Temporal shattering, Its a land that is full of temporal rifts and tears, Its full of things that come from different parts of time and places. This place could help lead to another plane, place, time, etc.
Bygone shadows: A realm made up of broken mirrors, each one acting as a portal to the past of whoever enters it first. If a warrior has strong memories of a glorious battle, the demiplane will contain a constantly erupting battlefield with everyone and thing he remembered from it, except that everything will feel strangely hollow.
You might also want to think about a realm of portals, a crossroads between all the other realms, etc. A way to move adventurers from realm to realm either in a planned or (unplanned way). It could be something simple or something complex, from a traveling event like the Carnival l'Morai to a ghost train to a city outside the planes like Sigil, maybe even something as simple as a ritual performed at a crossroads that summons some type of entity who can be bargained with to transport you.
I already have. One of the main purposes of Starry Heights is that it has multiple portals to other realms, as even to open a portal to Starry Heights, you have to find a key in 8 other realms to access a comically large trebuchet to be launched into the realm.
The homebrew plane I've had the most fun thought-experimenting with is called "The Unclaimed".
There's an old saying that someone is never truly gone as long as someone remembers them. The same goes for objects, and creatures, etc. Memory, and evidence that supports memory, is a fascinating thing. For example, how many people can you name right now, from memory, who lived 37 centuries ago? Probably not too many. But there was this one guy in Ur named Ea-Nasir who sold some low-grade copper, and now, despite him being dead for the last 3,700 years, I still know his name. I remember him. On some infinitesimal level, he still exists, because his story endures.
But not everyone is so lucky. A lot of people lived 37 centuries ago. Most of them are lost to us. Their names, their faces, their deeds, their hopes and dreams, are all lost to us forever. They are all now residents of The Unclaimed. Imagine a random person in your game world passes away. They had few friends or family, but their grave is marked with a headstone with their name on it. Eventually everyone who knew them in life will die, but their gravestone endures to offer their memory to passers-by. But still, eventually even that gravestone will give way under centuries of wind and rain until that name is no longer decipherable. On that day, the spirit of that person will appear in The Unclaimed.
The Unclaimed is a plane of infinite but undefinable geography wherein reside everyone and everything that has ever existed, but that have been lost to the vagaries of time and memory. This is Oblivion. Every person who no one remembers lives there. The painting that someone made, that only they ever saw, and that was destroyed when their house burned down so no one else ever saw it - that painting is there. An army roams the vast fields of the Unclaimed; the army of an ancient civilization that rose and fell long before the advent of writing; an army who all perished in a grand Final Battle and whose remains are buried there still, never yet discovered by any archaeologist. They reside here. Countless centuries ago a volcano erupted on a remote island on the other side of the world where no one lived. No one saw it erupt. No one felt the ground shake. And the handful of people who saw the smoke in the sky a continent away all died millennia ago. That volcano is in The Unclaimed.
When you arrive in The Unclaimed, the plane appears to be a massive diorama made of translucent sepia toned paper figures with vague and shifting edges amid a landscape made of tea-soaked dried paper. Rather too quickly, however, everything comes into better focus. Or rather, you devolve to match their ephemeral essence. The sepia toned ghosts who inhabit this forsaken realm appear to go about the mundane tasks they performed in life. But anything crafted in this realm quickly vanishes like smoke on the wind. Sounds are nothing more than muted echoes. The difference between sunrise and sunset is no more than the difference between ignorance and indifference. The ghosts speak little, and never speak their names, for willful amnesia is less painful than the cold brutality of Oblivion. You wander along a path through an unrecorded primeval forest, listening to the song of a bird that went extinct before mankind left the trees. You notice a trinket on the ground and you bend to pick up a ring, the shine of its gold dulled by the long centuries since anyone who remembered its owner passed away. You slip it into your pocket, but then immediately forget about it, and it reappears somewhere else on the plane.
As the heat death of the universe lies infinite trillions of years in the future, The Unclaimed is the heat death of memory. Imagine you were a simple knight in a remote land many centuries ago. You died in battle and your body remains in that soil, never found and never disturbed. The only record of you ever having existed is your name written in one book in a remote abbey on a remote island where the monks of a scholarly religious order dedicate their lives to dutifully copying ancient manuscripts to preserve the knowledge they contain. A young ascetic scholar pulls that tome from the dusty shelves, its pages worn with time. He places it gently on the desk before him, readies a blank folio, and prepares to make a copy of this tome before its inevitable crumbling. As he opens to the first page, the only page with your name on it, one of the tabby cats that keep mice from the abbey hops down from a bookshelf onto the desk, causing a small vial of ink to overturn, covering your name with an inky black pawprint. The young monk tries his best to decipher what is now covered, but cannot. Your soul ceases to reside in whatever afterlife you had been enjoying, as you are consigned to The Unclaimed for eternity.
I'm making an entire multiverse that every single one of my campaigns exists in, so I need help coming up with some planes to help flesh it out more.
So far I have:
I should make something clear: the planes can range from super silly to super serious
Temporal shattering, Its a land that is full of temporal rifts and tears, Its full of things that come from different parts of time and places. This place could help lead to another plane, place, time, etc.
Bygone shadows: A realm made up of broken mirrors, each one acting as a portal to the past of whoever enters it first. If a warrior has strong memories of a glorious battle, the demiplane will contain a constantly erupting battlefield with everyone and thing he remembered from it, except that everything will feel strangely hollow.
You might also want to think about a realm of portals, a crossroads between all the other realms, etc. A way to move adventurers from realm to realm either in a planned or (unplanned way). It could be something simple or something complex, from a traveling event like the Carnival l'Morai to a ghost train to a city outside the planes like Sigil, maybe even something as simple as a ritual performed at a crossroads that summons some type of entity who can be bargained with to transport you.
I already have. One of the main purposes of Starry Heights is that it has multiple portals to other realms, as even to open a portal to Starry Heights, you have to find a key in 8 other realms to access a comically large trebuchet to be launched into the realm.
Dang, over a month and only 5 replies
The homebrew plane I've had the most fun thought-experimenting with is called "The Unclaimed".
There's an old saying that someone is never truly gone as long as someone remembers them. The same goes for objects, and creatures, etc. Memory, and evidence that supports memory, is a fascinating thing. For example, how many people can you name right now, from memory, who lived 37 centuries ago? Probably not too many. But there was this one guy in Ur named Ea-Nasir who sold some low-grade copper, and now, despite him being dead for the last 3,700 years, I still know his name. I remember him. On some infinitesimal level, he still exists, because his story endures.
But not everyone is so lucky. A lot of people lived 37 centuries ago. Most of them are lost to us. Their names, their faces, their deeds, their hopes and dreams, are all lost to us forever. They are all now residents of The Unclaimed. Imagine a random person in your game world passes away. They had few friends or family, but their grave is marked with a headstone with their name on it. Eventually everyone who knew them in life will die, but their gravestone endures to offer their memory to passers-by. But still, eventually even that gravestone will give way under centuries of wind and rain until that name is no longer decipherable. On that day, the spirit of that person will appear in The Unclaimed.
The Unclaimed is a plane of infinite but undefinable geography wherein reside everyone and everything that has ever existed, but that have been lost to the vagaries of time and memory. This is Oblivion. Every person who no one remembers lives there. The painting that someone made, that only they ever saw, and that was destroyed when their house burned down so no one else ever saw it - that painting is there. An army roams the vast fields of the Unclaimed; the army of an ancient civilization that rose and fell long before the advent of writing; an army who all perished in a grand Final Battle and whose remains are buried there still, never yet discovered by any archaeologist. They reside here. Countless centuries ago a volcano erupted on a remote island on the other side of the world where no one lived. No one saw it erupt. No one felt the ground shake. And the handful of people who saw the smoke in the sky a continent away all died millennia ago. That volcano is in The Unclaimed.
When you arrive in The Unclaimed, the plane appears to be a massive diorama made of translucent sepia toned paper figures with vague and shifting edges amid a landscape made of tea-soaked dried paper. Rather too quickly, however, everything comes into better focus. Or rather, you devolve to match their ephemeral essence. The sepia toned ghosts who inhabit this forsaken realm appear to go about the mundane tasks they performed in life. But anything crafted in this realm quickly vanishes like smoke on the wind. Sounds are nothing more than muted echoes. The difference between sunrise and sunset is no more than the difference between ignorance and indifference. The ghosts speak little, and never speak their names, for willful amnesia is less painful than the cold brutality of Oblivion. You wander along a path through an unrecorded primeval forest, listening to the song of a bird that went extinct before mankind left the trees. You notice a trinket on the ground and you bend to pick up a ring, the shine of its gold dulled by the long centuries since anyone who remembered its owner passed away. You slip it into your pocket, but then immediately forget about it, and it reappears somewhere else on the plane.
As the heat death of the universe lies infinite trillions of years in the future, The Unclaimed is the heat death of memory. Imagine you were a simple knight in a remote land many centuries ago. You died in battle and your body remains in that soil, never found and never disturbed. The only record of you ever having existed is your name written in one book in a remote abbey on a remote island where the monks of a scholarly religious order dedicate their lives to dutifully copying ancient manuscripts to preserve the knowledge they contain. A young ascetic scholar pulls that tome from the dusty shelves, its pages worn with time. He places it gently on the desk before him, readies a blank folio, and prepares to make a copy of this tome before its inevitable crumbling. As he opens to the first page, the only page with your name on it, one of the tabby cats that keep mice from the abbey hops down from a bookshelf onto the desk, causing a small vial of ink to overturn, covering your name with an inky black pawprint. The young monk tries his best to decipher what is now covered, but cannot. Your soul ceases to reside in whatever afterlife you had been enjoying, as you are consigned to The Unclaimed for eternity.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.