User:Quantumboost/High Adventure in the Cordant Planes

= High Adventure in the Cordant Planes =

"Then you shall face your punishment in a realm of neither the Heavens nor the Hells..."

The Cordant Planes are extremely different in character from the Upper and Lower Planes, just as the difference between Law and Chaos is fundamentally different from that between Good and Evil (Robots vs. Frogs, after all, doesn't have the resonance that Angels vs. Demons does). Out of the Tomes, the Book of Gears deals most heavily with one of the Cordant Planes - Mechanus - so really this is the best place to handle them.

High Adventure in... Mechanus!
Mechanus is the plane of Ultimate Law, and while the actual nature of Law is dependent on how you handle Alignment in general, Mechanus is always a giant clockwork land filled with robots and ant-people. Currently the official “robots” are the Inevitables, but you might very well have Modrons. The below examples assume that you’re dealing primarily with a version of Mechanus which doesn’t include the Modrons.

High Adventure in... The Outlands!
The souls who end up in The Outlands are those who are "Neutral" or follow one of the dieties who live here. Given how alignments in 3.0 work, this means basically everyone who doesn’t give a damn about alignment and it also includes druids and other "balance of nature" fanatics. The Outlands is a lot like the Prime Material Plane in that there is a bunch of nature and also a bunch of cities, except all of it is made of soul-stuff and ideals, and near the center magic cuts off. Generally you’ll be here either because you’re traveling between the other planes via the gate-towns on its rim or because you have business with the Mind Flayers, Naga, Obad-hai, or any other of the random domains which exist around here.

The Outlands is also the home of Sigil, a planar metropolis consisting of a ring of unknown material supposedly floating on top of the supposedly infinitely tall spire which is supposedly in the middle of the Outlands. And none of that can actually be demonstrated, because any proof positive would take infinitely long, so it’s essentially just a psychological shell game by the natives. Essentially, Sigil is a gigantic mish-mash of fragments of the most prominent planar and Prime Material cultures. The city is watched over by a super-deific entity whose sole purpose there is to keep the pit fiends and other assorted super-powerful planar beings out.

High Adventure in... Limbo!
Limbo is a land of Chaos, and like with the rest of the Law-Chaos fiasco it’s not entirely clear what this means. Mechanically speaking, Limbo is made of a bunch of "Chaos Matter" which is for some reason shaped entirely by the minds around it and otherwise arbitrarily switches between the basic elements. Also the natives are all supernatural Giant Frogs or Githzerai. Despite the unstable nature of everything in Limbo, there are a few areas of interest which are either inhabited (and thus kept in a stable form pretty much all the time) or some sort of psychic storm where unusual resources can presumably be gathered and mystical chaos magic forged into gems.

Campaign Seed: The Graveyard of Worlds
Limbo is described in some places as "where the elements go to die", and sometimes that is literally true. In various places around the plane, actual fragments of now-dead worlds exist, having been somehow transported to the Everchanging Chaos in some cataclysmic event. The normal matter these world shards are composed of takes longer to degrade than the native material, and often they contain still-intact ruins. The promise of unique magic and treasures ripe for picking over often attracts those who are willing to brave the danger of an environment that is only kept stable and survivable by pure willpower.