Thursday, January 22, 2015

Symbols of the D&D planes

In Dungeons and Dragons most normal adventures happen in the same plane of existence—the eclectic þe olde Ængland meets Middle Earth meets Greek mythology meets ninjas. However, there are many planes of existence, each a caricature of a theme —Celestia, Hell, Elemental planes etc.
They were introduced in AD&D 2 Planescape as a collection of various books, 3.5 as two books (guide and player's handbook), 4e (one book) and 5e (a chapter so far in the DMG).
The nonsense of the spacial geometries apart, the are kind of cool.

In one of the editions each plane was given a symbol as fluff. Teleportation circles have a series of sigils —Stargate chevrons basically. Here are my copies of the symbols:
Also: Illustrator file and pdf A4 file.
 

Mechanus (Nirvana of)

Arcadia

Mount Celestia

Bytopia —no idea why the -y

Ysgard —faux Asgard

Arborea —wasn't that a place in Flash Gordon?

Beastlands

Elysium

Pandemonium

Gehenna —oh, that one which makes little sense.

Carceri

Abyss

Acheron battlefields

Baator

Hades




Limbo

Outlands

Whereas these I made up:

Sigil —12 planes not counting the outlands, hence the dodecahedral star

Plane of mirrors

observatorium

Feywild

Shadowfell —okay, it's a bio hazard rip off.

World Serpent Inn

Air —the alchemical symbols are triangles but Celestial took the air one.

Earth

Fire

Water

Prime material…
A desperate attempt, I'll admit.

Plane of dreams. Also a poor attempt.

5 comments:

  1. Just came across these. I attempted to use your dropbox links and I'm getting a 404 error.
    Any chance you could re-up them?
    Thanks for the work you've done.

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  2. Hey. I really appreciate this. I put my players in a homebrew world with several portals to other planes. They may or may not come across them (aside from the one they found at the start (Fire) but at the base of these portals are runestones the size of manhole covers made of stone bearing glowing runes representing the planes (your symbols) The first one they powered down the portal by smashing it, not that I blame them, but they may one day find out what's up with all of them. Anyway, this is awesome, and it's provided me and my friends with some fun. Cheers.

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  3. This is really cool. I kind of created a gin-type card game. Feel free and use it or change it if you like. Thanks for the symbols.
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QWngDbnY7YstYumQ7eiDO1RmgsFwRcY5/view?usp=sharing

    ReplyDelete
  4. Echoing what folks here have said-- thanks for this! Would be great to have PNGs of these with transparency. :)

    ReplyDelete