Rise of the Planar Trade Consortium
Welcome to the Rise of the PTC
This is just a place for me to publish the logs of my campaign. If you would like to see how a mercantile-oriented game of Planescape plays out using the new 4th edition universe, then welcome. If you don’t care and are just trolling through stuff to read aobut folk’s campaigns, then welcome as well.
Either way, feel free to check out the campaign log. It’s really all I’m working on keeping up to date, or working on at all actually.
The campaign initially focused on the activities of a promising young agent who did work for Estevan, a factor of the Planar Trade Consortium. It oriented on low-level activities as she gained the trust of the various high-up-men (not always male, and certainly not always human) in the PTC. Now that Sioned is more skilled it looks in on her as she becomes aware of greater mysteries regarding the PTC and begins to discover What Is Truly Going On.
Rise of the Planar Trade Consortium Comments
Cosmology is a more complex discussion. I steal greatly from the Great Wheel, there’s no doubt of that. Many things are the same in my cosmology as there, but there are differences. I’ve endeavored to make anything canonical be true, so all the various places and references in the various books will be true.
My cosmology centers around The Land, which uninformed primes have sometimes called the “Plane of Concordant Opposition”. The Land is a world and yet is also an Astral Domain and is connected to Chaos, it is singular and might well be the center of the universe. Unlike the Great Wheel’s Outlands The Land is a single continent, it is roughly disklike and rotates around The Spire. Seasons change as you rotate around the year, directions are things like Inward and Outward and Spinward and Antispinward (usually just “Anti”).
Places on The Land will be familiar; Tradegate, Rigus, Ribcage, Sum of All, all these will be familiar to the traditional Planescape enthusiast. New to things is that The Land, as a world, IS a prime itself, albeit a very special one. It is bounded by an ocean, near Tradegate (and some other burgs) currents of the Celestial Sea may be found. The Land has various god’s domains scattered across it, and it is swept by magic winds blowing in and out the rings just as it has before. Places change with belief, and entire burgs can still vanish to re-appear in another plane entirely if it’s beliefs change too much.
Many of the same planes are still easily gotten to from The Land, and the gate-towns correspond to the appropriate planes as they traditionally have. We’ve not been to too many of the outer planes but Ysgard and the Grey Waste have certainly been visited. Most of these planes float in the Astral Sea and as such are “astral domains”. Many outer planes and worlds have oceans that might have a current of the Celestial Sea touch it.
In terms of planar pathways the Celestial Sea is the familiar River Okeanos planar pathway except that it bounds a great many more places than the traditional river, it bounds the Astral Plane and The Worlds. The River Styx also exists, and strongly connects Elemental Chaos and The Worlds, as well as touching many of the “lower planes” like Baator and The Abyss despite their astral nature. The Worlds’ Tree exists, it’s branches run in and out of many realities, it grows from Chaos and feeds it’s crown in Dreams. The Infinite Staircase exists and continues to link up creativity across the multiverse. There is also a Great Road that runs to Rigus and facilitates the Republic of Rigus’s military conquests across various planes, my Rigus is very much a Rome analog. Other pathways also exist.
In the end my cosmos links up the Astral and Elemental planes with the various worlds in many, and wildly differing, ways. There are vast similarities with the original 2nd edition Planescape. But at the same point I’ve altered it somewhat to more easily support a canonical reading of 4th editions books with the world being The Land. It should feel familiar, but still be filled with mysteries and legends new to the traditional Planescape setting.