The Outer Planes, Part 5/8 Vigil, the City of Windows
Aw, Vigil! The legally distinct City of Windows! Can there be any doubt that Handbook-World boasts the finest doughnut-like hub city in all of cosmology?
<_<
Anywho, the demonstrable impossibility of such a place makes a fine jumping off point for today’s discussion. You see, our ongoing exploration of the Outer Planes affords us an opportunity to embrace the ludicrous. Thanks to the bizarre concepts, alternate physics, and magic-makes-its-own-rules nature of such settings, the Planes are exactly the sort of place where we can indulge our suspension of disbelief. This is the kind of setting where internal consistency goes to die, and whimsy rules the world(s). And I don’t think that’s necessarily bad.
Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Gulliver’s fanciful foreign lands, and Dante’s infernal excursions all provide us with balls-out crazy-pants fantasy. These worlds are subject to the forces of allegory, sublime emotion, or unbridled invention. Same deal with Gaiman’s Dreaming, Pullman’s Land of the Dead, or the kaleidoscopic acid trip of everyone’s favorite chocolate factory. These are fantasies that give a giant middle finger to sense-making. And my own affection for them has a little something to do with one of my favorite Gygax quotes.
After expanding upon his own Greyhawk seting in 1983, D&D co-creator Gary Gygax wrote that, “The revised material did not reveal all there was to know about the place…The world was still a place where mystery abounded. All of the places on the map are not detailed, every strange name is not explained as to its origination, all governments are not exposed so as to be mundane.” In other words, Gygax intentionally left blank spaces at the edge of the map. There are unnamed mountain ranges, uncharted rivers, and unexplored caves waiting for discovery. There were no convenient, prepackaged explanations for what lay beyond those borders. There were no deeper truths you could unmask by further reading. You had to go there for yourself, and you had to derive whatever meaning you could from your own imagination. (How like life!) And for me, that’s worth all the origin stories and in-depth explanations in the world.
Question of the day then! What is your favorite example of “nonsense fantasy?” I’m talking about settings that defy logical explanation and easy understanding. Do you find them infuriating and childish? Or do you perhaps share my love of the absurd? Have you found a way to insert such places into a campaign? Sound off with all your best-loved whimsy down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
Ah, yes, Vigil. Ruled by the enigmatic Lady of Gain, who can destroy any threat to the city with her mighty biceps.
You dirty spy! How did you get hold of my setting notes!?
I really like how the gravity of the Plane of Air works in Pathfinder. Namely that it is “subjective”. This basically means that everyone gets to decide which way this harshest of mistresses is going to pull them. You just have to make a Wisdom check to change direction. Implications for city design aside, where this gets really fun is that this only applies to sentient creatures. Creatures of animal-level intelligence, as well as inanimate objects aren’t subject to gravity at all. One day I’d like to play a Sylph that spent her entire life on the Plane of Air and is visibly freaked out at the way gravity on the Material Plane works. Getting frustrated with how you can’t just place stuff wherever, you have to specifically brace it against a surface facing a very particular way, otherwise it will “move on it’s own”. Occasionally freaking out at some object falling to the ground, because clearly it had to be a powerful intelligent item that just so happens to look like a wooden spoon. Etc.
My players just got to the “elemental planes are bleeding through into the Prime material” level of the megadungeon. I cannot wait to use this biz. 😀
Let me note that subjective gravity on the Plane of Air originally comes from 1st Edtion AD&D…
Well, my guess would be that that’s how it worked in whole bunch of editions, possibly all of them. But I’m not really that familiar with them, so I decided to “play it safe”.
One of my favorites was a campaign I played in where in one adventure we found ourselves in a bizarre hellscape. Every attempt to escape or explore returned us to the same clearing among the cinnabar dunes. Eventually we realized our prison was connected to our Wisdom scores, and as this dimension was beyond our comprehension, we actually had to fail a Wisdom check (DC unknown) to go anywhere at all. Enter my Wisdom 8 Fighter/Rogue. Following three NAT. 1’s in a row, the DM decided my swashbuckling half-elf had a sufficiently low grasp of reality to be able to Teleport at will within the confines of that dimension.
Sometimes, the dice make you a Lord of Chaos. Those are the good days.
In Pathfinder, I really like the options you can apply to a demiplane – it can have enhanced/lowered magics of various/all schools, gravity can be wonky, it can wrap into itself on its edges or have an ‘endless’ illusion to it, it can have a minor effect from a specific plane/alignment (e.g. positive/good, so any evildoers or undead suffer for merely entering your plane)…
Mechanically they also can break the game in half. By making a demiplane timeless, a crafter can remove any time element from a crafting project. The only caveat is that when they leave the plane, the time retroactively ‘catches up’. So you want to be immortal (via arcane discovery or Mantle of Immortality) and make sure you regularly eat/drink (via Bountiful or a Ring of Sustenance).
Once you’ve got that, you merely need to import crating materials into your plane and you’ve got an industry that instantly produces any product imaginable.
I’m pretty sure timeless just means time doesn’t affect people in the plane until they leave, not that anything happening in the plane happens instantly. You know, like that folk tale about a mortal king who goes to a dwarf king’s wedding and doesn’t realize three centuries have passed when he returns to the mortal world and there’s a new king in town.
I believe you are referencing that crazy turn-paintings-into-reality build.
Ah yes, the Trompe L’oeil stuff. That’s certainly one possiblity. But it’s also useful purely to craft endgame equipment which would take actual months to craft due to costing hundreds of thousands of gold. As for the timeless plane rules…
https://aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Time%20Traits&Category=Traits%20of%20a%20Plane
The real danger of a “timeless” plane is players who think it’s literally timeless. Gotta read all those little details!
More importantly, it’s entirely up to DM fiat how they work and flexible as to what aspect is actually timeless! You could have a timeless plane that’s only timeless to very specific things – i.e. you can literally create a training montage that lasts 1 minute of real time. Or an underwater kingdom where liquids don’t flow, acting more like a suspended jelly substance. Very useful on the DMing side.
The thing is Zarhon, that’s not how the timeless trait works, at all.
Time still passes (at the exact same one second pr. second if the plane doesn’t have any other time traits), as the very first sentence of the timeless trait says “On planes with this trait, time still passes but the effects of time are diminished.”
Timeless means that despite time passing, certain things that normally happen with the passage of time doesn’t happen. You might not age, or need to sleep or eat, possibly you don’t heal or have your disease progress. The duration of your spells might even never tick down and thus last forever there.
But montages, being a series of events, still take exactly the same amount of time, and the same is true of crafting, or Tromåe L’oiel stuff or walking around or literally anything else.
At most you might have a montage that after lasting however many days it’d normally last doesn’t actually teach the performer anything, and even that’s stretching the rule more than a bit.
You can use a custom demiplane to help you craft stuff, but you are limited to doubling your crafting speed by giving it the flowing time trait.
To clarify, to truly break Timeless, you just need to Time stop the place. Which is pretty trivial at that point.
Although the points raised here will definitely be considered for my Corefinder revision.
I find it interesting that in Pathfinder, the Positive Energy plane is just as dangerous as the Negative Energy plane. Sure, the plane heals and buffs creatures in it with temporary hp when going beyond that… But if you take too much of it, you literally explode. Thus, Planar Adaptation or the Necklace of Adaptation is a staple for any dimensional travel.
Planar Infusion is also interesting – a spell that gives you gimmicks of a plane you visit. Most powerful of which is arguably of the Time Dimension, where you get to freely act during another creature’s Time Stop.
I’m kinda sad that, by RAW, the positive/negative energy planes don’t have their effects reversed for undead. I’d rule that they did if it ever came up in my game and nobody would argue, but still.
A bunch of undead actually live there, so sadly it wouldn’t work to just make the same thing happen for them, but you could 100% make it so that living things that react to positive and negative oppositely would have the effects reversed. The big one would be dhampirs, but the are oracle mysteries and sorcerer bloodlines that will do it too.
This is reasonable homebrew. I approve.
Little trick for anyone playing Pathfinder and being inconvenienced by a demiplane: by rules as written, a simple casting of Mage’s Disjuction or the Wish/Miracle spells poofs it out of existence.
https://www.aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Create%20Demiplane
BBEG hiding in a horrible plane of fire explosions, within a fortress of spiky doom? Cast Mage’s Disjuction on the front porch and the whole thing collapses, ejecting every creature to wherever it was first cast in the process.
But by the same token, if a player puts in hours worth of design time to make “my own plane,” it might be worth humoring their supposedly-ingenious death trap for a while. At least until enough of the BBEG’s minion’s have been destroyed by it to warrant a disjunction.
Rereading the spells for this trick made me realize something related. The spells have a duration of either days/level or permanent. Notably not instantaneous (except when used to modify an already existent demiplane).
This raises the question of what happens if someone on that plane casts Antimagic field, thus suppressing it’s very existence within 10ft from them (a distance which in turn only exist when not suppressed).
An easy answer would be to just dump everything in that radius into the astral/ethereal plane as appropriate, but this also sounds like circumstances that could in theory get someone dumped (and possibly stuck) outside of reality.
I think it might cause the edges of the demiplane to stop working (becoming walls or an empty void). The matter in a demiplane is probably real or conjured so it doesn’t vanish outright, but the outright magical properties of a plane stop working in your proximity (e.g. planar traits). A tower or structure doesn’t wink out, and the floor doesn’t vanish under you. So only supernatural stuff is affected, and the demiplane is a pocket space full of otherwise mundane stuff.
Alternatively, you effectively maze yourself as you are put in a state of wandering a void until the spell runs out.
Or you just auto-eject yourself from the plane because you break whatever magic is allowing you to stay in there.
I imagine that map of Vigil can fold into a paper fortune teller for directions. Out of curiosity, what are Vigil’s laws in regards to defenestrating someone?
I suspect it depends on whether they land inside or outside the city.
What if they’re defenestrated into the city, but fall through another window and land outside of it?
That might be a crime under the noise pollution laws; all that screaming, you know.
I wonder what the difference is between “Defenestration in the 1st Degree” and “Defenestration in the 3rd Degree?”
I could see a ‘Portal’ situation where someone ends up endlessly falling through two portal-windows that link to each other (up until they splatter from terminal velocity).
https://imgur.com/t/infinite/dXpcttd
In Robert A. Heinlein’s Job: a comedy of justice, the thermodynamics of Hell are both ludicrous and highly interesting.
New arrivals fall towards (but rarely into) the well-known lake of fire. The main character comments on the fact that in spite of the vast lake of lava and flame, the place isn’t intolerably hot, but actually more on the balmy side. There’s a big city on its shore, with the locals (both demons and human souls) getting on with their affairs just fine.
A local explains this version of Hell is a planet, with a corresponding cold pit on the other side. Instead of hanging around and making everyone miserable, the excess heat is drawn up, around the planet’s curvature and down into the cold pit.
When the main character protests that physics aren’t supposed to work like that, the local agrees, but the setting’s version of the Devil has altered the laws of physics in his domain to suit his own convenience.
A wizard did it? Naw, son. The Devil did it, lol.
Heinlein is an odd example, and I think of him as a hard-SF guy fundamentally opposed to the nonsense version of fantasy. Sometimes you just want a lake of fire though.
Roger Zelazny’s Amber series provides some exceptionally fine nonsense and wonder.
Basically, any world you can imagine is out there to find, in endless permutations, the shifting realms of Shadow. Slipping between worlds gets easier or more difficult depending on whether you are currently closer to Amber (Order) or the Courts of Chaos, but there are ways to travel just about anywhere so long as you have the will and the power.
A Chaos guild specializes in building doorways between worlds, allowing people to create palatial estates whose rooms connect seamlessly but lie dimensions apart.
Initiates can create magical playing cards that allow you to speak to others and establish transport to or of people in far realms, or to step casually to locations depicted on the card.
Walk the winding lines of the Pattern if you should be of Oberon’s blood, or tread the spaces between the lines of the Broken Pattern if you are not; survive the maddening, shifting labyrinth that is the Logrus; you will be able to walk (or ride, or drive, or move about on a pogo-stick) between worlds by picturing changes in the world around you and shifting over to realms where they are the reality, rather than an idea.
Sources of cosmic power can empower the initiate to travel, but also conspire and connive to shift the balance in threir own favour.
Mighty dynasties and reality-defying monsters, ancient magic and misunderstood curses, fantastic technology and mystery, worlds untold. It can all be found. And although the royal family in Amber may claim that all roads lead to Amber, and the Courts of Chaos maintain that all of creation came forth from the Well, which is also the unmaking of all things, there is so much more than just their two extremes.
I saw at least one project, years back, that used the Amber vs. Chaos cosmology to connect a plethora of settings.
Roger Zelazny’s own character Benedict is the ultimate warrior and general, who studied the effect of minute differences on battles by stepping from world to world to world…
Immortal bloodlines, cosmic powers that are both symbols of far more ancient and primal avatars of implacable forces…
Even after Mr. Zelazny’s death and the effective end of the series, the Amber-setting is magnificent and entrancing.
Hey, I just finished my re-read of Amber a few months ago. First time I’d touched it since high school.
One day I need to actually give the “Amber Diceless” RPG a try. The worry of recapturing the flavor of the novels (both in terms of setting and complex mystery plots) always gives me pause though.
As an alternative, you could have some adventurers stumble on a Broken Pattern in their world, and the order of mystics that guards it and selects initiates to “explore the higher realities”.
Maybe Broken Pattern Initiate could be a feat, usable to transcend the setting’s standard cosmology and enter the wider realms, which exist in the tension field between Amber and the Courts of Chaos. (Just be careful of the break in the Pattern whenever traveling.)
Initiation in the Broken Pattern could allow the PCs to retain their powers in the wider realms — but their presence there, travelling about and learning things while leaving a trail the way beings do when traversing Shadow, could attract the attention of either the Court of Amber or the Courts of Chaos. Or possibly even both.
Powerful beings could show up any moment, acting as patrons or enemies, depending on whether they see a use for the adventurers, and on how said adventurers respond thereto. In the end, the adventurers need to decide whether they want to keep exploring all of Shadow and the Courts, or that they want to retreat to their home setting and figure out how to isolate it from the selfish godlings demanding their allegiance… or somehow neutralize one or both Courts.
The correct answer here is to then pull out your revised rules for the system and announce that the PCs actions have revised the multiverse. 🙂
Seriously, that’s a great hook!
I read an article once about three different magic systems for Middle Earth, of the Silmarillion, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
First, there is sacred magic, a kind of theurgy that calls on the Valar and Iluvatar beyond them.
Second, there’s the magic of mortals; witchcraft. It’s not as powerful as theurgy, but it’s more widely accessible. You don’t need to be an ancient Elf or a Maia to learn its secrets.
Third, there’s a magic that draws on Morgoth. In the Silmarillion, it is written that Melkor invested much of his essence into Middle Earth in an effort to make it his. Even with Morgoth bound and banished to the Void, his essence still lingers in Middle Earth, a taint upon all that is. Dark initiates can manipulate that essence to create magical effects.
No offense to the Valar or Iluvatar, but I thought that third style of magic was a clever idea.
Would love a link to that article.
And yet at the same time, I don’t know that I want to delve more deeply into the mysteries of Middle Earth. A few years back, I had the odd experience of re-reading LotR after my first read-through of the Silmarillion. I actually liked the novels less having learned more about the backstory. The odd names and fragments of myth mentioned by the LotR characters weren’t quite as evocative when I knew what they actually referenced.
I wish I could help you, but I have no idea what its title even was anymore. :-/
Greg Bear’s Songs of Earth and Power had some cosmic nonsense I find appealing.
Anyone with either the native talent or the right knowledge could step into a specific “place” and create worlds there. Learned Mages could, with great effort and care, make worlds. Those born with the talent, “Makers”, could do it organically, with all the free joy and artistic drive of a child sculpting things from mud at the seaside.
It’s ludicrous. It’s marvelous. It’s cosmic.
The story illustrated very well how worlds made too rigidly inevitably fall apart, and it takes artistic inspiration as well as know-how to make a living, breathing world – or heal one so it can continue to grow and develop.
I don’t know if it’s quite so innocent as all that. 😛
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life_(The_Twilight_Zone)
Unlike young Anthony (or his daughter), “Makers” in Songs of Earth and Power couldn’t do anything unless they got into the special place where it is possible to create worlds. They couldn’t change the world(s), except by creating new designs designed to merge with existing worlds.
The main character of Songs of Earth and Power was powerful beyond his role as a Maker because he’d also got a lot of training in other types of magic and some martial arts. ^_^
I’m a Mage: the Ascension fan. Enough said, I guess 🙂 You may be aware that it has one of the most vicious edition wars of all White Wolf products raging with its successor, Mage: the Awakening, and a big part of the divide is that Ascension players (often humanities students or experts) are willing to accept the idea of consensus reality and multiple equally valid truths, whilst Awakening players (often STEM students or experts) find that ridiculous and anti-scientific. I generalize, of course, but there is I think a reason why the hostility between Vampire the Masquerade and Vampire the Requiem has pretty much died out now, whereas fans of the two mage lines will still often be at each other’s throats about it all.
As for my favourite bit of weirdness… I guess the MtAs Consensus!
Well that’s fascinating. I wonder if there’s a conference paper in that somewhere?
Oh, there are floods of digital blood spilt and scrawled into the walls of fora past the internet all over, just about Ascension, no Awakening required.
One of the problems with Ascension (and the cause of hundreds of flamewars) is how there is no guidance to adjudicate the Consensus: no way to measure change, no mechanics, no suggestions, not even a way to determine if a spell went against it. I’ve never witnessed them myself, but I’m fairly sure a majority of all flamewars over Ascension were about how Paradox (a conflict between a Mage’s Paradigm and the Consensus) worked, if it was an omniscient universe who punished you, or just a Sleeper (non-mage) witness who was the conduit of the Consensus’ wrath.
And this is all without mentioning Ascension’s racist inheritance, an artifact from the 1990’s writing/attitudes, jamming culturally diverse and unique perspectives into one of 10 stereotypes. And what about scientific racism? Does the pressure of Consensus fuck over the downtrodden and oppressed when propaganda turns a malleable public’s opinion against them, making their lives nasty, brutish and short? Remember, science is only marketing in an Ascension universe. Science is merely a truth, not The Truth. And that leads into anti-vaxxers and homeopaths becoming heroic rebels against the tyrannical Technocracy, and… I don’t need to go into how ethically and politically fraught this is, right? Ascension has aged incredibly badly, is what I’m trying to say.
We haven’t even come to the primary reason that Ascension players hate Awakening: because Mage was the most radically changed gameline from the edition change. Vampire arguably changed the least, and Werewolf has elements ported over where if you squint you can see similarities. But Mage changed in such a radical way, you cannot see the Ascension in Awakening, outside of obvious homages that are ultimately window dressing, compared to how it served the broader Awakening material.
I came to Mage when Awakening released, so I’ve got a obvious bias right there. But I know there’s a great game there, because if people didn’t love the good parts of it, they wouldn’t… well, burn down the place arguing about it. You can even pillage Awakening for mechanics to play an Ascension game! That’s fine! But sometimes Ascension players take things way too far. One of the previous developers for Awakening, who was a fan of Ascension, and loved and played several games for Ascension, was exposed to the very worst of Ascension’s fandom as a writer/developer for Awakening, and attacked and harassed both online and in person until he just can’t work on Ascension anymore (they’re supporting the old games again), even when offered the job. The only things left are some fond memories, but it’s been ruined for him otherwise.
And that’s NOT OK.
You know what? I don’t think I want to write that conference paper anymore. 🙁
History is a fascinating yet depressing subject, and this history is well-trod and filled with many casualties, unfortunately. It’s like learning about what happened to the concentration camps in WW2 after they were liberated!
And they let all the gays go free, right!
…
They let the gays go free, right?
But we must not look away.
Just to second that… I think both sides have some elements of their fan-base that can be quite unpleasant, but Ascension’s have definitely done the worse stuff. I disagree with the idea that Ascension is outdated, and I think it (especially in 20th Ed, but also in revised) addresses most of the issues you mention totally. That said, though, I don’t really want to have that discussion because I feel like it detracts from the central, excellent point that you’re making: harassment on the basis of made-up games is unacceptable. People should be able to enjoy the things that they enjoy unmolested by those who don’t enjoy it.
The point being, the OG Mage was still incredibly bad. And honestly, I don’t think the “new” Mta changed much, and if it did it was because the overarching effects of “Consensus” were greatly downplayed and the OG metaplot basically rewritten. I can genuinely see why MtAw was made the way it was. And of course, the point stands that the ST system was really bad for balancing play beyond gritty street level.
The biggest pain (as in disappointed pain) about MtA was how SO MUCH of its stuff were amazing concepts for other games beyond the WoD, but Mages wound up being either useless or OP because of Paradigm. Either the GM would be overzealous and kill players for using powers, or they would allow super vague paradigms and allow the PCs to do whatever. Then you had weird things like metaphysics or how due to the nature of reality EVERYTHING can be statted as magick and its a mess.
PS: does Awakening have any major differences? It seems like something I could get into without being disappointed.
The majority of Mage problems frankly stemmed from the ST system itself. It makes effects incredibly hard to balance and make without throwing everyone else off balance. This was a problem shared by Exalted (and its 12-step combat resolution method, among other things)
Really, at this point, any intrigue Mage had has kind of been worn down for me and I can’t say I like it.
I’ve always been a fan of the Hedge and Arcadia from Changeling: The Lost. Since C:tL uses contract magic, everything in Arcadia is a contract. You want to get Warm? Better appease the fundamental concept of Fire. Hungry? Food isn’t gonna fill you unless you make it want to. The Gentry and Changelings of Arcadia also get to be any sort of wacky things imaginable. We got out Snow Queens and Mystical beast sure, but Also Terrain features, light bulbs, swarms of insects. They have to take a more humanoid form when they leave, and getting to and from Arcadia is a nightmare with very little incentive to go there, but still its fun.
I never got to play Changeling. I know that Laurel had a cool concept along the lines of “what if it was all cyberpunk and authoritarian inside the Hedge?” but I sadly never got to try that one out.
Changeling is fun, but yeah Onyx Path games are somewhat hard to find groups for. I think it’s that their hard sells to a lot of people. Sure Promethean is a glorious story about discovering humanity, but a game where the end goal isn’t “get stronger” but “Turn from Frankenstein’s Monster into Pinocchio” is gonna be a tough sell.
That and Onyx Path isn’t doing a good job of supporting their own games. Exalted 3E came out like six years ago and they just released the Lunar book last year. Changeling the Lost 2E reads like someone grabbed a bunch of Masquerade writers that had no idea what was different in the Requiem Era books.
I love the absurd settings with weird and nonsensical (or perhaps entirely logical in their own way) physics etc. I can’t come up with a personal favorite, but it’s always fun to read about them or have the GM find a way to incorporate them into the game (though it can take a particularly clever GM to avoid making them into fun mechanics and not frustrating pitfalls).
I remember a few of the latter Xanth novels I read as a kid. They had some whacky worlds in them, each one with relative gravity. Makes me wonder if Piers Anthony was ever in a Planescape game.
Oh man, I remembering reading some of the Xanth novels in middle school. Definitely not something I would ever show to family. Still, very creative stuff in there.
It’s fine, Dwarf. Vigil probably rotates poloidolly. (My Wikipedia search suggests that’s probably the term for a torus twisting around its ring axis instead of just spinning.) Or maybe the Gal of Discomfort generates an uncomfortable telekinetic force towards the “ground” mimicking gravity. Or maybe there’s a bizarre spatial phenomenon that makes all directions in Vigil down which also explains all the interdimensional windows and keeps the city precisely at the top of the Hinterlands’s…Pinnacle.
Look, my point is that there’s any number of explanations for this. If you can accept gods that grant magic powers, and especially if you accept that this wouldn’t result in the world’s religion being rendered alien to a modern player, you can accept some more overt fantasy.
Oh, right, formal question of the day. Not exactly nonsense fantasy, but I’ve been subscribed to the Shonen Jump app for months; while I subscribed for a few series that aren’t anything like nonsense fantasy, some of the ones I’ve read just because they’re there have a very…”This is how things work, just deal with it” attitude towards their magic/power systems. Devils with scarier names are stronger? This shapeshifter will return to her true form if she falls asleep? That planet is gonna fall apart if they can’t find someone strong enough to stick into its big magic box? This guy’s microwave is a time machine that spits out future Shonen Jump volumes? Sure. (This is hardly unique to SJ, but through it I’ve been exposed to a bunch of series I probably wouldn’t have tried otherwise.)
This isn’t nonsense fantasy per se; a lot of these series have fairly well-defined (if arbitrary) fantasy mechanics and/or try to stay grounded outside the magic system. But the fact that the rules of magic are what they are, and everyone just has to deal with that, somehow gives these sorts of series some of the same vibe as nonsense fantasy. Maybe it’s that a lot of ancient fairy tales which inspire modern nonsense fantasy run on the assumption that living with and obeying these arbitrary fairy rules is good and breaking them leads to disaster; maybe my brain just doesn’t distinguish between different grades of arbitrary magic well.
Anime is an interesting example for me, but in the opposite direction. When I think of the ludicrously over-explained rules of the Death Note for example, I just get tired. Some folks like picking apart those rules to discover what is possible within the setting, but that always seemed more like a puzzle than a story to me. My preference runs to the latter.
My own personal preference would run to collecting all the death notes, dousing them with gasoline and setting them on fire.
Seeing that one of my current settings, the same one with the Tiefling warforged and Githyanki who lay eggs in people, includes the following:
A civilization of gun wielding samurai gnomes who lives in great cities on the back of gigantic floating goldfish and great monasteries build into the shell of mountain turtles.
Dwarves and goliaths as the created servants of a long dead race, trying to preserve their work and find a way to save their species from extinction as the means of creating new members of it are slowly being lost.
Halflings as a pastoral people, who makes their living by savaging ancient ruins and flies using ancient gliders (Stolen directly from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind).
Elves that are pretty much like all other elves, just they keep saying “I told you so” whenever something bad happens, because they have basically given the other species several books of prophecies that are constantly ignored.
Humans are refugees from another world, and are mainly just trying to survive.
The Goblinoid empire that are gathering (mainly through raiding and warring) enough technology to launch their cities into space and leave the world to its doom.
And an eternal war between Changelings and Mind Flayers in the chaotic and ever changing realm of dreams, where they fight for control over what constitutes unreality and thus reality as well. A war which threatens to doom the entire world.
I must admit that I have a deep fondness for the more nonsensical and fantastical settings.
Are you the ghost of Douglas Adams perchance? 😛
I’m currently playing in a game where mortal interaction with the Fae is the main plot, and the player party have been to a few Fae realms. Each Lord ans their own realm, and the physical laws there are whatever they want them to be. We’ve had always winter and upside-down gravity so far, but have been reliably informed of endless ocean, places where there’s no ground, and so on.
It’s great fun as our perfectly normal mortal party try to work out how to interact with all this (without insulting anyone XD)
And that right there is the special problem of nonsense RPGs. It’s one thing to declare that “things just work that way” in literature. But when players are able to poke about the edges of plot holes in real time, nonsense becomes harder to pull off. You need to know the rules of the world to interact with it, and it’s hard to maintain that sense of wonder when you can actively investigate.
So our GM is maintaining it pretty well by declaring that given the Fae run on stories, they don’t have to make sense to mortals. I can (and do) investigate as much as possible, but eventually run up against ‘that’s the story’. Which to me makes it better as a setting, because why should story-driven Fae have any other reason? You don’t need a biological reason that the skinless Nukaleevee can function without skin – they have no skin because Nukaleevee don’t have skin, and they don’t need to worry about blood loss or infection because they don’t really have biology at all.
It may be hard for both me and my character to accept, but that’s the point.
Have you heard of the Wyld? Is just out there and is a great place. Quite safe too if you don’t mind the mutations or losing your arm by grabbing a jar of water 😛
How i love that illustration 😀
I love that kind of places that don’t make sense. Like a torus? The place is funnier if you need to fold the map into a crane to make sense of it 😀
Played a game of Terraria in the Wyld once. I had a whole grid of post-it notes set up to cover the board. The exalts had to dig a hellavator by removing one post-it note at a time to uncover new rooms. It was silly and ludicrous and exactly what I want the Wyld to be.
That sound like an interesting way to do things. Glad it was a good time, sound good 🙂
It’s not a fantasy setting, but I like the way Aqua Teen Hunger Force is seemingly deliberately internally inconsistent (in one episode vampires don’t exist, in the next a vampire is the landlord. There are nine different contradictory explanations for why the main characters are talking food items. Characters are killed off and returned to life without explanation, with the exception of one character who always has an explanation. etc etc etc.)
What’s the advantage of this level of absurdity?
My friends and I are all pretty heavy on the worldbuilding; coming up with the rules to make something bizarre plausible is half the fun for us.
That said, one aspect I do recall leaving mysterious is how merfolk civilization survives the lightless depths, which were established to be home to countless untold and unthinkable horrors. They use bioluminescent algae and plants to supplement magic for illumination, papyrus for paper, mangroves as a source of both oxygen and fruit (which is also made into wine), and pearlsteel to supplement their bubble forges’ production… but how they survive the monsters of the deep without protection is left mysterious. Do whalesongs soothe the monsters, letting the metropolis pass unnoticed? Are they protected by their gods, or perhaps a deal with some greater nightmare or fiend? Do the horrors shy away from such a high concentration of light? Or perhaps it’s the result of a massive ritual magic? Who can say?
One thing I haven’t mentioned is the philosophical differences between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Many worldbuilding types subscribe to the Tolkien philosophy: if you’re going to make a serious secondary world, you should take it seriously.
Lewis was fundamentally uninterested in internal consistency. Narnia is a beloved place anyway.
As I continue reading and absorbing new fantasies, I’m less convinced that Tolkien’s style is automatically superior.
Yeah, when I’m making a world I prefer to go ‘hard’ worldbuilding, making it essentially a system with predictable rules and elements. Demons grow in power by earning loyalty; only humans are vulnerable to possession but it requires their permission; angels get a single power that they can train in a variety of directions; when you get reincarnated you also get whatever trait your last life considered their most important quality.
But some of my favorite works go for ‘soft’ worldbuilding, and are no less enjoyable for it. For an easy example, we get very little in the way of rules for any of the Ghibli films, and those are fantastic.
Understanding the rules is great for understanding the setting and interacting with it intelligently; not understanding them lets your imagination run free. In the end, either works well for immersion.
Well, in terms of world-building, mystery, and internal consistency, I have two words for you: Jack Vance.
The Dying Earth novels and stories are filled with truly bizarre elements that are never explained to the reader, though the details are (largely) internally consistent and the various characters accept the weirdness with a “well, of course” shrug. (I’m looking at you, IOUN stones.)
I’ve got two favorites, though they’re rather simple.
The first is constantly (though not necessarily rapidly) changing terrain/geography, such as you might find in a fey land, a magical byproduct, or simply the unusual nature of a setting.
The second is the very simple, rivers that wind through the air and ground and maybe even through other bodies of water without necessarily merging with them.
Vaguely relatedly I’ve had this character concept for a while of a traveling merchant who bottles/trades in various flavors of day or season or the like. Like “lightly cloudly spring day”, “gentle breeze through an apple orchard”, “refreshing chill of an unseasonably cold afternoon in summer”, “sunshine reflected off a lake”, and so on.
Also related: the fae trade in memories.
“Give me the memory of your first kiss. The scent of your father’s coat on a rainy day. The sound of rain on a tin roof at night.”
Always thought that was suitably magical and melancholy and esoteric.
I know it’s super mundane, but the size increase rules in Pathfinder are absolutely insane.
Inanimate objects (weapons, armor, jewelry) double in weight and length/height when increasing in size. Organic objects (plants, animals, etc.) double in height and length but their weight is multiplied by eight.
The inverses hold true as well.
This means that SOME matter increases in mass differently than others. What would be logical is that ALL matter works the way organic material works, and to just adjust the Carrying Capacity by Size modifiers so that big creatures can actually carry their tools without struggling.
Colossal sized anvil: made from neutron star.
This is another thing I am trying to fix in my Corefinder revisions.
My personal favorite growing up: Bionicle, specifically the Gen 1 version from 2001-2010. It started with vaguely Polynesian elemental biomechanical robot heroes collecting magical masks to stop the evil Makuta, and only got weirder from there.
Bionicle wasn’t entirely nonsense–everything ultimately has an obscure explanation SOMEWHERE–but that doesn’t change that the entire setting was inspired by the idea of living chemotherapy pills for a giant robot. https://padandpixel.com/myth-maori-and-a-brain-tumor-the-bionicle-saga/
It was weird, but in a good way, having grown up with it. I played a ton of freeform play-by-post games on a forum for Bionicle fans, and it probably explains why I’ve enjoyed roleplaying in other gonzo settings (including Sigil!)
It’s also surprisingly trans, even if the writers definitely hadn’t intended it to be such: https://www.autostraddle.com/investigating-the-bionicle-to-trans-pipeline/