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The ground shakes, the sky darkens, the seas tremble. As you prepare your weapons, waiting for a foe to reveal itself, a horrible realization comes to you. It is not that some hidden foe has troubled the land before you. It is the plane itself, manifesting and preparing to unleash its fury upon you.
Of all the new monsters and foes you’ll find in Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse, very few come as close to the primal and mythical glory of fighting the very essence of a plane itself, the planar incarnate.
Fight a Plane? We Can Explain!
As the sentient embodiment of a plane of existence, a planar incarnate is understandably a force to be reckoned with. Planar incarnates are primordial forces that manifest from the Upper and Lower Planes themselves. An incarnate manifests from their home plane when a catalyst—perhaps you or perhaps something you’re fleeing—presents an existential or antithetical threat to their plane. Imagine a sentient tempest of energy representing the grace of Mount Celestia or the gloom of Hades, the clockwork order of Mechanus, or the ceaseless chaos of Limbo. Picture all of that concentrated into a form that can absolutely wreck your Saturday.
With a Challenge Rating (CR) of 22, facing off against a planar incarnate may be a campaign-defining encounter and make for a tough day for even the highest level of adventurers.
Planar Incarnate Attacks
Depending on if they originate from an Upper or Lower Plane, the planar incarnate manifests as either a Celestial or Fiend. This particularly comes into play with its most formidable attack, Planar Exhalation. The incarnate unleashes a 60-foot cone of energy from its plane, forcing a DC 23 Constitution saving throw. The damage from a failed save on this attack is a whopping 52 (8d12) necrotic or radiant damage, depending on the planar affiliation of the incarnate.
While that recharges, the incarnate can unleash a more concentrated energy bolt onto one target, dealing 32 (5d12) of its affiliated damage per successful attack. Which it can do twice in one turn. With a range of 120 feet. So. Um. Stand back?
Planar Incarnate Defenses
If you’re gonna fight a plane, you’re gonna have to work for it.
As you might expect from fighting something akin to a hurricane, the planar incarnate is pretty hard to damage. Not only does it sit with an Armor Class (AC) of 20, but it also boasts immunities to a slate of conditions and damage types, including nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing attacks.
If you think that means simply switching to purely magical attacks, think again because the planar incarnate also has advantage on saving throws against spells and other effects and a few uses of Legendary Resistance.
How to Use Planar Incarnates in Your Game
The most typical way a party would experience a planar incarnate is while traveling on the plane from which it originates. But whether you’re running a game using the settings found in Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse or diving into other interplanar quests, here are some ideas for introducing a planar incarnate into your adventures.
Welcome to the Neighborhood
Encountering a planar incarnate doesn’t always have to end in combat. The planar incarnate is proficient in all languages, and being a Celestial or Fiend of immense power could mean setting up a particularly memorable, near-godlike social encounter. This could serve as the Upper and Lower Planes’ equivalent of running into an archfey in the Feywild or a Darklord in Ravenloft’s Domains of Dread.
Everything Changed When the Lower Planes Attacked
Planar incarnates rarely venture outside of their own plane, but rarely doesn’t mean never. Having the incarnate of a rival plane arrive and even attack early on in a campaign could be a pretty impressive setup for a story that might involve finding a way to end a devastating multiversal war.
Elemental Quest Challenges
A possible character-driven arc could revolve around visiting planes of existence in order to find legendary weapons or unlock unique abilities. While defeating a series of planar incarnates in combat might be a tall order, the use of magic items or quest-specific boons could be a way to even the playing field. Or perhaps, like above, the quest isn’t to defeat the incarnate but to commune with it and learn something from it.
The Fury of Imagination
Sigil and the Outlands from Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse can give you a lot of new information and lore on the Upper and Lower Planes in the Great Wheel, but the planar incarnate could also be adapted to be an aspect of other planes as well, such as the many found listed in Chapter 2: Creating a Multiverse of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
The physical descriptions of planar incarnates compare them to natural disasters that further the interest or defenses of their native planes. If you like the idea of the planar incarnate but don’t think you’ll be dealing with the Outer Planes in your campaign any time soon, consider how you might instead manifest the incarnation of the Plane of Fire or another plane closer to the Material Plane. Could what seems like an ether cyclone actually be the incarnate of the Ethereal Plane?
More Planar Oddities Await in Planescape
What hero wouldn’t love to tell the tale of how they faced off against an entire plane of existence and lived to tell the tale? To find more of these sorts of encounters, the kind with the potential to shake the very foundations of the multiverse, be sure to check out Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse!
Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
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