D&D General What role do the planes play in your games?

[RangerWickett]

I just wrapped a short campaign where the party was trying to find a secret armory on the other side of a portal to the land of the fey, because someone who dreamed inside that armory could create magical weapons and monsters out of their dreams.

But the campaign before that was just overland travel and local adventures with no weird planes stuff. And the one before that was Star Wars.

How often do you go to other planes in your games? Is it a one-off excursion, or is traveling between planes of recurring element? How do you think about planes and what makes going to another plane different than just going to another location on the same world?

Like, that armory could have just been a magical location. It didn't have to be in another plane. So why did I put it there, I wonder?

Anyway, please brag about cool stuff you've done in your games.

 

[Zardnaar]

Very little maybe a sidetrip for a magical dungeon.

 

[HJFudge]

I have used other dimensions, but never have I used the planes-as-written.

Other dimensions or planes of existence in my campaigns have always been, if I use them, either places the party gets cast off too and the adventure is 'how to get back' or I put a macguffin in one they have to go into to get the thingamajig from.

 

[Umbran]

It has been a couple of decades or more since I played or ran a D&D game that made significant use of any planes other than the Prime Material.

You know how people sometimes complain that elves are humans with pointy ears? And all the other PC races are just humans in funny costumes? That's the planes, for me. In order to make the planes viable for play for any period of time, in some sense the group needs them reduced to "the normal world in a funny suit" - either the alien nature of the place gets toned down, or the party gets kitted out with magics such that the plane, itself, isn't a big deal.

At which point, going to another plane is only going to another area of the world with different political factions and such. And I don't need to muck about with the planes to do that. And I don't need to take PCs to the planes to give them a weird physical environment for short periods of time - I can have a magically unique area in my game world do that.

So, I don't really see the point.

 

[jgsugden]

It changes throughout the campaign.

Levels 1 to 5 are almost always entirely on the PMP, with perhaps some jaunts to the Feywild, Ethereal or Shadowfell.

Levels 6 to 12 usually get the PCs off plane for short stints. They may go to the Cities of Iron, Brass and Gold to buy something, travel to the Ethereal to get to my version of Sigil, or go visit a mining operation in the Elemental Plane (I have one elemental plane with pockets of different types of elements).

Level 13+17 - Have Plane Shift, will travel. My world is a sandbox and there are a lot of extraplanar hooks, but there are also hooks for the PMP as well. It is up to them, but they usually get excited about something extraplanar. Assaulting a Gith City in the Astral, taking down the Dark Force controlling a plane in my Raveloft equivalent, Finding a Devil in the Hells to kill it forever... these are more interesting, it seems, than shaping empires on the mortal plane.

Levels 18 to 20 tend to be where the campaign long storyline questions get answered and we pull the PCs away from the sandbox and into a railroad. Almost all of the 'end of campaign' storylines I've run have a long climax that takes place across the planes. 3/4 of them end up in the Hells for the final moments.

 

[Blue]

Current campaign we have a Oath of the Watcher Paladin who's order of knights watch the great Netherportals, evidence of naturally occuring infernal portals that infernal gnolls are coming through at great cost and setting up more portals, and the party is currently on a mad and timeless rush through the feywild because they need to get from Here to There really quickly as their Child-Empress has been usurped, and portals to the feywild ae the only way. (Teleportation and other magics do not work across the oceans.) Really working on the alien-ness of both the people and the land itself of the Feywild.

Last completed campaign really had nothing using other material planes, though it had more exploration of the Underworld (underdark-esqe) and Overworld.

Before that I ran multiple campaigns in a world with a homebre cosmology that came up a lot. Basically, the material planes were bubbles that floated independantly in each of the four elemental planes. (Think you have an X, Y, and Z for where you are in the plane of water, an A, B and C for where you are in the plane of fire, etc.) Each with their own vectors of movement, currents, etc. All elements in the material planes were therefore "close" to their elemental forms as well. When material planes got close, it was possible to move between them through that element in the material planes. The material plane the campaign was centered around had particularly thin walls from the elements making it easier to reach, and over the ages various gods had led their sentient followers hear to escape apocalypse, geneocide, etc. So there were distinct orc cultures that originate on different planes, etc. The only original sentient inhabitants of this plane was underdark halflings.

There was also a dream realm and a shadow realm that wrapped the material plane. While it was well before (these started when 3.0 was first published - not all the core books were out when we did session 0), the Upside Down from Stranger Things is a good analog.

The elven Courts were special material planes. They were limited demiplanes, but the elves had a lot more control over where they went and would intentionally visit various material planes. So a Court might intersect with a material plane for a decade or century and eventually move on, and another Court might come at another time.

There were no dedicated god-realms, but mortal could ascend and that was actually a big theme in the second campaign, as the intermediary step was a fisher-king like "the king is the land, the land is the king" and one of the PCs trying to unite all of the warring giants and humans and such to take those first steps.

 

[DammitVictor]

I try to avoid using them at all, especially in my favorite D&D settings-- Spelljammer and Dark Sun-- to the extent I warn players that they're less accessible and they might not work the way players expect, and really, guys, the campaign's over here... and you've already probably guessed how I feel about that. I don't like the D&D Multiverse, I don't like every D&D setting having a shared cosmology, and I don't like having all of the settings that are already the most alike constantly crossing over.

In my own settings... the one that's most like a D&D setting only has Worlds (primes with similar laws of magic/physics) and the Warp Zones which individually function as different mixtures of the Astral and the Far Realm. My wuxia setting, fittingly, has about a billion different Heavens and Hells and a bunch of undefined miscellaneous outworlds; these might individually be named, but they will never be categorized. My space opera has what humans call "Hell", functioning as both the Nine Hells and the Abyss and the Far Realm; there's theoretically a Heaven where the angels come from, but the angels don't want us to find it and the devils hate us more than they hate the angels at this point.

 

[SirMoogle]

Currently in a Tomb of Annihilation campaign, so no plane shenanigans. My DM's next campaign is supposed to deal with eldritch artifacts which may or may not create portals to other planes in Eberron, so who knows if us PCs will be flung into Syrania.

 

[FireLance]

The evil-aligned planes and the Shadowfell/Plane of Shadow are now my go-to source for creatures that have Bad Plans for the PCs' village/country/world/plane and which the PCs can fight without worrying if they are perpetuating racist tropes.

 

[Charlaquin]

I use the planes a fair bit, but I also interpret them very differently than what’s canon. My setting used a variation on the World Axis cosmology - the World exists in the balance between the tumult of the Primordial Chaos and the stasis of the Astral Sea. It’s very rare that the PCs will actually travel to these places, but their influences can be felt strongly throughout the World.

Parallel to the World is Faerie, which is a border plane between the Material plane and the planes of Fire, Earth, Water, Air, and Aether. These elemental planes arent exactly places, as much as they are states of being or “frequencies” within Faerie, accessed by attuning one’s self sympathetically to the appropriate element. Crossings to Faerie are more commonplace the further you get from civilization, to the point that one can easily end up wandering into Faerie by accident, and the line between “the Wild” and “Faerie” is pretty subjective.

Beneath the surface of the World is the Underworld, though its status as a distinct plane is highly debatable (and indeed, hotly debated by scholars in-universe). Similarly to how one can end up crossing into Faerie entirely by accident when venturing far from civilization, one can end up in the Underworld by delving too greedily and too deep. And the farther down you go, the less like the World above your surroundings become. So one could reasonably surmise that the Underworld and Faerie are both parts of a single Otherworld. Indeed, one could make similar arguments about all of the elemental planes these worlds connect to. The Otherworld plays a role in most of my campaigns. Most dungeons are at least partially in the Underworld, and wilderness exploration often carries a risk of ending up in Faerie.

Additionally, there’s the Abyss. Its precise place in the cosmos is not well understood, but the strongest theories draw parallels between the Abyss and the Primordial Chaos - the latter seems to exist at the farthest reaches of the elemental planes, and the former occupies a similar space in the deepest recesses of the Underworld (and maybe also the ocean...? Kos, or some say Kosm... do you hear our prayers?) It’s not common for PCs to visit the Abyss, but some especially deep megadungeons do connect to it.

Finally, there’s the Far Realm. It exists beyond the stars - in fact, many believe the stars are holes in the cosmos, portals to this other place. It is not accessible from the World by any known means, though it is theorized that if one could build a vessel capable of sailing the Astral Sea far enough to reach the distant stars, one might be able to sail through one. For the most part though, the Far Realm’s influence is only felt by way of its Aberrant incursions.