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GameMastery Guide / Creating a World / The Planes

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.

Archives of Nethys

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Location and Travel