Li Shenron
Legend
It is always part of my campaigns eventually, but I try not to drop it too soon, typically I prefer that planar travelling enters the story after the characters have adventured in the core world for a while. It's been a long time since I ran a game at high level enough however. Generally speaking I prefer expeditions to other planes rather than spending long times there, because this makes it easier to have the quest "stand out" from the rest without running too easily into inconsistencies.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.
The challenge is to make other worlds different enough. I don't think I am very good at that, but at least I try. Mostly I try to mess up with the laws of physics, logic or life a little bit. It doesn't necessary take that much, some basic ideas already work for me, such as altering gravity or the speed of time. For example, we've had some short quests in the plane of Air and Water: naturally, the PCs can't do much in Air without specific flight abilities or spells, or breathing in Water, but even having those available to the PCs doesn't trivialize the quest, it already feels strikingly different when you have to think of everything in 3D and there is no "up" and "down" and I think one of our players almost got seasick
The afterlife always offers good quests opportunities even at moderately low levels, you can easily find ideas in classic literature, but to me it is important to once again emphasize how un-earthly these places are. First of all I want to avoid any normalizing/trivializing things such as having communities of mortals "living" in the afterlife (this is a pet peeve of mine, I have always found it a huge dealbreaker). Then I make sure to tell the players that the afterlife doesn't follow the same rules... for example, hint at the possibility that if you are still alive and die in the afterlife, then you can't be resurrected by any means and have to stay there, or you are destroyed forever like it happens to devils when "killed" in hell. It doesn't even have to be true, as hopefully the PCs won't die.
Other planes which I liked using because they already work in wacky ways are the plane beyond mirrors and the plane of shadows.