#xoriat

The Far Plane

           So if you’ve been an adventurer for a long enough time, the word “Cosmic Horror” kinda gets reductive. I mean, after a certain point, it seems like the alien monstrous beings whose minds are impossible for mortals to understand start to outnumber  the actual mortals, Fae, Demons, Angels, Elementals, Spirits, Jinn, Gods, Primordials, Titans, Dragons, Xen races, gnomes, Dustmen, the Lady of Pain, at some point you have to stop and ask what creatures aren’t alien monstrosities who operate on Blue and Orange morality.  So I want to make something clear here, when I say the Far Plane is weird, I am not just talking in the context of D&D generally, I mean it’s really wack yo.  

           The Far Plane is a realm that….well its not that it shouldn’t exist, it that it shouldn’t’ exist concurrently with ours.  Imagine the Far Plane like an alternative Multiverse, sort of an anti-verse that is happily doing its own thing, but any time we interact terrible things happen. See the Far Realm isn’t part of our Cosmology, it is an entirely separate cosmology that we can occasionally access and that is why the realm is so terrible, because it doesn’t follow our rules, and when two separate rule systems interact…well its messy.  Every time the Far Realm has touched ours, bar none, its utterly messed with everything, not just in the whole “The land gets creepy looking and everything in it tries to kill you” sense, I mean that is par for course, you run into that whenever some demon lord thinks it’s a good idea to pay the Material Plane a visit.  No, the weird part is that time and space both stop working, it’s…well if I could describe it, then it wouldn’t be Eldritch.  Duh.  These realms should never touch, they are not suppose to exist with each other, elements from the Far Realm coming here actively damage and harm our reality.  And what’s more, I think the same goes for them, every time I’ve seen a creature from that realm come here, it seems to be pained by our existence.  Of course, it tries to deal with that pain by taking it out on us, so let’s not get soft on it.  

 Things the Far Plane is not

Due to its Alien and mysterious nature, the Far Plane is often mistaken for other horrifying eldritch horrors that drive us mad, so a quick rundown of what the Far Plane is and what it isn’t.  

           The Far Plane isn’t Xoriat:

I don’t know what asshole started this rumor, but no, the Far Plane is not Xoriat.  Xoriat is the plane of madness, of insanity, of the delusions of the mind.  Sure you go to Xoriat for the first time and see your eyes turn inside out, your childhood memories invade a small Island nation, and your soul is given a paper cut, but once you get over it or experience it a few times, the weird shit isn’t really what makes Xoriat creepy.  Like yeah, the first time you fight your own skin but with marmalade instead of innards its creepy, but what makes the plane creepy is when you see a guy selling shrimp, you go buy some and it tastes perfectly fine and both of you go happily your own way.  Because Xoriat is a reflection of your own mind, or rather the collective mind of mortals, except when it goes wrong.  Honestly, there is a lot in Xoriat that is just kinda normal, because again, this is the plane of the mind gone mad, not the plane of what is incomprehensible to the mind.  Madness isn’t eldritch, it isn’t beyond mortal comprehension, frankly it seems to be our default state, insanity is not what we don’t understand, and it’s what we are exposed to on a daily basis.  

           The Far Plane is not Lovecraft: I know your young ones get your hands on those books and you think everything is Cthullu, but no, the Far Plane is not the Realm of the Great Old Ones.  If you people actually read those damn books rather than just getting the meme version on the internet, then you’d know that the whole point of cosmic horror is that these creatures are infinitely more powerful than us, and don’t even know we exist. It is their antipathy towards our existence that is frightening, because wherever these books were written it must have been a world where the notion that your existence can be snuffed out in an instance by accident due to a being who is more powerful than you can comprehend must have been considered scary rather than you know…Thursday.  No, the Far Plane isn’t unaware of our existence, they know we exist, but they regard us with the same fear and antipathy that we view it.  Every time their natives come here, they react with fear and pain, because they don’t want to go here and instead want to go back.  This is what I keep trying to beat into you young folk’s head, as much as the Far Realm invades our reality and corrupts its very being with its fundamental incapability with our existence, our reality does the same to them. There are creepy alien adventuring parties who close the portals form their side of the Living Gate to keep the world stable and not falling apart.  Sure they occasionally grab our guys and drink them despite them being solid, but again, that isn’t them being Eldritch horrors from beyond our compression who don’t even register the existence of our planet…that is them being dicks.  So yeah, they are alien entities whose very existence causes use to break into pieces, but it isn’t because they don’t know we exist, it’s because they know we exist and they find us as incomprehensible as we find them.  

           The Far Plane is not the Blight:

Ok, yeah, the Far Plane is a place that shouldn’t exist, a realm beyond our compression that’s very presence violates our continual existence and it must be driven back but the Far Plane isn’t malicious about it.  I know that is little comfort when your bones are growing spikes and attempting to free themselves from your body, but the Far Realm doesn’t seem to actively dislike you in anyway, instead it seems to just do its own thing.  It’s just that its “own thing” seems to be cause time to turn into knives.  The Blight though….yeah the Blight is Malicious. Darkspawn aren’t just horrible monsters whose existence is an enigma upon existence, they are also a bunch of assholes who take delight in raping, torturing, and murdering anybody they can get their hands on and mutilating the corpses.  Darkspawn seek out our world in hopes of destroying it, they revel in violating our reality itself.  Where again, the Far Plane seems to be as scared of us as we are of them, or at the very least find our existence painful.  Also while the Far Realm and our world interacting seems to be a bad idea, it seems like the Far Realm’s existence isn’t intricately a threat to our own, in fact some people theorize that the Far Realm might serve as a sort of Anchor to our existence, sort of a cosmic equilibrium.  Though if that were true, wouldn’t the Rule of Three dictate that there should be like another reality that completes the cycle, like maybe a Near Plane or something…wait I got distracted.  

TA’s NOTE: IF such a realm does exist, it is called The Outside. We aren’t sure what that means, but just run with it.  

           The Far Plane is not the Evil Stars that randomly hate us for no reasons and send horrifying abominations to reap our souls.

           At least I think they aren’t, I’m not sure, nobody knows why those ten stars hate us and keep sending horrible abominations down to consume our souls, but if it is the Far Plane, it is likely a different part of the Far Plane than we normally deal with, because whatever those star abominations are, they seem to actively want to involve themselves in our reality, which again, the Far Plane, or at least most of what we have encountered isn’t interested in.  So I don’t know what those star fuckers are, or why they wish to reap our souls, but I don’t think they are the Far Realm, I think they are something far worse.  

                                                                                                                            Now for most of our history, the Far Plane has been so…well….far away that portals between our realms have been extremely rare and almost always temporary.  Breaches or rifts occasionally happen, but that was extraordinarily rare, and were closed quickly by our side or theirs.  There has never been a permanent long standing connection to the Far Realm…well until the Living Gate broke.  Because turns out Gods can’t be trusted with anything without screwing it up. See once upon a time the Living Gate Served as sort of the dimensional keystone that kept our realities at bay, the only way you could access the Far Plane is by heavy drinking I mean by deliberate exposure.  Like those idiot Kaorti, that was a deliberate effort that they poured a massive amount of effort into creating the Vast Gate so they could access the Far Realm, and since they all got trapped there, it came to nothing.  The Far Realm was basically a hypothetical until the Living Gate was destroyed but now…yeah now rifts are being created every few decades or so.  Oh and the Vast Gate opened up again, yeah that sucks.  The Shardminds assure me they are on this,  and will solve the problem any day now, which really makes me feel comfortable about this whole thing.   It will be fine, I’m sure.

           Natives to the Far Plane

The vast Majority of Far Plane natives are impossible for us to conceive, they are their I assure you, but you simply can’t interact with them, they are present and can influence us but its kinda…insubstantial. Maybe they would manifest fully if a breach was allowed to continue as long as possible, but I for one don’t want to test that…because that would be stupid.  The only ones who seem to be able to consistently keep a full form from the start are the absolutely horrifying Uvuudaum, because when they come through a breach…yeah shit gets really bad really quickly.  Except for that one time, when an Uvuudaum came through and became a Paladin, that was….that was weird.  Most natives of the Far Realm however simply latch unto some local life and alter it so that they can partially manifest in our world, becoming the infamous pseudonatrual creatures.  If more than a day or so has passed since the alteration, then that creature is entirely lost and all you can hope to do is slay them.  

           Now the claim that Aberrations come from the Far Realm is pretty much nonsense, almost all of them have their own perfectly reasonable backstory that makes far more sense then coming from the Far Realm.  The Only exception are the Aboleths, cause…I honestly don’t know where they came from so the Far Realm makes about as much sense as anything else.  

           I would be remiss though not to mention the Kaorti, a group of mages and wizards who thought it was a good idea to travel to the Far Plane en mass.  What happened there I don’t know, and I don’t think I am capable of knowing, but let’s just say that the result is anything but pretty.  But unlike the rest of the Far Plane, that really would prefer not to interact with us, these guys actively want to merge our reality with the Far Realm, and ever since the Living Gate shattered and the Vast Gate reappeared they have been a problem.  Kill them whenever you seen them, because they are about the only people on either side of the Living Gate who actually want the merging to happen. Seriously fuck these guys.

           So after all this, what is the Far Realm?  Fact is, I don’t know, and neither does anybody else.  It’s a place that seems to be an anathema to our dominion, it violates our very ability to think, and whenever they show up in our domain, they basically just destroy shit until we have to put it down.  What the Far Realm actually well…that’s one of those questions that are fun to ponder but never to answer.  All we know now is that any time our realms touch, bad things happen, so it’s the job of you lot to make sure that never happens.  Alright, have fun.

Daelkyr Lords of Insanity 

Adaru

Dolgrim

Dolguant

Magia 

Dolghast 

Akleu

Gibbering Mouther and Gibbering Abomination

Gibbering Orb

Gibbering Mouther

Chocker

Dolgrue

Symbionts

Daelkyr Spawn