At some point in the next few sessions my team is going to embark on a metaplanar quest to permanently destroy a toxic free spirit. Well, the team magician is going anyway, accompanied by the metaplanar simulacrums of the other team members. The toxic free spirit is "of Man." The PC magician has a custom Tradition similar to the elven "Path of the Wheel" in that it sees spirits as manifestations of the fae.

So, where should I send him for the metaplanar quest? Is there a separate Toxic Metaplane of Man? If not, are sections of the (functionally infinite) regular Metaplane of Man corrupted by toxic magic? Since this particular Free Spirit is stealing Karma from victims in Jack the Ripper style ritual vivisections, should I use some other metaplane like Fear?

I was also thinking that it might be cool to incorporate the magician's tradition into the quest by having the metaplanar geography and trials take on a distinctly dark fae feel.

Anyway, just looking for ideas and input. Thanks much.

To start: The meta-planes don't have to be so clearly defined. One mans paradise is another hell, if 2 mages go together I sometimes give them different descriptions of the events unfolding... or rather they perscive different metaphores for the same events... the metaplanes are really a wild card only bound by the kind of story you want to tell.

However the plane your Elf will be visiting I would be basing not off of his views but off of the views the Toxic Spirit represents. If you wish to filter it though the PC's lens there are some quite dark Fae out there in legends. Lords of realms of dreams and gossemer light, creatures beautiful and terrible and grand, Lords that hate mankind and all it is. The Unseelie Fae, those courts that did not hold with these "human things" in their lands, if I recall, were generally less human in appearance, though this is not a rule.

For this kind of quest I'd write a Farie Tale, one of the old dark ones where at the end the lesson is not to go into the woods because there are rapists killers and thieves there and at the end everyone is dead except the hero who leaves empty handed and scared (kill the rest of the PC's horrifically? it is just their psychic impressions... or is it?). If you insist on a name for the plane the Fear works pretty good though making it undefined and only reachable by chasing the monster to it works better in my opinion.

Of note if you are in a "Toxic to Man" realm:
Make everything of beauty an illusion save the Fae themselves, and their beauty in only skin deep, and they have very thin skin.
Promises are binding, oaths doubly so.
Don't thank them or take their gifts, it indebts you to them.
Don't do them favours or give them gifts, they will try to pay you back - this is never good.
The Fae love music - a tune can buy you a crown and a whole song may by you freedom from that crown.
Mortals are fasinating to the fae - for about a night, being boring to the fae can be fatal.
Iron, especially iron bells drive them back and shatter their lies - anyone got a bell focus made of iron? No? Too bad.

EDIT - Terry Prachetts "Lords and Ladies", Blanking on teh author - "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" both come to mind for my insperations here... there are alot of other sources, I used to run alot of medival fantasy (no not D&D, tho I did that too)

Very good ideas here. Thanks a lot.

Wait, there are standard metaplanes?

I believe the standard ones are one for each type of spirit then you have extensions of those like Metaplanes of concepts like fear, order, chaos, etc. Then again thats just how my group does it so I don't exactly know whats RAW.

There is no RAW metaplanar setup. Not for 4th at least. D&D has a cosmology - SR has a "thingies are out there. Not sure what they are though".

So then basically it falls down to the group I suppose. It's easiest to classify planes by the types of spirits that live there. Its simple and there easy to describe. "The plane of fire is hot...with fire." Of course you wouldn't make it that simple but I think you get the point.

While I don't like DnD as a system (got tired of my concepts taking 15 freaking levels when I can do it in other systems with the first one) I actually buy a lot of their fluff books especially the Planar Handbook. I once helped my GM make a planar quest for this newbie group I was helping him with and that book has tons of ideas in it.

"There are places that have been visited repeatly by many mages, areas with broadly similar inhabitants, customs and traits.

There are countries out there in the astral and the borders we have drawn for them are as artificial as the borders we draw in our own lands, between our own peoples.

But we draw the borders all the same, not to define or constrain, but to guide and sadly in many cases, to warn away. The direction of "second star to the left and straight on till morning" is still a direction and we need them, lest we become even more lost in these distant lands.

To this end I propose the Metaplanal Exploration Foundation, a group of mages of all stripes with one thing in common - an agreement to come together and share the knowledge we gain from our explorations of the meta-planes to show those places that are safe from those that clearly are not and to seek to expand the understanding of all mankind of these strange and wornerous places. On this our founding day we will go deep out beyond the explored ways to touch on new lands, to explore and learn"

- exerpt from a speech given before one of the first deep metaplanar quest by Dr. Ratath Fris, subsequently a founding member of the Universal Brotherhood, these are now known to be his last words.

Ok, but are any of them listed? I know about "Crystal Keep" or whatever on one of the sidebars in Street Magic, as well as the Navajo (?) one with the giant squashes and corn stalks, but mainly my above comment was meant to expose how truely little Shadowrun actually has on the metaplanes.

Broadly speaking yes - there are the elemental planes the hermetics visit - these are deliniated, it just not clear if these are the same "places" as those the Shaman visits on their vision quests. "Crystal Well" is an example of someplace clearly defined, hard to mistake and experianced by many, if they had added many more it would have been too much map and such places should be the exception, not the rule.

In Shadowrun we border a strange land who inhabiatants are so alien as to make the wildest imaginings of creatrues from deeps space banal and mundane. From my readings of the various rules sets regarding meta-planar travel there are descreet "areas" and locales though for the most part they are seperated not by space or wall but by ideas and metaphors. How defined the different regions are is fairly squarely placed in the GM's lap with only a couple of written examples to draw on.

How close are the Domains of Man a hemetic and a shaman visit? are they closer together then the Shamans plane of beasts and the plane of man?

What seperates Man from Beast? - in my game what seperates the "planes" of man and beast would be that very question, askes a countless number of ways. How each plane would be presented to you when you arrived would depend on you answers - the route you take and it would range from stories of Horror to Wonder if I'm doing my job right. Other journeys will be more or less abstract, depending mostly on my mood.

I go back to my origional statement - the metaplanes are only constrained by the type of story the GM wants to tell. If the story you want to tell has a map and desreeet locations, guess what? It does. Me? I prefer taking the idea of "direction" and "place" and turning them on their ear - they are still present but are different here. Nothing is what it seems and everything is Magic. You are as foriegn here as the spirits are in our world, perhaps more so.

Is any of this RAW? Not much. Do I care? Not much. Do I wish they had defined these things more in the various Magic books though the editions? No, not in the least.

That's all I needed.

y'know, for what it's worth I've always been of two minds about TSR and their decision to open up the the outer planes to player character involvement. On one hand, they are truly an epic setting for high level characters...but on the other hand, it takes some of the mystery out of the whole magic and the afterlife thing.

One aspect of shadowrun that I like is how much mystery there is to the metaplanes. I'd like to keep it that way, at least for a while.

I am somewhat familiar with D&D's planar system but when I'm thinking about how the metaplanes might work in SR I find myself more heavily influenced by the spirit world of oWoD Werewolf. I ran a fairly lengthy Werewolf "chronicle" in which travel to various Umbral Realms was frequent. Not as constrained as the D&D planes, it was still pretty well fleshed-out.

On the other hand, the SR4 take on Traditions seems to indicate that practitioners mold their magic in a way consistent with their beliefs. To me this means that the elf magician in my OP would normally do just about all of his metaplanar travel in a vast world of Faerie, consistent with his Tradition. The interesting thing is when a magician of a given Tradition has to deal with an entity from an entirely different, even antithetical, Tradition. Thus I am drawing on the advice from posters in this thread and having the Quest take place in a very "Dark Fae" realm, featuring the most nasty and capricious elements of the Fae.

One alternative would have been to have the quest take place in a post-apocalyptic realm a la "The Road," with the Free Spirit in question hunting down and murdering individual survivors.

Have you yet discovered the Dresden Files books? Sounds like you'd be wanting the Winter Court areas, shown a little in book #4, Summer Knight.

I have read the Dresden Files books, and I do plan on using some of his Winter Court ideas. His Summer Court isn't exactly snugly either, but it's the Winter Court I'll need for this toxic free spirit.