Touched by the Otherworld

Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of adding a different spin to the way that the magical world is handled within fantasy settings in games like Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy RPGs. D&D traditionally has merged the magical and the mundane—true to the high fantasy genre that it seeks to emulate—creating lands where the magical and natural seamlessly coexist with each other as part of the same realm. Some distinction is made between magical and non-magical things, but generally speaking they are part of the same world, rather than separate realities.

The one exception to this is the concept of other Planes of Existence—places of supernatural splendor and horror that exist beyond the trappings of the material world. They are the lands of the gods and extra-dimensional beings—both angelic and demonic—that exist beyond physical reality. They are the places where people’s souls go after they die, and also the places where the stuff from which the Prime Material Plane is made of comes from—scattered across the various Elemental and Energy Planes dealing with different types of raw material and energy from which the physical world is shaped and emanates from.

But while the magical and the mundane are usually merged and coexist within the same world in most D&D settings, the Planes of Existence are distant and strictly separate from the worlds most player characters usually inhabit. Rarely do player characters venture into the other Planes of Existence, and such worlds are typically accessible only through portals created by powerful, high level magic—making travel to other planes the stuff of adventurers who have already attained legendary stature. The Planes of Existence are but a distant reality, rarely thought about or considered by the typical adventurer unless the Game (or Dungeon) Master happens to have a special adventure planned that specifically takes place in such far-off worlds, or (less frequently) once magic using characters have attained levels high enough to cast spells to open portals to such worlds.

Yet real world mythology is littered with tales of heroes and even ordinary people venturing into worlds beyond our reality. The Odyssey tells the tale of the Greek hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his travels on the way back home after the Trojan War. Throughout his journey he encounters numerous obstacles—both supernatural and mundane—and has to venture into the Underworld to seek guidance for his travels. References to similar trips to otherworldly realms can be found in numerous world mythologies, including Celtic, Persian and Germanic, and typically involve a descent into the depths of the earth through mountain caverns, crossing of rivers or traveling to mysterious islands, usually guarded or inhabited by otherworldly beings, such as multi-headed dogs, restless spirits or alluring nymphs.

In such mythological sources the Otherworld (a concept similar to the notion of Planes of Existence) isn’t quite some far-off theoretical land that exists mostly within a wizard’s dusty old tomes, but an ever lingering reality awaiting barely at the edge of the natural world. Travel to the Otherworld is often an intrinsic part of the hero’s journey in mythical tales, and access to these strange lands is not just limited to advanced spells, but can be readily found within geographic features, such as caves, mounds, islands, rivers, lakes, trees or wells.

So I’ve been exploring the possibility of adding a touch of the Otherworld to my own campaigns. Whether I work this feature into an existing campaign or develop a new setting just to deal with such matters remains to be seen. But at a minimum I want to develop my own take on how the Otherworld operates within my games, if only as a mental exercise.

I will probably expound on this topic at a future blog post later on, but some key ideas I’m considering include the notion of treating the Otherworld as a separate layer of reality—different from the natural world, yet overlaid on top of it (or perhaps underneath?). I want the Otherworld to be an ever present reality at the edge of our awareness—something that’s always there, yet invisible to normal senses. And I want passage to the Otherworld to be more readily available as part of the landscape and certain locales—perhaps not terribly common, but also not as rare as planar travel tends to be in most D&D campaigns.

Conversely I’m also thinking of making the magical and the mundane separate from each other, yet tacitly coexisting in this conception of the world. Magical things belong to the Otherworld, while the mundane reality consists solely of the natural world. This would mean that the world that characters inhabit would be populated primarily by natural creatures (except for the occasional otherworldly traveler) and that magical creatures—including traditional fantasy races, such as elves and gnomes—would belong to the Otherworld, and will be found in the natural world only as otherworldly travelers beyond their native realms.

I may elaborate further depending on interest on this topic and my own chance and ability to do so. But at the very least I will flesh out these ideas for my own use to have a working cosmology of the Otherworld for RPG worlds.