Nothing New Under The Sun?

This morning, as I was sipping some coffee and looking over the mounds of electronic trash that our provider thoughtfully shovels to us each morning I found this little gem -- Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered 14 tombs of a type that they have never seen before.  The Video that I saw is here.  I also found a nice article (with very good photos) here. 

As I started to dig into the news surrounding this new find, I discovered a fun PDF from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston regarding Egyptology which you can grab here.  There's also a PDF from the British Museum here.  If you are interested, there is a nice list of the tombs in the Valley of Kings here.  There's also a nice hand-out for a Yale University course in Egyptology here.  And here is a little more ammunition for discounting the myth(s) surrounding who really did build the Pyramids, and no, it wasn't aliens and it wasn't slaves, either -- it was most likely a Union Job.

Before I got too distracted, I also found this article on a joint Egyptian-Dominican Republic Archaeology mission to Posiris/Abu Sir and another piece here that turned out to be something else but which led back to Dr. Hawass.  So I went over to Dr. Zahi Hawass' personal site.  Dr. Hawass is the Elvis of Egyptology, a real-life Indiana Jones, the Undersecretary of the State for the Giza Monuments, and sure enough he had details on this new find just as I expected.  Dr. Hawass is the go-to guy for all things Ancient Egypt.  He's not only a rockstar of a scientist, he is the current and undisputed world heavyweight champion of full-contact Egyptology.

So what's up with all this stuff about Ancient Egypt?  Besides having been a life-long interest of mine, Egypt is one of the real-world places that I've been looking to for inspiration in terms of how to handle the implications of the whole Chakra-to-Attribute sub-project.  They have a wide variety of tombs, and as I develop the High Tombs of Yuddoth for Riskail, I want to incorporate some more versimilitude into things.  Also mummies are cool.  So are Scarabs (especially as a possible player race option).  And then there is the little matter of the rivers that flow into Devukarsha via the Twelve River Gates that form the cascading waterfall of the River Senube.  Each of those twelve rivers flow into the Senube's headwater-basin from another world.  But those rivers aren't just the waters flowing from one world to another, oh no; each of these rivers has their own networks of river-gates leading back across hundreds (in some cases thousands) of worlds, all of which are interconnected into one incredibly complex ecosystem encapsulating worlds without end, at least according to the prevailing public viewpoint.

The Ninth River cascades from its massive pylon-flanked gate from Thebu-Amur which in turn flows back to the pylon-flanked gate to Khefnum which flows back to Ntalat and on back to Rhakishu and to Djefbek and onwards and ever backwards through countless worlds to Siret iteself.  Siret is the main seat and legend-shrouded core-world for the numerous subsidiary, splintered and sequentially-segmented cultures that dominate the banks of their shared river that all the ancient records claim connects back to the very Nile itself.  Certain banned and censored scrolls dare to whisper subversively that anyone daring enough or auspiciously guided by the gods themselves just might be able to make it back to Old Earth by following the river backwards to its source.  Several such attempts have been recorded, none have returned.  Most people don't think it's a worthwhile endeavor.  The media are reluctant to cover such attempts as they tend to be utter wastes of time.  The Teeth of Xobek, sharp rocks jutting out of the river like black crocodile teeth, make the passage backwards treacherous, dangerous and incredibly difficult and they only become more numerous, and some say aggressive, the farther back one goes.  Even mentioning a previous attempt gets people uneasy, making the more pious perform various apotropaic gestures and stirring-up bad auspices for those around anyone so crass as to raise such an uncomfortable subject to the light of day like a corpse disinterred by tomb-thieves.  It is considered very bad form, poor manners and a terribly vulgar thing to do in public.  There is also the matter of the plagues that have come down along the river from whatever lies before Siret, terrible plagues that have lain waste to several once-elegant metropolises that now stand as barren and deserted ruins and grim monuments no one will visit for fear of the hideous death that awaits anyone foolish enough to expose themselves to the plague-phorms.  To speak of what lies before Siret is to invoke plague, pestilence and a wasting death.  It just is not done.

And this does not even cover the amiteret (leopardpotamus-crocodile hybridized hominids who ritually remove the hearts of their foes in order to prove their fearsomeness in combat), the amaunetiri (horned and plumed snake-things that willfully and purposefully flood the river unless placated through sacrifice or bribery) , babadru (nasty and all too intelligent baboon-things),  mutontu (wicked harpy-ish vulture-falcon war-forms) or the other feral and vicious creatures who prey upon the unfortunate, the ill-advised and unprepared.

In time, as such things are wont to do, the plagues passed and life returned to some semblance of normality for the survivors.  The river-gates remained open, the Siret-Nile flowed onwards and the once Great Houses of Siret-Nile became a memory, a myth and a cautionary tale told to the young who grow a bit too brash or cocky in their youth.  There are still numerous Dynasties along the Siret-Nile, immortal emperors and philosopher-pharaohs who rule over great and shining city-states along the banks of the river or who maintain roads and canals that let their people access the river from behind fortified citadels where autoi and chitoi servitors stand vigilant and ever watchful for the next black barge, the next plagueship orginating from one of the dark and deadly plague-ravaged worlds that lie out before Siret itself, past the Teeth of Xobek, where no one sane willingly goes and no one has ever returned.

"Out of our... lineage, minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this Earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars."H.G. Wells
The Discovery of the Future (1902)

Along the lush and fertile banks of the Siret-Nile are numerous Dynastic Enclaves founded upon the various Successors, Inheritors, and other bio-sects that have descended from the Nine Great Houses of Siret-Nile, each of which was founded in antiquity by a collective of biomantrists who had acquired, each in their own ways, the gene-profiles and lineages of every known and recovered potentate and noble from the myriad dynasties of Egypt's glorious days in the Deep Past.  Each of the Great Houses of Siret used these gene-profiles in their own ways both aesthetically and reproductively to recreate ancient lineages or to form fresh new combinations that partook of both the ancient past and the living present.  For decades the Great Houses of Siret-Nile busied themselves with developing their gene-based arts and building their carefully designed societies, each one following the river through the various gates along its banks to their own private worlds where they each set themselves up as allied techno-satraps and divine-emperors, philosopher-kings and pharaohs.  A golden age ensued and the Great Houses of Siret-Nile fell prey to the principle of diffusion.  They allowed their numbers to spread out, to scatter amongst the worlds along the various branches of the river-gates that in time they had little in common with one another and even less interaction.  Then the plagueships came down the river.  Whole megapoli were robbed of their incarnate populations in the space of mere weeks or even days.  The Great Houses fell into chaos, fear and turmoil.  Demagogues and warlords arose from amongst the decimated populations and the virts as well, each promulgating a program of violence or extermination, either seeking to conquer the domains left bereft of their kindred or setting off across the unknown regions of their respective worlds to settle far, far away from the river that had once been the very core and spine of their collective civilization.  Many city-states fell to the plagues, even more were ruined in pointless internecine warfare or rioting or bizarre religious ecstasies rooted in the most primal reaches of the human psyche that so many of the Great Houses had thought they had evolved beyond.  

Poe

Edgar Allan Poe.  Yes, I sort-of talked about Poe previously in the Public Domain Resources For Your Game post here, but Poe deserves more, much more than a quick paragraph and a link to his work out on the net.  He was an incredibly gifted writer, original thinker, and man of many talents who is still surrounded by mystery, mythology and misunderstanding after over 200 years.  People still read his works, his poetry is still sublime, disturbing, macabre and yet beautiful and moving (consider Ulalume, Annabel Lee, or Ligeia /Conqueror Worm for three quick examples of something other than The Raven).  Poe is one of the few poets whom I do not recommend reading in a Shatner-voice, but rather more of a Max Von Sydow kind of rumble works wonderfully.  Or you could scream it out like death metal, if that's more your thing.  Whatever and however you read it, his work is well worth investigating and since there are quite a few places online that will let you grab it for free, why not give the guy a chance?  You can go ahead and skip the poetry, the out-of-date literary criticism, his one play, even the work that he considered to be his literary magnum opus Eureka! (now in Free or Scholarly Tome flavors) and just dive into the short stories he is so well-remembered for.

Free Works of Edgar Allan Poe Online
EAPOE
Poe's Stuff at the English Department at The University of Virginia
Poe at Online Literature
Poe at eServer
Poe's Poetry (A Complete Collection, they say...just in case you decide to test out the poetry after all)
Poestories
Read Book Online
and there are dozens more such sites out there for anyone wanting to Google Poe.

My (personal) top three short stories by Poe are: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Cask of Amontillado, though I like The Gold Bug quite a bit as well, in a cryptic sort of way.  But don't let me rail-road you into anything; there are quite a few other stories to sample and explore, and The Tell-Tale Heart is not to be overlooked, despite having be re-told so many times that you can probably recite the majority of the story off the top of your head.  Poe wrote a lot more than just The Raven, and as cool as that piece is, you're doing yourself a disservice if that's the only bit of Poe's work that you've bothered to read or watch (Vincent Price's dramatic reading or Roger Corman's movie.)

You can now watch Poe narrating The Raven at Youtube, or perhaps you'd prefer to hear Christopher Walken read it to you, or maybe you'd rather hear James Earl Jones perform The Raven, and if you want to waste invest a few hours, you can find quite a few other dramatic recitations of this super-famous poem.  I actually prefer Sydney Greenstreet's presentation of The Cask of Amontillado, but then I've always been a big fan of Casablanca, the Bogart-version of The Maltese Falcon, and any other movie that has Greenstreet in it.  Long Live The Fat Man!

Imagine Sam Spade striding into Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca as he is tracking down a missing person, what should have been a simple case and an easy couple of bucks, only to learn that the guy was walled-up in the basement by the owner in order to settle an argument over some dame.  Too bad he arrived just as the place was quarantined as Ugatti fell dead at his feet, covered in the characteristic red splotches of the plague sweeping through North Africa after a mysterious incident involving a crashed Nazi UFO...and it just gets more twisted and weird the longer it goes on with a shoggoth in the drains, some washed-up opera singer sitting ominously in the corner behind his leather mask (they say he has ties to the Underground), and the revivified corpse of the Marquis deSade who was arrested while parading about in the souk only this morning--he was babbling something about mesmerism and some Bohemian doktor whom he alledged was conducting unholy experiments that made even Mengele uncomfortable.

Cool.  Poe is a perfect fit for bringing the Weird into the Noir, and how can you go wrong with adding-in bizarre fringe science and conspiracy theories?  It just gets better the more you stir things together, like making a delicious stew or chili in my new crock pot.

"When I write stories, Edgar Allan Poe is my model."

- H.P. Lovecraft

You could do much worse than lift a few things here and there from Edgar Allan Poe.  But there is no need to just rip the guy off, even if his work is in the Public Domain and free and there's nothing stopping you from doing just that.  Just because you can, doesn't always mean that you should.  And with Poe in particular, there is a lot of inspiration lurking just behind those darksome and melancholic words, inspiration, imagination and tons of atmosphere and style.  The more I have dug into Poe's work, the more and more I see his influence all over the place, beyond anything that I had ever imagined back when we were required to read his stuff in High School English class.  Lovecraft wasn't the only big-name author who was inspired by Poe, but he was one of the more honest ones to admit his debt to the brooding genius from Baltimore.  Poe even wrote an essay on The Philosophy of Composition which has had no small influence on a wide range of authors, including a certain Marxist auteur of the Weird you might have heard of by the name of China Mieville.  If you haven't read Perdido Street Station yet, you might want to give it a try.  That book and The Scar are both very good.  Mieville is one of those modern authors who really gets how to loot the good stuff from out of the older works of people like Poe and transmute it into some serious literary gold.  He's a tremendously talented guy who makes his fiction fun despite the literary aura that surrounds his stuff, lest it descend into the murksome depths of mere genre fiction.  I'm looking forward to Kraken.

So yes, I am definitely a fan of Mieville's literary work, but it is Edgar Allan Poe with whom I find a great deal of commiseration and inspiration and from whom I started exploring many of the notions and ideas that have since coalesced into Riskail.   In some ways Mieville is too modern for me, if that makes any sense.  I prefer the old stuff like Poe, Dumas and Haggard.  I can and do enjoy his stuff, but I find more inspiration from the forgotten, overlooked and neglected works that he too is reading, enjoying and mining in his own way.  I guess that's something that we both have in common, for whatever that might be worth.  When I read Poe or Haggard, Hammett or Welles, I find myself getting ideas of how to use their ideas, how to go them one better or to turn their ideas around -- to begin toying and playing with their concepts and conceits and see what I can come up with to either meet or exceed them if possible.  It's a fun game, digging into the sources of inspiration, not the work itself, and to see what you can do with the kernel that they worked from perviously.  In some ways it is like going back to the original scribble that they started with and seeing what you can do with it from here and now, not recreating their already existing work, but seeing what new stuff can be wrung out of the little chunk of wonderful-stuff at the core of those old stories, the notions that set things into motion.  Even something as simple as inverting the premise can be fun to explore or one can re-examine the assumptions that someone like Poe made like in Eureka! and in spotting where he went 'wrong' in terms of his science, coming up with either a fresh take on the idea(s) in question or going off on a tangent that explains things differently in light of prevailing, modern science just like he would have done himself, were he able.

Poe was a big believer in science and he worked a great deal of what once was cutting edge scientific theory or conjecture, and sometimes flaky-fringey pseudo-science as well, into quite a few of his tales.  Like how he dealt with mesmerism in The Case of M. Valdemar, or consider this quote from Manuscript Found in a Bottle:

“To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible --yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge --some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.”

Wow.  No wonder Lovecraft rated the guy so highly.  He could make a whirlpool seem cosmically ominous.  Not bad for the guy who once stated that he wished he could write as mysterious as a cat.

Or consider this quote that I've lifted from the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe edited by Professor Harold Beaver:

"Electro-chemistry dominated the early nineteenth century, Galvani and Watt, Volta and Ohm, Ampere, Bunsen, Morse -- its pioneers embedded their very names into the language.  Sir Humphrey Davy's researches led to the isolation of potassium and sodium in 1807; of calcium, barium, boron, magnesium and strontium in 1808.  His assistant Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and developed the first dynamo.  It was the age of voltaic cells, electrodes, Leyden jars, piles, conductors, ions, insulation, electric circuits, batteries, generators, dynamos, condensers, galvanometers.  The fundamental nature of all matter, it became apparent, was electrical."

Cool stuff.  Reading through this book has made a firm connection in my mind between Poe and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  Poe is regarded by many to have been the father of Science Fiction as well as the Mystery novel.  Reading his more scientifically-oriented romances, especially The Balloon Hoax, the claim makes good sense to me.

I've barely scratched the surface, so here are some more links for you, if you're inclined to learn more about Mister Poe:

• 
  
  A Poe 'Webliography' , thanks to Rutgers.
• 
  
  A mercifully short Biography of Poe, another very good Biography of Poe from the Poe Museum, a Critical Biography by Arthur Hobson Quinn , the Obligatory Wikipedia entry, the Poe Portal also at Wikipedia, and for something different you can read about the lies Griswold spewed about Poe after his mysterious demise at Poe Decoder HERE or HERE.  As Poe said himself: "To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness."
• 
  
  If you need to research Mister Poe for school, you could do worse than to go HERE or HERE.
• Two places to find out more about Poe's weird death are HERE and HERE.
• Read about Poe's Mysterious Trunk, one of those Too Good Not To Use bits of weirdness suitable for any Call of Cthulhu game.
• Lou Reed digs Poe.
• Poe in the Comics.
• Poe Versus Stephen King in a steel-cage death-match of literary analysis.
• Poe and Anabel Lee as Dolls, really creepy dolls.
• A Quick run-down of Poe on TV or in Movies.
• Jefferey Combs as Poe.
• Tim Burton's Vincent, just because.
• Harry Clarke's amazing illustrations for Poe's more famous tales.  (More Harry Clarke and one more Clarke site.)
• Poe narrates Annabel Lee (Animated).
• Gustav Dore's illustrations for The Raven.  (Scroll down to entry 5)

Finally, for now, I leave you with Matthew Pearl, another one of those Literary Authors who manages to make his work interesting and not boring while staying literary, who has delivered Mysterious Forevermore in which Poe's mysterious demise forms a central theme.  This is the guy who wrote The Dante Club, so it is probably worth checking out.  You can find Missing Chapters to The Dante Club here.

Two Awesome Poe-Quotes:

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

&

"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."

Edgar Allan Poe

Plane Speaking

Planes.  Whether you subscribe to the theory that there are Seven Planes of existence, or Fourteen (seven plus a second set of opposite shadowy planes), or Thirty-One Planes (ala Buddha: Check out this handy reference at Buddha-Net), or some other configuration based upon Nineteenth Century esotericists, Theosophists, Science fiction, Enochian magic, Neo-Platonism, quantum mechanics, Gnosticism, newage quackery, or whatever else floats your particular boat.  Seriously, you can pretty much pick a number at random and find a system out there that will support your spontaneous channeling of higher wisdom in regards to how many Planes of Existence there might be out there. 

That last sentence in particular works best if you say it all breathless and as if it were supremely meaningful, like Shatner reciting from the Yellow Pages.  It'll help you keep a healthy dose of skepticism when treading into this particular territory.  Worse than any religious components or deprecated philosophies struggling to regain prominence, this area has money attached to it, and where there be money, there be pirates (both operative and speculative), intellectual sharks out to make a buck from the gullible & vulnerable, and rentable prophets of spurious dogmas as well.  It's quite the cavalcade of human frailties, foibles and follies.  Just remember that an open mind does not mean that you need to be a suggestible moron.  As always, when exploring the realms of philosophies and related pursuits, question authorities, demand proof or at least a receipt, keep your hands inside the car at all times and Caveat Emptor!

Pointless Confession Number One: I have never liked, nor have I ever used the so-called 'standard cosmology' first promulgated by Gygax and then peddled like pseudo-esoteric crack by those who came after.  It's rubbish, pure and simple (in my personal opinion).  If you like it and have had wonderful experiences with it, that's cool, but not of any interest to me.  When I speak of Planes of Existence, I'm referring to concepts derived from sources far older than an RPG and in some cases even older than Shatner, comic books or the Yellow Pages.  Not that those sources are necessarily more credible, just more interesting to me.  It is my blog after all.

Ahem.  Back to the Planes. 

 One of my favorite phrases used to describe the nature of Planes is "...a fractal ontological spectrum of innumerable divisions..." that a wonderfully helpful author/scholar named Kheper uses on his website discussing the correlations of Blavatsky's model of the planes to Max Theon's model (and includes Gurdjieff as well).  Blavatsky is heady stuff and best taken in small doses.  Her use of Sanskrit confuses Sanskrit scholars, her references to various Eastern concepts often diverge substantially from the supposedly quoted sources so that it confuses the experts of those traditions being quoted.  This is not to say that she was any sort of a fraud, not at all. I am not inclined to judge her but rather much like H. P. Lovecraft and a number of authors before me, I like to wander about the various constructs and conundrums that good old Madame HPB tossed out there and see where they can take a story--or a game.  Kheper's analysis of the Seven Terrestrial Planes at the link above will give you a wealth of information to sift through.  Oh, and there are diagrams.  Lots of diagrams.  Gotta love weird, esoteric diagrams.  Once I get the chakra-to-attribute diagrams I am working on finished, I'll be able to expand upon them to show the next level of complexity in terms of chakra-to-planar level correlations.  Then I can plot out the portions and parts of the astral-body and some other cool stuff.  That'll be fun.  Really.  I promise.  It'll be in color, too.

Any how.  Before getting too much farther down this particular maze of madness and mysticism, we need a good definition of what a 'plane' actually is, otherwise this is all rather pointless and not of much use to anyone.  Okay.  So a 'Plane of Existence' is best summed up, at least for our purposes, as being both a location and a state of consciousness simultaneously.  Mind and matter are interconnected, just as space and time are intertwined, and as a person dwells upon certain concepts or acts out various irrational desires or rational principles, they are already aligning themselves with various and sundry planes both positive and negative.  The more 'evil' one acts/thinks, the more evil that begins to harmonize with them on the subtle levels and they become attuned to those sorts of expressions, they sink to those levels, they literally already are living on those planes in some respects.  Likewise with 'good,' however you care to define it.  One's state of mind determines which planes they have access to, and where they are drawing energy from.  There is an implicit, intrinsic moral geography or topography that comes along part and parcel with the notion of planes of existence.  Planes are states of Consciousness as well as places that can be traveled to or visited.  That makes them freaky on so many levels.  As soon as you even touch the concept you are confronted with Freewill, Meaning, Perception, Souls, Spirits, and the deep waters of philosophy, religion and the emergent doctrines of quantum psychology and so on.  The beauty is that there are no right or wrong answers aside from matters of personal conviction, established faith and a lot of conjecture that frankly amounts to so much fiction.  What it all boils down to is we really don't know all that much about Planes beyond the various (often conflicting) notions that we've inherited from (almost always) apochryphal/dubious sources.
(Philosophers are still debating just what the hell COLOR is or is not.  Check out this paper on 'Color Primitivism.')

A better question might be: "What do we want planes to be like in our setting?"  Approaching the material from that angle will convert all of the perplexing, convoluted crapulous creeds and spurious claims into grist for our respective mills.  We can pick and choose whatever sounds appropriate and cool and leave the rest for other folks to play around with later. 

For my Riskail setting, I am approaching the concept of Planes as being layered around each world-core like the sections of an onion.  Each level outwards shifts a bit farther away from the central nexus in terms of how it relates to time, space, energy and consciousness.  Each planar layer has a particular vibrational rate or frequency that can be tuned-into like with a crystal radio set, or that can have an influence upon areas or persons sensitized to its particular vibration via rituals or mechanisms.  And, as I alluded to above, I am making the Chakras as well as Attributes integral aspects of the Planar Layers which are directly related to specific chakras which can then be further refined or attuned to these energies for various sorcerous applications.  Likewise Consciousness has serious ramifications in regards to the planes, not just in terms of which ones your character has access to, but by configuring consciousness in specific ways one gains access or blocks access to / from a variety of planes, unlocking both oneiric and etheogenic approaches to exploration of realities behind / beyond the conventional, accepted facade -- and that is so frikkin' Lovecraftian it hurts.  But in a good way.  I'm also building a set of diagrams, not quite so clunky as Blavatsky's or Theon's multitude of sub-planes, at least not right off.  Pictures make things easier to understand, and hurt the brain less than an over-abundance of cryptic, obscure and polysyllabic words that quickly slide into meaninglessness due to their inherent level of abstraction. (What?)

What makes the whole thing hang together in a useful way is that it serves as a terrestrial-style system of correspondences that facilitates comparison, description and manipulation.  For example, the various layers of a character's Aura are effectively membraneous interference layers between their chakra and the plane(s) that are aligned / attuned / resonant (cognate?) with their chakras.  Thus, as a character does things to themself, or suffers various effects, their connection to various planes will shift and change, allowing for all sorts of mechanics such as invisibility, clouding people's minds, glamoury, illusions, phantasms, communing with elders of another time and pace (Kashmir), and much, much more.  On a related note, I had thought that I could jettison that hoary old chestnut Alignment, instead it appears that I might have to re-think alignment as an attribute akin to Strength, Wisdom, etc. Maybe. This idea of a moral component to space-time is not just for fantasy role-playing any more.  Scientists and other authors writing about quantum mechanics are talking a bit about this sort of thing as well.  Books are being written, fist-fights have broken out; it's fascinating stuff, and I neither accept it nor decry it, I'm just here for the free beer.  It's weird. But I like weird.  Watch your step if you decide to go exploring in those caves and waters.  It gets pretty treacherous fairly quickly.  Beware the Wandering Opinion Table.

What do I mean by 'terrestrial' which I mentioned above?  Good question.  Sometimes it is better to begin with what is known before diving into the unknown.  We awaken into an awareness of our selves, our bodies and our surroundings.  Usually in that order, but that could be debated ad nauseum as well.  When we awaken into sentience, becoming thinking / feeling personalities who can answer questions on a Myers-briggs test Instrument in order to discover our personality-type, then we are becoming cognizant of our non-physical / abstract attributes (what OD&D would refer to as WIS, INT, maybe CHAR--that one likewise gets a bit of a debate going).  When we become aware of our bodies, we start dealing with breathing, eating, pooping and the physical attributes (STR, DEX, CON...).  Then we start to figure out that there is a world beyond our own asshole, unless we're a born politician sociopath or are crippled with an acute form of narcissism (which really is its own reward when you think about it).  The world around us, our environment, affects us in numerous ways.  Think burning stove, running water, and barking dogs and you'll be on the right track.  Those three developmental steps form the basis of how we perceive, relate and express our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the immediate world.  It is also the basic set of concepts that then leads into such stuff as chakras (attributes again), auras (chakra-planar interfaces), ectoplasm / phantasm (the sticky-gooey media in-between chakras and planes), and the terrestrial forms of divination, geomancy, interior decorating, and coping with ley-lines, etc.  Then there are the celestial / astral influences such as astrology, luminiferous aethyr / astral light, the ethereal zones, and so on.  It all stacks one upon the other like a bunch of weird Legos (tm) , and it all inter-locks just like the little Danish plastic blocks.

You start out small and simple and then slowly build up the complexity as things progress.  Now the notion of seven planes tied to the colors of a rainbow sounds pretty appealing, over the thirty-one bizarre-sounding ones with all the sub-levels and crap, huh?

Nah.

Go big, or go home.

But whether there is only one plane or a billion, the scheme for explaining these things needs to be accessible, readable, something that can be grasped both conceptually and figuratively so that they can be used in a setting, story or adventure.  They make lovely furniture / backgrounds if you want to get all Zelazny-like, which is a great way to handle an infinite number of planes swirling between two primary poles, one of which is Chaos.  (scroll down to 7: Mike Says.)   Zelazny also pioneered the conceptual conceit of having physical laws shift in smallish increments from adjacent plane to adjacent plane so that what worked for gunpowder in on place might only be good for polishing shiny rocks in another.  That alone can spawn numerous random tables for handling a wide range of planar effects, or serve as a plot-twist worthy of the worst groaner of a Star Trek plot in which the PCs gain a massive load of fire-power (personal-scale Vulcan Gatling Guns ala Predator anyone?) only to find out that the dirt in their bullets isn't particularly flammable despite having gained some seriously intoxicating effects.  Of course, that only works if you're not a dick and let them find some other substance to re-load their ammo with, or you let them discover an alternative like trees that produce pods that have strange bio-crystalline cores that focus a wielder's WIS into a blade of shimmering force that cuts through titanium like a Ginsu, or something like that only actually cool.  Taking an Amber-style approach gives you those kinds of off-the-wall opportunities.

Moorcock has been developing his version of the Multiverse for decades and anyone not immediately familiar with Elric or Moorcock should probably stop reading this stuff and go read a book.  Even if you don't like the guy or his work, his fiction is very influential and worth taking a look at just to see how he handles planes if nothing else.  Consider the Vadhagh ability to shift from one to another of the Fifteen Planes: "Once it was easy to move through the Five Planes at will.  With a little more effort the Ten Planes could be contacted, though, as you know, few could visit them physically.  Now I am unable to do more than see and occasionally hear those other four planes which, with ours, form the spectrum through which our planet directly passes in its astral cycle." Corum from The Knight of Swords.

Now we're getting someplace.  A set number of basic, common-access planes (directly tied to the chakras to facilitate various forms of clairvoyance / clairaudience, etc.), that are all arranged into a spectrum (shades of Ken Wilbur!), and all part of a vast planetary-level astral cycle (HPB again).  I like this approach.  It is clean and a good place to start from, without getting too bogged down in endless reams of useless details.  It also presents a nice way to integrate mechanics into the underpinings of the setting, which makes things more integral, to borrow a Wilbur-ism.

Another fictional approach to Planes is Farmer's World of Tiers series.  This time though, the planes are synthetic and the work of super-science, not mystical mumbo-jumbo, and we all know that weird science and rocketships always trumps magic and unicorns, except when the scientists start creating unicorns like in Stasheff's stories, but that's a digression for another day.  Farmer did some fun stuff with his artificial planes, and it's too good an idea to waste, so I'm bringing my friends the Temjurri, a faction from the old Bazra campaign / stories from way back into Riskail.  The Temjurri are plane-makers, hardcore scientists every bit as weird and powerful as any wizard.  So now we have artificial planes in Riskail, planes that are designed, built and made-to-order by an elite cadre of technologists and engineers from an obscure secret society who are reputed to lock away their enemies in pocket-spaces the way that Montresor walled-away Fortunato in Poe's classic tale.  Cool.  Weird science, artificial planes, secret societies of engineers who hold the secrets to forgotten or forbidden technologies, a wonderful tie-back to Poe for the sake of atmosphere, and we're in business.

Another approach to the subject of Planes is Rudolf Steiner, not known for fiction but rather an intriguing guy in his own right. Steiner was an old school occultist who literally and truly did have run-ins with the Nazis who both feared him and hated him like no other metaphysical adept.  He was like an Austrian George Washington Carver only he was more ignored and his work tended to be less commercially applicable, except for his unique form of agriculture still in use, his unique approach to music (Eurythmy), architecture, education (ever hear of Waldorf?) -- oh just go take a look at the guy.  He wrote more books than just about anyone and when he got bored with that he started whole new schools, founded alternative economic systems, got entangled in politics and started his own band of not-secret society called Anthroposophy.  This guy's life reads like he was a real-life Doc Savage and The Shadow rolled into one, only more academically inclined and less likely to punch you or pull a Colt .45 from under his cape and blast you into kingdom come...but then again, I won't take that bet.  Maybe he donned a mask, fedora and opera cape and did just that and never got caught.  If anyone could do it, he'd be the one to pull it off.

Handy Link: Forgottenbooks.org is a good place to go snooping for weird, old out-of-print books that can be mined for all sorts of ideas and Steiner's Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment can be downloaded as a free e-book here.  Be Warned: Anyone interested in this stuff could lose many hours of their life digging through the many obscure treasures gathered at this site.  I am a big fan of this site.  Highly recommended.

Steiner offers up a lot of intriguing concepts that many a less talented and often times more venally-motivated author has gone on to present as their own revelation from the ethers.  He firmly and devoutly espoused the doctrine that any human being willing to do the work could reap the benefits of the spiritual sciences.  He was one of the earliest proponents of self-development, and in many ways could be seen as a godfather to the whole self-help movement.  The Guardian on the Threshold is one of those cool bits of esoteric lore that keeps turning up all over the place, from Alice Bailey to Joseph Campbell and on to hordes of earnest newage gurus trying to sell you on their cosmique revelations channelled directly from Sirius or wherever.  (sphincter?)

Despite the snake-oil peddlers, the Guardian of the Threshold is too good an idea to not use it, especially when planes are directly tied to both consciousness and locality.  PCs will need to learn techniques and / or rites for gaining the permission / means to cross the threshold(s) between them and the other planes, perhaps a pilgrimage to other planes is required in order to activate Arbitrary Powers or one needs to contact a plane to arrange for a sponsor on the otherside in order to gain access to the plane or planes in question.  Ancient secret societies guard antiquated devices said to awaken dormant powers of perception within a subject (victim), allowing them to negotiate with the Guardians directly and possibly giving them a way to go get strange cool powers as a result.  Sacred sites might facilitate this sort of experience, especially certain ley-line junctures / nodes, or one of those stock ruined temples with the vaguely pre-Columbian motif and cyclopean (non-Steiner) architecture could have literal thresholds constructed within them that are activated by rituals and sacrifices of silly-putty so as to allow a dedicant to shift across into other planes.  Assuming they get past the three-headed parakeet that guards the mauve portal to Ygulix, or whatever other dread form the Guardian takes.

Steiner is awesome.  You could spend decades just reading his stuff, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're prone to insomnia.  A genius, yes, but a popularizer of his concepts suited to today's reading public?  Not hardly.  Thankfully there are scads of hacks authors who rip-off re-discover his works and foist share them with the world, or at least those enlightened souls with credit cards.

Steiner is also a good example of how something as seemingly simple at first blush as Planes can get way out there in three or less clicks.  Planes are an integral part of the magic system, at least in my setting.  They also tie directly into the core mechanics of attributes which makes the whole process of developing a ton of spell-effects and Arbitrary Powers incredibly simple and straightforward, which I will cover in a future post.

The idea is to make the magic / sorcery coherent.  I refrain from the use of a word such as 'authentic,' because after decades of intense personal study, I can tell you that there is very little of any actual authenticity in these areas beyond stuff that has lingered long after the expiration date has lapsed.  If it wasn't for inspired forgeries, conceited frauds, or conniving mountebanks a lot of this weird and wonderful stuff would never have happened in the first place.  But that doesn't discredit it any more than applying the same standards to religion would produce any other results.  We're dealing with the geography of imagination and the mechanics of mythologies.  Authenticity stems from an opinion, a particular point of view, and frankly the magic of a made-up setting either in fiction or in an RPG needs be no more authentic than the systems used to handle quasi-medieval combat, and no less.  Mayhem is an abstract thing in the OD&D-derived corpus, for the most part.  Attempts to make it more realistic are of limited utility, in my experience, as they tend to be promoted most vigorously by those who wish to super-turbo-charge their characters and who do not wish to see anything even close to what they are promulgating being done for the magic system of the game.  Somehow some schmuck waving a length of steel is supposed to be superior to someone who wields the powers of a hundred planes and can cast lightning bolts.  Sure, it's a common enough conceit in a great many of the old Sword & Sorcery stories.  Plenty of times you read about some illiterate git in a fur kilt laying the bloodiest of smack-downs on the massed ranks of the local members of the Conjurors, Sorcerers and Wizards Local 113 (a special sub-section of the union of electrical workers possibly).  Maybe that works for you, and that's wonderful if it does.  It doesn't work for me.  I want magic to be fun, usable, and not a bogus weeny-copout kind of train wreck that just makes wizards top dog.  Fighters and others get their due just as well, and the basic mechanics coming together from all this can serve the less wizardly-inclined and even the anti-psychic null-zone-emitting types as well.  But I want more than just fireballs and a list of boring spells for my magic-users.  If thieves get special skills, then so should sorcerers (and fighters, but that's another post).

There needs to be some way to prevent magic-users from taking over everything.  Just like there needs to be a way to keep the fighters from taking over everything, or any of the other classes.  No problem.  As they develop their powers (just like a warrior develops techniques with weapons, or styles of fighting...), they have to deal with repercussions and consequences that come with their decisions, initiations, attunements and actions.  Every time they resort to certain proscribed rites of nastiness, that affects their aura, contaminates their chakras, and affects which planes they have access to. In some cases they can lose the ability to contact certain planes altogether.  The other-planar entities that they decide to contact or consort with likewise affect them on this deep level.  Entering into the service of higher-order entities, be they mythic angels, synthetic archetypes, obscure demigods or the embodiment of abstract principles has a direct and very powerful effect on the character that goes beyond just what color underwear they wear or what brand of sword they prefer when looting a castle.  It closes some options off even as it opens others up.  And that is exactly the sort of approach I want in Riskail.  Your choices as a player matter, not in a punitive sense, though some actions carry penalties just like hacking off an arm might impair one's ability to play piano, but in an empowering sense.  I want options, not restrictions.  Player skill can (and should) have a direct and dramatic effect on character attributes, giving the best of both approaches in one fell swoop.  Maybe.  Depending on how well I can get the diagrams all colored in, I guess.  We'll see.

Planes.  Getting back on track.  Planes are an opportunity to provide forms of experience, adventure and even some excitement that can really enrich a game.  Being able to project psychically into a realm of strange creatures on a vision quest, or stepping across a threshold into a realm where the rules of physics are off-kilter, or learning the secret art of drawing forth the dreaded Purple Flames of Kumashton and single-handedly wiping-out the voracious swarm of link-beetles about to devour the party body and soul--that's what I want from Planes in Riskail.