Forgive Us - thoughts on play

On the weekend Team Anti-Capitalism, the years-old spurts and fits Unknown Armies game I'm part of met up from the different corners of the British Isles for a long awaited get together. Except that +Pete Wolfendale was suffering from velvet brain worms or some similarly horrific mental complaint, so instead I ran Lamentations. I didn't have prep time and also before the game I had to move half a tree and a bunch of gravel into a skip, so what happened was I ran Forgive Us by Kelvin Green.

Spoilery thoughts below:

1. This is a Warhammer Fantasy Role Play module, right? Everyone knows this? It's not on the cover but that's what it is. I mean, that's a great thing. Nurgle is the best plague God. Who even knows about other plague Gods? Except old testament Jehovah I guess. But he doesn't have Plague Bearers. There are no Plague Bearers in this module yet but you could fit them in. It would be like taking apart an Ikea bookshelf and using it as a standing desk or a cupboard or what have you.

2. This is a really perfect module for a one shot. I read it in about twenty minutes and the players went from plot hook to clusterfuck in about three hours. That included the players reloading their save after they got to the end and Nottingham was a flaming hellscape with face-fucking tentacle monsters everywhere and they hadn't got a clue what was going on and they didn't even go in the vault. So we reversed time, let them fiddle with the vault, then two of them died in a pit trap and one of them ran screaming into the chalk caves below the city. Pretty good.

3. This module has the structure of a three panel comic. Panel one - hook the PCs. Panel two - they explore the Dog and Bastard. Panel three - The Thing. Keep it snappy and don't forget the point of panel two is to get to panel three. If your players really chaff at losing characters maybe don't drop this on them? Because surviving this module would involve not experiencing it.

4. You could start a campaign off the back of this module. That would be good. The mooks who die in this one are only there for the prelude. Then run the campaign using All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

5. Don't skip out the second adventuring party. My players didn't even say hi to them, but having this other group of jerks rummaging through the thieves' complex helped keep the players nervous and honest and on point. Also good for visual things - torches lit in the other buildings, a man with wounds down his arms after an (unseen) encounter with the dog thing.

Have some class

The players in my home game have been pressing up against the edges of the base classes in Lamentations of the Flame Princess. So I've sketched together some variant classes that tweak things a little to bring the mechanics a bit closer to the flavour or enable them to do something that isn't really covered by the core classes.

These are rough and ready and untested yet - suggestions welcome.

Witch

Saves, hit dice, attack bonus and level advancement and skills as per Cleric or Magic-User; player's choice. Additionally, a Cleric or a Magic-User can take Witch levels, with progression as per their base class. Witches are either Lawful (read omens) or Chaotic (consult with spirits).

Abilities

The witch has the once per day per ability to cast Curse. This is the opposite of Bless; the target suffers d6+level negative points across their dice rolls for one day. The caster can decide when these points afflict them.

The witch can brew Potions. The witch cannot cast the spells, but is able to create a potion capturing its effects. This takes d6x spell level days and requires 50sp per day. The Witch can brew a potion of any spell from the Cleric or Magic-User list that requires a target, that they would be able to cast if they were a Cleric or Magic-User of equivalent level. This takes d6x spell level days, and costs 50sp per day. For every level the witch gets a 50sp reduction in the cost of the brewing the potion – it still takes the full amount of time, but a skilled Witch can brew potions from nothing more than Wing of Bat and Eye of Newt. A Witch doesn't need a laboratory to create potions – just a cauldron.

For characters that are both a Witch and either a Cleric or a Magic-User:

Use their level solely as a Witch to calculate their Curse ability.

Use their combined level as a Witch and a Cleric to calculate the maximum level of potion they can brew from a Cleric spell, and the cost reduction when brewing Cleric spells.

User their combined level as a Witch and a Magic-User to calculate the maximum level of potion they can brew from a Magic-User spell, and the cost reduction when brewing Cleric spells.

Animal Handler

Saves, hit dice, attack bonus and level advancement as per Specialist.

Abilities

The Animal Handler can form a close bond with a number of animals equal to their Charisma modifier plus one (minimum one). The maximum HD these animals can have is equal to the Animal Handler's level. Normal horses and dogs will have one hit dice, a bear will have two to four, an elephant will have four to six. A bonded animal will perform any trained behaviours well (and without any dick moves from the GM). Bonding to an animal takes one month of regular training and may be dangerous depending on the animal in question.

A trained animal can be sold on and will be more valuable than an untrained animal, though it will not perform its behaviours without question for anyone other than an Animal Handler it has bonded with.

The Animal Handler gains skill points as per a Specialist, but they have access to different skills.

Animal Ken

This skill enables the Animal Handler to get along with animals they normally couldn't. A successful roll indicates the Animal Handler has the animal's trust, at least temporarily. This could let an Animal Handler slip by a guard dog, make a wild bear back off rather than attacking, or tempt in a valuable bird of paradise to eat seed from their hand. This doesn't work once an animal has started attacking, or if someone else is directly influencing its behaviour.

Trained behaviour

Each one of the animal handler's bonded animals has one trained behaviour as standard depending on the type of animal it is. In addition, the Animal Handler can use a skill point to learn how to teach one additional behaviour to one class of animal (dogs, birds, rodents, horses, livestock, elephants, bears, monsters etc.) It takes one month to train a new behaviour.

Horses and ponies: Accept rider

Retriever dogs: Retrieve

Hawks, ferrets: Hunt

Large nasty dogs, bears, monsters: Attack

Pigeons, carrier-hawks: Carry message

Blood-hounds: Track

Other behaviours include:

Stop that

Herd livestock

Ride into combat

Go into that hole and bring out something shiny

Go into that hole and bring out something made of paper

Perform (specific natural behaviour)

Beg!

Roll over.

Play dead.

Monsters and wild animals that cannot be truly domesticated may need to be taught the behaviour: Keep calm just a bit longer, please don't attack, yes he's shouting but he's very important and has a lot of soldiers behind him.

Cleric of the Hanged God – variant Cleric

This is a straight set of spell swaps for the Cleric based on the Hanged God of Murderers and Chieftains, a background deity who has accidentally become a live concern in my campaign.

The Cleric loses Cure Light Wounds, Cure Serious Wounds and Cure Critical Wounds

In their place he gains:

Consume the liver and spleen

Cleric level 1

Duration: 1 turn / level

Range: Touch

The Cleric removes the liver and spleen from an enemy the Cleric or their subordinates killed through open violence, and either eats the organs raw or feeds them to someone. The person who eats the liver and spleen heals 1 hp per HD of the enemy, and gains a +1 attack bonus per HD of the enemy.

The arm bleeds to preserve the head

Cleric level 4

Duration: 24 hours.

Range: Touch

The Cleric designates chattle – these must be sentient creatures the Cleric owns or has vassalage over (a serf or subject will do, but a member of your congregation or an employee will not.) The Cleric may designate 1HD of chattle per level. When the cleric would take damage, it is instead inflicted on the chattle provided they are on the same plane of existence.

Like unto the Hanged God mighty shall you be

Cleric level 5

Duration: 1 turn / level

Range: Touch

The target must strip naked, daub themselves in woad, hold a metal sword, tie a rope around their left ankle and don a crown made of horns before this spell can successfully be cast on them. When the spell is cast the rope will lift them into the air and they will hang upside down. They are able to move around like this, as per their unencumbered walking speed, hovering freely in three dimensions. Their AC becomes 16+Dexterity modifier and they gain the benefits of the Heroism spell for the full duration of this spell. As long as they do not let go of it, their sword can also injure monsters immune to non-magical weaponry.

Trap logic

Why build a trap?

1. Password protection. That is - you're hiding something, you want to come back for it later, you want to ensure no-one gets to it before you. Knowledge of how to circumvent the trap is the password.

2. Military strategy. Could be a component of fixed-location-defense (murder-holes, false gates, landmines) guerilla warfare (spike pits, different landmines) or part of an ambush. Basic premise - make your enemy fear to enter a location, or punish them for entering it, or both.

3. Hunting technique. Webs and snares. Potentially nonlethal. Main purpose - physically restrains a prey creature so you can devour their succulent heart.

4. Disbarment. Not the same as defense - this isn't about keeping an enemy away from something of tactical value, it's about keeping everyone away from something that it no-one should have. When burying an artefact under sixteen tonnes of stone isn't enough to keep it out of people's hands, fill a corridor with scythe pendulums, parasitic wasp nests, explosive runes, gorgon-eye jewels, mirrors, false-mirrors hiding doppelgangers, ooze monsters, wand of fireball, large blocks of gelignite carved to resemble ooze monsters, ooze monsters disguised as bars of gelignite, lamp oil laced with napalm, oil bottles with warning labels containing small font explosive runes, word puzzle that must be completed to open final door (spells out "explosive runes".)

5. Shits and giggles. You have a sense of humour / justice / revenge based around pulling the wings off flies. Death traps are what you do instead of lathing table legs. Basically a craft hobby.

6. Don't build a trap. Then something happens. Example - bottom fifteen feet of a shaft containing a cage elevator floods with water, elevator continues working. Elevator gradually fills with the bones of people who don't notice all the other bones in the elevator.

7. Scourge the unworthy. You don't want some chickenshit lifting the Crown of the Everchosen. Make them earn it. (Likewise - coming of age rituals, learning the inner mysteries of a temple, romancing an Elf lord/lady, buying shit at Argos.)

Suggestions?

Dark Souls 2: in light of B/E Dungeons and Dragons

I wouldn't be running a Lamentations game if it wasn't for Dark Souls. I wouldn't be running fantasy at all - it would be Supers or Grimdark or Steambots or fucking in the apocalypse. No dungeons, no random result tables, far less giggling from behind the GM screen.

Dark Souls lit a fire, then branded me. It's an S&M kind of game. I've written about it before. It took ninety hours of my life and made every other kind of fantasy - that is, fantasy with hope, with answers, with concessions to the participant - seem hollow and wan. Now, belatedly, I'm playing the sequel.

Exploration

You need to explore Dark Souls, because I can't tell you or show you what makes it so beautiful. But it has these features and they are ones I constantly fail to realise:

Vistas. God the vistas. You can see for miles. More even in DS2 than the first. Oceans crash against ruined coastlines. Mysterious lakes open underground in a forest of infinite fossilized trees. Hell gapes. The ruined thrones of Gods fade, still magnificent, buttressed against decay but sliding downwards still.
Deep, dark, dank. Dungeons are filthy, miserable, oppressive, terrifying, deep, dark, down, down, pits, filthy pits, filthy murderholes, hopeless tombs, inescapable tombs, charnel holes, horrible, horrible, nightmare, horrible. Death Frost Doom comes close, followed by any other dungeon module after I remind the players that if all their torches go out they will inevitably die trapped in a cave beneath the earth.
Infolding. Spaces in Dark Souls are puzzlebox complete, wrapped around themselves in snake-knots. Progress is, in part, a matter of solving the space. Physical awareness is necessary and also challenging. In DS1 whole levels connect to each other through hidden shortcuts. That's missing in DS2 and the game feels weaker for it - DS1 is a mega-dungeon, DS2 is a series of modules connected by fast-travel.
Verticality. More so in DS1 (so far) than DS2, levels rise and plunge. You are climbing towards heaven or descending through hells without end. Fortress walls and deep culverts, the walls of gullies, stacked halls and basements and sub-basements and caves and tombs and mires and mud and hells. The best DnD module I've read in the last year is Deep Carbon Observatory, and this is one reason why I love it.
Tease. You see something shine on the far side of a locked grille. You see a chest in the middle of an open room. You see a trap, laden with cheese, and the game says "surely no-one could be fast enough to get the cheese without getting caught." What now you see, soon you will climb or descend. Teasing is much, much harder in pen and paper, because players have things like rope, spiderclimb, and crowbars. I'm still working out how to do this properly.

Skill

You need two sets of skills in Dark Souls. One is mastery of the combat systems. The feel of twiddling a joystick obviously doesn't translate to the feel of rolling dice, but the aesthetic quality is something that carries between - combat is nasty, brutish and material, based around the reality of steel clattering from stone when a swing goes wide.

The other skill is awareness. I'm finding DS2 much, much easier than DS1. Part of that is that my combat skill is far higher after ninety hours playing the first game. Much more of it is that I have spent the last year designing dungeons that reward careful (but rapid) consideration of the environment and punish thoughtlessness. This is how Dark Souls gets you. Some fights can't be won - so run from them. Some ground is bad for making a stand - so abandon it. When an arena is surrounded by archers you must circumvent them, find a way around behind, stab them in the spine. Is a target obvious? Watch for enemies coming from behind, or above, or from another angle you didn't predict. Don't take the built environment at face value. (So there's a cage-elevator - can you stand on the roof instead of inside it? Do you really want to be inside a cage?)

Asymmetry

Dark Souls does not care that you aren't ready for it. The challenges put before you do not follow a neat progression curve from simple to complex; evaluating when you are outclassed is part of the challenge. Get it wrong and you'll die. It also doesn't care if you find a way to abuse the environment, your skills, your abilities. Within the scope of what the game simulates everything is permitted; your ability to exploit that is also part of the game. These are two faces of the same coin. This is DnD.

Experience and progress

The XP system is DnD. Killing monsters earns you their souls, which you can cash into stat improvements when you return to a bonfire save-point (in DS2, you can only cash them when you return to "civilization"). Souls can also be spent buying equipment, a kind of reversal of the Moldvay system that XP is derived from the amount of treasure recovered.

An element I didn't notice when I played DS1 is that progress between stats and acquiring and improving equipment is ambivalent - an investment of a certain quantity of souls into equipment is worth as much to your chances of success as an equal investment into improving your stats. It breaks the sense that there is a strict linear progression to make a character more potent. I wouldn't have noticed this if I had been playing a more "balance" minded DnD system (which is perverse, because DnD 4th states explicitly that progressively owning more powerful magic items is a necessary component of character progression). The OSR vibe seems to reject the notion of an objective measure of power for a character - Carcosa is a great example of this, where 1st level characters can potentially kill Cthulhu if they get their hands on a sufficiently powerful laser tank. The use value of a power, upgrade, item or whatever else a character might pick up is what we look at to determine how much of an improvement it is for a character, not numerical values associated with it, and its use value is in part a function of the player's ingenuity.

World

There isn't one world in Dark Souls, though in DS1 the thing that stands in for it is called Lordran and in DS2 the thing is called Drangleic. It is a Viriconium, materially inconsistent but held together by metaphorical and thematic gravity; it is also a world unwinding, spooling down, decaying. In both you are undead, sentenced to an eternal return, fumbling through never-to-be-explained mysteries in a twilight world. There is a sense that you have arrived far after the point at which all the great battles have been fought - you are vermin in the rubble. (If Athas had a more evocative past it would be almost as interesting as Lordran.) Time and space are put together wrong, worlds slide over one another - this is part of the game system, with players able to summon allies into their game from other worlds, or unexpectedly invaded by savage murder bastards. If you attempt to reconstruct the game's continuity you will discover that characters have arrived in this part of the world from different points in time relative to one another.

Again, experience it. Watch some YouTube videos if you can't play it. The feeling is of a world larger than you, a world that is entirely indifferent to your success. In DS1 there is a prophecy that, technically, you might fulfill - or not. In DS2 you are adventuring for purely selfish reasons. These worlds do not pander. They do not accept you. You are an interloper. If there's one thing I'm pretty happy with in my DnD-ing (and which I think Basic promotes while, say, Pathfinder does not) is the sense that you are a small agent in a large world.

The other games

Dark Souls is at least three games. The first is the belt-sander of fantasy horror that you press up against while playing solo. The second is the co-operative boss-fighting mode, a design a bit like Monster Hunter or MMORPGs. In both games there are bosses that are functionally unbeatable without assistance from online allies - in DS2 these come really early. You can practice against bosses by making yourself available as an ally for another player in their game, and beating bosses is also the most effective way to regenerate your humanity, a status you require in order to summon allies to your game. And while visiting other player's worlds you will transfer tactics, secrets and ideas like gene transfer between bacteria.

While this is the closest to playing in a "party" that Dark Souls gets, it feels very little like the adventuring party in DnD. There's no conversation; parties are short-lived groups of players coming together with characters who exist in entirely separate worlds. Maybe the drop-in play of Flail-snails games or Pathfinder society resembles. The joint-play experience foregrounds combat and repetition - while it is very helpful to have another player join you to help explore, they are essential for boss-fights. As far as RPGs with satisfying placement and target-selection based combat goes this is more like DnD 4th or Iron Heroes than Basic.

The third game is one I haven't experienced yet and probably won't. The PvP elements that make much of the solo game a nightmare metamorphose into a competitive duelling mode. High level players seek out worthy opponents to fight with their max-leveled characters. This is transcendence of the fighting system out of the base fundament of the game - the people who play this way are resolute masters of the systems that make up the game and they are using it as a playground, a stage.

Necromantic Bumpercars

Play Cave Evil at a big group event. Someone is going to be eliminated in the first half an hour, and it's a ninety minute game, they need somewhere else to go. This is good game design.

Page six of the rulebook: "You are now an evil wizard!" Yes! You are an evil wizard. You absolutely are. You are a necromancer. You dwell in a crushed complex of ancient necropolises, a geologically-compacted strata of aeon-dead hell cities, a seeping place of hellfire and gore floods and liquid madness slime. Your servants are demonspawn and necromonks. Your nemeses are other necromancers.

Relatively this means you're an ethical everyman. If a gorebeast eviscerates an undead mammoth in a cave and no-one is around, does it make an ethical difference? (This fits in with the brutal metal aesthetic - an ethically quarantined zone of mindless violence perpetrated on the mindless and the violent, a reflexive self-punishment of the brutal by the cruel, the kind of self-contained atrocity that makes moral opprobrium infantile and claims of rebellion laughable.)

Production values are just high enough that you won't chunder. Once you pop the pieces they won't fit back in the box. If you want a board printed on board, not paper, that's sold separately. The money's gone on the art. Every card has a unique monochrome illustration of bones and gore and pseudopods and tusks, and there are about 666 cards.

It plays as you expect it to play. The really good news - you can dig tunnels. Thank Christ. This shouldn't need explaining. Spells are equippable items, and the ability to carry items, use them, and cast spells are all separated out. This creates monsters who can cast spells but need a friend to hold them, and also allows for items like carts (bone carts, gore carts), which carry other items and are obviously brilliant. Also some items are statted up as monsters so they can affect the movement speed of the unit they're in or take up space in an army or wander around on their own. The random event cards can stack as deep as chaos permits. In the last game everyone had to pass a minion to the player on the right - then a traitorous monk murdered its master and Neil was eliminated from the game.

The game uses d12s because fuck the system. I have been misusing the timer for the game and failing to summon the Great Old One early enough. My favourite is obviously the Black Old Goat - once summoned he runs around the table auto-tunnelling new sections of the board and obliterating anything he touches.

One of the necromancers you can choose to play as has the ability to split into two smaller wizards. It is a constant dilemma.

Book Weevils

When the first Rust Monster was created by Vorn in the chemical wedding of Primordial Iron and Primordial Rain, disjunction entered the cosmos. The Hanged God of Murderers and Chieftains perceived a future without metal, in which the feeble bureaucrats and their papyrus-and-charcoal remembering cloths would rule a world of miserable clay and straw. He feared this gross inversion in which the strong would bow to the weak and the sword would crumble before the stylus. Most of all he abhorred the libraries, those gatherings of remembrance cloths in which the weak schemed and plotted, spreading their minds across pages and pages of incomprehensible marks and generations of never-communing bodies, and feared that without the righteous vengeance of angry iron these blasphemies would spread throughout creation.

In his rage he made the first Weevil and their papyrivorous breed has persisted since.

Book weevils are no stranger to the libraries of the world. Not only do they feast and breed among the stored knowledge of centuries but their shells can be ground to create a potent and long-lasting ink - ironically, many book weevils dine on paper imbued with the ground hides of their ancestors. Book weevil shells are worth three times their weight in silver to an antiquarian, scholar, priest or wizard to create this ink.

To protect their precious knowledge from book weevils, a wizard may wish to prepare the spell Protection from Weevil. This is a level one spell and cannot be memorised or cast, though a wizard must record it in a spell book. The wizard writes out the spell as a scroll using ink made from book weevil shells, then inserts it among the bundles of books he is protecting. Book weevils will be drawn to consume the scroll sheet before any other paper, and will wither and die shortly afterwards. The spell will protect 500sp of books for one week per level of the caster - it could protect a larger library for a shorter time, or a small library for a long time. At the end of this time the scroll is completely consumed.

If a book weevil eats a spell scroll or spell book other than Protection from Weevil it undergoes a metamorphosis. It gains HD and an INT score equal to the highest spell level it has consumed, swelling in size and mutating rapidly as it absorbs the magic. In addition it gains the one-use ability to cast any spell it has eaten, just as if it were using a scroll. Its ability to make good use of a spell depends on its INT score - an INT 2 weevil casting "Identify" will not have much success.

If a weevil consumes any of the following spells it gains the ability to use them once per day, unless it consumes the spell again, in which case it gains an additional use:

• Bookspeak
• Light
• Spider Climb
• Speak with Animals
• Stinking Cloud (projects from the butt, like a bombadier beetle)
• Explosive Runes
• Web 
• Secret Page
• Dig
• Cloudkill (projects from the butt)
• Speak with Monsters
• Permenancy

The spells a book weevil can use are visible on its shell, though only a Magic-User using Read Magic will be able to tell what they are at a glance.

A dead book weevil that has not cast all its spells has several uses. Segments of its shell casing can be used as spell scrolls for the various spells it has yet to cast. Alternatively if the casing is ground up into an ink it is worth 200sp of components for preparing scrolls or transcribing spells per level of unspent spell on the weevil's casing. A weevil with nine HD and nine levels of unspent spells on its casing can be used in a Summon ritual to guarantee an audience with an avatar of the Hanged God. You don't want to do that, though.

Weevils despise denizens of frozen, northern countries (with which Vorn is associated) and artists who labour for many hours to produce beautiful books, and will do everything they can to consume their precious works.

The Planes

A piece of cloth, a length of thread, a needle. Start there.

The cloth has two dimensions - length and breadth.

The thread has one dimension - length.

The needle allows the thread to jump instantly from one location in the length and breadth of the cloth, to another, by traversing a higher, third dimension.

In three dimensions we pinch the cloth so that two points are adjacent in the third dimension, though their relative positions on the cloth remain the same. The needle draws the thread and connects them. We release the cloth and it returns to its original shape. Now that same, single dimension string emerges in two places on the two dimensional cloth without appearing to traverse the distance between them.

Do this again and again. Dozens and dozens of threads appear and disappear, dancing back and forth through the cloth. They reveal their single dimension again and again at different points across the cloth to give it colour, to differentiate sections within it, give them structure and content. Gradually we create a tapestry, and give the impression that the differences, colours, structures are all features of the two dimensional cloth. This is not true. Then cloth has colour and form because it is interwoven by many, many, single-dimension strings.

The world is a four dimensional fabric and everything within it is the result of other, immanent dimensions revealing themselves, like threads of complex colours emerging through the fabric, then returning into the place outside it and emerging again and again at an unlimited number of points in space and time. A mountain is a point on the thread that is all possible mountains, and so is every other mountain, and they are separated from each other not only by their position in the four dimensional world but also the distance from one another along the thread. Each instance of fire is a point along the line of all fires.

In dimensional travel an adventurer exploits this fact to defy the four dimensional world and travel between points that are distant in space or time. A dimensional gate, and spells that allow faster-than-light communication or travel through time, acts like a needle. The magic has two stages - first, it either creates or reveals two points in four dimensional space that are adjacent in the higher space beyond our cosmos. Then it alters the energy state of one of the single-dimensional threads that connect the two points to permit four dimensional entities to travel the miniscule distance in higher space needed to move between the points.

This is incredibly dangerous; even slight corruption of the energy signal will result in hideous (but hardly ever fatal) mutilation and mutation of the subjects travelling across the gate. Altering the energy state of a dimension can have catastrophic side-effects as well, as changes ripple throughout all the other points in space and time where that dimension is immanent, potentially unleashing chaos throughout the cosmos as changes propagate without limit. And the four dimensional world is not infinitely flexible - by contorting the world in higher space in order to bring two distant points adjacent it is entirely possible to rip and tear it in others, creating black holes that will consume material entities, and allow entry for the unimaginably strange things that live in the higher space beyond.

The single-dimension threads that give our world texture also exist outside four dimensional space - the realm into which the threads disappear when they pass to the far side of the fabric. They are suspended in the higher dimension which contains the four dimensional worlds that constitute our (and all possible) worlds. In this realm of infinite infinities almost everything is chaotic and uninhabitable void, but there are also unlimited domains that have form and coherence which a four-dimensional entity could understand and conceivably survive in. Bundles of dimensions knit together to create planes of endlessly repeated and iterated forms, weaving strange properties into a cloth that mimics the function of the four standard dimensions and gives the impression of space and time. In places the planes intersect with four-dimensional worlds. A mountain beyond the plateau of Leng might open onto a plane of infinite mountains, each one subtly distinct, each one a concatenation of the dimensions that gave the first mountain its form.

A connection between a plane and the world is almost always a naturally occurring feature - some wizards speculate that a planar conjunction is the point at which a particular set of dimensions enter our world for the first time. By finding these connection points and making themselves aware of the plane beyond, through magic, scarification rituals or drug trances, an adventurer can pass outside the normal world and traverse a space outside space. Planar travel is at once safer and more dangerous than dimensional travel.

The plane of water is an infinitely vast and deep ocean filled with drifting predators and eyeless killers on a scale beyond earthly reckoning. The infinite, yet relatively tiny area where it is adjacent to the plane of air is filled with vegetation, plankton and drifting civilizations afloat in cities carved into the chambers of nautili and the shells of gargantuan horse-shoe crabs. An infinite distance
below this the cosmically black ocean bed crawls with crustaceans the size of cathedrals feeding on the carcasses of amorphous creatures vaster than empires. The mariana trench opens into this plane and allows passage for its most miniscule entities into the material world - creatures like krakens, aboleths or the avanc.

The labyrinth plane is the nightmare and the dream of every adventure. It is a land of dungeons, of cells, chambers, pits, tunnels, catacombs and crevasses sewn together without human logic. It extends in all directions, passages and tunnels sometimes leading on for hundreds or thousands of miles before doubling back or simply ending in a dead end, and in other places intricately and almost intelligently laid out to resemble palaces, temples and lairs. The few living denizens are brutal and hardy predators that can survive for aeons without feeding, then emerge from hybernation in a storm of teeth, limbs and hunger. The undead are everywhere, mindlessly patrolling or organised under the command of greater creatures that use their tireless labour to hunt out exits into material worlds. There are cruel and unnatural traps that would be useless to protect an actual trove, death machines that swing into life on unpredictable triggers in defence of empty alcoves, generated by the inevitable logic of the plane. Treasure is abundant but often absurd - a shining statuette may reveal itself as a solidified mass of slime, a gleaming sword sets the wielder on fire and turns their beard into mice, and a whole chamber tiled with black flag stones is actually made from gold, hidden underneath a layer of radioactive black paint. The greatest dungeon makers of the ages pride themselves when they discover a connection from their dungeon into the labyrinth plane - though they seldom return.

The Westerland is an infinite wilderness of mountains, forests, cold rivers and lost ruins. Any adventurer who heads West has into the unknown has a chance of arriving here. It is a land with a thousand civilizations, each one a tiny city state founded by some long-dead adventurer who carved herself a little stable ground among the turmoil. Nomadic groups travel across this plane in great migrations once in a generation, arriving with news of distant cities, with never-before-seen trade goods, with lethal weapons and vile appetites. In the Westerland there is always a ruined keep, there is always a mysterious cave, there is always something unknown. The wilderness cannot be trained.
Dimensional travel across a plane is impossible: there is no way to bend a plane in higher space to connect two points within it as it is not coherent four-dimensional world. But planes connect to many worlds, and it is possible for a traveller to cover a great distance within a plane, enter a world and travel through that, and re-enter the plane at a far distant point. The secret roads between worlds and planes are among the most jealously guarded secrets of archmages, demons and gods.

It is possible for a group of travellers to walk those roads in complete ignorance. To a group who become lost in a worldly wildnerness they may notice nothing as they leave normal space and enter the infinite Westerlands. A group could quest for years before deciding to turn back home, only to discover there is no road and they have no home, and they are far away from the world they once left. They hear of a magical shining doorway at the bottom of an ancient ruin, but as they carve their way deeper and deeper down they begin to suspect that there is no bottom to the ruin, only ever deeper darkness, limitless depths of cruel and inhuman traps and passages. Lost and confused they strike out in search of some missed branch in their path only to emerge through a ransacked tomb into a desert of ash. The carved faces of long-dead kings lie buried in the black sand, and fat white worms dance around them in mourning.

For those who travel the planes there can be no return home. Merely stepping beyond the mortal world changes them. They know what every sentient entity has feared since birth - that the universe is so vast as to render every achievement of their species below meaningless, and that the universe is itself only one among unlimited trillions, and the collection of those infinite universes is utterly insignificant compared to the infinite planes beyond, and that if most of the world is hostile and most of the universe is empty and most of the planes are chaos, how much more hostile and empty and chaotic must be the higher realms that hold all those numberless infinities?

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - Francis Wayland Thurston, investigator