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The Planes

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 166
Perhaps the most prominent question in any society is that of what happens to us when we die. In a roleplaying game featuring larger-than-life heroes, this is a practical as well as philosophical consideration, for many spells are capable of returning the dead to life, and more than one group of daring PCs has followed the path of Orpheus and ventured into the underworld to reclaim a fallen comrade. Fantasy RPGs have long been attached to the idea of the multiverse, the concept that the world in which the players reside is merely one (and often the most mundane) of a number of different planes of existence. Many real-world religions follow the same principle to a lesser extent, often viewing death as the natural transition from one plane to the next. When designing your world, it’s important to give thought to the worlds that lie beyond, and how souls and the various cycles of existence play into them.

The Purpose of Planes

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 166
If you’re pouring all your efforts into developing a vibrant, self-contained world for your campaign setting, why should you bother introducing planes at all? The simplest answer is that many rules systems expect you to. Monsters like devils and angels—and in fact, all creatures of the “outsider” type in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game—are presumed to stem from different planes than the PCs, often ones tied to specific alignments. In addition, it can be difficult to challenge high-level PCs within the boundaries of the same world that housed their low-level adventures. By having your players travel to other planes, you gain the opportunity to reinvent the natural laws of the setting and introduce both creatures and characters powerful enough to keep the PCs on their toes. Most importantly, however, planes fill out your world and help to answer the biggest of spiritual questions.

Planar Models

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 166
The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game presumes a multiverse in which each alignment has its own plane. After death, individual souls travel via disparate means to the plane that most closely matches their alignment, or else the domain of the primary god they worshiped in life. Within this model there’s room for great variety—every plane is yours to design as you will, and the organizational structure might be anything from concentric shells like nesting dolls to a great wheel or islands floating in an astral sea. Yet the alignment system is far from the only means of dealing with the afterlife. Below are a few other models drawn from real-world beliefs. (Note that each of these deals in some way with the progression of souls—for information on alternate dimensions and other secular diversions from reality, see Parallel Worlds on pages 168–169.)

Heaven and Hell: Many religions opt for a two-party moralistic system, with saved or good-aligned souls going to Heaven and all others condemned to Hell, which in an RPG comes with the added bonus of explaining both good and evil outsiders. Yet several questions arise in such a situation: does your world have a Purgatory, in which those in-between or not-yet-judged souls wait out eternity? Where do neutral outsiders live? Do multiple deities exist in such a situation, or is there simply a single god (and perhaps that god’s adversary)? Traditional visions of Heaven and Hell vary by culture, with Heaven anything from stately cities and Valhalla-style feast halls to battlefields and untouched wilderness, and Hell ranging from a burning pit of torments to the lonely absence of creation.

Underworld: Perhaps you don’t want to bother with sorting the good from the bad, and all souls travel to the same underworld to while away eternity. For many cultures, this kingdom of the dead exists deep underground, often ruled over by stern but honorable gods charged with keeping the living and the dead apart. Sometimes the corralling of dead souls is the underworld’s sole purpose, while in other legends, such as those of the Egyptian Duat, this goal is secondary to another, like providing the tunnels through which the sun rolls during its journey from west to east each night. As such a realm likely serves as the destination of both the wicked and the just, the conditions often prove neutral or little different from those in the world of the living, though such might vary wildly.

Distant Worlds: In some belief systems, a soul freed from the body by death is transported to a realm on another planet rather than a different plane, sometimes in its original form, in others reincarnated.

Elemental: The four elements of earth, fire, air, and water play a significant role in many cosmologies. Rather than merely harnessing energy, do spellcasters calling upon the elements in your world actually bind beings and spirits from elemental planes of existence? And if so, do their own souls break down into those same fundamental elements when they die?

Structure: Some planar systems are held together by a single object or structure, such as a world-tree whose branches and roots connect and support a number of different planes, or a vast mountain with each plane of existence representing a terrace along its sides. Variations on this theme are endless, and when constructing such a system, be sure to note whether the connections are visible to outsiders—does a traveler between planes literally climb the mountain’s slopes or walk the tree’s branches?

Order and Chaos: Just as Heaven and Hell divide the planes along one axis, order and chaos divide them along another. Perhaps your universe rejects moralism in favor of organization versus entropy. In this case, consider whether your PCs’ native plane is the epitome of order and everything beyond it is the howling dark, or if your world instead follows in the footsteps of Scandinavian myth and exists at the balancing point between the two extremes, the line at which the generative forces of light and order meet chaos and crystallize into a world.

Deific Realms: Rather than instituting any overarching organizational principle, it’s entirely reasonable to say that every god in your world possesses its own realm, to which it draws the souls of petitioners after their deaths. This realm may be merely a manifestation of the god’s will, a tiny island of creation the deity has claimed as its own, a purely metaphorical place representing a merging with the god’s essence, or whatever else strikes your fancy.

None: Who says you need an afterlife, or alternate realities? While it requires more footwork to explain how some creatures and magic work in the absence of the presumed planar model (and perhaps the absence of gods as a whole), there’s no reason you can’t build your setting to focus exclusively on a single world. Players may gain an entirely new and more harrowing experience if they learn that death is final and that not even magic can return the dead to life.

Sample Cosmological Shapes

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 167
The overarching structure by which individual planes are connected to each other can take any form. Below are merely a few suggestions.

Nested spheres or shells, with each plane a new onionlike layer.
A great wheel with planes linked to form the rim or emerging from the central hub of the Material Plane like spokes.
A mobius strip connecting all the planes, similar to the great wheel, save that the mobius strip may be twisted to bring distant planes closer together.
A world-tree whose roots and branches provide conduits between worlds.
Islands in an ocean of chaos, or mountaintops poking above the clouds, beneath which lies the underworld.
A living creature, with the planes forming its limbs or carried on its back.

Location and Travel

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 167
Once you’ve decided what sorts of planes your setting needs—whether a thousand tiny fiefdoms, two massive planes where souls roam before birth and after death, or something else entirely—it’s time to address some basic logistical factors likely to come in handy if your PCs ever decide to visit. Start with the spatial: Is each plane infinite, and if so, how does even a god handle organization, communication, and travel when there’s literally always someone else just over the horizon? If not, what’s beyond the plane’s horizon (and beyond that, and beyond that...)?

Equally important is the question of how the planes are arranged and connected. Does Heaven share a border with Hell, a constantly shifting battlefield of impaled devils and dying angels? Are they coterminus, with any point as close as any other for those with sufficient magical power, or separated by unimaginable gulfs of nothingness? Do some planes connect with others to form vast patterns, and if so, can you walk from one to the other, fly up into heaven, or dig a tunnel to the underworld? Travel is by far the most crucial consideration in constructing a cosmology, as it’s the only way your players will ever interact with your creations. Assuming mundane means are insufficient to access the planes—that it’s not merely a challenge of building a new Tower of Babel or finding the right cave entrance—the most common methods are through planeshifting spells, magical portals, and strange and deadly interstitial realms and passages. You should feel free to make certain planes off-limits or reachable only through other planes, forcing your players into a mind-bending cosmological walkabout—for if ever there were a place for a GM to blatantly play god, this is it.

Other Considerations

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 167
One of the biggest questions that comes up in creating planes of super-powerful (and in some cases deific) entities is why those beings don’t already control the players’ comparatively weak homeworld. Is it that planeshifting is forbidden, or too difficult for the creatures to attempt it on their own, or simply that it’s not worth the effort? Certainly some of the gods have managed to exert themselves on the Material Plane, and perhaps it’s these same gods that keep the borders from becoming too porous. Regardless, it also brings up the issue of the gods—do they reside on particular planes, and can you visit their shining cities in person? Or do they exist here and there, as ideas or manifestations, omnipotent but unconcerned with creating a physical home? Do they all reside in the company of their peers, looking down like the Greek pantheon at plots they’ve set in motion, or do they seek solitude in the farthest reaches of their chosen plane, bored with the constant streams of petitioners seeking their favor? For that matter, did the gods create the planes, or did some mysterious force beyond even them set the current celestial order in motion? Dealing with the infinite and omnipotent always begets such questions, yet it’s within these very tangles of cause and effect that a GM can unleash the most creativity.