I can't decide if these are bugs, or bad design or what, so posting to gameplay to get some indication of what is what.

1) Some of the wands can be used outside the Sanctum. Some of them can only? be used outside (not 100% sure on this).

I strongly suspect this is a known issue and is by design. I only mention it because they break the general rules on # of charges and spell level vs. wand level.

2) Earth elementals stoneshatter

I get why this makes sense from a 'earth magic' perspective, but I don't think a being made of stone would cast the thing that shatters stone. That's just me. Not a major issue really except for 3.

3) Wand of marble does 'earth rift' spell, but is made of stone.

Making it pretty ineffective at it's purpose because of #2.

4) Wand of "acid" is no such thing. It also contains 'earth rift' spell.

Which makes the useable against the earth elementals, but makes a noticeable lack of acid spells for smoke plane. All the others have a polar opposite, and this wand clearly *should* be for smoke plane, but isn't. Virtiolic stream, acid blast, etc. would make more sense.

5) Fire elementals are opposed by ice, and magma by water.

Even though that should be reversed. It even makes sense, like with physics. Ice to cool magma and stop it, water to smother fire and stop it. I didn't double check this but I'm 95% sure I've checked in the past and this is the case. The other 5% says they're both double vuln ice and neither is overly vuln water.


6) Water elementals can't be struck by fire... because underwater.

Not clear answer for this one other than it's magic fire and maybe it works underwater? Seems odd that this element can't be opposed by it's opposite because the very plane prevents the opposite from being. If all planes prevented their polar opposite, or none of them, it would make more sense, but all-but-one seems silly.

Maybe just make them on top of water instead of submerged?

7) (Lightning, Radiance, Steam, Minerals, Dust, Salt, Ash, and
Vacuum)

Someone get their lazy bones on making the other planes.

8) Everything dispels.

This is just annoying for a place designed for mage ranking. It just feels unnecessarily punishing against the exact people meant to use the place.

9) Some? partial shifts can be dispelled.

which makes no sense and I don't think applies to all of them. I know paws of the cheetah can be dispelled, but I don't think horns of the bull can. Consistency would be nice. Also partial shifts shouldn't be dispellable as they are body modifications. Just IMO.

If you read the Dungeons and Dragons 'Manual of the Planes' this would probably make a lot more sense to you.

To save a bit of time, I'll stick on a screenshot or two since it also saves me from having to write something that is easy to pick up and read.
1) Dunno how it works out, nor do I know the intent of the author.
2) They’re earth. I’m sure they’re decent at shattering it.
3) I don’t know if the goal was to make it easy?
4) The wand of acid is actually called “a glass tube filled with corrosive acid”. That lets you know, up front, it is glass. It does an earth rift, just like the marble wand, I’m not sure whether the intent was to have it shoot acid or just do a rift. I’ll try to check on that.

5) Ice beats water. Ice melts to water, then water evaporates. Water JUST evaporates.

As far as I can tell on the CF mobs, both fire elementals and magma para-elementals are vuln to cold and drowning, with a bit more of a vulnerability to one over the other.





6) Fireballs -

Having it on top of water/surface -

7)

8) Some places are annoying, but have other trade-offs.
9) I’ve got no idea if this is consistent, but personally I’d be fine if they could all be dispelled. I’d also be fine if we want to say the ‘spell’ only kicked in to cause the shift, making a dispel after that point do nothing. Consistency is what would matter most to me here, but no idea how it currently fits.

Cause if so... oh boy do we need to make a bunch of changes.

That bit of snark aside, most of this is about internal consistency and playability.

2) Why exactly? Pebble to boulder makes sense, to me, or earth wave or earthquake, but stoneshatter seems a bit like giving an angel power word kill. Angels are about killing, they could have it, but the connotation is anathema IMHO, same with stoneshatter and earth elems. I'm ok with a disgreement here, mostly making an argument in favor of playability

3) It clearly is to give a mage the tools to defeat the elementals with something they're clearly vulnerable to. Making that thing made of stone and thus stone shatterable seems off. Not from realism, but from playability. There is no reason that wand can't be glass like all the others.

4) The label and application, plus the fact smoke doesn't have an opposing wand leads me to believe it was mislabeled or something. Doesn't appear to be internally consistent with the rest of the area's design, which is why I mention it.

5) Ever tried to put out a fire with ice cubes? Again the interal consitency of the area leads me to believe that ice beats magma more and water beats fire more as they are opposite on the diagram and thats how all the other planes work. Smoke vs Ooze, Air vs Earth (although that one is weird).

6) Understandable, this time I'm making a playability argument vs. being consistent with the water planes handbook for an old edition of D&D.

7) Are you trying to tell me those are in there? Because if they are they are crazy good hidden.

8) Annoying to the very people meant to use it isn't a very friendly design.

9) Agreed

Lots of areas, myths, areas, races, etc. have classic DND sources. We're our own thing, but you can see the inspiration of, what I consider to be, in depth well created fantasy that we use.

I'm not really interested in arguing back and forth numbering it all, I was just trying to provide some information, so brief response:

Again, to repeat myself on the acid wand, I'll check into it since we can't know otherwise, but I get the same feeling.

I don't know if the goal was to make a perfectly easy convenient mage-ranking location. I think the goal was to provide mages options. Having some difficult aspects to that is fine with me.

Not all the planes are available, often due to constraints on area size, coding, BUT I will say that I'd love to see all of the planes represented as areas at some point. We have Hell (see: Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells), and now we've got the Shadow Plane. We even have some extra-planar visitors (azure, conjurer summons, etc.). I'd personally love to see that slowly added to until we've got the whole hodgepodge! Planar Sanctum, on the other hand, only offers what it offers - particularly since I see planes being much larger than the few rooms that it offers as a brief tour.


Either way, maybe I can find a way to get in touch and figure out the intent behind the acid wand. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, you can deal with those pesky stoneshattering element-traitor earth elementals .

-Ish

Several years ago, I submitted an area idea to expand upon the planes concept, similar to the concept of Sigil: The City of Doors, complete with a grid map, NPC descriptions, and room descriptions for several significant rooms, plus a few for rooms with more generic, cookie-cutter descriptions. Along with this idea, I also conceived of expanding the current elemental planes, basically using the elemental aspects of Planar Sanctum as simple transition gateways which would lead you to a whole new area, each one being its own plane according to its element, with legendary elemental cities accordingly. Each elemental plane could also be reached via the "Sigil-like" area, as well as potentially from the Elemental Temple, which would be similarly expanded along with the elemental planes (Could be included in the accompanying story arc prior to the opening of the new areas), and possibly a connection from the Tower of Sorcery to the "Sigil-like" area as well.

The "Sigil-like" area wasn't 100% fleshed out, but certainly had more than the bare bones. Unfortunately, none of the staff at the time seemed interested in picking it up. This was during the time when there was a big push to rewrite/revamp old, dreary areas to make them fresh and new (prior to Arboria revamp, Arial City revamp, and some others for which I'm now drawing a blank).


On a SLIGHTLY different note, I also worked up the bare bones and a bit more for a "Skull Port" concept of an area, beneath Galadon. An undercity of sorts for all manner of ne'er do wells, with the Galadon city guards being obviously opposed to such things happening beneath their streets, and criminals occasionally showing up in the city from down below. The red dragon being captured and harnessed as an energy source for the undercity, to provide flames for forging and keeping the undercity warm and dry. The Slayer and the Enforcer could also be tied in to the interplay story between the two areas, and perhaps even the Mayor of Galadon with hints that he's being somehow blackmailed or bullied into becoming an unwilling stooge of the criminals below.

The post itslf is more like a bitching rant or (more likely) just some ideas out of boredom.

The intent wasn't to bitch or rant, but rather to point out some inconsistencies and offer some feedback on things that are unduly punishing without being... interesting?.. I didn't mean to imply it wasn't fine, but simply that there are some small places where things don't follow the internal logic as well as they could and potentially where play-ability could be improved without really affecting the balance.

Has really neat progs, a cool background and quest line, is easy to generate roles from that tie in to outlander/rager/Conjie backgrounds.

I'd hope imms have bigger fish to fry than microanalyzing existing popular areas even if you don't.

but I doubt someone would put that much time and thought into critiquing an area he didn't already think was pretty cool. I think it's a pretty cool area, myself.