still squeeze most of what I want out of the trip, including the fun stuff for me during the traveling, but it won't be as relaxed or leisurely, and I won't have as much free time to read in the evenings either. 

And then, on Thursday, I drive from Del Rio to San Antonio, see my sister briefly, and take off the next morning to come home.

That's a whole lot of personal detail, but it may well mean that I'll read less. On the other hand, I was initially annoyed in the first place because my work trip is the same week that my wife will be out of town. When I'm no longer traveling, maybe I'll be reading more rather than less. She'll also be gone over the weekend, and although I do have some things I need to do over the weekend, I can still find, I think, lots of time to read or do other things in between doing those things.

Other than reading some old D&D books that I've already read and have owned for years (but which I'm really enjoying rediscovering, and they're still in Very Good or even Like New condition, because I'm always careful with my books), I also want to spend some time in the next couple of weeks wrapping up the Cult of Undeath fronts, and tying that whole 5x5 up before Halloween. That would be an appropriate Halloween activity to finish a 5x5 Front called Cult of Undeath, I think. And I want to create a new batch of iconics. The ones that I created previously ended up getting kind of coopted either into samples for the fronts, potential novel characters, or contacts. I now have a bunch of new races, and I'd like to turn those into more iconics.

Then, in November and December, I'd like to modify the DFX rules to have an EFX variant, and get rolling on my Solo Shadows Over Garenport stuff. Pretty ambitious, but I think that if I don't have some ambitious goals, I end up just frittering away my free time, and honestly, that kind of sucks.

Captain Borus, friendly and helpful Garenport NPC 

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. 

RT 1: Set-up

An important conceit of the REALMS TRAVELER setting is that it can work like a sandbox in many ways, by borrowing elements from a lot of other sources.  Needless to say, I'm only going to develop a bit of the setting, and I'm going to concentrate on a fairly linear path from point A to point B.  That's not the only path from point A to B; just the most direct.  You can choose to go many ways.  But in order to do so, as a GM, you'll either have to make up a bunch of stuff, or borrow a bunch of stuff.

I anticipate that descriptions of realms will be much like the descriptions of planes (or at least a single layer of a plane) in books like Manual of the Planes for instance (3rd edition version.  I don't know much about the AD&D version of the book.)  That is; they may be hypothetically infinite, but in terms of described areas, they are geographically quite limited and circumscribed.  There may be up to about half a dozen locations, described in a paragraph or two each.  A few general characteristics of the realm.  What kinds of inhabitants you can expect to interact with and how.  In all, I don't imagine that these realm descriptions will amount to more than about two to four pages worth of text, total.

Then, I'll focus on what, specifically, I expect the PCs to need to do in realm.  What they need to do to move through it and on to the next.  What they need to do in the meantime to either earn their passage, or kill time until they can leave, or whatever the case may be.

Remember; I consider this to be a fairly "On the Road" type of adventure.  Nobody goes to a new realm to set up shop permanently.  No single realm is the campaign setting; rather--the entire cosmology is the setting, and the point is to sample many realms while moving from one to the other.  Like episodic TV shows that featured moving protagonists--Wagon Train, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica (the old one), etc.   Or more accurately, Sliders is the model for which this will work.

I've got a partial list of realms that I will use.  These are largely either planes from other sources (or more accurately, layers of planes from other sources) or other similar entities (such as planets in the Pathfinder solar system.)  Most of them can be used more or less as is, but minor adjustments to fit them into the context of a "River of Worlds" type cosmology might be necessary.  This is not meant to be exhaustive.

Realms borrowed from Manual of the Planes

• The Plane of Shadow
• The Ethereal Plane (blended with some elements of the Astral in the Deep Ethereal to form the Ethereal Sea)
• Lunia (first layer of Celestia)
• Ocanthus (bottom layer of Acheron)

Realms borrowed from Beyond Countless Doorways

• The Underland (also utilizing material from the Darklands book
• Avidarel (the dead void)
• Carrigmoor (post-apocapytic dome-city)
• Faraenyl (season based quartiles; fey and elf dominated.  With some modification of my own.)
• Lizard Kingdoms (fewer unique critters.  No bugs.)
• Curnorost (angelic tomb world)

Realms borrowed from Distant Worlds

• Akiton (maybe blended with Mars d20 and plain ole Barsoom)
• Eox
• Verces

Realms borrowed from Fiendish Codex 1

• Gaping Maw (Demogorgon's Realm)
• Thanatos (Orcus' Realm)
• Androdynne (eladrin vs. demon war)
• The Demonweb (Llolth's realm)
• Yeenoghu's Realm (unimaginitively named, yeah.)

Realms borrowed from Fiendish Codex II

• Avernus (rubble-choked battlefield)
• Minauros (polluted swamp, with Jangling Hiter hanging above)
• Stygia (icey place.  Combine with other icey plane ideas if needed)
• Nessus ("bottom" of Hell)

Realms borrowed from other sources

• Shadowsea (Dragon Magazine article on Dagon)
• Hollowfaust (city sourcebook from Scarred Lands of the same name)
• City of Brass (original concept is from 1,001 Arabian Nights, but I've got options on D&D sources)

Realms of my own invention

• Demons in the Mist setting
• Ape Kingdoms
• Leng (although, yeah--borrowing lots of ideas from Lovecraft here)
• The City - the entire realm is a vast city
• Shattered World - floating worldlets in a vast atmospheric sea and flying ships
• Nephilos - realm ruled by fallen angels

I still don't know what realm I will use to start the game, but I want one that's suitably generic and suitably small in scope.  Maybe I'll trawl through my old campaign notes for some small little duchy or province or something.  All of the realms above, even those borrowed from another source, are subject to modification, occasionally intensely, to make them better fit my needs.

All realms go into and out of conjunction with other Realms.  Ideally, I'd like to have several options for PCs to pick from when looking to leave a Realm, but I'm not sure now much of that I'll do--if options are needed without additional preparation, well, that's when borrowing something already written goes into play.  However, without doubt, the first realm that the PCs have to travel too (after leaving their home realm) will be the only realm in conjunction at the time that they wish to leave, so they'll be bottlenecked through it whether they wish to be or no.

Some of the planes that have been adapted into Realms for my game are heavily influenced by the alignment based Great Wheel cosmology from whence they originally came.  There is no such thing in my setting as alignment--or, if there is, it'll be mostly marginalized to importance, and most creatures will read as "unaligned" by anyone who wishes to check.  Yeah, yeah--this is more of a 4e concept, but it's my one concession to alignment at all.  I think 4e should have gone all the way and chucked alignment, but I'm OK with a toothless version of alignment.  If a realm is considered a Heaven (like Lunia) or a Hell (like Nessus or Thanatos) that's because of the nature of the place and its inhabitants, not because of its "alignment."

Similarly, losing this focus on alignment frees me up to ignore a lot of weirdness in D&D monster listings.  What, really, is the difference between a devil and a demon in D&D?  How about between them and other hostile outsiders like oni (from Oriental Adventures) or demodands, or efreeti or slaadi?  Nothing, really--except the bizarre categorization of alignment and a handful of minor subtype abilities.  This means that I can have much more "cosmopolitan" Heavens and Hells than D&D offers.  Angels and ghaeles, or devils and demons, have little reason to consort in D&D, but much moreso to do so in my setting.  Don't make assumptions based on what you think you know from D&D.  It may not be valid here.

Announcing Realms Traveler

My Myths Revisited series has stalled a bit. I was on the verge of tackling the Norse myths, after updating the Greek myth cycle, but I realized that the whole thing would quickly get repetitive. In fact, I realized that I didn’t really have much to say about any of that other than the high concept. It probably never was deserving of a “series” at all; it probably was only ever a post or two worth of content. So, although I may (of course) return to the Myths Revisited series as a form of setting development, I also may not. And I don’t feel regretful about it; I think that that series never had very many places to go anyway.

Rather, I have another bit of setting development I’m interested in doing, alongside of regular DARK•HERITAGE updates. This time, however, I have a very specific plan. In fact, when I’m done, the entire thing will be a fairly detailed outline of an entire campaign that can be run, not unlike a Paizo Adventure Path or something like that. Except that I’m not filling in any stats or too many details; rather, this is in outline form and could be adapted to any D&D-like game system.

Also, in a move that is not my normal wont, this one is very specifically D&D, and meant to be from the get-go. Therefore, the rules to support it should probably be a variety of D&D. Although, of course, that’s a somewhat loose characterization these days. I would probably run this as either D&D 3.5 (either with the E6 tophat, or with slowed advancement so that it never got higher than 8-9th level at the most anyway) or standard m20. It could also be run with AD&D, 4e, D&D Next playtest, Pathfinder, Trailblazer, Labyrinth Lord, Sword & Wizardry, Microlite74, Old School Hack, or any other game that approximates, in a generic sense, the feel of playing D&D.

To start this off right, here’s the précis for this campaign or setting, which I shall call REALMS TRAVELER—both because it sounds vaguely like Blues Traveler, and because it has to do with hopping from one realm to another. I’ve been toying with this idea for some time, although I first called it somewhat tongue-in-cheek “Wagon Train to the Planes.” It’s the same idea. Borrowing the high concept from the old TV show Sliders, where a group has to travel from one world to another to reach a destination at the end of the show, much of the source material is going to be adapted from Manual of the Planes, Beyond Countless Doorways, and Distant Worlds—because those are source books that have a lot of exorealms in them (a term I’m coining to refer generically to worlds that are not the standard, basic campaign setting world itself.) I’m probably also both consciously and sometimes unconsciously going to be influenced by another great fantasy series that had to do with exorealms, the Myth Adventures series of books by Robert Asprin.

Basically, the premise of the game is that the PCs need to make their way from a city in one plane to a destination in another plane. To get there, they need to travel through a number of other planes on the way. While this seems kinda railroad, that’s only in comparison to the platonic ideal of a sandbox. After all, nobody really complains that they’re being “forced” to go through Dayton if they’re on their way from Detroit to Cincinnati, you just do it because, hey, it’s right there on the way on I-75. It’s up to the GM to make sure that the game doesn’t feel like a railroad by giving the players plenty of freeform stuff that they can do on their own in each realm.

For my purposes, a realm, or plane, is a smallish area. Sure, according to D&D cosmology, they’re infinite, but realistically, each one will provide about a “module’s” worth of adventuring locales, before you’re off to the next one. What’s to impel a group to continue moving? Hopefully the carrot of getting to the final goal is sufficient, but as in the Sliders show, I think there needs to be a time that the gates are open, and the rest of the time they are not, or some other reason that compels the PCs to stick around on the realm for a little while. This means that you don’t just get to “pass through” a realm, you actually have to spend enough time on it to “adventure” a bit.

Also; there’s an expectation or belief that “the Planes” (to which my realms are directly analogous) are for high level PCs only. This clearly isn’t the case here, where right from 1st level, the PCs are expected to hop through a gate and go somewhere else. This means that GMs will need to be a bit judicious in how they handle threats—as will players. Don’t pick a fight with a really big angel or demon if you come across one, because it’s probably not scaled for you to handle. As GM, don’t send the PCs to a realm that will drain hit points at a rate of 1d6 per round without giving them some kind of (at least temporary) protection to deal with it. In fact, finding the appropriate protection before they move on can be the entire purpose of adventuring in one realm, sometimes.

Needless to say, the Great Wheel cosmology does not exist here. I’m actually doing something more akin to the “bubbles” cosmology described in Manual of the Planes, or more explicitly described in Beyond Countless Doorways. Planes can be coterminous with several planes at once, but certainly not with all of them. This requires that one often has to travel through many realms to reach a destination on some other realm. Again; think of driving cross country from the East coast to the West coast. You have to pass through many states to reach your destination. This will be the same. Also, it’s expected that most people you come across is at least familiar with the notion of multiple realms. While visitors might be rare, they’ll never be completely unheard of, and in many cases, some realms will be major crossroads, with folks from all kinds of places wandering elbow to elbow.

When I come back to this, I’ll have a simple schematic for the “River of Worlds” plus some detail on the realm in which I intend to start this whole shebang.