Character got pulled into The Nine Hells while attempting to summon a Pit Fiend. Decided to walk all the way to the ninth level to try and bargain with Asmodeus. Failed a Dex check when walking along the River Styx, and that's how you forget what you were doing.
Freenix In D&D as far back as I can remember it has been the Styx that erases them, but it is indeed the case of it being different in Greek mythology.
No. The River Styx makes *you* forgotten and forever drowning or grants you invincibility at the cost of a fatal weakness -- depends on your interpretation of the story of Achilles. It is the river of death and forgotten dreams, along which flows eternally all things once lost but never recovered or remembered. The River Lethe washes away memories. See? *splish* ...who am I?
Played a game once where we figured out that the fire plane was actually the surface of the sun. The ice plane was Pluto, the air plane was Jupiter, and the water plane was Neptune. Was a cool way to combine cosmology with the planescapes.
@Sean Fisher It's a fantasy world where a single, God-like being and some plastic shapes dictate what happens. The planes can be planets if the DM so wishes.
Yeah the issue with this is that the planets and sun canonically exist as part of the prime material plane. Travel between worlds within the prime material plane is done via spelljamming, the true representative of "fantasy space" from d&d. The planes are realms of creation, thought, and energy that exist separately from the prime material.
That's the beauty of the D&D system. Your setting doesn't actually have to conform to the canon setting. For all it matters, the beastlands in your setting could literally just be a chain of islands off the coast of spain.
I've run a bunch of 5th ed Planescape campaigns, just because my players are already so familiar with the system. I've always wanted to try a 2nd ed Planescape campaign.
Having created my own homebrewed version of Tamriel from the Elder Scrolls games, I Definitely wish to utilize what I've seen here in Daedric planes as well as possible access points to the Soul Cairn. Thanks, Web DM!
I hope I'm not alone in hoping that in addition to some new inspired art, WotC needs to use some Tony DiTerlizzi art from Planescape 2e. His art IS Planescape forever!
I had the idea of having it so that every player starts somewhere different, under different circumstance or situations, each of which pass through a portal different from the next. From they, each find themselves in Sigil and must learn or adapt from a place so different from their home. Coming together because sharing experience and working together to perhaps make their way home or embracing their new home.
I ran a game in Sigil and I had a lot of fun with my players just figuring out the portal system, the first half was about heaven and hell and all worked dandy. But portals started to run erratic when they tried to get into the abyss, one might say they behaved chaotic :p
I love the great wheel cosmology; that being said, I am using the Shadowfell and Feywild in my campaign, because they have some cool features and ideas for adventure.
I've always been worried about DMing planer adventure because i don't really understand what they are all about.This vid has shed a bit of light for me. Cheers fellas
This video did wonders for my first campaign and gave me so many great ideas on how to make a Planar Adventure my players and I's own. All first time players mostly picking characters connected to elements with pretty great, but still open ended backstories. Then I find this episode of WebDM and connect all of them to the Planes in their own fun and unique ways. It's been amazing. Thank you all so much.
The outer planes are my jam. I have an artificer who uses an amulet of the planes to just jump around between different planes constantly. It’s hilarious to see them bringing back new trinkets
I like how everquest represented the planes in the planes of power expansion. Themed but actual places you can adventure and explore if you are powerful enough.
I had a campaign where i let the characters roll for random magic items; one of them rolled a Jacob's Ladder which lets you access a random outer plane. This was a campaign breaker. This was also the campaign when I quickly solidified my view of the outer planes. Whenever they traveled into a new plane I just had the be in the same place in the dungeon, I just modified it to fit the plane. For encounters I used as many dead NPCs and monsters from their previous adventures, so it was a best of hits from the previous adventures populating the outer planes. On the planes one of the characters got killed and vanished. When the party returned to the material plane, in the same dungeon, due to the weird nature of planar travel it was actually 20 years later; the character killed in the outer planes had been reincarnated in the material plane, and was now grown up and following visions he's had his whole life met them all here in the dungeon, and the party continued on.
I loved the cosmic wheel and the alignment based worlds. I'm with you Jim. My favorite mode to have players traverse the outer planes is the river Styx and river Oceanus.
The bottom of the ocean being a ice type Atlantis and a steamy surface and then your normal ocean for the middle would definitely be something interesting to play with
My favorite setting! Currently have a party hustling through Avernus trying to catch up to a Gelugon before he makes it back to Dis. Probably my favorite D&D story ever was in a bar, in Sigil.
Oh hell yeah! Planes! I remember the first time I read upon them, I just completely skipped them because they seemed SO complicated when I read through them for the first time a year ago (new to D&D)... But then a good month ago, I thought to finally get into it- and try to understand it, so I started reading them.. And the more I read, the more I fell in love with it! I don't know how I got so confused back then, it's so simple and so PERFECT! And now I can't wait for the day where I can create my own version of the planar dimensions (all 4 elements); but I do feel a need to include the brass and the jewel city.. They seem fun! I also like the idea that it's possible to travel to the plane of water, simply by sailing in the deep waters (like in the Pirates of the Caribbeans movie.. that was awesome.). Can't wait to get there.
I'm glad the DMGuide had an evocative rundown of the planes, new for me. I was inspired by the Fire, Air, and Ethereal planes. I'm a bit intimidated, though, with how to deal with the movement through the floaty endless ethereal space, though. Same with underwater worlds.
I run the plane of water like an endless ocean with some small islands jutting out from the floor when closer to the material plane or plane of earth, but as you move farther away from the prime material and the other elemental planes, air ceases flowing, and the earth is simply gone and it's all water and sky. Then set the campaign in the areas with flowing air and some islands with the party in a boat or small fleet and travel between the two through a fog portal, or were thrown in by a whirlpool/water spout (how a bunch of boats went missing that we have to investigate in our current campaign). For plane of air. Have some floating islands when near the prime materium/plane of earth and some areas with solid clouds shaped by elementals, or go Xenoblade Chronicles 2 with leviathans housing the denizens and players and sky ships are abound for trading and transport. And if someone falls, either the plane or air currents send them back to the top above from where they fell (and maybe allow some clouds to act as cushions for the fall and we're specifically made by the inhabitants for that very reason).
Planes are something I've always had trouble integrating naturally into my worldbuilding. The inspiration here is seriously appreciated!! Currently planning on drawing heavily from each Outland zone, using their aesthetic for individual planes
Planescape: Torment was by far my favorite game of that style of isometric; Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale look. 'Till Dragon Age: Origin. But Planescape was really deep philosophically if you wanted to explore the implications.
I always imagine the Elemental Planes as having border regions where the other elements are present. So the plane of Earth is mostly an endless Underdark-style dungeon, but its border region is its "surface", a very stark mountainous and hilly landscape. If you fly up, you're in the borderlands of the Plane of Air. If you travel North or East, you start to encounter rivers and swamps and eventually the shore of an endless Ocean with floating iceberg continents as you walk the borderlands of the plane of Water. If you head West or South the mountains increasingly become volcanoes, then lakes and rivers are replaced by lakes of fire and rivers of lava, until you eventually encounter a giant endless wall of fire, as you walk through the borderlands of the Plane of Fire.
they talk about ways for the planes to be easier to adventure in but for the most part what they described IS how it's described in the DMG. You'd think they'd be aware of it.
Great show as always and so well timed for me as I have been thinking about planar travel for my group! And please,please do a show about Faerun being the battlefield of the planes and the peril they face. (pretty please)
I have to admit, I do have a few issues with alignment; they don't stop me from using them, they just annoy me. Basically, it boils down to the fact that alignments, like the ability scores, greatly simplify and blend multiple things into one messy soup. How so? Well let's take a look: Good vs Evil: Aside from hurting people or not, there are also certain methods (torture, poison, necromancy) that are often assumed to be involved with this axis to some degree or another. Technically, codes of conduct should be purely the realm of law vs chaos, meaning this blends things in a murky way; this then allows segway to... Law vs Chaos: This is a big mess. Do you believe in cosmic order? Do you prefer to work with established authority/tradition or do your own thing? Do you follow a code of honor/conduct? Do you prefer/are better at planning or improvising? Are you a team player? All of these questions are, to some degree or another, part of this one axis. So what happens when someone doesn't follow one side's answers all the way? The planning vs improv one even creates issues where one character can prefer one side for any number of reasons yet be better at the other despite their preference. Is this a deal breaker for the alignments? No. Is it annoying? It can be; similar to how Dexterity mixes both one's reaction time and one's sense of balance, Strength mixes both arm and leg muscles into a single number, Intelligence includes both memory and logic, and how Wisdom mixes one's common sense with one's perceptive abilities and willpower, it's really just a way to simplify the rules.
I just say this: get into character and see where it takes you. Alignments are useless unless used simply to evaluate the current standing of a character based on beliefs, actions and plans/tendencies. Everything else boils down to certain creatures having an overall ___ nature, and a certain perentage of them, let's say
Synth Ovine Watch their video on aliments to actually know what he thinks about them. It's okay to disagree with him but don't right him off as wrong without actually listening to his reasoning. Heck! The fact that Jim likes alignments invalidates you're point that they are universally bad! He's an example that they can be good thus they can't be "absolutely useless, cumbersome, annoying, and act more as a hindrance than a boon in practically every conceivable way." You only need one example to the contrary to disprove that statement.
I love this series and you guys are great!! i am running a planescape adventure but using 5e.. and i would love if you guys could go into more depth on how to run a full planer adventure. i think you should consider that as a topic for one of your shows. maybe break it up into 2 or more (positive planes vs negative planes) but id watch a video per plane if you could muster that! LOL
I know the best way to jump into Planescape is reading the existing material, but do you guys know if WotC are planning to do more or less the same they did with Ravenloft and bring it back?
I think the 5e DMG's description of the plane of Ooze was great. You could have a powerful magic item thrown in there and you have to find it. It could have been thrown there years ago and now it's very important to find it. It could have been found by a hag, or a lizardfolk tribe found the item and now worships it.
I am currently DMing a homebrew game where all the planes are 1 universe. Need to get to the abyss? down. astral plane? basically space, go up. water, earth, fire, air? north, east, south, west. I gave them a spelljammer inspired airship, I roll most encounters randomly for insperation and then ultimately make them my own interspersing hints of an overarching story I'm not done with yet. Most of they players are new and its great fun. tl;dr I had the neat idea of making all the other planes attached to the material plane, gave the group good transportation, and it worked out great.
actually, it(plane of water) is canonically endless water without a surface. “ It is an ocean without a surface. It is domain of current and wave. It is a bottomless depth. ” - Manual of the Planes
I like to do my shadowfell a bit differently where the fey wild is a the mirror world born of the left over creative energies that were used to form a cosmos and the shadowfell is a network of all the collapsed alternate realities and prime materials slowly fading into nothingness. So each fey wild is fairly local with maybe some narrow linkages to other realms, like a border ethereal, whereas you can enter the shadowfell and immediately be confronted with the ghosts of alien cities from an alternate future version of your reality that suffered cosmic cataclysm eons ago. The shades you meet there inform you that, based on what you've told them about your history, you are in fact quite doomed.
I've just been binge watching a load of Web DM videos and I thought this was a good tie in to an earlier one I watched. Jim said he was a really big Warhammer RPG fan, but not really the tabletop game and not really having any knowledge about the current version of Warhammer after the end of the Old World. Well... Warhammer: Age of Sigmar should really have another subtitle. Warhammer: Battle For The Planes! At its most basic that is the concept. The Mortal Realms are different planes not unlike in D&D, but based on the winds of magic from old school Warhammer and everybody is fighting to control the Realm Gates to travel unimpeded between them and build empires. I just thought it was an interesting tie in to this video. Warhammer has gone Planar. Also we will be seeing a new edition of Warhammer Fantasy RPG soon, 2 even. 1 based each on the old and new settings. I'm really looking forward to them both.
In 1st Edition, there was an idea that a spell's level dictated how it was granted: 1st and 2nd level spells are conjured by pure faith. 3rd, 4th, and 5th level spells are granted by a lesser servant of the deity, such as an angel or demigod. Thus, 5th level was the maximum spell level that demigods (which were similar to empyreans in 1e) could grant. 6th and 7th level spells were granted by the god itself, with lesser gods only being able to grant 6th level spells. I think it'd be fun to modify this for 5e: 1st and 2nd level spells can be cast anywhere where magic is and can be summoned from a false deity entirely. 3rd-5th level spells are granted by servants of your deity. Thus, if you were to bring an empyrean servant of Zeus into Hell, you could still cast these spells. 6th-9th level spells have to be granted directly by your deity, not functioning on directly opposite planes, or only some of these levels function.
Our party JUST hit Lv.10 in our current campaign and the last game (the game this current campaign is a sequel to) ended at Lv.10 so me and my wife (we co-GM the campaign, she's doing the narrative and the characters, I help out as kind of a mechanics / editor guy) are thinking about flipping the script and throwing the party out to the planes once they finish the current main events that are probably going to get them closer to 13-15. Here's hoping that we can give it a decent spin.
I know it's been a year and a half, I know you guys probably won't read this, but OH MY GOD the Harmonium would have locked you up and thrown away the key for mispronouncing Sigil so many times. My wife and I both were cringing every time you said it. That said, still nice to see the planes and the Cage getting love. Good video. Aside from your blatant disregard for the law.
i've read some books where the main place was a Taver/Inn that had doors into other places and realms, and depending on where they lead, you could just go through, had to get a key and some doors where sealed off and had walls build infront of them. so that could be a place the group can find in like the spacerealm or feywild etc. ofc htey are not aloud to use the doors/portals just like that. they have to pay or convince the Innkeeper that they are allowed to do so.
In the first game I’m running I’ve decided to have a background calamity where the river Styx is flooding from energy release by the last great world shaking events, and now every body of water is liable to transport you to a different plane as the floods through planer boundary’s out of wack. Always fun to have your lvl 1 party of newish players go to 3 hells (baator, the abyss, and the shadow fell but my players just called them all hells). Session 8 had them step into limbo and fight a red slaad, and next time they’ll be reintroduced to the giant octopus they met living in the sewers of the prime material plane city exerting great control over his own octopus garden floating in limbo.
We fought an Undead Kraken & 9 Undead Sharks in the Plane of Water....we pushed them back with 3 Thunderous Smites, Callshot from the Heavens (homebrewed bow attack) and Conjure Volley (Radiant) & we nearly killed the Undead Kraken....
I remember being in the abyss lost with my group for weeks and come to find out we had to fail are intelligence check to find the doorway into the city.
Other than the Elemental planes of Water and Earth the Mud Hills and the Ooze river I also am a fan of specific layers of the Abyss also are interesting to me Juiblex and Zuggtmoy being 2 if my favorite dnd characters
Would you guys ever consider doing a second video about Planescape, maybe focusing more exclusively on Sigil, now that we have a bunch of new lore and such in 5e
So in the plain where thought determines my movement speed if I am a kinda dumb brute fighter guy but happen to have a sentient sword with me, could I hold onto it like a rocket and let me pull through the astral sea?
The hellish bureaucracy idea got my wheels spinning. So, what if at mid tiers the party becomes bounty hunters and treasure seekers in the nine hells. There are a lot of ways to take it the technical way of battling bureaucracy and political fractions in hell or the more straight forward adventure way of finding items for certain people. It would be interesting because there is that added layer of implied deceit and manipulation that maybe the players pull one over the devils every once in a while and remind the devils why they bother with mortals.
Planar Adventure My game shop 12 years ago ran 3.5e I walk in and told everyone I have a pre writ campaign ready, and everyone is going to play Lawful Evil characters with the Leadership feat and Craft Wondrous Item feat. One play asks," Are we playing Baator Devils ?" I told him no. Also I told them everyone starts with multi-class characters. fighter2nd/ rogue2nd/sorcerer2nd/ wizard3rd. +9CR; +5BAB. Other player asks," So what are we playing ?" We are playing Efreeti fire genies. The shop owner's wife has a thing for fire genies. It was a fun campaign.
At best the alignment system is a starting point for creating deeper meaningful characters and encounters, at worst it glosses over the complexities involved in the decisions made by intelligent beings, robbing them of any illusion of self determination, which tends to lead to poor story telling, and over all just reveals the DM's or DnD writers' moral prerogatives more than anything else. More often than not it's the latter than the former, so fuck the alignment system and those that support it. ~A well-intentioned goblin that is totally not evil or chaotic.
KageRyuuUji I think it all depends on how you describe it, good and evil are defined to an extent, but where they aren't fall back on the PC intentions, chaos to law is more like a spectrum of Freud's Id to superego. Just tell people it's what there character would want to be and fall back on if given the choice, more of an informal moral compass than a moral identity (at least that's what has worked for me). That said, being a goblin feel free to f#&k what you want, not like laws would stop you.
True, but that is to say that moral objectivity exists for extraplanar beings. They're literally made of alignment. Mortals should, and do, have wiggle room and differing points of view. Ultimately, I simplify this by having my players be whoever they want and letting that inform their alignment, not the other way around. If you're CE, you don't only have to do evil things. Maybe some spark of good rises up, or you find a line even you won't cross. That's fine - you can do whatever you want, and in time this'll inform your alignment and its shifts, which determine who comes to greet you at the end of your life.
I appreciate this vid, and I also love the Wheel cosmology, but I have no idea how to run a Planeswalker campaign with the new nebulous crap they've given us. As a result, I feel like I can't really introduce any of it for a 5e campaign (as, say, an ending to the premade 5e campaigns). The Infinite Staircase is my only recourse, it feels.
Question: Seems like you guys always do some super epic stuff, and it makes me wonder if your groups usually start off at 1st, or if you usually start at a higher level, so you get to the crazy high level stuff with less gaming hours spent?
We generally start between 2nd-5th level. Occasionally higher or lower. But we've been playing together for...nearly 18 years. Jeeze. So we've had time for a lot of long term campaigns.
+JPruInc Thanks, good to know! I've been playing for many years but have had trouble finding consistent, well functioning groups for the past decade, so getting to the higher levels have been scarce as experiences go lately. It is fun to hear about high level craziness, but it makes me miss playing through it myself, even though I really enjoy starting my characters from scratch too. I've just started a new group (with me as a first time DM) so here's hoping we'll stick together all the way to the epic stuff! Your videos have been a huge help and inspiration already, so thanks for those!
+Pru-Pruh I like starting 3 and above because you can at least do a little more in combat and also more utility things for role play. That's just me, when I first started D&D 5e I began at level 4 and for my first time as DM I had every start at level 3. I couldn't really see myself starting at level 1 just with all the fun I'm having with a cleric at 5 and a monk at 6
Good Video as per usual. I will definitely be taking some of your advice for my 15-20 epic homebrew campaign assuming the party survives the Tyrany of Dragons modules. 1 Quick comment.. it seems like the links in your description are all broken... They all end in ... for me, and when clicked bring up the youtube error message. Note after a small amount of digging, this only seems to be the case on the last "few" videos you have uploaded. It seems to be the case starting on the video: Campaign Creation & Coven of Razel-Sinn Wrap-Up - Web DM, and all videos that are newer than that. (going by upload date). Just thought I would give you that heads up, if it is a problem. Might just be my browser being stupid.
I run a forgotten realms adventure and I felt like traveling between the planes is to easy yet hard. Sigil and it's portals are supposedly so valuable yet so celestial, fiends, and others can planeshift. Any advise on how or whether to do this?
We can excuse the fact that you slaughtered two yugoloths before you realized where you were, Outsider, but you pronounced the name of our fair city "Sijil," not "Sigil," and there can be no excuse for that! -- Her Honor Rastina Tollin of the Guvners
Are there any books I should look at if I want to move my D&D game into Sigil that'll help with knowing all this?? BTW. Commander Holly I'm loving your Planescape: Torment Let's Play, please keep making it!!
+Sam Wannan: 4E and 3.0/3.5 had the Manual of the Planes, 3.0/3.5 had the Planar Handbook and AD&D 2nd had the Planescape Campaign Setting. Sigil is probably still the least described of most planar locations, as much of it is simply greatest fantasy kitchen sink you can imagine where EVERYTHING comes together. It really allows for a lot of possibilities and freedom for DMs, though you may want to know a bit about all the other planes too.
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I just want to know who drew the xenomorph.. .cuz.. DAMN .
Character got pulled into The Nine Hells while attempting to summon a Pit Fiend. Decided to walk all the way to the ninth level to try and bargain with Asmodeus. Failed a Dex check when walking along the River Styx, and that's how you forget what you were doing.
Technomancer I thought it was a different river that wiped your memory.
Logan Sanders sadly not. Wish it was the case but it is indeed the River Styx, which runs through quite a few of the lower planes as well.
Not sure about D&D lore, but in Greek mythology the river Lethe is the river in Hades that wipes your memory, not the Styx.
Freenix In D&D as far back as I can remember it has been the Styx that erases them, but it is indeed the case of it being different in Greek mythology.
No. The River Styx makes *you* forgotten and forever drowning or grants you invincibility at the cost of a fatal weakness -- depends on your interpretation of the story of Achilles. It is the river of death and forgotten dreams, along which flows eternally all things once lost but never recovered or remembered.
The River Lethe washes away memories. See?
*splish*
...who am I?
Somewhere, there is a plane of mimics, and you thought the 9th lair of hell was bad...
And there are 5 actual chests with 11 legendary items in each of them
That would actually be the best place in the multiverse to hide something.
You could get a good campaign out of that.
Michael Klaczynski I might borrow that for one of my campaigns. Make that a Demiplane. Thanks for the idea!
But if everything is a mimic then nothing is a mimic
There are 5 actual chests with 11 legendary mimics in each of them.
Played a game once where we figured out that the fire plane was actually the surface of the sun. The ice plane was Pluto, the air plane was Jupiter, and the water plane was Neptune. Was a cool way to combine cosmology with the planescapes.
@Sean Fisher It's a fantasy world where a single, God-like being and some plastic shapes dictate what happens. The planes can be planets if the DM so wishes.
Yeah the issue with this is that the planets and sun canonically exist as part of the prime material plane. Travel between worlds within the prime material plane is done via spelljamming, the true representative of "fantasy space" from d&d. The planes are realms of creation, thought, and energy that exist separately from the prime material.
That’s really smart lol
Agree. Associating the planets with the plane is a helpful analogy but it s not the way to play it.
That's the beauty of the D&D system. Your setting doesn't actually have to conform to the canon setting. For all it matters, the beastlands in your setting could literally just be a chain of islands off the coast of spain.
I still run a 2nd Edition Planescape game. Simply love the setting.
I've run a bunch of 5th ed Planescape campaigns, just because my players are already so familiar with the system. I've always wanted to try a 2nd ed Planescape campaign.
I use 5e and the 2nd edition books
Fuck yeah! My favorite setting with my favorite rule set!
Having created my own homebrewed version of Tamriel from the Elder Scrolls games, I Definitely wish to utilize what I've seen here in Daedric planes as well as possible access points to the Soul Cairn. Thanks, Web DM!
Mystic Vee XD mine is a rip-off of Hyrule and Terminal stapled together
I'd say the angels don't hate the Devil half as much as they hate Demons..
And invading the 9 Hells means that Demons are going to run amok...
Yea since devils are extremly lawful beings angels respect them grudingly
I misread your shirt at a glance and read “Erotic Good”
Matt Swann must be them good bards
About to DM my first game of D&D this week, wish me luck!
I'm currently doing my first game as a dm, it's honestly a lot of fun; are you doing module or home brew?
Homebrew, modified rules. I'm playing with people who are also new and are familiar to the video game RPGs.
Good luck! Come back and tell us how it went!
+Migario Lamplight just did mine last weekend Home brew. Have a great session man
you have to make sure the adventures understand you make the rules.
I hope I'm not alone in hoping that in addition to some new inspired art, WotC needs to use some Tony DiTerlizzi art from Planescape 2e. His art IS Planescape forever!
I had the idea of having it so that every player starts somewhere different, under different circumstance or situations, each of which pass through a portal different from the next. From they, each find themselves in Sigil and must learn or adapt from a place so different from their home. Coming together because sharing experience and working together to perhaps make their way home or embracing their new home.
I ran a game in Sigil and I had a lot of fun with my players just figuring out the portal system, the first half was about heaven and hell and all worked dandy. But portals started to run erratic when they tried to get into the abyss, one might say they behaved chaotic :p
This needs more than one episode. I'd really be interested in some clearer examples of things like roleplay encounters on these other worlds.
I love the great wheel cosmology; that being said, I am using the Shadowfell and Feywild in my campaign, because they have some cool features and ideas for adventure.
Sigil seems like the apotheosis of all city settings - it makes Greyhawk or Watedeep or Lankmar look like provincial backwaters
I've always been worried about DMing planer adventure because i don't really understand what they are all about.This vid has shed a bit of light for me. Cheers fellas
This video did wonders for my first campaign and gave me so many great ideas on how to make a Planar Adventure my players and I's own. All first time players mostly picking characters connected to elements with pretty great, but still open ended backstories. Then I find this episode of WebDM and connect all of them to the Planes in their own fun and unique ways. It's been amazing. Thank you all so much.
The outer planes are my jam. I have an artificer who uses an amulet of the planes to just jump around between different planes constantly. It’s hilarious to see them bringing back new trinkets
The 4e re-imagining of the elemental planes as simply "elemental chaos" was a good one.
I like how everquest represented the planes in the planes of power expansion. Themed but actual places you can adventure and explore if you are powerful enough.
I had a campaign where i let the characters roll for random magic items; one of them rolled a Jacob's Ladder which lets you access a random outer plane. This was a campaign breaker. This was also the campaign when I quickly solidified my view of the outer planes. Whenever they traveled into a new plane I just had the be in the same place in the dungeon, I just modified it to fit the plane. For encounters I used as many dead NPCs and monsters from their previous adventures, so it was a best of hits from the previous adventures populating the outer planes. On the planes one of the characters got killed and vanished. When the party returned to the material plane, in the same dungeon, due to the weird nature of planar travel it was actually 20 years later; the character killed in the outer planes had been reincarnated in the material plane, and was now grown up and following visions he's had his whole life met them all here in the dungeon, and the party continued on.
Planar Airlines, better than United.
Planes of water, earth, and fire are offended by the term "air"lines...
@@michaelsorensen7567 Planar Hose Pipes, Planar Trenches and Planar Venting are all a match for the Airline business.
A thought I'm surprised you didn't bring up with the water plain is snow. Maybe there's no land, but there is a landmass kind of like Antarctica
That's quite brilliant.
I loved the cosmic wheel and the alignment based worlds. I'm with you Jim. My favorite mode to have players traverse the outer planes is the river Styx and river Oceanus.
I think my favourite opening joke out of all of them. Planar Airways was gold.
The bottom of the ocean being a ice type Atlantis and a steamy surface and then your normal ocean for the middle would definitely be something interesting to play with
Yggdrasil is pronounced Ig-dra-sil.
Genies. This is all I needed to hear to be convinced to included more Planar influences.
Hahaha!! Love the intro line. Watched probably 20 webDM videos, this was the best I've seen I think. Such swagger, Pruitt! Thanks for the chuckles :D
My favorite setting! Currently have a party hustling through Avernus trying to catch up to a Gelugon before he makes it back to Dis. Probably my favorite D&D story ever was in a bar, in Sigil.
Y'all need to get the Planescape Campaign Setting
I know, they so expensive though :(
Oh hell yeah! Planes! I remember the first time I read upon them, I just completely skipped them because they seemed SO complicated when I read through them for the first time a year ago (new to D&D)... But then a good month ago, I thought to finally get into it- and try to understand it, so I started reading them.. And the more I read, the more I fell in love with it!
I don't know how I got so confused back then, it's so simple and so PERFECT!
And now I can't wait for the day where I can create my own version of the planar dimensions (all 4 elements); but I do feel a need to include the brass and the jewel city.. They seem fun!
I also like the idea that it's possible to travel to the plane of water, simply by sailing in the deep waters (like in the Pirates of the Caribbeans movie.. that was awesome.).
Can't wait to get there.
I'm glad the DMGuide had an evocative rundown of the planes, new for me. I was inspired by the Fire, Air, and Ethereal planes. I'm a bit intimidated, though, with how to deal with the movement through the floaty endless ethereal space, though. Same with underwater worlds.
I run the plane of water like an endless ocean with some small islands jutting out from the floor when closer to the material plane or plane of earth, but as you move farther away from the prime material and the other elemental planes, air ceases flowing, and the earth is simply gone and it's all water and sky. Then set the campaign in the areas with flowing air and some islands with the party in a boat or small fleet and travel between the two through a fog portal, or were thrown in by a whirlpool/water spout (how a bunch of boats went missing that we have to investigate in our current campaign).
For plane of air. Have some floating islands when near the prime materium/plane of earth and some areas with solid clouds shaped by elementals, or go Xenoblade Chronicles 2 with leviathans housing the denizens and players and sky ships are abound for trading and transport. And if someone falls, either the plane or air currents send them back to the top above from where they fell (and maybe allow some clouds to act as cushions for the fall and we're specifically made by the inhabitants for that very reason).
Planes are something I've always had trouble integrating naturally into my worldbuilding. The inspiration here is seriously appreciated!! Currently planning on drawing heavily from each Outland zone, using their aesthetic for individual planes
Planescape: Torment was by far my favorite game of that style of isometric; Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale look. 'Till Dragon Age: Origin. But Planescape was really deep philosophically if you wanted to explore the implications.
cant wait for a new planescape for 5e. Working on it would actually be my dream job, berks ^^
I'm about to run a campaign set in the planes (all of them) and this has been a good inspirational and informative video! thanks again!
Hi! Greetings from Chile! It was a real flashback to my 90's. Thank you very much for your dedication. Jorge
I would like, in place of traditional alignments for a given campaign, MTG color alignments to be used instead. It's worth a try.
I always imagine the Elemental Planes as having border regions where the other elements are present. So the plane of Earth is mostly an endless Underdark-style dungeon, but its border region is its "surface", a very stark mountainous and hilly landscape. If you fly up, you're in the borderlands of the Plane of Air. If you travel North or East, you start to encounter rivers and swamps and eventually the shore of an endless Ocean with floating iceberg continents as you walk the borderlands of the plane of Water. If you head West or South the mountains increasingly become volcanoes, then lakes and rivers are replaced by lakes of fire and rivers of lava, until you eventually encounter a giant endless wall of fire, as you walk through the borderlands of the Plane of Fire.
they talk about ways for the planes to be easier to adventure in but for the most part what they described IS how it's described in the DMG. You'd think they'd be aware of it.
Great show as always and so well timed for me as I have been thinking about planar travel for my group! And please,please do a show about Faerun being the battlefield of the planes and the peril they face. (pretty please)
I'll put it on the list.
I have to admit, I do have a few issues with alignment; they don't stop me from using them, they just annoy me. Basically, it boils down to the fact that alignments, like the ability scores, greatly simplify and blend multiple things into one messy soup. How so? Well let's take a look:
Good vs Evil: Aside from hurting people or not, there are also certain methods (torture, poison, necromancy) that are often assumed to be involved with this axis to some degree or another. Technically, codes of conduct should be purely the realm of law vs chaos, meaning this blends things in a murky way; this then allows segway to...
Law vs Chaos: This is a big mess. Do you believe in cosmic order? Do you prefer to work with established authority/tradition or do your own thing? Do you follow a code of honor/conduct? Do you prefer/are better at planning or improvising? Are you a team player? All of these questions are, to some degree or another, part of this one axis. So what happens when someone doesn't follow one side's answers all the way? The planning vs improv one even creates issues where one character can prefer one side for any number of reasons yet be better at the other despite their preference.
Is this a deal breaker for the alignments? No. Is it annoying? It can be; similar to how Dexterity mixes both one's reaction time and one's sense of balance, Strength mixes both arm and leg muscles into a single number, Intelligence includes both memory and logic, and how Wisdom mixes one's common sense with one's perceptive abilities and willpower, it's really just a way to simplify the rules.
I just say this: get into character and see where it takes you. Alignments are useless unless used simply to evaluate the current standing of a character based on beliefs, actions and plans/tendencies. Everything else boils down to certain creatures having an overall ___ nature, and a certain perentage of them, let's say
Synth Ovine In every conceivable way? Fuck off.
Synth Ovine
Watch their video on aliments to actually know what he thinks about them. It's okay to disagree with him but don't right him off as wrong without actually listening to his reasoning.
Heck! The fact that Jim likes alignments invalidates you're point that they are universally bad! He's an example that they can be good thus they can't be "absolutely useless, cumbersome, annoying, and act more as a hindrance than a boon in practically every conceivable way."
You only need one example to the contrary to disprove that statement.
I love this series and you guys are great!! i am running a planescape adventure but using 5e.. and i would love if you guys could go into more depth on how to run a full planer adventure. i think you should consider that as a topic for one of your shows. maybe break it up into 2 or more (positive planes vs negative planes) but id watch a video per plane if you could muster that! LOL
I know the best way to jump into Planescape is reading the existing material, but do you guys know if WotC are planning to do more or less the same they did with Ravenloft and bring it back?
I think the 5e DMG's description of the plane of Ooze was great.
You could have a powerful magic item thrown in there and you have to find it.
It could have been thrown there years ago and now it's very important to find it.
It could have been found by a hag, or a lizardfolk tribe found the item and now worships it.
Always great to see more videos from you guys. Keep doing what you're doing it's always interesting!
As long as you keep watching!
I am currently DMing a homebrew game where all the planes are 1 universe. Need to get to the abyss? down. astral plane? basically space, go up. water, earth, fire, air? north, east, south, west. I gave them a spelljammer inspired airship, I roll most encounters randomly for insperation and then ultimately make them my own interspersing hints of an overarching story I'm not done with yet. Most of they players are new and its great fun.
tl;dr
I had the neat idea of making all the other planes attached to the material plane, gave the group good transportation, and it worked out great.
actually, it(plane of water) is canonically endless water without a surface.
“
It is an ocean without a surface.
It is domain of current and wave.
It is a bottomless depth.
”
- Manual of the Planes
Spelljammer ship that plane shifts instead to get around also flys like a airship.
I like to do my shadowfell a bit differently where the fey wild is a the mirror world born of the left over creative energies that were used to form a cosmos and the shadowfell is a network of all the collapsed alternate realities and prime materials slowly fading into nothingness. So each fey wild is fairly local with maybe some narrow linkages to other realms, like a border ethereal, whereas you can enter the shadowfell and immediately be confronted with the ghosts of alien cities from an alternate future version of your reality that suffered cosmic cataclysm eons ago. The shades you meet there inform you that, based on what you've told them about your history, you are in fact quite doomed.
I've just been binge watching a load of Web DM videos and I thought this was a good tie in to an earlier one I watched.
Jim said he was a really big Warhammer RPG fan, but not really the tabletop game and not really having any knowledge about the current version of Warhammer after the end of the Old World.
Well... Warhammer: Age of Sigmar should really have another subtitle. Warhammer: Battle For The Planes!
At its most basic that is the concept. The Mortal Realms are different planes not unlike in D&D, but based on the winds of magic from old school Warhammer and everybody is fighting to control the Realm Gates to travel unimpeded between them and build empires.
I just thought it was an interesting tie in to this video. Warhammer has gone Planar. Also we will be seeing a new edition of Warhammer Fantasy RPG soon, 2 even. 1 based each on the old and new settings.
I'm really looking forward to them both.
infinite staircase great fer calves.
Jason Sanford "alrighty players, today is leg day!"
I really want to write like an angel vs devil Diablo type campaign, this kinda stuff really helps me get the creative juices flowing =D
Glad we could give inspiration. Stay tuned in coming weeks...trust me.
I hear you man, as soon as i saw the three Angels in the monsters manual I was like oh ya I'm fitting these guys somewhere in the campaign for sure.
Loved this one. Really liked the concept of clerics or paladins in hell not having access to their powers, great idea.
Holy shit there are no words to describe the awesomeness of that into.
In 1st Edition, there was an idea that a spell's level dictated how it was granted:
1st and 2nd level spells are conjured by pure faith.
3rd, 4th, and 5th level spells are granted by a lesser servant of the deity, such as an angel or demigod. Thus, 5th level was the maximum spell level that demigods (which were similar to empyreans in 1e) could grant.
6th and 7th level spells were granted by the god itself, with lesser gods only being able to grant 6th level spells.
I think it'd be fun to modify this for 5e:
1st and 2nd level spells can be cast anywhere where magic is and can be summoned from a false deity entirely.
3rd-5th level spells are granted by servants of your deity. Thus, if you were to bring an empyrean servant of Zeus into Hell, you could still cast these spells.
6th-9th level spells have to be granted directly by your deity, not functioning on directly opposite planes, or only some of these levels function.
Our party JUST hit Lv.10 in our current campaign and the last game (the game this current campaign is a sequel to) ended at Lv.10 so me and my wife (we co-GM the campaign, she's doing the narrative and the characters, I help out as kind of a mechanics / editor guy) are thinking about flipping the script and throwing the party out to the planes once they finish the current main events that are probably going to get them closer to 13-15. Here's hoping that we can give it a decent spin.
I know it's been a year and a half, I know you guys probably won't read this, but OH MY GOD the Harmonium would have locked you up and thrown away the key for mispronouncing Sigil so many times. My wife and I both were cringing every time you said it.
That said, still nice to see the planes and the Cage getting love. Good video. Aside from your blatant disregard for the law.
i've read some books where the main place was a Taver/Inn that had doors into other places and realms, and depending on where they lead, you could just go through, had to get a key and some doors where sealed off and had walls build infront of them.
so that could be a place the group can find in like the spacerealm or feywild etc. ofc htey are not aloud to use the doors/portals just like that. they have to pay or convince the Innkeeper that they are allowed to do so.
look at the pictures of the planes by Gary gygax.. best way to picture the planes, thumbs up!
idk, siege of the 9 hells sounds like my kind of epic campaign :D
Where could I find out more about the city of sigil, infinite staircase, or these other places that can allow planar travel?
Just hope you can pass a grapple check if the flight is overbooked, Planar Airlines is like United for keeps.
In the first game I’m running I’ve decided to have a background calamity where the river Styx is flooding from energy release by the last great world shaking events, and now every body of water is liable to transport you to a different plane as the floods through planer boundary’s out of wack. Always fun to have your lvl 1 party of newish players go to 3 hells (baator, the abyss, and the shadow fell but my players just called them all hells). Session 8 had them step into limbo and fight a red slaad, and next time they’ll be reintroduced to the giant octopus they met living in the sewers of the prime material plane city exerting great control over his own octopus garden floating in limbo.
We fought an Undead Kraken & 9 Undead Sharks in the Plane of Water....we pushed them back with 3 Thunderous Smites, Callshot from the Heavens (homebrewed bow attack) and Conjure Volley (Radiant) & we nearly killed the Undead Kraken....
The wibbly wobbly timey wimey planes of the planescape
I remember being in the abyss lost with my group for weeks and come to find out we had to fail are intelligence check to find the doorway into the city.
"Throwing you guys in prison, in the plane of fire, and then selling you into slavery in hell really put you guys into a tough position"
-Jim Davis
If I ever run a game in the Plane of Water I'm definitely going to have Seal Team 6 in there somewhere.
Other than the Elemental planes of Water and Earth the Mud Hills and the Ooze river
I also am a fan of specific layers of the Abyss also are interesting to me
Juiblex and Zuggtmoy being 2 if my favorite dnd characters
I use either a maze with openings in various worlds and dimensions or when on Eternia use Castle Greyskull.
Everyone forgets that monks can astral project
In the prison realm I like to think there a chain devils hunting you down
"If anybody doesn't like the alignment system, I don't really give a shit."
P R E A C H
:D
9:07 The real Planes of Conflict exist between Jim and anyone who doesn't like the Great Wheel cosmology.
Would you guys ever consider doing a second video about Planescape, maybe focusing more exclusively on Sigil, now that we have a bunch of new lore and such in 5e
I'm running a game now where I don't base myself on any existing world at all, I just made up my own.
So in the plain where thought determines my movement speed if I am a kinda dumb brute fighter guy but happen to have a sentient sword with me, could I hold onto it like a rocket and let me pull through the astral sea?
The hellish bureaucracy idea got my wheels spinning. So, what if at mid tiers the party becomes bounty hunters and treasure seekers in the nine hells. There are a lot of ways to take it the technical way of battling bureaucracy and political fractions in hell or the more straight forward adventure way of finding items for certain people. It would be interesting because there is that added layer of implied deceit and manipulation that maybe the players pull one over the devils every once in a while and remind the devils why they bother with mortals.
Do you have a link to the "Different Plane Rules"? I would love to check those out some more.
Ah yes, the Shadowfell and the Feywild, the Plane of Edginess and the Plane of Whimsy.
Planar Adventure
My game shop 12 years ago ran 3.5e
I walk in and told everyone I have a pre writ campaign ready, and everyone is going to play
Lawful Evil characters with the Leadership feat and Craft Wondrous Item feat.
One play asks," Are we playing Baator Devils ?"
I told him no.
Also I told them everyone starts with multi-class characters.
fighter2nd/ rogue2nd/sorcerer2nd/ wizard3rd. +9CR; +5BAB.
Other player asks," So what are we playing ?"
We are playing Efreeti fire genies.
The shop owner's wife has a thing for fire genies.
It was a fun campaign.
*Stare at the pen*
*Hold the pen*
*Swipe in the air a few times*
*Drop the pen*
*Stare at the pen again*
"then repeat"
this was super interesting, thanks!
At best the alignment system is a starting point for creating deeper meaningful characters and encounters, at worst it glosses over the complexities involved in the decisions made by intelligent beings, robbing them of any illusion of self determination, which tends to lead to poor story telling, and over all just reveals the DM's or DnD writers' moral prerogatives more than anything else. More often than not it's the latter than the former, so fuck the alignment system and those that support it.
~A well-intentioned goblin that is totally not evil or chaotic.
KageRyuuUji I think it all depends on how you describe it, good and evil are defined to an extent, but where they aren't fall back on the PC intentions, chaos to law is more like a spectrum of Freud's Id to superego. Just tell people it's what there character would want to be and fall back on if given the choice, more of an informal moral compass than a moral identity (at least that's what has worked for me). That said, being a goblin feel free to f#&k what you want, not like laws would stop you.
KageRyuuUji DnD is a gameworld where moral objectivity exists.
True, but that is to say that moral objectivity exists for extraplanar beings. They're literally made of alignment. Mortals should, and do, have wiggle room and differing points of view. Ultimately, I simplify this by having my players be whoever they want and letting that inform their alignment, not the other way around.
If you're CE, you don't only have to do evil things. Maybe some spark of good rises up, or you find a line even you won't cross. That's fine - you can do whatever you want, and in time this'll inform your alignment and its shifts, which determine who comes to greet you at the end of your life.
Why not have the plane of fire have a party area, with camp fires, lanterns, tiki torches, clam bakes, etc.? A luau for down time?
I appreciate this vid, and I also love the Wheel cosmology, but I have no idea how to run a Planeswalker campaign with the new nebulous crap they've given us. As a result, I feel like I can't really introduce any of it for a 5e campaign (as, say, an ending to the premade 5e campaigns). The Infinite Staircase is my only recourse, it feels.
My current character has see invisibility permanently on him so now I see ghost and stuff
I think meritime pirates would be a good theame for an adventure on the plane of water.
not even a mention of the Far Planes and the madness inducing stuff that happens there or creatures that live there?
I think the endless choking ash plane is Gehenna.
Question: Seems like you guys always do some super epic stuff, and it makes me wonder if your groups usually start off at 1st, or if you usually start at a higher level, so you get to the crazy high level stuff with less gaming hours spent?
We generally start between 2nd-5th level. Occasionally higher or lower. But we've been playing together for...nearly 18 years. Jeeze.
So we've had time for a lot of long term campaigns.
+JPruInc Thanks, good to know!
I've been playing for many years but have had trouble finding consistent, well functioning groups for the past decade, so getting to the higher levels have been scarce as experiences go lately. It is fun to hear about high level craziness, but it makes me miss playing through it myself, even though I really enjoy starting my characters from scratch too.
I've just started a new group (with me as a first time DM) so here's hoping we'll stick together all the way to the epic stuff!
Your videos have been a huge help and inspiration already, so thanks for those!
+Pru-Pruh I like starting 3 and above because you can at least do a little more in combat and also more utility things for role play. That's just me, when I first started D&D 5e I began at level 4 and for my first time as DM I had every start at level 3. I couldn't really see myself starting at level 1 just with all the fun I'm having with a cleric at 5 and a monk at 6
2-5 is my go to starting point too.
JPruInc My group always starts at 1. That's not my rule, that's just how they like it
Good Video as per usual. I will definitely be taking some of your advice for my 15-20 epic homebrew campaign assuming the party survives the Tyrany of Dragons modules.
1 Quick comment.. it seems like the links in your description are all broken... They all end in ... for me, and when clicked bring up the youtube error message. Note after a small amount of digging, this only seems to be the case on the last "few" videos you have uploaded. It seems to be the case starting on the video: Campaign Creation & Coven of Razel-Sinn Wrap-Up - Web DM, and all videos that are newer than that. (going by upload date).
Just thought I would give you that heads up, if it is a problem. Might just be my browser being stupid.
Thanks for letting us know. We'll look into it and thank you for watching!
First time wathching this channel, its awesome!! Do you upload live games somewhere??
I run a forgotten realms adventure and I felt like traveling between the planes is to easy yet hard. Sigil and it's portals are supposedly so valuable yet so celestial, fiends, and others can planeshift. Any advise on how or whether to do this?
make the Lady decide to hinder travel by either making portal keys harder to divine or a Dabus TSA to kick the clueless out.
Huh im new to D&D 5th is my fist edition. I may have to check out plane rules.
2nd edition? May give me some good ideas.
Yeah, most of the material for the Planescape setting is 2nd ed, but it's easy enough to farm it for adventure ideas for 5th ed.
We can excuse the fact that you slaughtered two yugoloths before you realized where you were, Outsider, but you pronounced the name of our fair city "Sijil," not "Sigil," and there can be no excuse for that! -- Her Honor Rastina Tollin of the Guvners
Gotta ask: how is Sigil pronounced?
Sijil
Why was it "sigil" in Planescape: Torment then? I'm so confused. Is it both?! haha
Are there any books I should look at if I want to move my D&D game into Sigil that'll help with knowing all this?? BTW. Commander Holly I'm loving your Planescape: Torment Let's Play, please keep making it!!
+Sam Wannan: 4E and 3.0/3.5 had the Manual of the Planes, 3.0/3.5 had the Planar Handbook and AD&D 2nd had the Planescape Campaign Setting. Sigil is probably still the least described of most planar locations, as much of it is simply greatest fantasy kitchen sink you can imagine where EVERYTHING comes together. It really allows for a lot of possibilities and freedom for DMs, though you may want to know a bit about all the other planes too.
are the paraelemental and quasi elemental planes still a thing?
My character is a rangers who’s family is close to a goddess and the dream of his family is to learn words of creation and meet there goddess