Arborea – Plane of passionate freedom
Arborea is the Upper Plane where freedom, emotion, beauty and artistic creation possess the power to reshape the world.

- Plane Type: Outer Plane
- Cosmic Region: Upper Outer Planes
- Moral Gravity: Chaotic Good
- Common Names: Arborea, the Olympian Glades, the Passionate Heaven
- Primary Function: Freedom expressed through emotion, art, hospitality, love, grief, celebration and heroic choice
- Layers: The Olympian Glades, Ossa and Pelion
- Gravity: Normal across most regions; subjective around divine summits and powerful manifestations
- Time: Normally passes at the same rate as the Material Plane
- Size: Immeasurable
- Planar Nature: Divinely morphic and emotionally responsive
- Planar Sigil: A green laurel branch encircling a red-gold flame beneath an eight-pointed silver star
- Primary Inhabitants: Petitioners, celestial spirits, nymphs, dryads, satyrs, centaurs, sea peoples, sacred animals, artists, heroes and divine attendants
Arborea is the plane of passionate freedom.
Its forests rise higher than mortal towers. Its mountains carry divine halls above the storms. Its seas answer songs sung on distant shores. Vineyards preserve memories within their fruit, flowers open when beloved names are spoken and valleys change colour as their people celebrate or mourn.
Everything in Arborea feels intensely alive.
Joy becomes festival. Grief becomes rain. Love becomes shelter. Anger becomes thunder. Inspiration shines as visible light. Courage opens passages through mountains, while shame, jealousy and possessiveness may close them again.
The plane welcomes powerful emotion, but it does not treat every desire as righteous. Passion gains worth through what it creates, protects and allows others to become.
A ruler may command respect, but title alone cannot compel loyalty. A host may protect a guest, but cannot turn hospitality into captivity. Lovers may promise devotion, but neither may claim ownership of the other. A poet may rebuke a god when the poem carries truth. A hero may reject a divine command and remain honourable.
Arborea is beautiful, generous and dangerous. Its greatest perils are celebration without rest, love turned possessive, grief preserved as a weapon, anger emptied of mercy and beauty treated as something to own.
The Nature of Arborea
Arborea stands between the Beastlands and Ysgard within the Upper Outer Planes.
The Beastlands expresses freedom through instinct, wilderness, migration and the life of animals. Ysgard expresses freedom through courage, struggle, contest and heroic defiance. Arborea expresses freedom through feeling, relationship, art, celebration and the power to become someone new.
Its chaos is living choice rather than meaningless disorder.
Communities form around friendships, sacred duties, artistic movements, shared grief and common causes. People remain because they choose to remain. Settlements divide when their purposes diverge, reunite when old injuries are answered and transform themselves without waiting for distant permission.
Its goodness is active. Arborea resists slavery, magical domination, humiliation and pleasure founded upon another person’s suffering. It honours hospitality, generosity and protection while demanding that these virtues remain freely given.
Anger, rivalry, sorrow, desire and pride all have a place here. The plane judges them by what follows.
Planar Laws
Emotion Shapes the World
Strong and honestly recognised emotions alter local weather, colour, vegetation, music and terrain.
A reconciliation may cause a dead orchard to flower. Suppressed grief may gather as a storm that cannot break. A community preparing for rebellion may hear drums beneath the earth. A feast founded upon genuine welcome may cause tables to fill no matter how many guests arrive.
False displays produce weaker and shorter-lived effects. Arborea answers most strongly when emotion is genuine and carries consequences.
Hospitality Carries Power
A host who welcomes a willing guest gains supernatural authority to protect that guest from violence, intrusion and betrayal.
Guest-right weakens when the host conceals a dangerous condition, demands obedience as payment or prevents the guest from departing. A guest who knowingly betrays generous hospitality may find every door in the region closed against them.
Art Reveals Truth
Songs, plays, sculptures, dances and stories may expose realities concealed by ordinary speech.
A performance might reveal the emotional cost of an ancient victory, give form to communal grief or allow witnesses to experience an event through another person’s eyes. Art does not automatically establish every disputed fact, but it can make denial far harder to maintain.
Promises Bind; People Are Not Property
Freely sworn oaths possess real force in Arborea. Friendship, marriage, service, kinship and loyalty can create profound obligations.
Those bonds do not grant ownership of another person’s will. An oath extracted through fear carries little authority, while a humble promise freely kept may reshape an entire region.
Grief Must Be Allowed to Move
Arborea protects mourning. It does not demand happiness or require sorrow to be hidden.
Grief becomes dangerous when deliberately trapped, exploited or denied. Unanswered mourning gathers in dreams, storms, songs and the landscape until someone gives it honest expression.
Celebration Requires Willing Participants
Feasts, dances, athletic games, dramas and ecstatic rites are common throughout the plane. Participation remains a choice.
A revel that prevents its guests from resting or departing ceases to be a celebration and begins to corrupt the region around it.
Beauty Creates Responsibility
Beauty can heal, inspire and reveal possibility. It can also provoke vanity, obsession and possessiveness.
Those who protect beautiful places while allowing them to remain alive and changing earn Arborea’s favour. Those who destroy or imprison others in order to possess beauty find splendour fading from everything they touch.
The Three Layers of Arborea
Arborea consists of three immeasurable layers. They are connected through divine gates, sacred rivers, emotional storms, ancient performances and acts of mythic significance rather than ordinary geography.
1. The First Layer of Arborea – The Olympian Glades

Arborea’s first layer is a vast realm of immense forests, flowering valleys, sacred rivers, storm-crowned mountains, orchards, vineyards, open-air theatres and divine estates. It is the most heavily inhabited and socially active of Arborea’s three layers, with communities formed around freely chosen bonds, shared traditions, artistic movements and sacred duties.
Gods receive petitioners upon mountain summits and within divine halls. Poets challenge rulers in public theatres. Athletes compete for honour in gymnasia and festival grounds. Travelling celebrations cross entire valleys, carrying music, drama, debate and feasting between settlements. Arguments may be fierce, but authority carries less weight here than courage, truth, hospitality and loyalty that has been earned.
The principal regions of the Olympian Glades are:
- Mount Olympus — the divine summit and principal realm of the Hellenic gods.
- The Laureled Valleys — olive groves, vineyards, gymnasia, feasting grounds and athletic or artistic contests.
- The Wild Choir — an immense living forest where birds, rivers, leaves, nymphs and musicians form one evolving song.
- The Thunder Vineyards — storm-fed vineyards whose wines preserve courage, grief, longing and other emotions present during the harvest.
- The Theatre of First Stories — a sacred amphitheatre where performances reveal forgotten witnesses and transform how old events are understood.
- The Valley of Honest Grief — a green valley of warm rain where the dead are remembered and sorrow is allowed to move toward renewal.
Typical inhabitants include petitioners, dryads, nymphs, satyrs, centaurs, celestial spirits, pegasi, sacred animals and divine attendants.
Mount Olympus

Mount Olympus rises above the Olympian Glades as a divine summit and gathering place of the Hellenic gods.
The earthly mountain in Greece is a Material Plane anchor. Sacred paths, divine invitation and exceptional mythic deeds may lead from that mountain to the planar summit, but an ordinary ascent does not automatically carry a traveller into Arborea.
Zeus, Hera and Athena are among the established powers associated with the divine summit. Other gods maintain halls, gardens, workshops, shrines, embassies or visiting places according to their own recognised divine realms.
Mount Olympus is a realm within Arborea. It is not another name for the entire plane.
The Laureled Valleys

Vineyards, olive groves, orchards, gymnasia and public feasting grounds fill these broad valleys.
Competitions include racing, wrestling, poetry, music, debate, sculpture, dance and acts of hospitality. Victory brings honour, but victors are expected to enrich the community rather than merely humiliate the defeated.
Rival settlements sometimes allow artistic or athletic competition to harden into inherited hatred. The landscape then magnifies the feud until someone finds the courage to break it.
The Wild Choir

Every living thing in this enormous forest contributes to its music.
Birdsong forms melody. Rivers provide rhythm. Leaves answer spoken verse. Dryads, nymphs, satyrs, centaurs and travelling musicians tend its harmonies and search for songs that have never before been heard.
A missing voice may reveal disease, captivity, desecration or an old wrong concealed beneath the roots.
The Thunder Vineyards

These vineyards grow across mountain slopes watered by warm rain and frequent storms.
Each vintage preserves an emotion present during its harvest. One wine may restore the courage of a fallen defender. Another may carry the longing of people divided by war. A corrupted harvest can spread obsession, fury or despair through an entire festival.
The finest vintners treat emotional memory as a sacred responsibility rather than a luxury to be traded without consequence.
The Theatre of First Stories

A vast amphitheatre stands within a natural bowl of white stone.
Performances here can transform how an event is understood, though they cannot change what physically occurred. A celebrated hero may be made to confront the cost of victory. A forgotten witness may finally be heard. A hated enemy may be revealed as something more complicated than the story preserved by the victors.
Several unfinished plays continue to influence mortal dreams.
The Valley of Honest Grief

Warm rain falls across this green valley, nourishing white flowers, dark-leaved trees and clear streams that carry sorrow gently through the Olympian Glades.
The living and the dead come here to mourn. Arborean petitioners remember their mortal lives, companions who passed into other divine realms, families divided by death and losses that followed them beyond the grave. Some mourn the people they once were. Others grieve old failures, broken communities or loved ones whose final fate remains unknown.
Living visitors may meet the dead who dwell in Arborea, provided those petitioners freely choose the meeting. The valley does not summon, bind or imitate souls belonging elsewhere.
Memory appears throughout the landscape as familiar scents, distant voices, flowers growing in beloved colours and brief figures glimpsed through the rain. These manifestations express what the mourner carries; they are memories given shape rather than captive spirits.
The valley offers recognition rather than forced consolation. Sorrow may remain for as long as it is honestly felt, but it gradually becomes something that can be carried without consuming the mourner.
Those who steal memories, silence grief, impersonate the dead or turn another person’s mourning into a weapon awaken violent storms. The rain becomes cold, the streams rise and every stolen sorrow returns to its thief.
The Second Layer of Arborea – Ossa — The Living Sea
Arborea’s second layer is an immeasurable ocean beneath rapidly changing skies. Its waters shift between blue, green, violet and wine-dark black, while islands rise and disappear in response to emotion, memory and storm. Coral forests support cities beneath the waves, great singers carry messages across impossible distances and powerful conflicts gather as tempests capable of disturbing the entire layer.
Ossa expresses freedom through movement, transformation, voyage, departure and return. Its peoples are shaped less by fixed borders than by currents, migrations, songs, storms and the responsibilities carried between distant shores. Settlements may drift, submerge, surface or grow from living reef. Travellers are judged not only by where they are going, but by what they refuse to leave behind.
The principal regions of Ossa are:
- The Wine-Dark Expanse — the open ocean, crossed by celestial vessels, living islands and travelling sea communities.
- The Isles of Sudden Weather — islands formed where powerful emotions meet the sea, some lasting hours and others surviving for generations.
- The Coral Revels — living reefs containing submerged halls, gardens, festivals, councils and theatres.
- The Singing Deeps — deep coral forests where sea spirits and immense creatures preserve songs capable of crossing planar boundaries.
- The Drowned Amphitheatres — ruined theatres upon the sea floor whose performances continue without visible actors.
- The Shore That Remembers — an endless coastline where every departure leaves a trail until the traveller returns, reaches their true destination or abandons the purpose of the journey.
Typical inhabitants include aquatic petitioners, nereids, ichthyocentaurs, celestial sea creatures, sacred dolphins, great singers, reef-dwellers and other recognised sea peoples.
The Wine-Dark Expanse

Open water stretches beyond every horizon.
The sea favours travellers who have honestly accepted the purpose of their journey. Those fleeing truths they refuse to face encounter contrary currents, repeating horizons and storms born from their own denial.
Celestial vessels, living islands and travelling sea communities cross the Expanse without always seeking land.
The Isles of Sudden Weather

These islands form wherever powerful emotion meets the sea.
A joyful reunion may raise an island covered in flowers. Betrayal may create black cliffs beneath permanent lightning. Some islands last only a few hours, while others survive long enough to develop peoples, traditions and histories.
An island’s inhabitants do not cease to be people merely because the emotion that created their home has faded.
The Coral Revels

Immense living reefs support submerged halls, gardens, theatres and gathering places.
Nereids, ichthyocentaurs and other sea peoples hold festivals, councils and competitions here. Music travels through the water as colour, pressure and vibration.
The Revels become dangerous when hosts use beauty, enchantment or intoxicating food to prevent guests from leaving.
The Singing Deeps

The deepest waters contain pale coral forests and enormous, slow-moving creatures whose songs cross planar boundaries.
Sea spirits preserve ancient melodies among the Deeps. Some songs carry warnings from lost cultures. Others call particular travellers by names they have never heard.
When one of the great singers falls silent, currents and migrations may fail throughout Ossa.
The Drowned Amphitheatres

Ruined theatres stand upon the sea floor.
Their performances continue without visible actors. Sailors hear tragedies through the hulls of ships, while divers see processions moving beneath clear water.
Several plays end differently depending upon who watches them. One missing final performance may explain why a drowned city has never returned to the surface.
The Shore That Remembers

Every departure leaves a mark upon this endless coastline.
Footprints remain until the traveller willingly returns, reaches the destination they truly sought or abandons the purpose of the journey. The shore contains tracks belonging to gods, exiles, missing heroes and entire migrating peoples.
Following a trail reveals moments from the traveller’s departure, but does not necessarily show where the traveller is now.
Pelion — The White Silence
Pelion is a white desert of pale dust, buried cities, colossal statues and forgotten civilisations.
It belongs to Arborea because it embodies longing, memory and the emotional force of absence. Here passion survives after its singers, lovers, rulers and enemies have disappeared.
Pelion’s ruins belong to peoples and powers from within the established history of the Outer Planes. Their age does not place them before the Great Collision, the formation of the Astral Plane, the coming of the Elder Gods or other events already fixed within SpiralWorlds chronology.
The mystery lies in who built them, what happened to them and why so many names were erased.
The White Expanse
Pale dunes extend beneath a brilliant sky.
Sound travels immense distances and sometimes arrives years after it was made. Travellers may hear songs from buried cities or arguments spoken by companions who have not yet reached the region.
At the brightest hour of the day, the outlines of structures become visible beneath the dust.
The Buried Cities
Whole civilisations lie beneath Pelion.
Some cities were destroyed. Others were abandoned. A few appear to have deliberately erased their own names. Their buildings retain impressions of revolutions, marriages, festivals, betrayals and final farewells.
Recovering treasure without recovering its story can awaken the city’s unresolved emotions.
The Avenue of Nameless Statues
Colossal statues line a ceremonial avenue.
Their faces remain intact, but every name and inscription has been removed. Different observers sometimes recognise different people in the same stone face.
Restoring a false name causes the corresponding statue to turn away. Restoring a true name allows it to speak once.
The Last Amphitheatre
An immense stage waits at the centre of a ruined city.
The final act of its civilisation’s greatest epic was never performed. Spirits, scholars and divine messengers disagree over whether completing it will restore the city, release its dead or repeat the catastrophe that destroyed it.
The surviving fragments preserve several incompatible endings.
The Orchard Beneath the Dust
A living orchard survives within a sealed underground valley.
Its fruit contains memories belonging to people whose names have disappeared from history. Eating the fruit grants the memory but also places responsibility upon the person who receives it.
The orchard’s keepers refuse to allow memories to become curiosities, weapons or entertainment.
The Wells of Forgotten Names
Deep stone wells contain names erased from mortal and divine remembrance.
Speaking into a well may return one lost name, but another forgotten name rises beside it. A name restored to the world may awaken loyalties, debts, inheritance claims and enemies that have waited for ages.
Inhabitants
Petitioners
The dead who reach Arborea remain people.
They form households, artistic companies, athletic societies, orchards, theatres, travelling communities and sea-going settlements. Some retain clear memories of mortal life. Others remember through skills, relationships, emotions, songs or recurring dreams.
They possess homes, loyalties, dignity and the right to refuse the commands of those who mistake the dead for servants or scenery.
Nymphs and Dryads
Nymphs embody living places and the relationships that sustain them. Dryads are particularly associated with trees and groves, naiads with freshwater and nereids with seas and oceanic places.
Their bond to a place does not make either the spirit or the place the property of whoever claims the surrounding land.
Nymph communities possess their own friendships, rivalries, duties, customs and grievances.
Satyrs and Centaurs
Satyrs and centaurs inhabit the Olympian Glades in independent communities.
Satyrs serve as musicians, vintners, herders, scouts, hosts, provocateurs and guardians of ecstatic traditions. Centaurs maintain families, herds, sacred grounds, athletic societies and travelling settlements.
Neither people should be reduced to a single tale about drunkenness, desire or wilderness.
Sea Peoples
Nereids, ichthyocentaurs and other recognised aquatic peoples inhabit Ossa.
Their settlements may be mobile, submerged, amphibious or grown from living reef. Migration rights, songs, storms, currents and responsibility for the health of the sea matter more than fixed borders.
Celestial Spirits
Chaotic-good celestial beings serve as guardians, messengers, healers, artists, defenders and witnesses.
Individual celestial peoples should be named and linked only when their maintained Bestiary entries have been verified. Generic celestial categories are preferable to importing creatures solely from old encounter tables or source material.
Sacred Animals
Swans, eagles, lions, deer, horses, bears, dolphins and pegasi are found across the plane.
They possess their own habits, migrations and sacred places. They are not automatically mounts, familiars or rewards for visiting heroes.
Primordial Cyclopes
The ancient primordial cyclopes associated with the Olympian gods may be encountered around divine workshops, volcanic forges and the approaches to Mount Olympus.
They are powerful individuals rather than a common population spread across all Arborea.
Divine Powers in Arborea
No single god rules all Arborea.
Divine powers can reshape their own realms, command servants and influence neighbouring regions, but the plane’s deeper nature resists absolute government.
Mount Olympus is the principal Hellenic divine realm within the Olympian Glades. Zeus, Hera and Athena are among the established powers associated with its courts, halls and sanctuaries.
Other gods should be named on this page only where their maintained deity entries establish a permanent realm, recognised residence or direct active role within Arborea.
A god may visit Mount Olympus, maintain an embassy in Ossa or receive worshippers in a sacred grove without making Arborea that deity’s home plane.
Divine rank establishes precedence, but it does not guarantee obedience. Personality, kinship, favour, hospitality, old promises and heroic achievement often determine what actually occurs.
A divine command that destroys meaningful freedom may still be obeyed through fear, but the act remains contrary to the plane’s moral gravity.
Law, Personhood and Consequences
Arborea recognises personhood through mind, will, relationship, responsibility and established standing rather than creature type.
Petitioners, nymphs, satyrs, centaurs, sea peoples, celestials and other thinking inhabitants may possess homes, inherit obligations, give testimony, demand restitution and receive the protection of their communities.
Guest-Right
A formal welcome places both host and guest under obligation.
The host must provide protection, sustenance and a clear opportunity to depart. The guest must respect the household, refrain from treachery and declare any known danger brought to the host’s door.
A violation of guest-right may bring public shame, divine displeasure or the closing of every hospitable door within the region.
Oaths and Agreements
Freely sworn oaths carry great weight.
Witnesses, sacred places and the emotional truth of the promise matter more than elaborate written forms. Coercion, deception and concealed conditions weaken an oath and may render it powerless.
Serious Wrongs
The gravest offences include enslavement, magical domination, treacherous murder, imprisonment under the guise of hospitality, destruction of a spirit’s bonded place, theft of names or memories and the deliberate silencing of testimony.
Judgement and Restitution
Some divine realms maintain formal courts, but many Arborean communities rely upon assemblies, respected witnesses, elders, poets, champions and public testimony.
Common consequences include restitution, the return of stolen works or memories, restoration of damaged land, public acknowledgement, service freely accepted by the injured party and exile where trust cannot be restored.
Punishment without repair carries little honour.
Duels and Contests
A duel or contest is lawful only when all participants understand and accept its terms.
Intimidation, enchantment, concealed rules or the inability to withdraw invalidates the contest. A victory achieved through coercion brings shame rather than honour.
Killing
Killing in defence of another person may be praised. Killing for humiliation, vengeance or pleasure remains subject to judgement.
A victor who continues violence after the danger has ended may find the landscape preserving the victim’s final experience until the wrong is answered.
Travel
Reaching Arborea
Stable entrances may appear within:
- sacred groves and ancient orchards;
- old theatres where a forgotten work is performed correctly;
- mountain sanctuaries touched by divine storms;
- islands reached during supernatural weather;
- festivals founded upon genuine hospitality;
- places of communal mourning;
- sites where captives have just won meaningful freedom;
- works of art completed through shared sacrifice.
The earthly Mount Olympus is one important Material Plane anchor. Reaching the planar summit requires divine invitation, a recognised sacred passage or an exceptional mythic act.
Moving Between Layers
The three layers are joined through divine gates, sacred rivers, living ocean currents, storms that cross from mountain to sea, performances that recreate forgotten voyages and ancient arches uncovered beneath Pelion’s dust.
Travel should present meaningful choices and consequences without making failed navigation the default subject of every Arborean adventure.
Leaving Arborea
Recognised gates, divine passages and planar magic allow travellers to depart.
Some visitors remain because Arborea offers belonging, inspiration or emotional fulfilment that they have never found elsewhere. The plane does not need to imprison them. The temptation to stay is powerful precisely because departure remains possible.
Arborea in the World
Arborea touches the mortal world most strongly through Greece, the Mediterranean, sacred mountains, old theatres, groves, vineyards, springs, islands and communities where people gather freely to celebrate or mourn.
Its influence can also appear wherever:
- a ruler is publicly challenged through art;
- a captive people wins meaningful freedom;
- strangers receive protection without hidden obligation;
- a community allows grief to be spoken openly;
- rivals choose creation over inherited hatred;
- a festival restores its participants rather than consuming them;
- a promise is kept despite the absence of force or reward.
Hellenic traditions recognise Mount Olympus as Arborea’s strongest divine anchor in the mortal world, but the plane’s reach is wider than any single people or religion.
Artists, lovers, mourners, athletes, rebels, hosts and travellers may encounter its influence without ever learning its name.
Game Mechanics
The rules below are mechanics compatible for different game editions.
Arborea 5.5e
Arborea 3.5e
Arborea 5.5e Mechanics
General Planar Traits
- Gravity: Normal.
- Time: Normal.
- Extent: Infinite.
- Morphic Nature: Divinely morphic and emotionally responsive.
- Rest: Normal unless a regional or divine effect states otherwise.
- Food and Water: Abundant throughout the Olympian Glades and available within inhabited regions of Ossa and Pelion.
Arborean Resonance
Once per Long Rest, the GM may award Heroic Inspiration to a creature that willingly accepts meaningful danger, loss or hardship in order to:
- protect another person’s freedom;
- preserve a living place or work of genuine beauty;
- keep a freely sworn promise;
- offer hospitality despite personal risk;
- speak a difficult truth before someone with the power to punish it.
The choice must carry a real consequence. A safe or repeated gesture performed solely to gain Heroic Inspiration does not awaken Arborean Resonance.
Freedom of the Self
A creature has Advantage on a saving throw against a magical effect that would:
- permanently enslave it;
- erase or replace its identity;
- compel marriage, affection or intimate devotion;
- prevent it from leaving a feast, performance or place after it has clearly chosen to depart.
This trait does not grant general Advantage against the Charmed condition. It does not apply to ordinary persuasion, temporary battlefield control or an effect that merely restricts movement for the duration of an encounter.
Guest-Right
When a creature accepts a sincere invitation into a household, sanctuary or recognised camp, the host and guest become bound by guest-right until the guest willingly leaves or openly breaks the terms of hospitality.
While guest-right remains intact:
- the host has Advantage on Wisdom checks made to detect threats against the guest;
- the guest has Advantage on saving throws against being Frightened while defending the host or household;
- neither party can gain Heroic Inspiration from betraying the other.
A host who imprisons a guest or a guest who deliberately betrays the household immediately ends guest-right.
Emotional Weather
Strong communal emotion may create a local regional effect. Emotional weather should normally provide warning and opportunity before it causes direct harm.
- Concealed Anger: Thunder gathers, granting Advantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks made to recognise hostility.
- Communal Grief: Warm rain falls, granting Advantage on Wisdom (Medicine) checks made to stabilise a dying creature.
- Reconciliation: Flowers open and vegetation parts, removing nonmagical Difficult Terrain within a local area.
- Denial: Roads, currents or paths repeat, imposing Disadvantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks until the concealed truth is acknowledged.
Living Performance
A creature proficient with a musical instrument, Performance or an appropriate Artisan’s Tool may spend 10 minutes creating or performing before willing listeners.
At the end of the performance, the creature makes a DC 15 Charisma (Performance) check or an appropriate ability check using the relevant tool proficiency.
On a success, choose one willing listener. That creature gains Advantage on its next saving throw against the Charmed or Frightened condition before its next Long Rest.
A creature can benefit from Living Performance only once per Long Rest.
Regional Effects
Individual realms may add further effects governing storms, performances, divine authority, memory, travel or ancient ruins. Such effects should be stated in the relevant region or adventure rather than applied universally across Arborea.
Pathfinder First Edition Mechanics
General Planar Traits
- Gravity: Normal.
- Time: Normal.
- Size: Infinite.
- Morphic Trait: Divinely morphic.
- Alignment Traits: Mildly chaos-aligned and mildly good-aligned.
Enhanced Magic
Spells and spell-like abilities with the chaotic or good descriptor are enhanced. They function as though cast at +1 caster level.
This increase affects level-dependent variables such as duration, range and damage but does not grant additional spell slots or allow a caster to exceed normal maximum limits.
Individual regions may also enhance emotion, language-dependent, sonic, plant, water or weather effects.
Impeded Magic
Spells and spell-like abilities with the lawful or evil descriptor are impeded.
A caster attempting to use such an effect must succeed at a caster level check with a DC of 20 + the spell’s level. On a failed check, the spell or ability is lost without effect.
Arborean Defiance
A creature compelled to accept permanent enslavement, surrender its identity, accept forced affection or remain within a celebration after clearly attempting to leave immediately receives a new saving throw against the effect with a +2 morale bonus.
A creature gains only one additional saving throw against each separate effect through Arborean Defiance.
Guest-Right
A creature that formally accepts sincere hospitality gains a +2 morale bonus on saving throws against fear while defending its host, household or fellow guests.
The host gains a +2 circumstance bonus on Sense Motive checks made to detect threats or treachery directed against the guest.
These benefits end immediately if the host imprisons the guest or the guest knowingly betrays the household.
Living Performance
A creature may spend 10 minutes performing before willing listeners and attempt a DC 20 Perform check.
On a success, one willing listener gains a +2 morale bonus on its next saving throw against a charm or fear effect made within 24 hours.
A creature can benefit from Living Performance only once per day.
Emotional Weather
Powerful communal emotion may create a regional effect. Appropriate examples include:
- Concealed Anger: Creatures gain a +2 circumstance bonus on Sense Motive checks made to detect hostility.
- Communal Grief: Heal checks made to stabilise dying creatures gain a +2 circumstance bonus.
- Reconciliation: Natural undergrowth parts, removing nonmagical difficult terrain in a local area.
- Denial: Survival checks made to navigate the affected region take a –4 penalty.
Petitioners
Arborean petitioners retain individual personalities, relationships and significant memories. Unless an adventure specifies otherwise, they possess the petitioner traits appropriate to their current form while remaining recognised persons within Arborean society.
Regional Traits
Regional modifiers should be used when an effect belongs specifically to a divine realm, emotional storm, sacred theatre, ancient ruin or living sea rather than to Arborea as a whole.
Arborea 3.5e Mechanics
General Planar Traits
- Gravity: Normal.
- Time: Normal.
- Size: Infinite.
- Morphic Trait: Divinely morphic.
- Alignment Traits: Mildly chaos-aligned and mildly good-aligned.
Alignment Effects
Lawful creatures take a –2 penalty on all Charisma-based checks while within Arborea.
Evil creatures take a –2 penalty on all Charisma-based checks while within Arborea.
A creature that is both lawful and evil takes both penalties, for a total penalty of –4.
Enhanced Magic
Spells and spell-like abilities with the chaotic or good descriptor are enhanced. They function as though cast at +1 caster level.
The increased caster level affects level-dependent variables but does not allow a spell to exceed its normal maximum limits.
Impeded Magic
Spells and spell-like abilities with the lawful or evil descriptor are impeded.
A caster attempting to use an impeded spell must succeed on a Spellcraft check with a DC of 20 + the spell’s level. Failure means the spell does not function, though the spell or spell slot is still expended.
Freedom of the Self
A creature affected by a charm or compulsion receives one immediate additional saving throw if it is ordered to:
- accept permanent slavery;
- surrender or erase its identity;
- accept forced affection, marriage or intimate devotion;
- remain within a place or celebration after clearly choosing to depart.
A successful saving throw ends the charm or compulsion effect. This benefit can occur only once against each separate effect.
Guest-Right
A creature that formally accepts sincere hospitality gains a +2 morale bonus on saving throws against fear while defending its host or fellow guests.
The host gains a +2 circumstance bonus on Sense Motive checks made to recognise threats against the guest.
These benefits end immediately if either party knowingly violates guest-right.
Living Performance
A creature may spend 10 minutes performing before willing listeners and attempt a DC 20 Perform check.
On a success, one willing listener gains a +2 morale bonus on its next saving throw against a charm or fear effect made within 24 hours.
A creature can benefit from Living Performance only once per day.
Emotional Weather
- Concealed Anger: Creatures gain a +2 circumstance bonus on Sense Motive checks made to detect hostility.
- Communal Grief: Heal checks made to stabilise dying creatures gain a +2 circumstance bonus.
- Reconciliation: Nonmagical difficult terrain formed from natural vegetation is removed within a local area.
- Denial: Survival checks made to navigate the affected region take a –4 penalty.
Petitioners
Arborean petitioners retain individual personalities, recognised relationships and important memories. Their exact game statistics depend upon their current petitioner form and the region in which they dwell.
Localised Planar Effects
Emotion, sonic, plant, weather and water magic may gain further modifiers within appropriate regions. These rules should be stated in the individual realm or adventure rather than treated as universal planar effects.
Adventure Hooks
The Feast Without Dawn
A celebrated festival has continued for thirty years. Every guest appears happy, but anyone who tries to leave forgets why departure mattered.
The Silent Voice
Part of the Wild Choir has fallen silent. The missing voice belongs to a dryad whose tree was secretly moved into a divine garden.
The Wrong Ending
A newly recovered fragment gives the Last Amphitheatre’s unfinished epic a peaceful conclusion. Three powerful factions insist that the fragment is false.
The Returning Island
An island rises in Ossa whenever two estranged rulers consider reconciliation. Someone is killing their messengers to keep the island beneath the sea.
The Stolen Vintage
Wine containing the courage of an ancient rebellion has been stolen from the Thunder Vineyards. A mortal tyrant intends to serve it to soldiers while erasing every memory of what they once opposed.
The Nameless Statue
A statue on Pelion bears the face of a living adventurer. Restoring its erased name may reveal a forgotten life, a future possibility or an elaborate divine deception.
Historic and Mythic Context
Arborea is a fantasy cosmological realm shaped from several mythic and literary traditions rather than a direct reproduction of a single historical belief.
Ancient Greek religion did not describe one unified afterlife or divine plane identical to this entry. Mount Olympus was the home and gathering place of the Olympian gods, while the dead were more commonly associated with the realm of Hades. Traditions concerning Elysium, the Isles of the Blessed, Oceanus, divine mountains and distant paradises varied between poets, cities, mystery traditions and historical periods.
The Olympian Glades draw upon classical images of sacred mountains, laurel groves, athletic contests, public theatre, vineyards, hospitality, divine feasting and intense relationships among gods and heroes.
Ossa draws upon the mythic importance of the Mediterranean and the wider encircling sea: voyages, storms, islands, sea divinities, shipwrecks, transformations and the uncertain boundary between the known world and the marvellous.
Pelion develops the classical fascination with ruins, lost ages, vanished peoples, broken statues, forgotten names and the belief that present civilisations stand among the remains of greater or stranger worlds.
The name Pelion is used here as a planar layer name and should not be confused with the mortal Greek mountain of the same name. Likewise, the planar Mount Olympus is connected to the earthly mountain without being physically identical to every slope, village and summit found in mortal geography.
The plane’s central concern with freedom, emotional truth and art is a SpiralWorlds interpretation designed to distinguish Arborea from the Beastlands, Ysgard, Elysium and the Fey World.
Historical material therefore serves as inspiration and context, while the reader-facing entry remains an authoritative description of the campaign plane.
Sources and Further Reading
- Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days.
- Homer, Iliad and Odyssey.
- The Homeric Hymns.
- Pindar, Olympian Odes and related victory odes.
- Pausanias, Description of Greece.
- The maintained SpiralWorlds Hellenic Pantheon and Bestiary entries.
- Wizards of the Coast, System Reference Document 5.0 and Open Game License.
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