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## Fundamental Concept: Planar Cores [OCS]

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Orion
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### Fundamental Concept: Planar Cores [OCS]

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Post by Orion » Fri Feb 25, 2011 5:08 am

"Planar Cores" are a far-reaching house rule/setting detail for 3.5 D&D. They exist to solve a number of things about the D&D cosmology that bother me.
1: Clerics getting spells granted directly by gods is unfortunate. First of all, it's stupid to have a PC whose powers can be arbitrarily removed at any time. Second, it's never clear who can actually grant spells anyway. Just gods? Some Outsiders? Demon Lords (who are kind of both?). Finally, how the hell are clerics of philosophies supposed to swing this?
2: Infinity Sucks. Seriously.
3: Teleport is too powerful. Teleport takes you anywhere you want to be with no fuss, but many adventures *want* to be set in locations that are not easily accessible. If nothing else, you need to explain why the dungeon is still there and nobody else looted it yet. Therefore like every high level adventure sends you to the planes. That's fine--unless you actually care about the campaign world you were playing in, and want to keep interacting with it.
4: Alternate dimensions really crimp the style of an airship-based campaign. You really should be able to fly wherever you want to go. There's not currently even a good way to bring your airship TO another plane.
By introducing planar cores to your game, you can kill 2 chickens before they hatch.
Planar Cores
A Planar Core is an enormous, mostly immobile ball of magic energy. Some are lodged deep under the earth. One is at the bottom of the sea. A number of them float a few miles above the ground. The sun is one. While the exact appearance and physical consistency of planar cores is variable, they all share some properties.
Gravity: A Planar core generates a field of gravity. This means that the aerial cores are orbited by a number of islands. It also means that there are enormous underground caverns that work like the "hollow world" setting.
Radiation: Each Planar core has a list of planar traits, just like a plane. Everything within some large radius of a core takes on those traits. Including all those islands in orbit. Hades is actually a series of caverns you can burrow down to, but it still causes despair.
Discontinuity: A great many magical effects that transmits data or objects through space are attuned on a casting to the local background radiation. These effects unravel as soon as the background changes. This means that spells and effects that don't work across planar boundaries in 3.5...still don't work across planar boundaries. Hell is a hole in the ground. You can walk to Hell. You can jump in. But you can't Teleport there. And If you hide there nobody outside can scry you.
Genesis Planar Cores spontaneously give birth to Outsiders and Elementals. These creatures are dependent on the core's radiation for survival. They cannot leave their plane unless summoned or called.
Divine Source Divine Spellcasting, as opposed to Arcane, is spellcasting which works by siphoning energy from a planar core. It's frequently associated with religion in the setting because Outsiders are the foremost experts, and many people worship Outsiders. Also because magic, generally, is associated with religion. But once you know how, it can't be taken from you.
This is also why Clerics are better at Plane Shift, and planar magic generally, than wizards.
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Post by RiotGearEpsilon » Fri Feb 25, 2011 3:15 pm

Very fabulous.
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Orion
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Post by Orion » Sat Feb 26, 2011 8:38 am

Hell is an actual hole in the frickin ground. Particularly cruel warlods have been known to dump their prisoners into it. The Plane of Water is actually just the big ocean on the south end of known space, subjective gravity and all.
The Plane of Air is in the Stratosphere. The Astral Plane is outer space. The Positive Energy Plane is the Sun. Acheron and Beastlands and Ysgard are seriously just islands floating around out there. The Plane of Earth is a serious of underground caverns. So is Hades.
Negative Energy plane is the biggest stumper right now. Oh, and Abyss. Also, Etheral Plane and Plane of Shadow are still legit other dimensions.
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BearsAreBrown
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Post by BearsAreBrown » Sun Feb 27, 2011 12:48 am

@Divine Source, Clerics get spells from a planar core. A particular planar core? All planar cores? Are there multiple cores of the same type?
@Negative Energy Plane, core of the surface? Clashes with the PEP and explains why undead love the surface so much?
@Ethereal/Shadow, why avoid cores with these?
@Abyss, why not just another hole in the ground like Hell?
Last edited by BearsAreBrown on Sun Feb 27, 2011 12:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Orion
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Post by Orion » Sun Feb 27, 2011 3:16 am

Ethereal and Shadow don't get cores because every point in the Prime has a corresponding point in the Ethereal, it wouldn't really make sense to be able to fly from one to the other.
Hell works because it's explicitly a nine-tiered vertical shaft anyway. Most of the other planes can just be islands. But the Abyss is supposed to be an endless numbers of sublayers and I don't know how to deal with that.
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Post by TarkisFlux » Sun Feb 27, 2011 8:38 am

You haven't made it clear whether or not the planar cores have variant geometries as well as gravity and whatever else they have. If you allow "bigger on the inside" cores, you can make the abyss just a very wierd pile of shifting cores contained within a larger shell. And it's not actually infinite, but the shifting means that some sub-cores occasionally disappear and sometimes new ones appear. Since no one has ever been able to accurately count the actual spheres on the inside some jerk went and called it infinite and it stuck, but it's really not. People just don't like spending enough time with demons to make a map that's only good for a couple of days.
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Post by Vebyast » Sun Feb 27, 2011 10:21 am

That's true; I bet that, if you do your geometry and calculus just right, you can stuff an entire infinite-on-the-inside space into a finite-on-the-outside space without any discontinuities. I haven't done the math; I'm just thinking of things like the infinite sum of the reciprocals of the powers of two.
Last edited by Vebyast on Sun Feb 27, 2011 10:43 am, edited 2 times in total.

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BearsAreBrown
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Post by BearsAreBrown » Sun Feb 27, 2011 2:26 pm

> Vebyast wrote:That's true; I bet that, if you do your geometry and calculus just right, you can stuff an entire infinite-on-the-inside space into a finite-on-the-outside space without any discontinuities. I haven't done the math; I'm just thinking of things like the infinite sum of the reciprocals of the powers of two.

That's a great idea. Something like Gabriel's Horn has an approaching infinite area in a finite volume.
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Post by TarkisFlux » Sun Feb 27, 2011 4:47 pm

Yeah, except Orion specifically wanted to avoid infinities (see point 2). So rather than do an infinite array I think it better to do a finite but malleable one that might look infinite because it's basically impossible to properly map out, but was really just fairly large.
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Post by Vebyast » Sun Feb 27, 2011 7:47 pm

True. I was thinking that you could use that geometry to get your limitlessly-large and near-impossible-to-map abyss and just cut it off at some point to produce a finite space.
Also, this space would be insanely difficult to map. At the most basic level, since we're distorting space continuously, the parallel postulate no longer holds. Depending on how you terminate the abyss, near the very center it may be violated incredibly dramatically: walk forward a hundred feet, step sideways five feet, turn around, and walk backward again, and you're half a mile from where you started. Nobody in the setting (and likely none of your players) know hyperbolic geometry or calculus, so you're set on mapping.
Navigating this space, especially to go deeper, would be equally difficult. Thanks to the hyperbolic geometry, headings are naturally unstable. In euclidean geometry, a five-foot error sideways will displace you five feet from where you want to go, and a five-degree error will displace you a distance linearly related to how far you go. In hyperbolic geometry, a five-foot error sideways will displace you linearly, and a five-degree error will put you on the other side of the plane. Since the space is also compressed near the center, moving inward will amplify these errors as you get closer to the destination, making them even larger and larger.
Last edited by Vebyast on Sun Feb 27, 2011 8:08 pm, edited 3 times in total.

> DSMatticus wrote:There are two things you can learn from the Gaming Den:
> 1) Good design practices.
> 2) How to be a zookeeper for hyper-intelligent shit-flinging apes.

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Orion
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Post by Orion » Wed Feb 08, 2012 9:06 pm

Fundamental Concept: The Green Voice
Design Intent 3E sorted spellcasters into "arcane" and "divine", and then proceeded to stuff all kinds of ridiculous bullshit into the "divine" category. What with Archivists, Philosophy Clerics, Spirit Shamans and Favored Souls running around, it's hard to say what divine actually means apart from "the wisdom based ones." But one class always stood out as especially misplaced, not least because it was in the frickin PHB: the Druid. The PHB glossary defines divine spells as spells "of religious origin powered by faith or by a deity." It's pretty clear that outside Faerun, druidism is not "powered by a deity." Are we therefore meant to assume that Druidic spells are powered by "faith?" The actual Druid class writeup doesn't talk about faith at all, but rather "spirituality", which I would submit is not the same thing. Furthermore, druids are out of theme with the rest of the divine casting world. The other core divine casters all have a distinct extraplanar theme. They all draw power from somewhere "beyond," are good at summoning, warding, and banishing Outsiders, and get early access to spells like Plane Shift. In Ouranios, this translated to an association with planar cores, one which isn't apt for Druids.
In many ways the most elegant solution would be to simply recategorize. 4E went and made Primal its own power source, and one could easily imagine an alt-3E with Arcane, Divine, and Natural spells. This would work very well if you wanted to emphasize the role of druids as cultural leaders in marginal zones or in mythic history, or play up an uneasy three-way struggle between theocrats, technocrats, and traditionalists. But the Ouranios project prefers to change flavor text and add new mechanics rather than to overwrite mechanics present in the PHB, so we will be taking another route.
There's No Plane Like Home
If the Material Plane derives its properties from a localized planar core, no one has yet determined its location. Some hypothesize that it was concealed by long-forgotten gods who used it to create the known world, and that an explorer who came upon it could tinker with the settings of the Prime, or even that this has already happened four or five times in the past. Whatever the truth, it is clear that the Prime not only takes up more space, and less contiguously than any other, it also operates under very different rules. Unlike Outsiders, the native of the Prime are not dependent on its aether for survival. They need no more magic to travel in other planes than is required to physically carry them there, and thus can conduct extraplanar trade by merchant marine. Similarly, Prime spellcasters have found it relatively easy to construct short-lived bubbles of aether which allow Outsiders to live and work in the Prime. Even the Magical, which are spontaneously generated like Outsiders, are not restricted in their movements.
Today's scholars believe that the best explanation for these properties is that the Prime itself is becoming sentient. Other planes have no sense of identity, and thus the fiends and celestials generated by their substance remain fundamentally part of the plane. However, because the Prime is self-aware, it is able to comprehend the difference between itself and its inhabitants, and this able to separate itself more cleanly from them. Modern Prime theory holds that the Prime is able to tap into the unused brain space of all natural creatures, and is essentialy using individual Int 1 and 2 dogs and pidgeons as neurons in an enormously dispersed network. the capacity for language is thought to be what blocks the sentient races out from this network.
Clamantis in Deserto
However, the exclusion of the sentient races from the Primal network is not absolute. On rare occasions, someone who spends weeks or months separated completely from human society finds that their memories of home grow faint and their impulse to speak recedes. Eventually they stop even thinking in words, simple reacting to sensations. And when that happens, they begin to hear the Green Voice. The Green Voice tells them where to find food and shelter. It brings them to animals which guide or protect them. And though it never makes demands, it whispers requests and begs favors in dreams and lonely hours. Once someone has found the Green Voice, it cannot be rejected or shut out. One can choose only to accept the role of Ranger or Druid, or attempt to extinguish the voice by walking the path of the Blighter.
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...You Lost Me
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Post by ...You Lost Me » Thu Feb 09, 2012 12:24 am

That sounds rather... stringent. Is the Green Voice the only way to be a Ranger/Druid? Because that sounds very unkind and railroad-y..

> DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.

> Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.

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Orion
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Post by Orion » Thu Feb 09, 2012 10:08 pm

Elaborate? What's a concept you'd be interested in that this shuts out. Keep in mind that most Rangers come about by accident, but the elves and some Druidic societies have initiation rituals in which people are deliberately exposed and separated until they awaken. It's actually much like Inuit shamanism.
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BearsAreBrown
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Post by BearsAreBrown » Thu Feb 09, 2012 11:02 pm

A ranger for a rural town who will spend a couple days away from town, but not weeks or months.
Or charismatic/passionate natural casters.
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Orion
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Post by Orion » Fri Feb 10, 2012 3:18 am

Well, it just requires that they spent a month away from civilization at some point in their lives, probably as a result of some accident. Having become a Ranger nothing prevents them from rejoining society, although the occasional whispering in their dreams might urge them to leave.
EDIT: A charismatic Druid would probably emerge from the ordeal with an improved understanding of the fundamental emotions underlying language and social convention, and control of tone and timbre that gives his words the impression of a bared soul.
Not that Rangers or Druid PCs ever have high CHA.
Last edited by Orion on Fri Feb 10, 2012 3:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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BearsAreBrown
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Post by BearsAreBrown » Fri Feb 10, 2012 5:49 am

"Must spend a month with next to no human contact." is just a tighter net to be pulled around Rangers then they deserve. What about The Watchers, the group of Rangers who range together? A slight language change to allow for loopholes would solve this, like if The Green Voice can call out to those in need, or those that ask for it, or those who go to great lengths to protect it.
"...memories of home grow faint and their impulse to speak recedes." is the other phrase bothering me. Just... why? Why must Druids and Rangers be tight lipped cold people? What about the passionate, charismatic, indulgent snake Druid? Instead of distancing the subject from civilization, it should focus on bringing it closer to nature.
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Post by Chamomile » Fri Feb 10, 2012 6:33 am

Just because they became tight-lipped at one point does not mean they are required to be so still. Considering that rangers aren't just outdoorsmen, but outdoorsmen with animal companions and druid magic, the restriction doesn't seem overly onerous. It does get away from generic D&D and into a more specific setting like FR or Dragonlance or whatever.
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...You Lost Me
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Post by ...You Lost Me » Fri Feb 10, 2012 6:32 pm

Yeah, I was thinking of the troupe of elves who live in the forest learning from each other how to shoot and stab things and tame animals. None of them leave the colony (because there aren't enough to support nomadic behavior), but they all learn how to be rangers.

> DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.

> Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.

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Post by Foxwarrior » Fri Feb 10, 2012 7:49 pm

You're complaining about Elves spending a month, once, doing something? This is the race that reaches adulthood at 110 years, right?
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Orion
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Post by Orion » Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:12 pm

Design Intent: Rangers
Frank and K's Tomes leave Rangers in a weird place. First of all, the Ranger class from the PHB is rendered completely unplayable. Most of the advantages the Ranger had over other core fighting classes (Reflex saves, 6 skill points, and a strong skill list) now come standard on fighting classes. Other specials no longer do anything as a result of skill revisions (Camouflage, HIPS). What remains (the spellcasting and animal companion) is, although very cool, fundamentally piddly bullshit that in no way justifies their spot fighting alongside a Samurai or Monk. What all this means is that if anyone in a tome game is going to be writing "ranger" on their character sheet, we need either an all-new Ranger class or at least a revised and buffed one. However, it's not clear that anyone needs to be writing "ranger" on their sheet, because the basic "stealthy outdoorsy warrior" concept is handled perfectly well by existing options. A plain old Fighter can load up on stealth, nature, and perception skills, then go nuts with archer feats or TWFing. A nomadic monk can run through the trees in leather armor stunning people with a longspear or with arrows. If you really want animal friends there are community skill feats for that.
At the same time, having a Ranger class is a D&D tradition and I can understand why people are attached to it, so there's no reason not to throw in a new Ranger. The question is how to make the tome ranger look, feel, and play differently from a Fighter, Samurai, or Assassin. To me, the most logical way to carve out a niche for the Ranger is to emphasize the classes spiritual and supernatural elements. For this setting I recommend using my Spirit Ranger class, but really any fan Ranger will work as long as it has stuff like full animal companion progression, 6th level spells, or other Su abilities. At the same time, we want to distinguish them from Druids by making them neither overtly religious nor initiates in a secret society. Thus, the default Ranger backstory of accidental awakening.
TLDR: the hunters in a troupe of elves are mostly Warriors and Experts. Ordinary humans who happen to extremely skilled in forestry and guerilla combat are Fighters.
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BearsAreBrown
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Post by BearsAreBrown » Sat Feb 11, 2012 12:28 am

That works. I do have a followup still, do people in the setting treat the Green Voice like the nature god? If not, why the hell not?
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Orion
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Post by Orion » Sat Feb 11, 2012 2:02 am

What is a "god"?
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Post by BearsAreBrown » Mon Feb 13, 2012 12:57 am

Whatever people in the setting thing it is.
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Post by JonSetanta » Thu Feb 16, 2012 12:44 am

I love this whole thing just as much as I love Planescape. It goes together perfectly just like peanut butter, chocolate fudge, and abdominal fat.
Now you need epic rules that allow PCs to grab and throw planar cores at people they don't like.

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Orion
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Post by Orion » Thu Feb 16, 2012 7:34 am

Dwarves, Elves, and Merfolk all had Druidocratic societies in the distant past, remnants of which live on to this day. These days sunworship, anima technology, and elementalism respectively have replaced them as the dominant cultures. They didn't view the green voice as a god, exactly, but a wise and ancient mentor. Most humans, goblins, halflings, gnomes, and modern dwarves have little contact with the green voice, and if they do tend to think of it as a monster or terrain hazard. It has a tendency to interfere with anima harvesting operations that would disturb the ecosystem and other civilizing projects, making Druids a decidedly ambivalent presence.
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