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GameMastery Guide / Creating a World / The Planes

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.