Folk Knowledge of Minor Planar Ways (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from VDonnut Valley has the topic of Other, Between, and Under – The Worlds Beyond - which matches to some ruminations I have been having on minor planar paths.

The key aspect of the minor planar ways is harmony or coherence - when the natural world has conditions that are coherent with whatever planar other-where, a thinness forms and a path can be traversed.

The minor planar ways are long known to the ordinary folk of the realm - people know how to get there, people know the hazards and people know that by far and away these are ways to be treated with caution and respect. For the most part, foot, barge or faithful donkey is far more predictable and reasonable and so most folk stick with those.

Most of these thin places can be avoided by maintaining anchor in your own realm, the place you know you are - you can only step across when you are so hopelessly lost or mentally unanchored that you slip your footing on this world and step to the next. The many tales of drunkards stumbling into the fae realm support this.

From a non-human perspective there are many places where the planes wear thin - the 'four cardinal winds' that appear across many worlds can be used by migratory birds to traverse planar realms - often un-noticed because how often can you tell that those geese up there are not from this world?

The labyrinthine nature of the built environment leads to many such instances for - whether Gardens, Libraries, Infinite Cities - particularly for strangers come new to a place who have not yet had time to establish what the place is like. The locals are hard to shift - the anchoring effect of friends, family, enemies, duties, property and debts keeps them from stumbling away - but the newcomers can often fall through into another-place for their lack of all the same things.

The famed great routes - the River Oceanus, Mount Olympus, Yggdrassil, the Via Romana - are known and used to consciously traverse the planes. However, these are all collosal places and one is unlikely to fail to realise that in climbing this particular gigantic tree that one is embarking on a journey somewhat out of the ordinary.

The minor planar routes lead to less places, to a thematically smaller slice of the infinite everything - only communities by active volcanoes, only collosal libraries, etc. Further the people who figure out how to traverse them in a manner where they would be willing to do it a second time is further small.

Many people understand how to get to the Feywild but the reasons to go there are few and the hazards involved are great - and moreso for the Shadowfell or any other plane.

Practically this means that there will almost certainly be planar lore in your local settlements, the knowledge of the Worlds Beyond and some ideas about how to get there, but few of those ways will be heavily trafficked for lack of gains to be made or surfeit of hazards to be overcome.

d6 Known Planar Nexi
1. The fey ring - at lunar events, cross to the feywild; helped along by the odd effects of spores the mushrooms of the ring release at this time
2. Under the hill - a curious door that may be revealed to the drunk
3. The old catacombs - travel deep enough among the remains of the dead, contemplate them more than your destination and you can find yourself in the quieter reaches of the shadowfell
4. Foggy mountain road - the narrow trail on a sheer mountain face, enshrouded with fog, can lead to many other mountainous places, from the slopes of Olympus on the upper planes to those of the mounts of Gehenna in the lower planes.
5. Rushy marsh - slog through the tall undergrowth, with your mind wholly on not falling into the bog-holes and you can emerge on the Outlands.
6. Sea caves - be within these caves as the tide is rising, sufficient that your focus is only on finding a way out before the cave floods and you may find yourself on a different beach; sometimes even the coast of the heavens.
7. Dust devils - when the high summer winds race across a particular scrap of land, if you can find yourself sufficiently tired, thirsty and disoriented as a a dust-laden wind blinds you, it may pass to leave you on any number of the warmer, dustier planes. Blindfolded beasts can even be brought along.
8. Tumbling tides - similiar to the sea cave but more risky - throw yourself in to the churning seas on a dark night, become tumbled and tossed beneath the surface and when you rise - if you can - it may be elsewhere. This is both particularly hazardous as it can toss you out into such dangerous places as the Styx but useful in that it is often easy to find a place to near drown.
9. Cave at the centre - in many places where structures or diggings give way to burrow-like lower elements, if you venture deep enough, seeking a flickering flame up ahead you will find a small campfire in a room painted with many layers of ancient pictograms. The smoky air clouds the mind and when you pick a path to leave, invariably it will lead to somewhere else.
10. The forest wind - walk deep into the forest, between trees packed close enough to block out the skies, become sufficiently lost and you may emerge from another forest.