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Planar Adventures / Building a Planar Campaign

Alternate Cosmologies

Source Planar Adventures pg. 86
The Pathfinder RPG assumes a cosmology centered on the Great Beyond, a concept that not only contextualizes the alignment system, the functionality of certain spells (such as etherealness and shadow walk), and the nature of the divine, but also helps to define the roles of every outsider in the game. However, the Great Beyond is far from the only possible model for a cosmology in your game. Presented below are several alternate cosmologies you might wish to explore for your own setting. Consider these examples as options and inspirations; as always, you are encouraged to alter the game world to fit your desires and expectations, as well as those held by your players.

Alignment-Free Cosmology

Source Planar Adventures pg. 86
The Great Beyond relies on the presumption of outsiders linked to alignment, but what happens if you remove alignments from the game completely? In this alternative cosmology, the various outsider races might represent not alignments but concepts. Archons represent justice, while angels serve as unique representatives of their divine patrons, agathions as mercy, azatas as freedom, inevitables as rules, proteans as change, devils as punishment, daemons as death, and demons as temptation to sin. You can delve even further, assigning (for example) each individual type of devil a different form of punishment. From such decisions, entire new planes suggest themselves—one for each race of outsider to call home. Regardless of the conceptual assignments used, it’s not likely that large amounts of flavor change heavily, but the mechanical framework requires adjustments in the absence of spells and abilities that rely solely upon alignment, such as those offering protection from evil or good or from chaos or law.

In an alignment-free cosmology, rivalries between outsiders would not be split upon the easy lines of alignment, and unusual alliances might be made. Daemons representing death by execution might collaborate with devils representing lawful punishment and archons devoted to justice. Even stranger alliances might form between outsiders associated with more narrow concepts, such as a type of protean devoted to creative architecture working alongside an axiomite devoted to city planning.

Without alignment to rely on, the gods in this cosmology play a more important role, rallying a multitude of outsiders to the concepts encompassed by their areas of concern and enabling campaigning based on each type of outsider’s role rather than its morality and ethics. Mortal souls still flow to the specific god the owner worshiped above others, but rather than alignment, the owner’s actions serve as the determining factor of her fate if she died without a specific faith. An honest farmer’s soul would migrate toward the realm of the inevitables, perhaps, since the farmer obeyed the laws of the land and dutifully provided for her family and society, whereas another farmer might go to the realm of devils because of his penchant in life for abusing his employees.

In such a world, spells that function based on alignment will work quite differently, or perhaps not at all. In most cases, this puts you in the position of having to make decisions on the spot as to whether detect evil would provide information, or whether or not a holy sword might hurt the creature that attempts to wield it. As a result, the players’ trust in you becomes far more important in an alignmentfree cosmology, since they must respect and trust that you are making decisions for the good of gameplay, not to be merely antagonistic or competitive.

Alternate Realities and Parallel Worlds

Source Planar Adventures pg. 87
The universe is a brilliant and multifaceted jewel, with each angle and cut offering a different reflection of existence. Many of the countless faces may look similar, but each is fundamentally different, containing slightly or significantly changed versions of reality. Each of these alternate realities fills a role vacated by the loss of other planes, follows different metaphysical rules, and has natives comprised of one or more specific outsider races. Alignment serves as a linking factor for outsider species but lacks the implications of a broader cosmic force with effects for mortal souls.

Archons might rule one version of reality and travel to others seeking to spread their creed of organized benevolence, guiding some worlds’ development, defending others from rival forces, and perhaps even conquering those impossible to redeem by subtler methods. Daemons could hail from a reality wherein they have already accomplished their goal of obliterating all mortal life. Now, from a cosmos lurching towards entropic heat death—the stars long ago consumed by ravenous daemon gluttons akin to malevolent black holes—daemons seek to spread outward to obliterate each life-form extant in adjacent facets of reality. Proteans, as beings of chaos, would swim freely between facets of the world, belonging to all and none at once, and defy the rules of the cosmos while remaining true to their nature.

Gods in this cosmology exist in their own alternate realities. Perhaps they are the living result of those worlds’ souls merging into singular beings, or, in a world where belief had the power to alter the fundamental structure of reality, gods could be born out of gestalt mortal belief. In other facets, outsiders and gods might hold no sway at all. Each instance of reality is, in effect, an opportunity for you to create entirely new settings for the players to explore. One intriguing possibility with this cosmology is that there could exist multiple incarnations of each character across multiple worlds. Thus, when a PC dies and is resurrected, the restored body is not so much brought back to life as it is pulled from another reality, so each time a character returns from death, she might change in strange and unexpected ways. This gives a player the opportunity to completely rebuild her character upon resurrection, explaining, for example, that the new incarnation was drawn from a world where the character trained not as a wizard but as a fighter.

Dualistic Cosmology

Source Planar Adventures pg. 87
Not every belief system contains a multitude of gods. Some involve only a pair of diametrically opposed divine rivals, both competing for worshipers’ souls to either reward or punish. In this model, a dualistic cosmology would consist of only two Outer Planes, one for each divine force. The precise nature of those planes would rely entirely upon the nature of the gods in question.

In one example, there is only a Heaven and Hell, with the mortals who lived a good life ascending to Heaven among the archons and the wicked descending to Hell to receive punishment at the hands of devils. The role of law and chaos is less relevant than that of good and evil in this setting, and any pair of the good and evil planes could stand in for Heaven and Hell. With one deity ruling each plane, the role of demigod becomes one of servitude, each demigod being an extension of the deity’s will. A third, intriguing category could exist in the form of demigods who adhere to neither side of this eternal conflict, introducing such a category could erode the draw of a dualistic cosmology.

Rather than good and evil, a dualistic system based on law and chaos might have a single plane of law and a single plane of chaos complete with a variety of lawful and chaotic outsiders. Depending on their actions and beliefs while alive, adherents of a deity of law might ascend to a lawful plane at the moment of their death, only to be punished for transgressions. By contrast, adherents of chaos might find themselves hurled into a realm that combines the whimsies of proteans alongside the destructive horrors of demons and the freedom-loving passions of the azatas. This dichotomy need not adhere to the concept of alignment at all; instead, its deities could embody other dualistic concepts. For example, a deity of day could vie against a deity of night, with both having positive and negative areas of concern in their portfolios. This system might have one divine power enthroned within the First World and its rival dwelling in the Shadow Plane. Life and death. Love and hate. Fire and water. The possibilities are boundless.

Extraterrestrial Planes

Source Planar Adventures pg. 88
Rather than arriving through portals from other planes, outsiders hail from the depths of space, their homes far-flung planets. These outsiders are diverse, strange alien races that are genuinely physical beings that originate from bizarre worlds. Archons manifest as a race of beings devoted to implementing their own vision of benevolent order and structure upon other similarly mortal worlds, while devils oppose their archon creators as a splinter group devoted to conquest—or they could be an entirely different race of aliens from another solar system that has long fought the archons. Proteans could be serpentine beasts that swim the depths of space, delighting in the chaos and anarchy of a cosmos that predated the formation of planets and other races. Demons might be a race of bloodthirsty, starfaring marauders that come from worlds that have been destroyed, while inevitables could be a robotic species devoted to ensuring the lawful progression of the cosmos as given to them by their long-absent original creators.

Souls in such a cosmology may hail not from the Positive Energy Plane but from a vast and distant cosmic phenomenon linked to the birth of the cosmos that still sheds souls into creation. Similar to the cycle of mortal souls in the Great Beyond, souls migrate from this point and filter out to a myriad of worlds around a multitude of stars. The role of the Negative Energy Plane might then be filled by vast black holes that churn at the fringe of the universe, with ghosts, ghouls, and other undead drawing their power from these immense, haunted stars.

Upon death, rather than migrating to the realms of gods or alignment-based planes to receive their final reward or punishment, souls would instead travel to the planet or solar system claimed by their god or roam elsewhere to join those beings who were most metaphysically associated with their actions and beliefs in life. A chaotic neutral woman with no religious beliefs might die only to reopen her eyes and find herself swimming through deep space, reborn as a protean amid a chorus of her kind. By contrast, a penitent man with deep belief in his goddess might die and awaken as a petitioner at her feet, staring up at a sky with alien stars—only to dwell physically there with her for eternity.

In this cosmology, the gods might simply be ultrapowerful aliens who rule planets or entire solar systems reserved for the souls of their followers, who remain protected from the dangers and terrors between the stars for the rest of their eternal existence. Faith in these entities that dwell in a physical location rather than an unreachable plane might prove less fervent, or their proximity could make devotion stronger, even allowing for commonplace divine contact— unless the gods united in forbidding it.

Mundane Cosmology

Source Planar Adventures pg. 88
What if there were no other planes at all, in any form whatsoever? What if the universe was all there was, with nothing beyond the prosaic existence of physical reality? No celestials, no fiends, no elementals, and no gods? In such a setting, life would be followed by death and the oblivion of nonexistence. What sort of world would exist in the absence of the celestial, infernal, and even the divine? Without the ever-present threat of divine justice and an eternal reward or punishment, what would such a world look like? Religion would most certainly still exist, but it would rely on pure faith rather than demonstrable divine intervention and direct contact with divine emissaries. Likewise, divine spellcasters would still exist, but their magic would be fueled solely by their internal beliefs (you may restrict choices to classes like clerics, who must select domains, or give players complete freedom as to which domains they wish to pursue for their own personal religions); they would no longer be direct servants of supernatural beings.

In such a setting, you would need to decide if resurrection is at all possible and whether there is any place in the setting for the undead. Both of these concepts presuppose something akin to a soul; what happens to a soul in a mundane cosmology? Are souls natural by-products of life, or is a soul some sort of stellar energy adrift in the cosmos? Maybe there is no such thing as a soul, and all who die become ghosts unless some other event transforms them into specific undead creatures. Where do these ghosts go? How many would remain behind to haunt the site of their death? Do ghosts simply remain invisible and unseen? Do they drift to the edge of the universe?

Would outsiders exist at all? Certainly not in the normal conceptualization. Outsiders in such a cosmology could represent mortal beliefs rather than being an intrinsic part of reality. Powerful spellcasters likely don’t summon them from somewhere else—such outsiders are instead created out of raw magical energy and infused with a specific alignment or characterizing belief. A wizard seeking bloody, destructive revenge might channel his power to create a balor and set the creature loose upon his enemies. A religious spellcaster might form an angel that embodies her beliefs, rather than believing in the creed of the angel’s divine patron, turning the standard paradigm on its head.

World Tree

Source Planar Adventures pg. 89
The Great Beyond has the River Styx as a planar pathway, whose twisting tributaries weave across the evil-aligned planes and, to a minor extent, beyond. What if there was only one way to travel between planes—not on the Styx, but via a singular transitory plane that touches all other planes known as the World Tree? The World Tree might exist on a Material Plane world, but its trunk extends upward into a sort of haze that connects to the Outer Planes, while its roots burrow unseen into the world below, tapping into the elemental and energy planes.

As the only route between the planes, the World Tree becomes a battleground unlike like any other. Armies of celestials, fiends, inevitables, and proteans seize terrain around the points where the tree’s branches and roots touch other realms in a vast and almost unfathomable war. Scorched-earth tactics abound; armies of demons march en masse to the gates of Heaven as long as they can manage to physically travel there. The Four Horsemen personally lead their armies down the tree toward the Material Plane, promising their daemons the chance to feast upon all mortal life with nothing but physical distance barring the way. Travel is hazardous, more often than not a question of passing through a war zone as noncombatants struggle to weave between the encamped armies.

What, though, if the World Tree hosted a native race—a species that spawned from the flesh of their great mother tree, perhaps existing in the strange overlapping area somewhere between plant and fey, with their own cities and their own societies that were devoted to protecting the World Tree and regulating travel upon it? Wars would still occur, of course, but with the only path of transit controlled by the outsider race that emerged from its very substance, the World Tree would be less of a war zone and more a neutral ground between the planes. Outsiders and even mortals could travel upon the tree’s branches and up and down its trunk—if their journeys were the will of the World Tree and its chosen servitors. Instead of transit aided by spells and magical components, travelers would offer tribute to the living goddess of the World Tree, hoping for an answer to their prayers in the form of either safe passage or escort.

Archives of Nethys