Alright people, listen up.

We're going to make a plane.

But before we can make a plane, it needs a core, a theme.

That's what this thread will be about. Post your ideas and comment on those of others and we'll see where we get. You can post multiple ideas, of course.

I've got two ideas:

Death world

For those unfamiliar with the concept, a death world is a world that's out to kill you. Well, not just you, but pretty much any kind of sapient being.

I'm not sure on the backstory, but what I'm shooting for is a huge war between dragons somewhere in the past that left the atmosphere rather toxic. By now, most creatures have adapted and most have gotten larger and more aggressive because of [reason]. The sapient races were mostly faster to adapt and now most of their lifestyle is based on those adaptations. All colors would have factions that have adapted themselves to the environment but also those that have adapted the environment to them.

The way I'm seeing it, White relies heavily on defensive enchantment magic, holding back the dangers of the world. Blue would work with artifacts or maybe the Merfolk could survive underwater or something. Black would sap the life out of others. Red would [I don't know, really] and Green would either be naturally adapted or fused with plant-life that can breath the atmosphere.

Why do this? Part of this project is to do things that Wizard's won't. I've mentioned this before, but they don't generally show transhumanist ideals into a positive light and this world could do that, while still not being "the transhuman plane". It could explore those themes without being about them.

Knowledge plane

I've got this idea while joking around with the F&S plane. Imagine if an entire world dedicated itself to acquire and preserve knowledge. They would do this in a lot of different ways and each color would do it differently. Ideas I played around with already: Covering every inch of a city in text, changing mountain faces to show of historical events, tattooing information, creating scents, flower arrangement...

Why do this: This is the sort of idea you can push really far and it would be a very interesting exercise for all of us. It would be especially challenging to keep the plane diverse and interesting without becoming ridiculous.

A couple old ideas of mine:

Streaming Class War:
Steam punk trappings, a world that has a new life breathed into it by a new merchant class pedaling artifacts and alchemical concoctions that threaten to destabilize the established rule of a mageocracy.

Why do it? Cause wizards never will. This isn't a giant world spanning conflict, it'ss a world that's changing socially weather or not people want it. Also card type citizen or townsfolk.

Otaria done right:
Basically it's a world that came to the brink of disaster during g a war. Now wars are fought in gladiator pits, and that has grown into its own form of entertainment. There are several world powers, all thinking someone else nearly blew up the world, and all afraid to provoke some one for fear it was them.

Why do it? Cause I like pit figfights and Otaria had several issues.

Egyptian World

Exactly what it says on the tin.

Why do it? For funsies. Also our own chance to do something like Theros. But mostly for fun. And cause half of Egyptian mythology comes back to sex, which seems popular amongst some on these boards.

Of yours I like death world (I think Australia the plane) it seems like a lot of fun. I might suggest going about a different source for the death world status, but that's for actual world building.

Th e knowledge world seems better fit for very specific stories. A fun exercise, but one that may never get used.

Feedback

@Class war: I like it. I've seen Les Miserables in London, and the most interesting part (to me) was the revolutionaries. Exploring this in Magic might be cool.

@Otaria done right: Gives me a "meh" feeling. But that's just me. It's just not something that interests me. A pitfighting-based world might have potential, but it would probably work better as a minor theme somewhere.

@Egyptian Work: Seeing how bland I think Theros is, this could either be great (as in: Let's do better than Theros) or terrible (It's kinda like Theros...). I do have one problem with this, in that it requires rather in-depth knowledge of Egyptian mythology, which isn't something you can assume in a community-work. While this is a good idea, I think it works better when just one or two people are working on it.

Other than I like Theros your thoughts on the second 2 are my own, but I thought I'd throw them out since they've been kicking around in my head for years.

@Egypt Land: Considering this is the M:EM I don't think it's too hard to assume that some of us have or will at least get E.A. Wallis Budge's take on Egyptian mythology, which is probably the most widely known seeing as it was popularized around the time of the Egypt craze in the early 20th century, even if later translations and interpretations of sacred texts are probably more accurate. If we go that route, I'd be able to help out... I may not actually have a degree in Archaeology, but I did all the non-lab coursework required for a minor and kept all my textbooks, including courses on Egyptian mythology and philosophy and an Egypt-focused religion of the ancient near east (Ancient Near East languages too, but I'm TERRIBLE with languages so while I can discuss the structural dynamics of Ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Babyolnian, and Sumerian, as well as the ins and outs of their writing systems, I still can't even sound out hieroglyphics without a cheat sheet)



Some ideas

The Unformed Land/Zendikar "Done Right": A highly Morphic plane, where "Civilized" areas are islands of stability in a sea of change. The terrain around settlements, distances, even time are unfixed. One day you might be able to see another town just a hundred yards over the ridge that marks the edge of your safety, but after some hours, dark mists roll in and when they next part that vista plays home to a landscape of fire and ash dominated by the smoking maw of hell's door. Of course, most often, there's just the mists, ever-present fog that marks the boundary of what's safe and stable as opposed to what might be anywhere. Themes are mystery, the exploration of secrets lost somewhere in the ever-shifting land, isolation, uncertainty, and dread.

Sky Plane: Zeppelins! Thopters! Entire castles kept aloft by massive helicopter-like blades and ducted fans bolted to bedrock upon which they stand! Lost magitech versus new inventions and no stationary ground to be found! Themes of Magic Versus Science and Progress versus Tradition, perhaps even questioning the efficacy of violence in a fantasy setting as both ancient superweapons and modern developments reach the point where the human cost of continuing to wage war begin to outweigh the "profit" of winning. I have a feeling this plane would have a normal-ish surface (perhaps small in the land-mass scale) so we could even see a class conflict between the abused rustics on the surface and the war-like factions of aeronauts.

I'd actually worked extensively on a world similar to this that never saw the light of day, but it wasn't nearly so concerned with technology, but rather just accepting that the integral aspects of the plane, the basics of what is known, were different, because it's really the only way TO do a skyplane. In essence, I never had any land below, because otherwise it isn't really a skyplane.

That being said, it's what has my vote most intensely, but I think we'd have to look a lot at the exotic nature of the world, because if we do a plane with a core of solid mass, it's not really even worth bothering with. It's hook isn't as vibrant as it would need to be.

When I read Death World my first thought was:

The plane's afterlife... once the actual original plane has fallen apart/been destroyed. There's just the husk of the plane's afterlife floating in the Blind Eternities, possibly without the inhabitants realizing that the original world was wrecked.

I'd just like to say that I'd previously thought of making an Egyptian-themed world (though I've come to the conclusion that we'll probably be seeing more Old World cultures expressed as planes by Wizards (e.g. Lorwyn, Kamigawa, and now Theros), with the following notes: (copy/pasted)



Huh. That was shorter than I thought. Anyway, feel free to dismiss this, but I thought I'd throw it out there since I wrote that down more than 411 days ago.

I will do a full evaluation of ideas put forward later tonight. But for I now this is where I stand:

My top pics are:
Death world and the class war plane. Both are things I'd like to see done weather now or later. I even have a cool idea for death world, but it may stray too much from what Yxo intended.

The Egyptian plane is probably best left to a smaller group, but I would welcome working on it.

The sky plane could be interesting, but I'm not inspired by it atm.

The remaining ideas, Otaria done right/uniformed world/knowledge plane, are all feel limiting for one reason or another

I kinda like the Sky-world idea. I'm just worried about running into a new twist on the old Merfolk problem. If the only way to move through the world is through the air, how do we make creatures without flying? It seems like it would be hard, especially to make green work in that setting.

Without a central body, there is no significant gravity. So you could still have beings capable of traversing point A and point B, but having very little control over their movement. It helps to differentiate between those who are motile by their own power and those who aren't.

Like I said, I'd given this one a lot of thought in the past.

In addition to the method Barinellos uses, it could present an interesting challenge to see how flightless races cope. The Kor of Zendikar probably wouldn't have much problem traversing such an environment.

So, contesters so far:

Class Struggle

Death World

And Sky world as runner up?

Can we combine Class Struggle and Death world?

I'm not sure really. I don't think so, as one wants to be more primal while the other has to be more civilized. I think that we would end up weakening the concept of both.

Even the ideas that we don't pick should be kept for future works.

But Egypt and sky both seem to have some decent support.

Sky world class struggle? >_> <_< >_>

On a dying world in Egypt.

Could totally work.

"Fellow members of the proletariat, we need to seize the means of air travel from the bourgeoisie! Those that control the airships, control the world!"

Can you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men...

My thoughts are that each of these ideas can stand on its own. Mixing them is likely to muddy the waters in some cases.

That said those two combine well, and I can actually see it well. I'm just reserved because the class struggle was just part of a bigger idea. It's was more a steampunk inspired place, the class struggle (and the idea for class based tribal) just spiraled out. But that is the nature of opening something up for others to use. There may still be room to use my idea if this sky class struggle (which will be pretty cool probably) is made.

Honestly, the thing that bothers me about it is that everyone is automatically going to technology on a world whose basic physics would be so different.
I mean, the original pitch and what I was talking about are inherently different because one of them is a literal sky world and the other is just a world where people live in the clouds.
Still, I don't think tech on an actual skyworld works, particularly not when magic is present.

The upper classes keep the lower classes in Death World to prevent them from fighting the system?