The astral plane really should not be just a void-world where ghosts or spirits live. It is, after all, the realm of pure idea and imagination, where concepts live. In honour of this, I devised a series of linked tables that allow you to project yourself into the astral plane. By rolling on the linked tables you will experience fantastic delusions/visions/glimpses of the impossible until your thoughts eject you. Suitable for vaguely Delta-greenish/modern OSRish/gonzo GLOGish/urban fantasyish settings. If I ever get the energy, I want to expand this to a full hexflower thing where you can move from hex to hex by thinking different thoughts/feeling different emotions. Merry glogmas!
A: How do you enter the astral plane? <depending on plot circumstance, or roll 1d5>
A lucid dream where you decided to peel away the surface of the dreamworld. <goto B1>
Meditation for thirty-two consecutive hours, according to the instructions specified by the recovered Tokai Botourouden (Tale of the Eastern Sea Dream-lantern). <goto B2>
You were on stage, and fell sideways. <goto B3>
[someone] cracked open your skull and [something] your brain [...] <goto B4>
Experimental program to determine the origin or prospects of consciousness through the use of EEGs, copious psychedelics, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. <goto B1>
B1: What do you see? <1d6, goto C>
A riot of sound, emotion, and colour. Howling red blushes and acrid blue silences, tinged with yellow fear.
A slow procession of ancient embarrassments, stirred up by an irritated superego.
The deep marsh of comforting primordial darkness that all sleep tends towards, arrested only by the day.
A replay of your life, flowing through the stream of a river. By moving your hand against or along the flow you can speed up or slow down the images. The air is lit by a beautiful golden sunset.
Yourself magnified a thousand times, talking, chattering, laughing, loveable, hateful. To go deeper you have to step around/through/into/beyond yourself.
Them. Why did it have to be them, waiting here in the dark? Oh god, you have so much to tell them. But would they understand? Can they ever forgive you?
B2: What do you see? <1d6>
Your house, but the colours have run cold and the time is fixed at midnight.
Your family, standing solemn and still, the jokes have fallen from their eyes.
Your Family, generations on generations, a great teeming mass of historic humanity reconstituted as astral shells. You can ask them many questions. Whether they remember the answers, and whether you can understand what they say, is another matter entirely.
A great stone amphitheatre, filled with meditating monks. You see a host of different colours on robes, banners with foreign scripts, and the standard of the Isshin-muten (One heart without sky) school whose practices you pilfered.
A massive theoretical construction they would have once called Oriental, impossible layers of towers on towers and seas of tiled roofs, gates ever growing and folding into themselves.
A beach. Each grain of sand is a letter or a character. The waves push the sand into new sentences and paragraphs, each lasting for a mere instant before being destroyed as the wave retreats.
B3: What do you see? <d6, goto C>
A massive industrial elevator, grinding and whirring as it cycles through backstage moments from across time and place. Macbeth, Agamemnon, Journey to the West…
A circle of people, clothed in skins and holding spears. You have been summoned as part of the enacting of a Hero’s Journey, a spectre of the future to perform for the past. A crackling fire sends soot into well-exercised lungs. Your body feels… younger.
Gold upon gold and ultraviolet upon ultraviolet. Barely human spectres–translated to umber-grey digital ghosts by your primitive visual cortex–review your performance in the simulation of your universe. Why has this agent simulacra temporarily unbound itself from the constructed quasi-Euclidean world-manifold?
Back on stage. The show goes on. The show is of your life. Offstage is just another stage.
Three aged witches. Something tells you that they are the three witches. Three as old as story. Three as old as time. They smile with gaping maws for mouths.
A great stone amphitheatre, filled with everyone from your life, even those you have not met yet. They are clapping and cheering, celebrating you, all of you, all of the tiny disappointments that you suffered, all of the titanic blows you survived.
B4: What do you see? <d6, goto C>
A circle of cackling magicians, wearing vestments and robes from another time and place. “This one will do,” says one, before another aims a spell from behind at his caged heart.
Still, gigantic, ponderous, glorious statues. Statues of the gods, past and present. Perhaps they are not statues—they cannot be, they are too terrifying and awesome. But they are not moving, not for you.
Three aged witches. Something tells you that they are the three witches. Three as old as story. Three as old as time. They smile with gaping maws for mouths.
An operating theatre. Surgeons with complex masks and devices for eyes, manipulating mechanical stingers that pierce and probe. Beeps and whirs, snaps and cuts, you are on the bench and unable to move until your thoughts untangle themselves.
A great library with caged shelves hanging from more caged shelves, forming chains of knowledge that stretch from a cold blue heaven into a burning red hell. Walkways connect them, and spirits scurry between the books. A set of hieroglyphs burn before your mind, giving you coordinates and commands. You find that you can choose to ignore them.
A digital nullscape, matrices of gridlines arcing between voids. At first, it appears to be merely rows and rows of nothing. Patterns slowly emerge from the shadows, ICE and AI constructs weaving between each other, interfacing with each other, devouring each other, spilling gigabytes of data into dust.
C: Even this is merely a shadow of the real astral plane. Which verb do you choose? <d8>
THINK <goto D1>
HATE <goto D2>
LOVE <goto D3>
REMEMBER <goto B2>
FORGET <goto B1>
PERFORM <goto B3>
MANIFEST <goto B4>
EXIT <goto E>
D1: What does it mean to think? <d4>
To grasp the iron laws of reality, and through them attain ultimate power. <goto F1>
To peel back the deceptions and falsehoods that drive our days, and beyond them attain truth. <goto F2>
To weave a deception about yourself, and in turn flee from that which you already know. <goto B1>
To think is to carry out the operations which form the computational unraveling of the universe. To think is to be. <goto G>
D2: What does it mean to love? <d4>
To deny yourself in abnegation, and escape yourself through a more gracious other. <goto B1>
To maintain yourself in the face of an uncaring universe. <goto F1>
To attain true appreciation of the oneness of things, and dissolve the artificial boundaries that divide us. <goto F2>
To exist and to care, which we do by existing. To love is to be. <goto G>
D3: What does it mean to hate? <d4>
Death. Destruction. Hurt them. They hurt you. Make them pay. <4d6 psychic damage, goto E>
Kill. Kill them. Kill someone. Kill them all. <3d6 psychic damage, goto E>
Why? Why did it have to be me? What was wrong with me, that you chose to do this to me? How could you? Why could you? Where are you? <2d6 psychic damage, goto E>
It is not me. It is not clean. It is not safe. It is not, it cannot. <1d6 psychic damage, goto E>
E: How do you exit the astral plane? <d6, end>
A fading, a dimming into a realer, more disappointing blackness.
An unravelling, the end of sense into nonsense into senselessness into a way a round a long the riverrun past eve and adams…
Floating. The infinite worlds become infinitely small beneath you. They recede into a unity, a unity that splits apart again into division, into reality.
Sinking. Fact, feeling, and idea swallow you. They demand more of you, until there is nothing to be done except to become real again.
Like a film reel or a comic book, time itself segments and accelerates towards the end of the story.
A train bursts onto the screen/dream/reality/self, and everything is shocked into order again. You wake up as if no time has passed.
F1: What is the nature of power? <1d6, goto E>
KINGSHIP. Rule them, command them, burn them, break them. <+1 CHA>
FORTITUDE. The totality of the self must become sealed against the totality of the other, this is true safety. <+1 CON>
OVERTHROW. Overcome all opposition, and thy will shall be law. <+1 STR>
FLOW. To be in the moment, to move with the moment, to supersede the moment. <+1 DEX>
KNOWLEDGE. To know is to control. Once you can understand something, you can have power over it and make it your own. <+1 INT>
FORESIGHT. True strength comes from knowing what battles to fight in the first place. <+1 WIS>
F2: What is the nature of truth? <1d6, goto E>
NOTHINGNESS. There is no root-substance, everything is relational and therefore hollow. There is no base matter. <Gain spell: DISINTEGRATE>
BEAUTY. The trueness of a thing is simply its aesthetic power. Falsehood is ugliness, and plain appearances mere nonexistence. <Gain spell: GREATER ILLUSION>
LIFE. That which is true is that which grows and changes over time. <Gain spell: RESURRECTION>
COMPLEXITY. There are layers upon layers, details upon details. There is always a caveat, another fractal reality beneath the current one. <Gain spell: POLYMORPH>
SIMPLICITY. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. <Gain spell: GREATER DISPELL MAGIC>
SYMMETRY. What is true in one place and time is true forever. <Gain spell: TRUE TELEPORT>
G: How is existence maintained? <goto E>
SUFFERING. Life is a mere contiguous sequence of senseless indignities. Shit happens and then you die. <Gain health>
HOMEOSTASIS. A delicate shell of extreme complexity and ever-shifting order, balanced on the cliff’s edge above senseless chaos. <Gain experience>
LOVE. You are loved, and that is enough. <Gain a wish>
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