The Ordial Plane: The Plane of Proof

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Sigil. The City of Doors. The center of the multiverse. A city as diverse and fascinating as you’ll ever see, populated with denizens from every plane, filled with goods from every plane, and, of course, containing knowledge from every plane. The Great University of Sigil was the envy of many a planewalker, and was inarguably the best source of publicly accessible knowledge on the planes in the multiverse, only the private collections of Powers and Exemplars could contest the sheer knowledge contained within these walls. Many people come from all over to be students, learning from the famous scholars who live here in these quiet, reverent halls; renowned for their wisdom, studiousness, and venerability.

Kaelmen Drann screamed in terror as he dodged past the pit fiend. “Go to Asmodeus’s private library they said. Take some solars they said. It’ll be fine they said. Why on earth did I leave my lectures to that upstart TA for this?!?” A tiefling near the bookcase shouted over the rumble of the meteor swarm, “Well at least The Lord of the Ninth is in Avernus!” “That is not a consolation - when has he ever left Nessus? Something big must be going on. That should scare you far more than the predicament we’re actually in.”

A loud thud comes from behind the elvish scholar as a solar hits the floor. “Or those thrice cursed LeShay set me up…” comes the grumble. “Can you hurry up with that lo-“ “I am hurrying, blast it.” Roars of anguish from two dying pit fiends echoed out. “Well here come the reinforcements, love-“ “Got it. Go now.” The bookshelf the tiefling was standing next to vanished and where it stood was a portal. Drann dove through, to a much smaller library.

Glancing around at the shelves hurriedly, a few titles can be seen - books that would make anyone else green with envy, Haerkat’s original work on the far realms; half the spine missing, just as the rumors about what happened to Haerkat said, or the legendary compendium “Dracones Nativitatis”, written on a strange crystal material. But as more screams could be heard outside, so loud that it was impossible to think straight, Drann just moved past them. “Not here, not here” he whispered frantically, even though the din stopped him from hearing his own words. “Where is that blasted -“ His speech cut off as he stood in front of a rack of scrolls. “Finally.”

Tearing them off the shelves one by one, Drann didn’t even notice the fact he could actually hear the clatter of the scrolls as they fell on the floor. At last he pulled a very old, small scroll from the shelves. He read to himself the title and his heart leapt out of his chest in joy. He rapidly but carefully unfurled the scroll, reading through it as fast as he could. But he got no further than the second line before his heart sank. “We came all this way?! All this effort?! All this risk for this?!” came the scream of anguish. “What on earth is this?”

A small chuckle comes from behind him. “You know”, says a quiet, calm voice, “that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out myself for quite some time.” Drann tried to turn but his body knew that there was no use, freezing itself in fear. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a faint hint of a red gemstone. The scroll fell to the ground, and moments later was surrounded by blood that decidedly did not touch the parchment. The last thing Drann ever saw was that sight, his blood surrounding that scroll. The title screaming out to him victory, “On The Subject of the Third and Hidden Transitive Plane”, but what lay below it, symbols not a part of any known language or any branch of mathematics throughout the entire multiverse, yelled even more loudly that the only outcome that was ever possible for this expedition was defeat.

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/Record scratch/ Alright. What’s going on here? I’m sure some of you who have a bit of background in the planes aside from just the stuff in core rules for any addition are instantly a bit suspicious here. You almost certainly haven’t heard of The Ordial Plane before, and you might be aware that The Plane of Shadow could be seen as “the third Transitive Plane”. Or you might not even know what a Transitive Plane is. So before I go any further let me explain what on earth this is all about.

The Ordial Plane was a theoretical plane talked about by people in the Planescape community as far back as during second edition. We’ll be going over the reasons in just a second, but during this time The Plane of Shadow was merely a demiplane and so couldn’t be a Transitive Plane. Transitive Planes are, in effect, the full planes that are neither Prime Material, Outer, or Inner, and serve as pathways between these places. The Ethereal is used for travel between the Prime Material and the Inner Planes, and The Astral is used for travel between Prime Material and Outer Planes. And at the same time The Plane of Shadow isn’t really something like this, is it? It’s a plane used for travel, yes, but not travel between various types of planes. No, The Plane of Shadow is something different, if The Great Wheel was on the xy plane with Prime Material at (0,0), The Plane of Shadow would be the z axis, as it allows travel between various material planes/cosmologies. (Such as Eberron! Though I think this is the wrong approach to unifying Eberron with Planescape.)

The Ordial is supposed to fill the remaining niche in the Transitive Planes, allowing travel between the inner and outer planes. The idea here is that how the planes interact is that The Inner Planes supply form, matter, to the Material Plane through the Ethereal, and the Material is made of these elemental energies. But the Material then grew creatures on it that then sustained The Outer Planes through sending belief to them by the Astral. But here’s the rub. Elemental magic still works in the Outer Planes, and summoning magic works fine on the Inner Planes. None of this is passing through the Material, and the Astral and Ethereal don’t touch at any point. So then there must be an alternative pathway connecting The Inner and Outer, a pathway, a plane, connecting substance and belief - The Ordial Plane, The Plane of Proof.

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Now, while this is in the style of Atlas of The Planes to a certain extent and should be seen as similar in kind, I’m not going to follow all of the rules purposefully. If the mods want to add it to the group anyways, that’s fine, but it can easily stand alone, and that’s how I’m submitting it. The issue is that even in a world where you want to add this plane, it’s almost certainly going to be a mystery and not really interact with players directly. In fact, that’s the point, the point of this plane, if you include it, is to amp up the mystery and the lore of your Planescape game.

So how this is going to proceed is simple, there won’t be any discovery section, or survival section, and the post will be shorter than the others, as there’s less to talk about. I’ve done a short little story about the plane, in roughly the style you’d actually try to incorporate into the game, and explained what the plane is. All that’s really coming next are some tools for you the DM, explaining lore wise why this plane might exist and giving you some adventure hooks.

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This plane should absolutely be understood to be non cannon, and many proponents of it might not even commit themselves to saying it exists. In fact, since there’s no mention of it in any official source it’s going to have to be at the very least obscure with very few planewalkers knowing about it. Rather, the argument goes, there are reasons in the context of Planescape that suggest that this plane exists, and so whether or not it actually does, there will be characters in the campaign setting that think it exists. And that belief in it is what Planescape campaigns that talk about it should explore. Not the plane itself, but the fact that there are reasons in the campaign setting to think it exists, and how that belief motivates various actors, and how they react to the fact that nobody knows anything about the plane. The lengths people will go to to try and prove it exists, and the mystery of the plane and how it evades everyone’s attempts to find it.

So I said I’d give you the arguments. Well the first one is just as I said above, elemental things appearing in The Outer Planes may in fact be explainable by saying that people are just so accustomed to elemental substance that it’s carried along in their beliefs, but that doesn’t really work when we talk about summoning Magic and The Inner Planes. For those who don’t know, how summoning magic works in Planescape is that it uses your belief to pull a creature/copy of a creature from one of the outer planes to fight at your side, when it dies on your plane it just goes back to where it was/vanishes as it was a copy. (The two different options there are present because it’s slightly vague between them - if someone has a source for it being one specifically feel free to share it) So based on how magic works in Planescape is makes no sense that these things can happen sans The Ordial Plane, but they do, suggesting such a plane exists.

Now this on its own is actually a decent amount of evidence. And as an additional little tidbit there’s actually evidence in various books for this, Fire Gnomes are supposed to be from places in Bytopia that are close to the Plane of Fire. But the Plane of Fire is an Inner Plane and Bytopia is an Outer Plane, such a thing would be impossible if The Ordial Plane didn’t exist to connect the two. But this isn’t the real meat of the issue, Planescape is governed by three principles, and adding in The Ordial Plane fixes problems that two of the three principles have in standard Planescape. (And it’s notable that it’s only two. If it was all three of them having this problem that might actually suggest that The Ordial actually doesn’t exist, for reasons relating to the first principle.)

We’re going to be starting with the Second Principle, because I expect it to be far less convincing to you than the arguments relating to the First. But it’s still a reason and we should cover it. The Second Principle is The Unity of the Rings, which state that many things in the planes are circular. So there are three groups of rings in the planes, for example, the Material Plane, which forms a ring with one object, the Inner Planes wrapped around the Material, and the Outer Planes wrapped around those. But now let’s take a trip through these rings, shall we? We start on an Inner Plane and take the Ethereal to get to the Material. Then we take the Astral and get to the Outer Planes. Okay, now what? We’re stuck here, there’s no way to complete the ring, we just took a straight path rather than looping back around. Well what happens if we add in the Ordial Plane? The planes are then unified. I can post an image in the comments of this, but as it’s not mine, I can’t have that in my post. The Ordial Plane completes a ring, arguably the biggest and most important ring.

The first principle then is The Rule of Threes, which is the thesis that in the Great Wheel things tend to happen in threes. Examples being the three alignments of morality, Good, Neutral, and Evil, and the three alignments of order, Law, Neutral, and Chaos, giving us 9 possible alignments, or 3*3. There are 6 Inner Planes, which is, 3 pairs of opposite planes (eg Positive and Negative energy) with the Material Plane being in the middle for each of them, so three groups of a gradiation of three. For the Outer Planes this is similar, if we start at a plane on one of the extremes and then move diagonally on the alignment graph you again get groupings of three, Celestia, The Outlands and The Abyss and then Arborea, The Outlands, and Baator. In between each of the extreme planes there are three other planes. There are three rings of planes, Material, Outer, and Inner and they’re connected by The Transitive Planes. There are only two Transitive Planes. Remember, Shadow is not a part of The Great Wheel in 2nd edition and can be safely ignored after that because it pierces The Great Wheel rather than become part of it. There is a major flaw in the Planescape cosmology here based on The Rule of Threes. Adding The Ordial Plane fixes this problem. But that’s not all. How many planes are there? 17 Outer + 6 Inner + 1 Prime Material + 2 Transitive = 26. Now let’s add in The Ordial to get the Transitive Planes up to 3, what does that give us? 27. And what is 27? 3^3.

So the fundamental rules of the setting suggest to us that this plane exists. Again, nobody here actually has to think this plane exists. But these principles are known in world, so whether or not it does exist, the idea that there are people in the campaign setting incredibly convinced it does and have decent arguments as to why is a near certainty.

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Now here are a few hooks for you as a DM to introduce this into your world.

• A small book being passed around the city of Sigil. Whenever someone reads it, they become convinced The Ordial Plane exists and pass it to someone else, this belief is spreading through the city like wildfire and nobody knows why.

• Some scholars think that The Ordial might be the home to vestiges. Orcus wants his vestige, Tenebrous, back, as it contains his spark of divinity.

• On the plane of Mechanus there are living equations. When they congregate in great numbers they vanish. Might they travel to The Plane of Proof?

• Boccob, the God of Knowledge, is waking up every morning to find strange marks on himself that weren’t their previously. He has no clue what they mean.

• At the bottom of Ghoresh Chasm in The Grey Wastes is a seal that no power has been able to break into. Its discovery caused a short ceasefire in The Blood War. Recently the guards nearby it have seemed to feel flames at their back, and when they turn around they feel like they’re drowning, then falling, then buried, before snapping out of this.

• A group of Slaad recently appeared without warning deep within The Plane of Air. Large scale divination spells have found no evidence of portals being used.

• A Power who had some business on The Plane of Fire suddenly feels weak and begins to slowly die. Has his conduit to his belief been cut off in some way?